Although a crucial element of imperial architecture, non-metropolitan penal colonies remain relatively understudied, compared with the richness of historical scholarship on modern prison systems in Western Europe and its offshoots. Complementing the perspective chosen in the recent International Review of Social History Special Issue 26, “Transportation, Deportation and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, the four articles in this Special Theme propose an additional angle of investigation of the role of convicts in the incorporation of new territories into colonial empires. The authors place sites of punishment, rather than flows of convicts, at the core of their reflection, and provide a close-up analysis of circulations of information and people across the borders of penal sites on various scales: local, trans-regional, and international. They problematize the notion of “border”, and consider it as a vantage point that leads to a new conceptualization of the penal colony as a system that expands in its surroundings and, in turn, assimilates external political, social, and economic stimuli. Relying on several distinct methodological approaches, the authors foreground the specificities of colonial punishment and demonstrate how punishment became part of the creation and maintenance of power inequalities between the colonies and the metropoles.

The article analyses the development of agricultural penal colonies in Italy, focusing on their margins and borders. The first section focuses on Italy's frontier with overseas territories that was assumed in discussion of the location of penal colonies following Italian unification. The article also highlights some of the factors behind the effective lack of deportation and transportation of Italians overseas. The second section explores Italy's largest agricultural penal colony, Castiadas, in Sardinia and, more generally, the borders between convicts and free citizens and between penal territory and free territory. My thesis is that penal colonies were partly designed to discipline populations in adjacent territories and that their economic and social organization served as a development model for rural Italy more widely.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

In the late 1930s, three mobile penal camps were established in the French colony of Senegal in order to assemble convicts with long sentences and compel them to work outside the prison. Senegalese penal camps were thus a place both of confinement and of circulation for convicts who constantly moved out of the prison to work on the roads. This article argues that the penal camps were spaces of multiple and antagonistic forms of mobility that blurred the divide between the “inside” and the “outside” world. The mobility of penal camps played a key role in the hazardous living and working conditions that penal labourers experienced. However, convict labourers were not unresponsive and a range of protests emerged, from breakout to self-mutilation. These individual and intentional forms of mobility and immobility threw a spanner in the works of the day-to-day functioning of Senegalese penal camps and, more broadly, in the colonial project of mise en valeur.

This article examines the social and spatial embedding of the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan within the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. It challenges the conception of the colonial prison site as an unquestioned symbol of discipline and control in the hands of the authorities, doing so by studying the various images, reputations, and stigmas of the island that circulated in the colony. Its reputation was established and disseminated by journalists, politicians, and other “informed outsiders”, who paid short authorized visits to the island, and their conclusions and evaluations determined, to a large extent, the effectiveness of Nusakambangan as a deterrent and as a symbol of colonial discipline and control.