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In recent years, historians have argued that commercial or strategic reasons lay behind the European settlement of New South Wales. This revisionist work reexamines the founding of Botany Bay and reaches quite a different conclusion: that severe penal pressures in Britain were the real impetus for the decision. Drawing on the latest research on crime and punishment in Britain, Mackay uncovers the financial, political, and logistical problems plaguing the British penal system from 1776 to 1786, which finally forced the Pitt ministry to look to New South Wales for a quick and desperate solution.