Convicts, Carcerality and Cape Colony Connections in the 19th Century

This article examines the ways in which the 19th-century Cape Colony was connected to other locations in Britain and the British imperial world with respect to the history of imprisonment and penal transportation. It explores prisoner and convict mobility; circulations of penal ideologies, officials and practices; and contemporary understandings of the connections between incarceration of various kinds and other forms of labour bondage. My argument is that in each of these respects the Cape was an integral part of both a regional Indian Ocean and global repertoire of carcerality, with influence over and being influenced by other penal sites. I show that the Cape’s penal regimes can be understood only by appreciating their local, regional and global dimensions, and by appreciating how the colony faced both outwards and inwards.