In July 1789, a soldier named Manuel Cuevas attempted to desert after he used a forged receipt to withdraw thirty rations of bread from the warehouse of the Royal Castle of the Aljafería in Zaragoza. At the time, he could not have imagined how many different forced relocations he would experience in the following years because of those acts. Caught and sentenced to ten years of transportation and hard labor, the twenty-three-year-old was first shipped to the work brigades of the North African presidio (military outpost) of Ceuta. Then his sentence was commuted into military impressment, and Cuevas was forced to join the Infantry Regiment of Havana in March 1791. Thirteen months later, he was transferred to the Infantry Regiment of Louisiana, based in New Orleans. In early 1793, he was returned to Havana and sent to Cádiz on board the warship Santa Viviana. Later that year, he lamented his long incarceration in the local jail and petitioned to serve in the army at a destination of the king’s choosing. By that time, however, the authorities regarded him as an “extreme liar, creeper, cheater and seller of his clothes” and decided that the work brigades in Ceuta were a more appropriate place for him.Footnote ¹

The young man’s reputation was largely attributable to a poorly received attempt to fashion himself as an informant in exchange for a pardon for his short-lived desertion from the garrison in New Orleans. During his interrogation on October 11, 1792, Cuevas told the sergeant that he had discovered a major plan to attack and burn down the city on the Mississippi Delta. He had seen many cannons and cannonballs, and several bags filled with gunpowder. In the houses where these munitions were stored, he had met the White male leader of the conspiracy, along with the free mulatto barber Antonio, several slaves, two White women, and many Frenchmen. The group thus included the representatives of those segments of society that were most likely to arouse the suspicion of the authorities in an age of wars and revolutions. But the local authorities were unconvinced by the pair of worn-out shoes that Cuevas presented as evidence of the long distances he claimed to have walked, of the forests he supposedly had crossed, and the places he had allegedly visited in his mere three-day-long desertion. He soon realized that the ploy had failed, and he confessed the falsity of his story. In the end, the attempt backfired badly – and much to his detriment. The authorities punished him harshly for “suggesting ideas from which bad consequences might result among the other sentenced and transported convicts that exist in the Regiment, and due to the state of affairs in Europe, and the consequences they can have in these Provinces.” From New Orleans, he was transported to Cádiz and Ceuta.

For all its specificity, Manuel Cuevas’s story highlights broad issues, including one that is central to this chapter – that war, revolution, and punishment were concrete realities in the lives of many individuals in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, these realities shaped their experiences of mobility and coercion, as much as they produced the imaginaries, hopes, and fears of both subaltern and elite groups. This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations in order to fully understand their blurred boundaries and mutual connections and thus better evaluate their overall impact on the making and maintenance of states and empires.

Focusing on the 1790s, I put two practices of punitive relocation at center stage. First, I look at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Second, I examine the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. Focusing on these simultaneous and partly connected flows allows me to discuss broad issues, such as the impact of racial and status differentiation on the trajectories and experiences of prisoners of war.Footnote ² At the same time, I emphasize that local responses to the captives’ arrival were part of broader strategies of social control employed to deflect undesired flows of refugees and enslaved persons stemming from the French colonies. The concluding section puts these empirical findings into a longer-term perspective and reflects, in particular, on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, I suggest the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishments, and the punished, was construed or marginalized.

Flows of Peninsular presidiarios to Spanish America

In the years of Cuevas’s double Atlantic passage, several hundred convicts were shipped from Cádiz and La Coruña to the Spanish possessions in the Americas and the Philippines.Footnote ³ Considered as a whole, these flows created an extensive network (Map 4.1).

Map 4.1 Main convict flows from Spain and North Africa to the Americas, 1788–95.

The rationale behind such an expensive and logistically complex endeavor was to protect the empire from the (potential and real) invasions of unconquered Indigenous peoples and foreign European powers, while at the same time securing trade routes. To that end, the centerpieces of the imperial defensive system – the presidios – were staffed by two groups of workers: the convicts (presidiarios or desterrados) who were employed in the continuous operation of constructing and reconstructing the fortifications as well as other military and nonmilitary infrastructure, and the more or less voluntary recruits who manned the presidio garrisons and, in times of war, the fighting battalions.Footnote ⁴ The categorization of the workforce into military and nonmilitary convicts had a considerable impact on the experiences of these individuals, but it should not suggest the existence of impenetrable boundaries between these two groups. Indeed, as Manuel Cuevas’s story shows, sentences to forced labor could be commuted into impressment into the army and the navy, and vice versa.

