In this lively history of transportation, Graham Seal shows how such hypocrisy was at the heart of the British imperial project. Britain built an empire based on transporting, and sometimes trafficking, human cargo to its colonies. Children were snatched from British streets and dispatched throughout the empire as forced labourers, their bodies sold into bondage by agents of the state in pursuit of profit. Historians have long discussed the iniquities on which empires are built, and in this sense Condemned makes no radical claim. The fresh material and thoughts are in the detail. I imagine that non-specialists in particular will find much in this book that is new. I certainly did.

Seal is careful to delineate between transportation and the even greater evils of chattel slavery – he uses the terms with precision – but the similarities between the systems are made clear. If the first purpose of transportation was to remove criminals and other unwanted people from Britain, its second and probably more important function was to deliver labour for imperial gain. Transportation served economic as well as social imperatives. As Seal notes, the histories of transportation and slavery sometimes touched. His focus on the imperial trade in human bodies leads to a discussion of ‘blackbirding’, a system in which Pacific Islanders were captured and forced to work in Australia. Blackbirding he describes as ‘an amalgam of indentured labour, transportation and slavery’. Scott ‘no slavery in Australia’ Morrison would do well to take note.

Seal’s aim was to write a history of transportation that focuses on people rather than systems, and he has done so with verve. For all the misery described in this book, it’s a rollicking read. Seal has mined letters, diaries, and songs for personal and intimate stories: as might be expected from a co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore (1993), this is bottom-up history. Sometimes these tales are little more than fragments, a snippet here or there of a life, but together they tell vividly of transportation as a pernicious instrument of the British state, dependent on the subjugation of individuals. Seal suggests that prisoner reform was never the main reason for transportation. What reckoning could come from years of vicious punishment and servitude, especially for good people who had been driven by hunger or other despair to commit a petty crime? Seal has sought to rescue the details of people’s lives from a system that rendered them anonymous.

The first half of Condemned explains the origins of the transportation system, with a focus on the movement of bodies from Britain to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the late eighteenth century, the body trade across the Atlantic had slowed, not least because the economics had changed: the empire’s biggest labour market had left the imperial fold. With the newly independent United States no longer a viable destination for Britain’s unwanted, and other colonies deemed unsuitable, London’s attention turned to Australia. The Australian story is told in the second half of the book. The two halves are well connected, with Seal explaining how transportation to the Americas, the Caribbean and beyond shaped the Australian experience.

Initially, the Australian section of the book, while fascinating, feels familiar. Most Australians have some knowledge of the country’s convict days. Tales of the colonial settlement at Sydney, and of brutalities committed in Van Diemen’s Land and at other sites of punishment, are part of the curricula taught in schools and repeated in national discourse. Where Seal departs from the expected is in extending his history to recent times. From the nineteenth century until the 1980s, orphaned and unaccompanied British children, mostly from deprived backgrounds, were dispatched across the empire, including to Australia, by charities and churches working in concert with governments. While Seal acknowledges that these schemes often meant well, many children suffered horribly. Boys and girls were put to work rather than schooled, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse were common. Seal puts the case that these schemes were adapted versions of the transportation project Britain had practised for centuries. That this argument never seems forced is evidence of a carefully constructed and well-written narrative.

Discussion of child migration schemes leads Seal to another connection between past and present. On the final page, he writes of a perverse twist of history by which Australians have come to apply ‘the old techniques of empire transportation’ to refugees and asylum seekers. He sees clear parallels between colonial transportation and the various forms of Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’. There are differences in the mechanics – refugees and asylum seekers transport themselves across the seas, then are banished to ‘bondage’ – but the calculated cruelty is the same. These systems function by hurting people, deliberately. For its last page alone, Graham Seal’s book is worth the price.