As the American Revolution halted the shipment of British convicts to North America, government officials and colonial projectors pursued a string of ill-conceived efforts to transport unwanted prisoners to west Africa. Emma Christopher’s fascinating and heartfelt A Merciless Place examines these African experiments, providing a welcome bridge between the better-known histories of penal transportation to North America and Australia and making the shipping of British convicts abroad comprehensible as a continuously evolving circumimperial story. The book, rich with evocative renderings of the sufferings endured by those sent to Africa, can be read as an extended rebuttal to Thomas Arne’s assurance in the patriotic anthem “Rule Britannia” that “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” To the people at the sharp end of these schemes—the mixed group of petty thieves and career criminals sentenced to African transportation and the almost equally unlucky free people assigned to superintend them—Arne’s patriotic insistence on the inviolability of British liberty must have seemed a bitter joke.

Christopher’s book, first published in Australia, aims to make this history of convict transportation to Africa accessible to an academic and a wider readership. Interesting stories and personalities capture her attention, with the work structured around a chronological account of African penal experiments. This history began in the late 1760s, as officials struggling to find soldiers for the nation’s new but disease-ridden colony of Senegambia began to encourage pardons for those who agreed to serve in Africa. By the 1770s, larger-scale plans were being mooted. The French destruction of the Senegambia colony in 1779 shifted attention to the Gold Coast, where Britain’s slave-trading forts seemed ideal destinations for convicts to some in government. Although many slave traders vocally opposed the idea—they feared the convicts would become uncontrollable and would reduce the stature of Europeans on the coast—the ongoing war in America and a perception that London’s jails were becoming dangerously overcrowded kept the idea of African transportation alive.

The scheme ultimately set in motion in 1781 saw two new “independent companies” of the British Army raised for service in Africa, consisting primarily of convicts as enlisted soldiers and a handful of free officers. Christopher devotes much of the book to narrating these men’s misfortunes. To circumvent slave traders’ objections, the convict soldiers were formally dispatched not to garrison British forts but rather to operate independently against the Dutch on the Gold Coast. From the start the plan was a debacle. Before the troops even arrived on station, one of their two captains was dead of a fever, and his second-in-command had been killed in a duel. Unsurprisingly, the units proved ineffectual as a military force, failing to capture Dutch Elmina in 1782. In that failure’s wake, the companies simply began to melt away. Mistrusted by those who administered Britain’s African forts, severely undernourished, and attacked by tropical diseases, most of the convicts soon died in abject circumstances. The desperate survivors were subject to brutal discipline at the hands of their dangerously outnumbered officers and frequently deserted to the Dutch. Continued government pressure on the Company of Merchants to accept convicts led to a small number of other prisoners—including, to the apparent horror of hardened slave traders, a few women—being sent to Africa in ensuing years, but they fared little better. By late 1785, only about a dozen of the nearly 250 convicts sent to the Gold Coast remained alive and in service (317–18).

Christopher aims to tell this story largely through attention to individual lives, assembling a large cast of characters and tracing their experiences through sporadic references preserved in various archives. The two most fully drawn figures, at the center of Christopher’s history of the independent companies, are Kenneth Mackenzie, a grasping Scottish army officer who commanded the convict-soldiers in Africa with increasing incompetence and brutality, and William Murray, a silver-tongued repeat offender whose luck finally ran out when he had to choose between being hanged and being sent as a private to the Gold Coast. Christopher compellingly reconstructs the British misadventures that led each of them to Africa and the unlikely, terrible, and intertwined history of the two men once they arrived on the coast.

The metropolitan underclasses soon came to understand that transportation to Africa equaled a death sentence. Although officials, including Thomas Townshend (Lord Sydney), and entrepreneurs attempted other solutions, including an effort to send prisoners to British settlements on the Bay of Honduras, resistance to transportation was resolute in the Caribbean and the United States. While the prospects for establishing penal colonies in Gambia and modern Namibia were investigated between 1784 and 1786, neither idea proved feasible. In the face of these failures, Sydney and others eventually concluded that the solution to England’s “prisoner problem” lay neither in America nor in Africa but rather on the other side of the world. In May 1787, the First Fleet, carrying more than seven hundred convicts, weighed anchor for New South Wales.

One of the book’s principal achievements is to put the Botany Bay decision into useful perspective. It appears here as simultaneously one more in a long line of penal colony experiments and, despite the distances and difficulties involved, as a more prudent and even more humane plan than recently tried alternatives. Being sent to Australia was a cruel fate for convicts, but “however hard things were, they were never as bad as the fate they had so narrowly escaped” (356). The total number of Britons transported to Africa was small—a few hundred people—but Christopher’s engaging account of their experiences is instructive. Shipped in chains to the epicenter of the transatlantic slave trade, frequently forced to serve as soldiers of the king, and sentenced to what amounted to an early and squalid death, these Britons both witnessed and experienced the ways that captivity flourished alongside liberty in Britannia’s maritime empire.