Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation

Thomas Jefferson was horrified to see a draft of the Encyclopédie that claimed that America was peopled by three classes—servants, slaves, and convicts. In defense he argued that only two thousand criminals had been transported across the Atlantic. In fact, the actual number arriving over the course of the eighteenth century was in excess of fifty thousand, accounting for as many as one in four of all migrants from Britain in the period 1700–1776. (Aaron S. Fogelman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers,” Journal of American History, June 1988, p. 44; Farley Grubb, “The Market Evaluation of Criminality,” American Economic Review, March 2001, p. 295.) Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton have considerably increased our understanding of the impact of that trade. Based on an analysis of convicts sentenced in the northern and western circuits of England in the period 1718–1775, their study, at least on paper, compliments A. Roger Ekirch's earlier work, which primarily drew on data from London (Bound for America, 1987). As it turns out, however, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation is a work that is less concerned with the process of transportation than with the way in which information about convicts, much of it spurious, circulated in the Atlantic world

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