Penal Colony

As far as colonial settlements go, Australia is unique.

Unlike most European colonies that were mainly about wealth extraction, Australia was founded as a giant prison yard. At first, there were way more convicts than there were free British settlers—between 1788 and 1868, about 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from Britain.

Throughout the 1800s, the ratio tilted heavily in favor of free colonists as more settlers showed up, and as prisoners were released.

The hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people who were already there? Merely an inferior civilization to be displaced in the view of the British Empire. Their political recognition would come painfully late in Australia.

There’s an argument to be made that Australia was the largest penal colony ever devised, and… well, they had a whole continent, so the math definitely checks out. However, the number of people imprisoned in Stalin’s Gulag system makes Australia’s prisoner numbers look tiny by comparison.

In the Soviet Union, forced labor camps held an estimated 14-18 million people prisoner from 1929-1953. Soviet citizens and residents of annexed territories languished under incredibly harsh conditions where about one in ten would die in prison, and those who survived would carry a legacy of generational trauma that pervades modern Russia today.

This coerced labor was a key ingredient in Soviet military and industrial might.

Still, the very idea that Britain needed an entire continent for its prisoners says an awful lot about the state of the world at the end of the 1700s.