The loss of thirteen American colonies turned Britain’s empire upside down, shutting off a transatlantic passage that the British government had used to dump convicted criminals in the Chesapeake colonies in huge quantities before the war. In the wake of independence, that government urgently began to search for a site for a new penal colony somewhere else. After seven tries and seven failures elsewhere in its empire, the ministry eventually established a new penal colony near Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1788. With those first 736 convicts and forced...