In Peninsular Spain, two institutions were primarily responsible for the organization of convict transportation in the years under investigation: the tribunal of the Arribadas, which was based in Cádiz and responsible for all incoming and outgoing maritime flows in that key imperial hub, and the recruitment commissions (banderas de reclutas), which operated in the Atlantic ports of Cádiz and La Coruña and were in charge of the recruitment of voluntary and involuntary troops. Both institutions answered to the high officers based at the Spanish Court, and ultimately to the king himself. At the same time, they were also connected to a host of legal, political, and military authorities, including the governors of the presidios of Oran (until 1791), Ceuta, Melilla, Peñón de Vélez, and Alhucemas in North Africa, and the navy officers of the peninsular ports of Cartagena, Málaga, and El Ferrol, which served as convict depots. After the prisoners had been shipped or marched, enchained in cuerdas (convict transports), to those hubs or directly to Cádiz and La Coruña, they embarked on the weeks-long transatlantic journey, which took place on a variety of vessels. These ranged from merchant and mail ships, which could only accommodate a few convicts at a time, to large warships that could hold dozens or even hundreds of convicts and other recruits at the same time.

The transportation process was characterized by a certain flexibility that also applied when crucial decisions needed to be made about convict destinations. It was not uncommon for royal, military, and ecclesiastical magistrates to content themselves with establishing the length and type of punishment, offering either few or no specifics about the actual punitive site, or limiting themselves to broad directives like “to the Philippines” or “to the Indies.” Even when specific presidios were mentioned at sentencing, the king and certain high officials were still entitled to change the destination, and they did so quite often. This, in turn, meant that a broader range of actors had the ability to influence the process, including the convicts themselves, their relatives, and the owners of the merchant ships. Contingent circumstances also affected the routes. Overcrowded and insecure jails, or the sudden availability of a ship, could give rise to an unexpected opportunity to organize the quick transportation of a group of convicts to a place other than their previously determined destination. The flexibility of the system allowed it to respond to major events, such as wars, natural disasters, and new projects of colonization, by channeling convict flows to the specific regions where they were needed.

Behind these institutional and logistical frameworks there lay a comparably complex cultural and political process involving the construction of the “convicts” themselves. The association between masculinity and the military, for example, made transportation to the presidios a male-only affair. Moreover, transportation brought together in each shipment individuals who were classified differently according to their legal status, the type of institutions that had sentenced them, and their conduct. Sentenced criminals (reos), military convicts (reos militares), deserters (desertores), and vagrants (vagos) were the main categories.Footnote ⁵ Each was further divided into subcategories emerging at the crossroads of material conditions, cultural perceptions, and imperatives of governance. Thus, in the case of impressments into the military, the key criteria were age (between sixteen and forty years), health condition (verified by doctors before transportation), and the type of sentence. Sentences had to be “clean” (limpias condenas), meaning that they could not involve degrading punitive practices, like flogging, and could not correspond to crimes against honor and morality, such as “pederasty,” rape, and the forging of money and documents. What was at stake was the honor of the army or the navy and the corresponding need to prevent the impressment of dishonorable troops.Footnote ⁶

The process whereby approximately 200 convicts from Cádiz were recruited and transported to Guatemala and New Granada in the period from April 1791 to June 1793 illustrates the complexity of the cultural–political dynamics and the spatial relocations at work.Footnote ⁷ The initial goal, means, and destinations were straightforward. Around 500 soldiers were needed to complete the Infantry Regiment of Guatemala; at least 200 of them were expected to be recruited among the presidiarios of Ceuta who had volunteered to be impressed for the time of their sentences.Footnote ⁸ In the second half of 1791, however, the resistance of the governor of Ceuta, Luís de Urbina, hampered the whole operation. He sought to retain the convict workforce in the North African outpost in order to improve local fortifications and to shore up the understaffed regiment of armed convicts. Whereas he had previously communicated that 3,000 presidiarios existed in Ceuta, he now disclosed to Captain Manuel Remon, who was commissioned with recruitment in Cádiz, that most of them had been sentenced for “indecorous crimes.” At the same time, he informed him that 150 convicts who had first enlisted for Guatemala had changed their minds when they had heard of the more attractive option of entering the Fixed Regiment of Málaga. Thus, he blamed the impossibility of sending them to Cádiz on the “natural inconsistency of these people.”Footnote ⁹

In November 1791, then, the hulk Florentina waited in vain in the Bay of Cádiz for the presidiarios-turned-soldiers from Ceuta. It ultimately left the Spanish port with just twenty-six convicts recruited from nearby jails. Its journey also proved more difficult than expected, as authorities in Guatemala observed high morbidity and mortality among the soldiers and convicts shipped to Omoa and suggested that they reach the province via Havana or Trujillo instead.

