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This revisionist history of convict transportation from Britain and Ireland will challenge much that you thought you knew about religion and penal colonies. Based on original archival sources, it examines arguments by elites in favour and against the practice of transportation and considers why they thought it could be reformed, and, later, why it should be abolished. In this, the first religious history of the anti-transportation campaign, Hilary M. Carey addresses all the colonies and denominations engaged in the debate. Without minimising the individual horror of transportation, she demonstrates the wide variety of reformist experiments conducted in the Australian penal colonies, as well as the hulks, Bermuda and Gibraltar. She showcases the idealists who fought for more humane conditions for prisoners, as well as the 'political parsons', who lobbied to bring transportation to an end. The complex arguments about convict transportation, which were engaged in by bishops, judges, priests, politicians and intellectuals, crossed continents and divided an empire.

Introduction: Empires of religion -- Religious metropoles -- The consolidation of Irish Catholicism within a hostile imperial framework : a comparative study of early modern Ireland and Hungary / Radhg O'Hannrachain -- Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815-1914 / John Wolfe -- An empire of God or of man? : the Macaulays, father, and son / Catherine Hall -- Religious literature and discourses of empire : the Scottish Presbyterian Foreign Mission Movement, 1824-1913 / Esther Breitenbach -- Colonies and mission fields -- Greater Britain : whiteness and its limits -- 'Making Black Scotsmen and women?' : Scotland, Scottish missions, and the Eastern Cape Colony in the nineteenth century / John MacKenzie -- Archbishop Vaughan and the empires of religion in colonial New South Wales / Peter Cunich -- 'Brighter Britain' : images of empire in the international child rescue movement, 1850-1915 / Shurlee Swain -- Saving 'the empty north' : religion and empire in Australia / Anne O"Brien -- Friends of the native? : universalism and its limits -- 'The sharer of my joys and sorrows' : Alison Blyth, missionary labours, and female perspectives on slavery in nineteenth-century Jamaica / John McAleer -- Richard Taylor and the children of Noah : race, science, and religion in the South Seas / Peter Clayworth -- From African missions to global sisterhood : the mothers' union and colonial Christianity, 1900-1930 / Elizabeth E. Prevost -- Post-colonial transformations -- Ireland's spiritual empire : territory and landscape in Irish Catholic missionary discourse / Fiona Bateman -- Canadian Protestant overseas missions to the mid twentieth century : American influences, interwar changes, long-term legacies, 1930-50 / Ruth Compton Brouwer -- Empire and religion in colonial Botswana : the Seretse Khama controversy, 1948-56 / John Stuart

Ethnographers, historians, and linguists have argued for many years about the nature of the relationship between missionaries and their collaborators. Critics of missionary linguistics and education have pointed out that Bible translations were tools forged for the cultural conquest of native people and that missionary impacts on local cultures nearly always destructive and frequently overwhelming (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Rafael 1988; Sanneh 1989). Sociolinguistic readings of scripture translation have emphasized the cultural loss inherent in the act of translation and even seemingly benign activities such as dictionary making (Errington 2001; Peterson 1999; Tomlinson 2006). To make this point, Rafael (1988: xvii) notes the semantic links between the various Spanish words for conquest (conquista), conversion (conversión), and translation (traducción). Historians, on the other hand, have generally been more skeptical about the power of mere words to exert hegemonic pressure on colonized people and have emphasized the more tangible power of guns and commerce as agents of empire (Porter 2004). Few would deny the symbolic power of the Bible as a representation of colonial domination, as in the saying attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Cox (2008: 4): "When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land."