Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094306118815499a

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Along The Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties And Colonial Common Sense

That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Peter Novick

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. By Alfred W. Crosby. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 368 pp. $22.95.)

A history of the study of human growth.

In 1787, the First Fleet was dispatched from the British Isles to find a penal settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. By this time, the British government had already experimented with convict transportation for over 160 years. The aim of this article is to place the history of transportation to Australia within the context of the wider flow of convict labour from the British Isles in the period 1615 to 1870. Using data from a range of sources it attempts to chart and explain fluctuations in the number of convicts transported over time. It also seeks to explore how the integration of convict labour within the transatlantic market in unfree labour-shaped British penal policy in the long-run. Such an analysis is useful in explaining the differing impacts that transportation had on the prisoners who experienced it and the intensity with which it was opposed in the 19th century by the British anti-slavery movement. Geographically the article explores these issues in relation to transportation to the New World (especially Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland and Virginia), West Africa, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Western Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar.

Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland 1615–1870

Chain letters : narrating convict lives

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830–1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and the convict body: the archaeological record of the Tasman Peninsula, the life course data of the convicts and the administrative record generated by decades of convict labour management. Through these, the research seeks to demonstrate how changing ideologies affected the processes and outcomes of convict labour and its products, as well as how the landscapes we see today were formed and developed in response to a complex interplay of multi-scalar penological and economic influences.

Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context:

In October 1827, nine convicts who had endured years of unimaginable cruelty at the hands of the system opted for 'state-assisted' escape. Five terrified witnesses - their hands and feet bound - were forced to watch as the chained convicts seized Constable George Rex and drowned him in the tannin-stained waters of the harbour. When the sentence of death was pronounced upon them, the condemned prisoners uttered just one word in reply: Amen...For twelve long years between 1822 and 1834, Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour was the most feared place in Australia. Clinging to the shores of the wild west coast of Tasmania and hemmed in on all sides by rugged uncharted wilderness, the environment itself formed the prison walls that confined the unfortunate convict re-offenders who were sent there. But the conditions were so brutal that many went mad, or chose death or a very uncertain escape into the bush rather than spend their time in this notorious place...Based on detailed accounts from the time, Closing Hell's Gates contains dozens of personal stories of the harsh and unforgiving life that people were forced to lead, both as convict and overseer, and in so doing reveals some startling insights about human nature when it is pushed to extremes.

Closing hell's gates : the death of a convict station

The earliest measures of well-being for Europeans born in the Pacific
region are heights and wages in Tasmania. Evidence of rising stature
in middle decades of the nineteenth century survives multiple checks
for measurement, compositional, and selection bias. The challenge
to health and stature seen in other settler societies (the ‘antebellum
paradox’) is not visible here. We sketch an interpretation for the
simultaneous rise of Tasmanian stature and per capita gross domestic
product based on relatively slow population growth and urbanisation,
a decline in food cost per family member available from a
worker’s wage, and early recognition of the importance of public
health.

/pdf/growing-incomes-growing-people-in-nineteenth-century-26fpawoy22.pdf

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

Papers

Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland 1615–1870

Chain letters : narrating convict lives

Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context:

Closing hell's gates : the death of a convict station

Growing Incomes, Growing People In Nineteenth-Century Tasmania