This article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the “loss” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, foregrounding “perspectives from the colonies”, I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

Examining intra-colonial punitive relocations during the first decade of US occupation in the Philippines, this article shows how colonial police and prison officials used incarceration and transportation in tandem to suppress incipient populist revolutionary movements. They exploited historic regional and religious tensions in their effort to produce new modes of racialized and gendered prison and labor management. Finally, while colonial officials sought to brand certain imprisoned subjects as criminal outlaws, rather than political prisoners, many of these anticolonial fighters actually sharpened their ideas about freedom through their experience of being criminalized, incarcerated, and forcibly relocated.

During the British colonial period, at least eleven islands off the coast of Australia were used as sites of “punitive relocation” for transported European convicts and Indigenous Australians. This article traces the networks of correspondence between the officials and the Colonial Office in London as they debated the merits of various offshore islands to incarcerate different populations. It identifies three roles that carceral islands served for colonial governance and economic expansion. First, the use of convicts as colonizers of strategic islands for territorial and commercial expansion. Second, to punish transported convicts found guilty of “misconduct” to maintain order in colonial society. Third, to expel Indigenous Australians who resisted colonization from their homeland. It explores how, as “colonial peripheries”, islands were part of a colonial system of punishment based around mobility and distance, which mirrored in microcosm convict flows between the metropole and the Australian colonies.

After ignoring its holdings in Africa for the first half of the nineteenth century, the European scramble for colonies in the 1880s forced the Portuguese state to adopt a new policy to cement its tenuous hold on its two largest African colonies: Angola and Mozambique. This challenge occurred just as the penal reform movement of the nineteenth century was arriving in Portugal, with a new penitentiary in Lisbon and new legal codes aimed at reforming convicts through their labour. This article examines the rationale and impact of the Depósito de Degredados (Depot for Transported Convicts) in Luanda, Angola, the larger of the two prisons established to supervise the work of convicts sent from Portugal and Portugal’s Atlantic colonies of Cape Verde, Portuguese Guinea, and São Tomé.