The Infantry Regiment of Guatemala had to look elsewhere for its troops.Footnote ¹⁰ The recruitment of some sixty volunteers in the capital was insufficient, although the president of the province, Bernardo Troncoso, expressed satisfaction with the fact that their hair was “straight, or not too curly,” and their skin color was “light, and could be taken for the one of the Europeans.”Footnote ¹¹ The governor of Cuba, Luís de las Casas, communicated the impossibility of sending the “vagrants and vicious” of his island to Guatemala, since they were needed to reinforce the local garrisons, as well as those in Louisiana and Florida that depended on Cuba. The impact of the impressment ultimately fell on the shoulders of the “vagrants and vicious” of New Spain, whom the viceroy Count Revillagigedo agreed to send, insisting that they be transported by sea via Havana, in order to avoid the escapes and deaths invariably occasioned by the march along nearly 2,000 kilometers of “painful road.”Footnote ¹²

Back in the Mediterranean, 140 convicts from the “minor presidios” (presidios menores, or Melilla, Alhucemas, and Peñon) had been expected to reach Málaga in July 1791, in the hope that they could replace the flow of men from Ceuta to Guatemala. On account of logistical problems, however, they first arrived in January 1792, and only reached Cádiz the following month: too late to join the Florentina. By then, escapes, death, sickness, relocations to other peninsular regiments, and the exclusion of counterfeiters and “tumultuaries,” had reduced their number to eighty-two. Nonetheless, their individual records (filiaciones) reveal their variety: the group featured the usual mix of deserters, vagrants, and sentenced criminals. They came from several places across the peninsula, and from as far as France, Sardinia, Genoa, and Mexico; and their crimes ranged from smuggling, bodily injury, and murder, to adultery, poisoning, and carrying prohibited weapons. The twenty-one-year-old seaman Joseph de Flores, born in the province of Seville, had even impersonated the son of His Most Serene don Luís, Infante of Spain. Chained in pairs, the convicts were directed to the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and sixty-six of them ultimately joined the Infantry Regiment of Cartagena de Indias. Although their number was lower than expected, they were warmly welcomed by the viceroy, due to the failure of local attempts to attract volunteers and capture vagrants, and because of the “utility that derives from disposing of a substantial number of European individuals.”Footnote ¹³

Thus far, this reconstruction of events has hinted at high levels of integration between the metropolitan punitive relocations and those within Spanish America. This took various forms. On their way from Spain to the Philippines, for example, some convicts remained for several months in the castles and fortifications of New Spain, where their workforce was exploited while awaiting the ships. Other presidiarios coming from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa were redistributed within the jurisdiction of each Audiencia, or High Court, and Viceroyalty. Like Manuel Cuevas, who found himself re-transported from Havana to New Orleans, at least 350 peninsular convicts were shipped along that same route between March 1792 and July 1793 to be employed in the fortification works – an extended endeavor of deforestation and construction for which, for economic reasons, Governor Héctor de Carondelet relied on convicts rather than slaves.Footnote ¹⁴ In Spanish Florida, peninsular presidiarios redirected from Cuba were part of the approximately 200 convicted laborers (forzados) employed at the fortification in Pensacola.Footnote ¹⁵ Others joined the Cuban vagrants and presidiarios in the important military outpost of Saint Augustine, contributing to the progressive growth of the convicted workforce there: from a dozen individuals in the years after the Treaty of Paris (September 1783) had returned the province to the Spanish monarchy, to approximately seventy convicts ten years later. Then, between the end of 1793 and 1796, their presence in the East Florida presidio more than doubled, as a new group of convicts was added: namely, French prisoners of war, nearly half of whom were of African descent.Footnote ¹⁶ It was one manifestation of the broader impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Caribbean punitive relocations, the subject of the next section.

