[TRANSPORTATION] Las colonias penales de la Australia y la pena de deportación.

Memoria premiada por la Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Politicas en el concurso ordinario de 1875. Madrid : Eduardo Martinez, 1877. Large octavo (255 x 170 mm), publisher’s wrappers (lightly marked, head and tail of spine chipped), 99 pp; text in Spanish; entirely unopened, a very good copy. Ferguson 6092.

In 1875 the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences held a public competition to gather responses to the question of whether Spain should establish a system of transportation of convicts – based upon the English model – to overseas penal colonies (for example to islands in the Gulf of Guinea or the Marianas Islands in the Pacific). As the English transportation system was well and truly finished by this time, this was a belated consideration on the part of the Spanish authorities. The author of this essay was the feminist and advocate of prison reform, Concepcion Arenal. Her work is an investigation of the moral and economic issues surrounding the transportation of English convicts to penal colonies in Australia, and it arrives at a conclusion that is strongly opposed to such a system.