Convict Transportation and Penitence in Moll Flanders

Drawing on legal and economic history and transatlantic debates about the behavior of transported convicts, this essay reads Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders as a key to the eighteenth-century colonial turn in criminal sentencing. This shift, wherein vestigial ecclesiastical privileges and reports of spiritual conversion legitimated the commutation of death sentences to servitude abroad, renders the narrative's concern with penitence newly legible. Not merely in Moll's spiritual condition, the text's religious language and narrative structures consolidate the terms of a penal system whose Atlantic reach was enabled by legal fictions and demonstrations of belief.