Emma Christopher

A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.

A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy

Freedom in White and Black

Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic--the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British empire, driven by the winds of the American Revolution and the currents of the African slave trade. In A Merciless Place, Emma Christopher brilliantly captures this previously unknown story of poverty, punishment, and transportation. The story begins with the American War of Independence, until which many British convicts were shipped across the Atlantic. The Revolution interrupted this flow and inspired two entrepreneurs to organize the criminals into military units to fight for the crown. The felon soldiers went to West Africa's slave-trading posts just as the war ended; these forts became the new destination for England's rapidly multiplying convicts. The move was a disaster. Christopher writes that "before the scheme was abandoned, it would have run the gamut of piracy, treachery, mutiny, starvation, poisonings, allegations of white women forced to prostitute themselves to African men, and not least several cases of murder." To end the scandal, the British government chose a new destination, as far away as possible: Australia. Christopher here captures the gritty lives of Britain's convicts: victims of London's underworld, rife with brutal crime and sometimes even more brutal punishments. Equally fascinating are the portraits of Fante people of West Africa, forced to undergo dramatic changes in their role as intermediaries with Europeans in the slave trade. Here, too, are the aboriginal Australians, coping with the transformation of their native land. They all inhabit A Merciless Place: a tour de force and historical narrative at its finest.

The Fate of Britain's Convicts after the American Revolution

A Merciless Place

An examination of the lives of those laboring aboard British and North American slave ships.

Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807

Tells the extraordinary story - lost for two centuries - of how a failed British attempt to establish a penal colony in West Africa led to their eventual decision to abandon their African plans and establish a new colony in the recently discovered colony.

The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia

Marcus Rediker

Cassandra Pybus

Marcus Buford Rediker

"Extends the concept of the Middle Passage to encompass the expropriation of people across other maritime and inland routes. No previous book has highlighted the diversity and centrality of middle passages, voluntary and involuntary, to modern global history."—Kenneth Morgan, author of Slavery and the British Empire "This volume extends the now well-established project of 'Atlantic World Studies' beyond its geographic and chronological frames to a genuinely global analysis of labour migration. It is a work of major importance that sparkles with new discoveries and insights."—Rick Halpern, co-editor of Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850

Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World

Many Middle Passages

This is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost as soon as it was over. In the wake of its most crushing defeat, the America War of Independence, the British Government began shipping its criminals to West Africa. Some were transported aboard ships going to pick up their other human cargo: African slaves. When they arrived at their destination, soldiers and even convicts were forced to work in the region's slave-trading forts guarding the human merchandise. In a few short years the scheme brought death, wholesale desertions, mutiny, piracy and even murder. Some of the most egregious crimes were not committed by the exported criminals but by those sent out to guard them. Acts of wanton desperation added to rash transgressions as those whom society had already thrown out realised that they had nothing left to lose. As jail and prison hulks overflowed, and as every other alternative settlement proved unsuitable, the British Government gambled and decided to send its criminals as far away as possible, to the great south land sighted years before by Captain James Cook. Out of the embers of the African debacle came the modern nation of Australia. The extraordinary tale is now being told for the first time - how a small band of good-for-nothing members of the British Empire spanned the world from America, to Africa, and on to Australia, profoundly if utterly unwittingly changing history.

Emma Christopher

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