French War Captives, Refugees, and Convicts in the Caribbean

When one considers the situation of the Caribbean in the early 1790s, it is hardly surprising that in October 1792 the Spanish authorities of Louisiana reacted so harshly to Manuel Cuevas’s clumsy attempt to upgrade the value of his information by including French prisoners among his group of imaginary conspirators. Indeed, Cuevas was consciously evoking the “specter of Haiti” that haunted colonial and republican elites across the nineteenth-century Americas and ultimately took the form of thousands of French soldiers, prisoners of war, convicts, and refugees (emigrados) who came from the island of Hispaniola.Footnote ¹⁷

As early as January 1792, the governor of Yucatan reported that the conflict between “Black royalists” and the revolutionary troops in the northern province of Saint-Domingue had resulted in more than 25,000 deaths, and the execution and transportation of some of the royalist leaders who had come from France. After that, several ships left Saint-Domingue with the aim of taking thousands of Black and mulatto prisoners of war away and abandoning them in nearby foreign possessions. The majority headed to the Dutch colony of Demerara, but two ships were reported to be en route to the Spanish dominions along the Mosquito Coast and in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. All of the French prisoners of war were mentioned in these communications as Black royalists, not revolutionaries. Yet the Spanish authorities were suspicious and sought to keep them at bay. “It is convenient for us,” wrote the governor of Yucatan, “to support the appropriate plan to keep away from us this mob infected with party and revolutionary spirit.”Footnote ¹⁸

The moral panic around the French captives understandably grew when Spain officially entered the conflict with France in the spring of 1793. From Kingston, a French exile reported on the “disaster of Saint Domingue,” where “nothing is left of the city, nor of the white population of the Guárico,” or of the northern province. “The whites are on the run in all directions,” he added.Footnote ¹⁹ Many others echoed his words. First came the news, then the prisoners. Major flows followed the Spanish seizure of Juana Mendez and the Dondón, along the border between the Spanish and French territories on the island. As soon as the first thousand captives reached the capital of Santo Domingo in July 1793, the governor sent them to Puerto Rico, Havana, and Caracas.Footnote ²⁰ Further contingents of prisoners, coming from the battlefields and from captured ships, were transported to those destinations during the war.Footnote ²¹ At the same time, a considerable number of prisoners were relocated within the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, some were exchanged with Spanish prisoners of war, and still others were transported to Europe during the final months of the Spanish involvement in the conflict on the side of the British.Footnote ²² On July 22, 1795, the second Treaty of Basel determined the transfer of Santo Domingo to France; in exchange, Spain regained Guipúscoa and other territories occupied by the French army during the concomitant War of the Pyrenees (1793–95). The news of the end of the conflict reached the Caribbean a few months later, after which the remaining prisoners of war were repatriated.Footnote ²³

Just as the transportation of the presidiarios from Peninsular Spain was shaped by organizational difficulties, so too were the flows of the French war captives (Map 4.2). The issues were not merely logistical; rather, they were the product of lengthy transatlantic negotiations among various authorities and of policy changes over time. In the process, legal and political categories were forged to segment and manage the various groups of people coming from Saint-Domingue, and the boundaries between those categories were blurred.

Map 4.2 Flows of French war captives from Santo Domingo (in black) and during the war (in gray), 1793–95.

The prisoners of war were classified into two distinct categories: “French prisoners” (prisioneros franceses) included the White war captives, whereas “enslaved negroes” (negros esclavos) was reserved for the Africans and Afrodescendants caught in Saint-Domingue. It is worth noting that the individuals in the latter group had been emancipated by the French in 1793; by categorizing them as “slaves,” the Spanish authorities demonstrated their unwillingness to acknowledge those revolutionary measures. At the same time, the fate of the White captives was further associated with that of the (White) French refugees (emigrados), who arrived from Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and France before and during the war. Moreover, some of those caught during the conflict were not classified and treated as prisoners of war but were prosecuted for specific criminal acts and labeled as convicts. This group, too, was divided and managed along racial and class lines.

