Emigrants In Chains: 1607-1776
by Peters Wilson Coldham

A history of forced emigration, Coldham's groundbreaking study focuses on the criminals and social misfits who were deported from English jails to the American colonies. The book dwells at length on the trade in convict transportation and on the hapless lives and careers of the felons themselves.

The book focuses on the emergence of transportation as a means of dealing with an unwanted population; the process involved; the administration of the system; and then proceeds with a fascinating look at the transportees themselves.

The whole unhappy saga of enforced transportation is recounted here with such eloquence that it is bound to set some popular notions about the peopling of the American colonies on their head.

196 pp., hardcover, 1992, ISBN 0-8063-1329-3