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Tag Archives: Convict Transportation

The Need for a New Punishment: Crime in England

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies. Why did England decide to ship its convicted felons across the Atlantic to America? To answer this question, we need to look at the changes in crime and its occurrence in early eighteenth-century England. The Rise in Property Crime The […]

Convict Transportation to America: Introduction

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies. On a winter’s day in 1723, James Bell, a tailor of age 20 with a dark complexion, wandered the narrow London streets not far from where the notoriously rank Fleet Ditch emptied out into the River Thames. He paused in […]