The authorities had distinct perceptions of the various groups and different preferences regarding their treatment and destinations. Much of this depended on how the authorities understood the specific interests and needs of the territory under their jurisdiction. The priority of the governor of Santo Domingo, Joaquin García, was expelling all French subjects from the island in order to channel all financial and military resources into the defense of the Spanish possessions. At the same time, he insisted that the Black prisoners be sold into slavery and kept under the “domestic zeal and vigilance” of their new owners. He believed that the masters’ interest in maintaining the subordination of their servants would have freed the island and the other Spanish dominions from the danger of insurrection. Conversely, he mistrusted state-administered punishments and insisted that “the presidios can frighten and contain the free men but not the slaves.” According to him, the slaves had “no freedom to lose” in the presidios, where they experienced a lighter regime of forced labor than under their masters and might even dare to hope for freedom at the end of their penal servitude.Footnote ²⁴

In principle, the captain general of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, did not oppose the idea of selling the enslaved prisoners, but he doubted that anyone would ever buy them. “Nobody,” he wrote, “would like to introduce in his [sic] own family a dangerous seducer, filled with the principles of insubordination and liberty.”Footnote ²⁵ Additionally, he emphasized the strategic importance of the territory under his jurisdiction and sought to prevent it from becoming the gate through which revolutionary ideas would spread to the landmass of South America. Thus, he proposed that Black and White prisoners of war be transferred to Cuba, an island with more secure castles (rebuilt and expanded by convicts and royal slaves after the Seven Years War). Meanwhile, he ordered that all prisoners be concentrated in the town of La Guaira and kept there, separated along racial lines, in the vaults of the castle and other buildings. At that time, the port town of some 7,000 inhabitants hosted approximately 1,000 French prisoners.Footnote ²⁶

Carbonell wrote to Spain in November 1793. The court replied the next spring, accepting most of his arguments and stretching them further. The plan prepared by the secretary of state and Duke of Alcudia, Manuel Godoy, was designed to preserve all of Spain’s Caribbean possessions. It upheld the prohibition originally issued on May 17, 1790, on selling slaves from Saint-Domingue in any Spanish possession. But Godoy went further, mandating the recapture of those who had already been sold, though evidence suggests that this measure was not fully implemented. The plan subsequently envisaged the transportation of all prisoners of war to Cuba and Santo Domingo. Among them, those deemed less dangerous were to be kept there and exchanged for Spanish or French royalist prisoners at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the majority were to be shipped to the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe and liberated there, under their word of honor that they would not serve against the Spanish and British armies.Footnote ²⁷

The expulsive intent of the plan was warmly welcomed by local authorities across the Caribbean. Its implementation proved difficult, however, and it was only during the last months of the war that some groups of prisoners of war were transferred to Spain. The rapidly shifting geopolitical situation across the region created substantial problems. Indeed, by the time Alcudia’s plan reached the Caribbean, the British had occupied those very French Antilles that were supposed to receive the prisoners. Furthermore, although the local authorities decided to confine all the White prisoners on the Isle of Pines (to the south of Cuba) and to have the negros esclavos serve as forced laborers in the public works of Puerto Rico, the plan failed. The weakness of the local garrison and the relative abundance of presidiarios in Puerto Rico ultimately forced the authorities to transfer the Black prisoners to the Isle of Pines as well.Footnote ²⁸

The slow transition from an approach centered on mobility and isolation within the Spanish territories to one based on expulsions from the Spanish American territories can also be observed in relation to the emigrados. In 1793 and the early months of 1794, authorities across the Caribbean unanimously emphasized the dangers posed both by the emigrados’ politics and their libertine lifestyles. From Santo Domingo, the governor warned that some of the emigrados who had been repatriated there were spreading rumors among the local slaves that the Spaniards were cheating them, that they would re-enslave them, and that they would be punished and flogged.Footnote ²⁹ The project of some imprisoned French royalist officers to serve the Bourbon king in Santo Domingo or in Europe was rejected by the authorities in Spain, and even the plan to enlist them in the Spanish navy, promoted by its general commander, failed on the grounds that their presence in the Tierra Firma was too dangerous. However, a royal order issued in July 1794 allowed the local authorities and elites to channel their fears literally in other directions, as the king disposed with the transportation of the French emigrados to Europe.Footnote ³⁰ The junta that met in Caracas on October 13, 1794, still complained about the “spirit of pride and independence, and a sort of contempt against the Spanish government” shown by the French refugees (emigrados) in La Guaira, but now the local authorities put most of their energy into the organization of the transportation of 500 prisoners and emigrados to Havana and Spain.Footnote ³¹

This shift in status from refugees to exiles/repatriates thus overlapped with the parallel reclassification of other French subjects from prisoners of war to exiles/repatriates. As in the previously mentioned relocation, the two groups were frequently merged. In 1795, the emigrados from Martinique and the prisoners of war from Santo Domingo were transported together from the Province of Caracas to Cádiz and offered the option to return to France or to join the French Royalist Legion fighting with the Spaniards against the French Republican Army in the Pyrenees.Footnote ³²

