The transportation debate concerns the evaluation of the criminality of convicts transported to Australia. In Essay of Elia Charles Lamb wondered whether peoplein Sydney were busy stealing from each other all day long and this may have been the general attitude of English people in the 19th century toward convicts in Australia. However, this attitude charged in the early 20th century when Hammonds suggested in The Village Labourer that the convicts had been victims of the Industrial Revolution or the village Hampdens of that generation. There was another change in the l950s, when Manning Clark stated that the convicts had originally been professional thieves. Thereafter changing trends in research into the social history of England, especially into criminal history, have influenced attitudes to the convicts. So when Tobias made a detailed study of the criminal class in 19th century England in his Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century both Robson in The Criminal Settlers in Australia and Shaw in Convicts and Colonies insisted that the convicts came from the criminal class in England. This view of the convicts as serious criminals prevailed until the 1980s, when Nicholas produced a new view in his Convict Workers. Following the lead of social historians such as E. P. Thomnson and his, sunrcorters, as well as Gatrell and David Philips, who denied the existence of the so-called criminal class, Nicholas tried to interpret the Past from the 'bottom up'. Whereas Robson used indents primarily as evidence of the recorded crimes of the convicts, Nicholas analysed the convicts, occupations as recorded on the indents and concluded that they had been ordinary workers who casuallv committed petty crimes at work when times were hard. From what recent social works in the social history of England tell, Nicholas's interpretaion of the origins of the convicts seems to hold true.
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