[idlewords]

A lot of those criminals were people who were transported for trifling offenses like theft. The real driver behind Australian settlement was overpopulation in Britain, not the need to get rid of some hardened criminal class. The Fatal Shore is a good, readable history of this social experiment.

Note also that this "budding free society" was responsible for horrible atrocities against the native population until fairly recent times.

[littlewing]

> Note also that this "budding free society" was responsible for horrible atrocities against the native population until fairly recent times.

Doesn't excuse it, but I can't think of a first world country that hasn't committed atrocities to native people or forced people into slavery. In many ways, the world is much better today than it was before.

[tptacek]

It's interesting how attempting to reconcile a "much better world" with multiple genocides forces you to evaluate what it means for the world to be "better" or "worse". If we can destroy a whole culture and virtually all its people to make room for settlers, what other forms of progress might invoke the same "eminent domain" against us?

The world is certainly a nicer place for us to live in than it was for the pre-colonial Australian aborigines, or the pre-Columbian Iroquois. I like antibiotics, plumbing, and electricity too. But too: there are lots of other niceties that would be much easier to dole out to our friends and fellow citizens if we could simply eliminate pesky rival people. Were constitutional democracy, English common law, and industrialization the key improvements that justified our ancestors perpetration of genocide? Are we done now?

[zurn]

Europe didn't have that many native peoples to displace. Colonialism rather dented the record for the countries that got into it though. And many that didn't got conquered. So kind of a survivor bias.

[douche]

If I recall, stealing anything worth more than a few shillings in value was a capital offence in Georgian Britain. The aristocracy, gentry, and merchants took property rights very seriously...

Georgia was also briefly a penal colony

[worik]

It is still committing horrible atrocities against the native population. They are taking more indigenous children from their parents than they ever have.