Those individuals coming from Saint-Domingue, whether Black or White, who were sentenced to the presidios by penal courts for crimes allegedly unconnected with the military conflict experienced different trajectories.Footnote ³³ They were moved across the Caribbean according to the flow patterns of other convicts. Whereas most of them were held in Havana, others ended up in the castles of Cartagena de Indias, San Juan de Ulúa (Veracruz), and Omoa. Those among them who belonged to elite groups especially resented this association with the presidiarios. The former officer Joseph-Barthelemy d’Azgaignon offered a vivid description of the humiliation he and his peers felt because of the “impolitic association” with those “villainous” individuals who manifested toward them “the hate of an enemy caste.”Footnote ³⁴ The authorities were sensitive to these arguments. In Havana, therefore, 110 convicts from Saint-Domingue were concentrated in the Morro, kept segregated along racial lines, and separated from the rest of the presidiarios.

From their sites of imprisonment across the Caribbean, French convicts also complained about the illegality of their sentences, which were based on charges that either were unknown to them or were as vague as “rabious republican,” “leader of a Club,” “he denounced all royalists,” or “slave who took up arms against the Spaniards.”Footnote ³⁵ These legitimate complaints about their trials and treatment were part of the basic toolkit of any convict. However, in their memoirs, they also questioned their very status as convicts and revealed that they understood themselves as prisoners of war. Their interpretations overlapped with those of the French republican authorities, especially in the aftermath of the war. At that point, French ambassadors and consuls repeatedly demanded the liberation of those they considered prisoners of war, who, as such, had been illegally detained by the Spaniards. The Spanish authorities, in turn, argued that these men were presidiarios or reos de Estado (prisoners of the state), who, as such, should serve custodial sentences. Only in August 1796, for diplomatic reasons, did they order the liberation of the French convicts.Footnote ³⁶

Political decisions, legal classifications, and cultural perceptions of race and class, therefore, did much to diversify the trajectories of the individuals who reached the Spanish dominions from Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the discourses and practices regarding each group were highly entangled. The Spanish elites (and a large part of the White population) tended to perceive any French presence as dangerous, and they were careful to define and manage each subgroup in relation to the others. Thus, they decided upon the fate and destinations of the White prisoners of war in connection with those of the emigrados, and they addressed the forced mobility of the esclavos franceses together with that of the White prisoners.

The punitive relocations described in this section were also connected to broader debates and policies about social control and further flows of migrants. The decision about the destination of the slaves of Saint-Domingue, for example, was linked to the attempt to build a cordon sanitaire around the South American landmass, which included the repatriation from Venezuela of maritime Maroons escaped from Curaçao.Footnote ³⁷ The related need to patrol the coasts, oversee prisoners, and maintain public order triggered further flows. In 1794, the navy in Havana received at least 500 convicts, military convicts, deserters, vagrants, and recruits from New Spain to reinforce the local garrison, which had been emptied by the transportation of many soldiers to the battlefields of Saint-Domingue. Deserters and “vagrants and idlers” (vagos y malentretenido) also made up a significant part of the 500 militiamen who were in charge of the defense and public order in Puerto Rico in June 1796, in the postwar period that witnessed an increased shortage of regular troops.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, while Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela were most directly affected by the flows of migrants stemming from Santo Domingo, preventive measures against the potential influence of revolutionary texts and people were also taken during the war in New Spain, Louisiana, Texas, and Yucatan. Still more distant provinces were involved as well. The order of the Duke of Alcudia regarding the French prisoners of war and the emigrados, for example, was received and praised by the captain general of Chile and the viceroy of Río de la Plata, among others.Footnote ³⁹

The Punitive Relocations in the Age of Revolutions in Perspective

Thus far, this chapter has highlighted the scope, complexity, and connectivity of the punitive relocations that took place in the early 1790s between Spain and Spanish America, and within the Caribbean. This supports one of the broader goals of the whole volume – namely, to highlight the ways in which multiple flows of convicts, prisoners of war, refugees, and exiles coexisted, often in entangled relationships, in a wide range of polities from the 1770s to the 1820s. This final section asks how, on the basis of this expanded approach, we can best reinterpret both the persistence and the transformation of the practice of punitive relocation before, during, and after the Age of Revolutions. Previous scholarship that has focused on (the repression of) the political movements and ideas associated with the Age of Revolutions has posited major discontinuities vis-à-vis the ancien régime. At the same time, this scholarship has foregrounded continuities with subsequent decades, and even described the nineteenth century as the siècle des exiles – one in which politically directed relocations of politically motivated individuals took center stage.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, I would argue that the picture changes fundamentally if we investigate punitive relocations holistically and place them in a broader chronological perspective, starting with the beginning of the Early Modern period. In what follows, I offer the outlines of this alternative approach.

