Stopping boats with convict passengers predates the more familiar racial dimensions of maritime border checks. The Australian convict exemplified many of the attributes of the unwanted stranger – as threat to moral order and linchpin of criminality – on arrival in port cities ranging from Melbourne to San Francisco, and Cape Town to London. Escapees and former convicts granted conditional pardons sailed to each of these locations, and served as magnets for immigration activism from concerned nativists. Convict prevention acts passed in California, southern Africa and Australasia in the 1850s and 1860s reveal not only the global reach of convict mobility. They also demonstrate how officials designed early immigration restriction not around racial exclusion – although this was an outcome welcomed by colonists – but to delineate the characteristics of desirable white immigration.

Anti-convict acts served as lightning rods for wider debates. Might proposed passports and border checks infringe the liberty of British subjects averse to paperwork to prove their identity? 
Did police detention of suspected convict migrants on suspicion alone threaten due process and the rights and respectability of everyday inhabitants in the colonies? Controversies over paperwork, security and personal liberties remain present in immigration debates in our contemporary world. The seminar brings scholarship on convict transportation into conversation with work on the long history of immigration restriction, to complicate our understanding of the genealogy of immigration laws.

Chris Holdridge is a National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Studies Group, University of the Free State, South Africa, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash University. An historian of British imperialism, he is interested in the politics of carceral spaces within Britain’s colonies. His research ranges from colonial opposition to convict transportation in the mid-nineteenth century, through to a more recent project on Boer prisoners of war exiled to India, Ceylon, St Helena, and Bermuda during the South African (Anglo-Boer) War. He is completing a monograph based on his doctoral research at the University of Sydney, provisionally entitled Unchaining the Antipodes: Settler Protest and the Ends of Britain’s Convict Empire.

This seminar is free and open to the public. All welcome.