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1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2024

Jan C. Jansen
Affiliation:
The University of Tübingen
Kirsten McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Sydney

Summary

This chapter introduces the essay collection Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750 – 1830. It argues that the history of exclusion and forced removal must be put center stage in order to understand the era often described as the cradle of political modernity. The collection argues against a dichotomy between free and unfree mobility, rather regarding them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. It emphasizes both the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the counterforces that kept people in place. It draws together hitherto separated scholarship on the mobilities of enslaved individuals, convicts, soldiers and war prisoners, refugees, and displaced Indigenous communities. The result is a set of entangled histories that together break down assumptions about geographies and chronologies, and interrogate the dynamic interplay between systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.

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Chapter
Information
Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions
A Global History, c. 1750–1830
, pp. 1 - 27
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024
Creative Commons
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This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

The revolutions and military confrontations that rocked the world during the decades around 1800 saw forced movements – both old and new – on a massive scale. It was during these years that the transatlantic slave trade reached its peak; that decades of almost uninterrupted inter-imperial warfare drove hundreds of thousands of soldiers and military agents across the globe, causing the number of prisoners of war and captives to rise to unprecedented heights; that long-standing imperial practices of convict transportation went into high gear; and that political refugees and exiles emerged as a mass phenomenon. Bold attempts by state authorities to control and regulate mobility led to new legal practices and statuses and to further waves of deportation.

Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c.1750–1830 brings this explosion in forced mobilities into full view. Rather than describing forced migrations as an aberration in a period usually identified with national independence struggles, the quest for liberty, and new concepts of citizenship and democratic participation, this book recognizes these mobilities as a crucial dimension of the momentous transformations that were underway. By putting the history of exclusion and forced removal center stage, Mobility and Coercion recovers the fundamental messiness, violence, and contingency of the era often described as the cradle of political modernity.

An Age of Wars, Revolutions, and Coerced Mobility

The decades between 1750 and 1830 comprise a chaotic and momentous period in world history. A long-standing, mainly Western, intellectual tradition has referred to this period as the transition to (Western) modernity. This Sattelzeit (saddle period), to borrow a term coined (half-seriously) by the historian Reinhart Koselleck, was marked by simultaneous transformations in politics, societal structures, and economic production, and by the attendant emergence of new worldviews, some of which permanently altered the experience of time and historicity.Footnote 1 Most scholars of non-Western and global history have cautioned against universalizing concepts of historical change that, in many cases, only apply to a subsection of Western European regions and peoples during this period. Yet most global accounts of the period agree on its transformative character, especially with regard to political and geopolitical upheaval in many parts of the world.Footnote 2

Building on this characterization of the years between 1750 and 1830, Mobility and Coercion emphasizes two forces that shaped this era: revolution, on the one hand, and warfare, on the other. These dual “expressions of mass human violence” have long been understood as defining features of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although they are usually studied in isolation.Footnote 3 A long-standing historiographic tradition has referred to the revolutions of this period as the cradle of Western political modernity. This Age of Revolutions came to scholarly life as an elite-centered picture of the American and the French Revolutions and their interconnections.Footnote 4 Over time, historical scholarship has broadened this focus on the North Atlantic to include the major political convulsions across Latin America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and southern Europe.Footnote 5 In so doing, historians have brought into view an increasingly diverse set of actors, including Indigenous communities across the Americas, West African jihadists and war captives, rebellious ship crews and privateers, and enslaved and free insurgents from Haiti and other American slave societies.Footnote 6 At the same time, our understanding of the Atlantic Age of Revolutions has grown to recognize the revolutions’ inherent imperial character.Footnote 7 Instead of following narratives of national self-liberation and exceptionalism, scholars now tend to highlight the imperial frameworks within which the era’s great political revolutions unfolded, and they argue for a better understanding of the dialectics of continuity and change that shaped this period.Footnote 8