There is little doubt that the period from the 1770s to the 1820s witnessed an intensification of punitive relocations in connection with the various military conflicts and revolutions that unfolded over those decades. It is also clear that the broad spatial scope of those events, and their connectedness, affected punitive relocations by making them spatially broad and closely connected as well. The empirical material that I have presented suggests that this observation holds true for the 1790s, while other chapters in this volume show that it is equally applicable to the Age of Revolutions more broadly. It is worth mentioning, however, that a similar expansion and intensification of punitive flows had occurred in previous periods as well, also in connection with other episodes of military conflict and political change. Moreover, it must be remembered that certain key elements of the logistical dynamics and cultural–political processes that I have discussed in the context of the 1790s predated the Age of Revolutions. Thus, as part of those processes, large flows of refugees and exiles also existed in the centuries before 1770.Footnote ⁴¹

As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish monarchy demonstrated an impressive capacity to mobilize large numbers of soldiers, convicts, vagrants, and prisoners of war to meet its defensive and offensive goals. For example, during the Eighty Years War against the Seventeen Provinces (1568–1648), thousands of troops were transported from the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish Italy along the “Spanish Road” and the “Swiss Road” to Spanish Flanders; they included important contingents of convicts and vagrants.Footnote ⁴² From the 1530s onward (and in some cases until the last decades of the eighteenth century), the Spanish, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Genoese galley fleets were active in the Mediterranean at the service of the King of Spain; their oarsmen were convicts (forzados), enslaved Muslims captives (esclavos), and “volunteers” (buenas boyas). Starting in the sixteenth century, the recruitment of sentenced criminals and vagrants for the galleys became increasingly integrated with their transportation to the North African presidios.Footnote ⁴³ A similar integration between the galleys and the presidios was a long-term feature in the Philippines; there, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the oarsmen and presidiarios, as well as the impressed soldiers, originated not only from within the archipelago but also from Peninsular Spain and the Viceroyalty of New Spain.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Spanish America, the galley fleets stationed at Callao, Havana, and Cartagena de Indias had a more limited relevance for a shorter period of time. The network of presidios became the central feature of the defensive system there, and the transported convicts, vagrants, and deserters had a significant place among their garrisons and played a key role among their forced laborers.Footnote ⁴⁵

The extensive network of punitive relocations that spanned the territories of the Spanish monarchy in the second half of the eighteenth century and up to the 1820s (Map 4.3), therefore, should be understood as emerging from a multisecular consolidation of punitive experiences, and from the constant reproduction and selection of simultaneous and spatially scattered punitive practices. This being the case, the network did not originate from the specific social and political processes of the Age of Revolutions, although these clearly added to its strength and scope during that period. At the same time, the punitive flows that occurred during those decades represented only one part of a broader relocation network that was connected to other simultaneous social processes, such as the colonization of new territories, the exploitation of natural resources and Indigenous labor, and local interactions among different social and ethnic groups.

Map 4.3 Network of punitive relocations to the presidios, Spanish monarchy, 1760s–1820s.

I am arguing that a fundamental continuity existed between the punitive relocations of the Age of Revolutions and those of the Early Modern period, with certain specificities regarding the former notwithstanding. This same continuity cannot be found in punitive relocations in the nineteenth century, since the situation was different. In the Age of Revolutions, the various political outcomes clearly had a profound impact on punitive relocations within the Spanish monarchy. At the spatial level, the independence of Spanish America (except Cuba and Puerto Rico) represented a major disruption of what was once a closely connected network. Many key hubs and flows no longer existed after the 1830s, and those that were added in the second half of the nineteenth century – Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea, the Carolinas in the Pacific, and the Chafarinas Islands in the Mediterranean – entered a Spanish monarchy that had undergone a thorough reconfiguration of its spatiality, structure, and conceptualization.

