Book excerpt: Between 1614 and 1775 some 50,000 English men, women, and children were sentenced by judicial process to be sent to the American colonies for a variety of crimes. The data on these involuntary colonists came from a variety of official records which the author of this work spent over fifteen years studying. Among those covered were minutes of eleven Courts of Assize and Jail Delivery and of twenty-eight Courts of Quarter Session, as well as Treasury Papers, Money Books, Patent Rolls, State Papers, and Sessions Papers. The names of those deported are printed in alphabetical order and form what can be considered the largest passenger list of its kind ever published. The data presented in this volume is highly condensed but most entries include some or all of the following information: parish of origin, sentencing court, nature of the offense, date of sentence, date and ship on which transported, date and place landed in America, and the English county in which the sentence was passed.