The Origins of Convict Flogging: Corporal Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

Flogging has long been seen as emblematic of the Australian nineteenth-century convict system, and, as such, has been widely discussed and debated by Australian historians. A nineteenth-century critical tradition with its roots in both respectable humanitarianism and convict experience, used the image of flogging to condemn the brutality of the convict system as a whole, first calling for an end to transportation, and subsequently contrasting a barbaric and authoritarian past with a progressive and democratic present. Since the 1960s, scholars have critically reassessed the practice, measuring its frequency, evaluating its role in managing convict labour, identifying significant variations over space and time and interpreting its meaning for both the colonial authorities and the subjects of their punitive discipline. However, almost all of this literature, whether critical or normalising, is based upon evidence of flogging in its later and more developed form, from the 1820s onward.