In terms of imperial governance, the growing hegemony of liberal discourse led to two processes that directly affected punitive relocations. On the one hand, the redefinition of the relationship between the metropole and the remaining overseas provinces and possessions forced a decision about the continuation or discontinuation of penal transportation from Peninsular Spain. Briefly stated, metropole-to-colony penal transportation could only exist if there was continuity in the legal regime between the metropole and the colonies. All Western colonial powers faced this problem, but they split over its solution. France and Portugal opted for a model of assimilation and extension of the legal regime of the metropole to their colonial dominions, and this allowed for the continuation of metropole-to-colony penal transportation. Conversely, Britain and, later, Germany elected to separate the legal regimes and, therefore, to end metropole-to-colony penal transportation. In the case of Spain, the assimilationist project envisaged by the Cádiz Constitution (1812) was later reversed into an imperial regime based on a legal gap between Spain, governed by a liberal constitution, and the overseas provinces, which were subjected to “special laws.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Therefore, penal transportation from the peninsula to the overseas territories was effectively ended in the 1830s, with the flows of sentenced individuals only continuing among the colonies, from the colonies to the metropole, and within each regional network (including one comprising Peninsular Spain, and the North African presidios).Footnote ⁴⁷

On the other hand, the introduction of liberal legal frameworks in the metropole and the redefinition of governance in the colonies paradoxically converged to increase the role of military and administrative relocations. In the overseas provinces, these stemmed especially from the new “supreme authority” (mando supremo) given to the captains general of Cuba and Puerto Rico and, on the former island, from responses to repeated insurrections and military conflicts. Accordingly, several thousand individuals – including insurgents, vagrants, rebellious slaves, and free Blacks – were sent from Cuba to virtually all the other territories of the Spanish monarchy. At the same time, in Spain, the frequent declarations of local and national “states of siege” or “states of emergency” in connection with internal regime changes, attempted revolts, and military conflicts (for example, with the carlistas in the 1830s and 1870s) triggered a series of administrative and military relocations of hundreds of individuals to colonies as distant as Fernando Po and the Carolinas.Footnote ⁴⁸

After the 1820s, then, the flows of punitive relocations were still spatially expansive and qualitatively complex but featured a composition and spatial configuration that was distinct from those in the past (Map 4.4).

Map 4.4 Network of punitive relocations, Spanish monarchy, 1830–98.

Due to the discontinuation of metropole-to-colony penal transportation, the flows that originated from the metropole were now primarily connected to administrative deportations linked to states of emergency. As such, they mostly contained politically motivated deportees. The authorities, however, often used those opportunities to also get rid of groups of undesired subaltern subjects with little or no political affiliations and aspirations. A more balanced composition characterized the flows stemming from the colonies. On the whole, the politically motivated and elite deportees left behind more traces in the archive and have thus attracted more attention from historians than have the “nonpolitical” ones. More generally, the increasing use of military and administrative relocations foregrounded the political nature of the repressive measures, while sentencing through the criminal justice system cloaked political motivations in the apparently neutral discourse of the law. However, penal transportation did not cease to play a role in nineteenth-century punitive relocations, and the expansion of the penitentiary system only made the criminal justice system more intrusive. This suggests that we should reconsider the actual impact of the political prisoners and exiles in each context and period by addressing their mobility as part of a broader network of punitive relocations. Moreover, by taking a longer-term perspective on the whole of punitive relocations, we are better able to ask how “the political,” as a category, was constructed. Doing so also encourages us to interrogate how different types of legal sources (the criminal justice system, military authorities, and police and political power) and distinct punitive methods (e.g., capital punishment, incarceration, penal transportation, and deportation) contributed to this process of politicization or depoliticization of both punishment and the punished.

More generally, this chapter demonstrates that if we situate the punitive relocations of the decades 1770s–1820s in the longer history of Early Modern and nineteenth-century punitive practices, then the question of continuity and discontinuity seems less straightforward than it has previously appeared.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Spanish monarchy provides an important vantage point in this respect, as its multisecular history of colonization and polycentric governance offers the opportunity to contextualize the various configurations of mobility and coercive practices across a relatively long time span. Potentially, this methodological approach might apply to other polities, too. Once we acknowledge that the simultaneity and connectivity of multiple flows was standard across time, we can better establish how different regimes of punitive relocations were connected to specific discourses and practices of power. Rather than linear and universal ruptures, we can then observe contingent, context-specific, and coexisting configurations, as well as simultaneous continuities and discontinuities with regard to more particular aspects. This calls for a connected study of the logistical and politico–cultural processes that shaped those flows, and, in turn, offers an invitation to investigate their impact on the broader dynamics of mobility and coercion in the context of state- and empire-building.