Island. In the end, almost all involved met a violent end. Despite efforts in the British and American press to portray Pitcairn as a utopian community, new imperial ventures in… Click to show full abstract
Island. In the end, almost all involved met a violent end. Despite efforts in the British and American press to portray Pitcairn as a utopian community, new imperial ventures in the Pacific could not escape the legacies of violence and dispossession so central to Britain’s Atlantic past. The fragmented and subjective experiences described in this volume suggest that political revolutions accelerated a number of developments that were bringing an early modern British Atlantic world to an end. While revolutionary turmoil, as the introduction argues, did indeed rearticulate and at times extend premodern ideas, it is less clear that this period produced outcomes as varied and inscrutable as the editors suggest. In his contribution, Randall McGowen argues that the penitentiary developed broad political appeal in Britain because it could be seen either to severely punish offenders or to offer a humane alternative to transportation and capital punishment. As the dynamics of power shifted, in ways both imagined and very real, states and empires adapted to new circumstances. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the prison stands as one of the most enduring legacies of this period of revolutionary reform.
               
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