A Merciless Place
Price:
$29.95 (02)Description
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.
Features
- About as lively as nonfiction can get; the author's depictions of place-that of London's fleshpots and streets, for example, is straight out of Moll Flanders-are completely riveting.
- Fresh topic. Nothing has been written between the time-period between when the American colonies were the destination for British convicts and Australia (cf. Robert Hughes' in FATAL SHORE). There's a gap, which this fills.
- This is the kind of book someone like Marcus Rediker (THE SLAVE SHIP) would write, and about it he said: "This book will challenge historians of many different specializations to think outside their small, comfortable frames of reference. Emma Christopher is a creative historian writing at the peak of her powers."
Reviews
"A gripping tale of convicts and slaves, disease, mutiny, crime and suffering that will take the reader on a compelling journey through the underbelly of the British colonial world." --Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, author of Closing Hell's Gates: The Death of a Convict Station
"It is a rare pleasure to review a book that will appeal not only to the specialist in the field, but also to the general reader. A Merciless Place is such a book, a work of original scholarship that clearly indicates years of hard labor in the archives, and also a beautifully crafted literary endeavor, one that should attract anyone who appreciates excellent writing . . . Thoroughly researched, brilliantly written, deeply humane, A Merciless Place is a model of modern legal scholarship." --H-Net
Product Details
440 pages; b/w photo insert; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-978255-0ISBN10: 0-19-978255-5About the Author(s)
Emma Christopher is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Slave Trade Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 and co-editor of Many Middle Passages. She has been a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library and a Gilder Lehrman Fellow at Yale University.
