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Dorice Williams Elliott, Hilary M. Carey. Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875., The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 762–763, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab234
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There have been many histories of convict transportation to Australia, ranging from popular accounts like Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1987) and Thomas Keneally’s A Commonwealth of Thieves (2006) to classic tomes such as A. G. L. Shaw’s Convicts and the Colonies (1977) to recent entries, including David Hill’s Convict Colony (2019). A few historians have also considered the causes of and events leading toward the ending of transportation. Hilary M. Carey’s Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875, however, adds something new to the discussion. Her comprehensive study examines how religious leaders—some officially affiliated with various religious denominations and others political or governmental leaders with strong religious sensibilities—influenced these forms of transportation. The book sheds new light not only on the effect of religion on the campaign to end transportation, as the subtitle indicates, but also on just how much religion was a factor in the ways convict transportation was implemented from its beginnings.
