Argumentative Essay On Convicts

1: Introduction
Historians are divided as to whether it was convicts or empire the motivation for the establishment of the colony in Australia. On one hand, it has been suggested that inefficiency of Britain’s criminal justice system, lack of penitentiaries and the failure of the Hulks Act, 1776 created a social climate by which transportation of convicts unavoidable. On the other hand is the notion that Britain’s imperial interests, and the value of Australian resources was the backbone of the decision to colonise. On balance, this essay will argue that it was both the need for a convict solution, and a strategic imperial outpost in the South Pacific that led the British to colonise Australia in 1788.

2: Major Arguments

Argument 1: Australia

4: Bibliography
Primary:

Gin Towns as sourced in:
Rodgers, Nicholas Mayhem: Post War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748-53, (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 153-154

‘Heads of a Plan’ as cited in:
Martin, George the Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins (Hale and Iremonger, 1978), pp. 1-7

Arthur Phillip, as cited in Barton, George and Bladen, Frank, History of New South Wales from the Record: Phillip and Grose, 1789-1794, (Charles Potter, 1894)

Dallas, Ken Trading posts or penal colonies: the commercial significance of Cook’s New Holland route to the Pacific, (Fullers Bookshop, 1969) p. 34

Secondary:

Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, (Macmillian, 1968), p. 11

Hill, David 1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet, (William Heinemann, 1947) Shaw, Alan, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britannia and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (Faber, 1966) p.57
Knorr, Klaus, British Colonial Theories. (University of Toronto Press, 1944), p.