Voting with Their Feet: Absconding and Labor Exploitation in Convict Australia

The rise of global capital was catalyzed by access to the colonial commons and the yoking of the labor necessary to exploit these overseas assets. In the case of colonial Australia, that labor force largely consisted of convicts sentenced to transportation in British, Irish, or other imperial courts. While convict laborers were among the best documented of all British colonial workforces, they are not a group of workers who have historically been associated with organized labor resistance. This reflects the management strategies used to extract labor from the bodies of prisoners. Conviction in a court of law was used both to justify exploitative work practices and to blunt any attempt to challenge the day-to-day circumstances faced by the tens of thousands of convicts transported to Britain's overseas penal colonies. Any attempt to resist confirmed that convicts were deviants who could only be controlled through the use of coercion. Yet analysis of the day-to-day paper-work used to manage the 73,000 convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land reveals plenty of evidence of labor withdrawal.