In Empire of Hell, Hilary Carey argues that debates about the virtues, nature, and vices of convict transportation in Britain's empire were suffused with religious ideas and imagery. Without them, argues Carey, we can understand neither transportation nor Britain's wider penal policy. Whereas Carey's God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (2011) challenged historians to reassess the well-trodden ground of missions to the colonized and asserted the role of Christian clergy in building settler societies, Empire of Hell mounts the most comprehensive examination to date of religious responses to convict transportation. It is a rich, detailed, and nuanced work covering transportation from Britain and Ireland to the Australian penal colonies, Bermuda and Gibraltar between 1788 and 1875. In each arena, Carey documents the influence of religion in endorsing, shaping and, ultimately, ending convict transportation. Religious reform, claims Carey, was “fundamental, not incidental, to convict colonization in the British Empire” (3). She challenges both historical and historiographical characterizations of the penal colonies as an “empire of hell,” by emphasizing transportation's reformative aspects and showing how both opponents and supporters of transformation deployed rhetorically the terrors of convict life.

Carey's argument ranges widely in both geographical and denominational terms, whilst moving smoothly between metropolitan and colonial arenas. She differentiates among Evangelicals, Quakers, Liberal Anglicans, and Catholics; considers penal reform experiments, including Norfolk Island and the probation system; and examines the late flowering of convict transportation to Bermuda, Gibraltar, and Western Australia, as well as the better-known eastern Australian penal colonies. Empire of Hell shows not only how understandings of transportation's religious dimensions varied over the nineteenth century, but also how different denominations and their clergy used the penal system to insert themselves into the fabric of colonial society. The views of elites, rather than those whose lives they debated, are explicitly and consistently prioritized. We hear from very few of the 185,000 convicts transported during the period in question; those who do speak—like the Dorchester swing rioter, James Loveless—are seldom run-of-the-mill. Other recent studies have endeavored to find ways to foreground the experience of ordinary convicts, but Carey's focus is the role of religion and religious discourse in debates about transportation. Thus, among others, Carey carefully dissects the views of William Ullathorne, Richard Whately, James Maconochie, George Arthur, Elizabeth Fry, the Third Earl Grey, and John West. Their debates interrogated the purpose, measures of success, efficacy, and costs of convict transportation. Which was the more important measure of success: reformed convicts or a productive colonial labor force? What purpose did a hellish deterrent serve? What role should ministers of religion play in administering penal colonies? How could mere compliance with the norms of civilized colonial society be distinguished from a profound moral and religious transformation? At stake in many of these debates was the very nature of the relationship between Britain and its colonies.

Empire of Hell provides a thorough demonstration of how religious ideas were invoked when debating transportation and penal policy: Carey certainly fulfils her intention to make the “religious threads … visible and integral to the historical tapestry of the convict system” (20). Thus, chapter 9's discussion of the lead taken by “political parsons” across the settler colonies in opposing the resumption and extension of transportation in the mid-century supplies clear evidence of how religious language and practices shaped manifestations of protest and dissent. It is less easy to discern how important religious experience or ideas were in some other circumstances Carey discusses. For example, her exploration in chapter 7 of Alexander Maconochie's regime at Norfolk Island remains ambivalent about the precise influence of his practical Christianity on penal practice.

To my mind, Carey's promise to prove that religious reform was fundamental to convict colonization remains unfulfilled. Nonetheless, Empire of Hell reveals the pervasiveness of religious ideas and discourse in nineteenth-century penal policy, and it illuminates the nuanced ways in which those ideas were invoked. At times, Carey's effort to take a comprehensive view of penal transportation, the complexity of the texts with which she grapples, and persistent poor editing threaten to occlude her arguments. Potentially intriguing discussions of the colonial anti-transportation movement (chapter 9) and Western Australia (chapter 11) are particularly afflicted by factual inconsistencies, as with confusion over the dates of the 1862 “garrotting panic” (298–99). This is a shame, as her arguments are, at their best, complex, subtle, and important. They suggest that we cannot understand convict transportation without paying due attention to religious discourse and denominational differences, not least because they were part of the fabric of empire. The concluding chapter presents Carey's views with welcome clarity; readers should turn to it first and know that their efforts with the rest of the book will be well rewarded.