Editorial

This paper explores concepts of death and dying during the period c.1480 to 1560, drawing on vernacular medical and devotional literature and legal depositions taken in cases brought before the English court of chancery. It looks at contemporary explanations for the physiological processes that caused the body's death and at the way in which the proximity of death was assessed. For the most part identifying whether an individual was alive or dead was straightforward. However, evidence from legal depositions relating to the death of a mother and child in childbirth reveals that in certain circumstances determining the point of death was more problematic.     

Editorial

ABSTRACT

Before the 1820s, enslaved people in many of Britain's Caribbean colonies were regularly sentenced to the punishment of ‘transportation’, which meant being sold into the slave trade within the Americas. For a short period ending in 1837 people sentenced to transportation in the Caribbean were sent to Australia via Britain. This article examines these successive systems of transportation and addresses the Colonial Office decision of 1837 to end transportation from the West Indies to Australia. It highlights the significance of an emerging racial and spatial politics of empire that coded Australia white and the Caribbean black, and tried to ensure that the two did not mix.