Scholarship that looks beyond the Atlantic world and seeks to understand the Age of Revolutions within even wider vistas must recognize that empires, rather than nation-states, functioned as political superstructures and that established chronologies were created from Eurocentric perspectives and should therefore be viewed critically. For British historian C. A. Bayly, the Atlantic Age of Revolutions was just one variant of a “world crisis,” a confluence of fiscal and military shocks that unsettled not just the colonial empires of Western European states but also those ruled by the Russian tsars, the Ottomans, the Qing in China, the Crimean Tatars, and the Mughals.Footnote 9 While these crises seldom led to complete imperial breakdowns, and while they affected the regions of the world in varied and uneven ways, they ushered in lasting geopolitical shifts: the worldwide expansion of European overseas empires, in particular the ascendancy of the British Empire to global supremacy, soon thereafter sustained by the increasing socioeconomic divergence between Europe and Asia.Footnote 10 In the Pacific and Indian oceanic worlds, expanding Western empires encountered, clashed with, or coalesced with manifold Indigenous efforts toward political and social reordering and state-building.Footnote 11 The decades around 1800 also saw a higher level of subaltern unrest at sea – seaborne revolutionary action, mutinies, and rebellions – across the world’s oceans.Footnote 12 This myriad of sociopolitical upheavals at land and at sea brought about a complex web of global interactions whose origin and impetus often lay outside of Europe and the (North) Atlantic world.

The upheavals of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “world crisis” were violent affairs, and the dividing line between revolution and warfare cannot be drawn sharply. Each of the great revolutions in North and South America, in the Caribbean, and in Europe involved large outbursts of civil war violence. Revolutions also grew out of major interstate wars, starting with the Seven Years War (1756–63), which has already been correctly described as a true world war.Footnote 13 The wars of US American, Haitian, and Latin American independence, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars across Europe, and revolutionary and religious wars in West and Central Africa yielded a state of almost ceaseless warfare across the globe, one in which long-standing geostrategic interests were overlaid by the new ideological and political front lines of the era. The formation and reformation of empires and polities in South Asia became entangled with increasing European incursions in the wake of revolutionary conflicts, linking the world of the Indian Ocean with that of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.Footnote 14 The world had long known major military conflicts. But after 1750, large-scale armed conflicts became more frequent, and they expanded massively in their geographic scope, both on land and at sea. These sustained armed conflicts also transformed the practice of warfare: In the decades around 1800, states built up massive naval forces, and military strategists put new and greater emphasis on artillery on the battlefield. As armies grew, civilians were increasingly drawn into warfare, a process exacerbated by the elaboration of the concept of “irregular” guerilla warfare (“small war”).Footnote 15 Considering revolution and war as equally defining – and inextricably connected – features of the years between 1750 and 1830 improves our understanding of the period’s military and political history. It helps us better grasp the transformative character of warfare well beyond the battlefield, and it illuminates the violent, disruptive, and contingent realities that are too often overlooked in a teleological view of the Age of Revolutions.

Mobility and Coercion also emphasizes a third characteristic of the period that was closely connected with the era’s sociopolitical and military confrontations and with the broader transformations then underway: greater human mobility. Against the idea of a long-term shift from “unfree” to “free” (labor) migration – still widespread in general accounts of migration history – the chapters in this volume highlight the ubiquity, persistence, and expansion of coerced mobility. Building on important advances in the historical scholarship on mobility and labor, Mobility and Coercion departs from the classic idea of migration as a free, linear movement between a clear starting point (place of origin) and a clear endpoint (place of permanent settlement).Footnote 16 This normative account only ever concerned a slice of human mobility, not only between 1750 and 1830 but also during any other period in world history.

Mobility and Coercion seeks to shift and expand the scholarly conversation on migration by following three key principles. First, the essays collected in this volume challenge the notion of “free” and “unfree” mobility as two discrete types of human migration and instead regard them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. The agency exercised by individuals who were moved against their will and the forms of resistance, strategies, and choices they deployed in response to systemic forces are central concerns of this book. Second, the case studies introduced in subsequent chapters emphasize the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the importance of transit and temporary destinations. Third, the featured case studies underscore the importance of coerced immobility, the crucial and yet largely understudied role played by border controls, forms of identification and registration, the regulation of legality and illegality, and of practices of expulsion and deportation, and the undoing of migration in the history of mobility.

Major Areas of Forced Mobility

The forms of forced movement that characterized this age of wars and revolutions had very different origins and trajectories. Although political refugees, as a mass phenomenon, date to our period of focus, most forms of forced mobility that we address have much longer histories. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade, for example, had already been conducted as a large-scale system of forced migration for several centuries. The same can be said of the transportation networks for convicted criminals. Nonetheless, all of the forms of forced mobility addressed in this volume entered into a particular stage during the globe-spanning political and military upheavals between 1750 and 1830. For the sake of clarity, we distinguish between five major areas of forced mobility that feature prominently throughout this volume:

  • Slave trade: Almost six million enslaved Africans were boarded onto ships to the Americas between 1750 and 1830, accounting for half of the estimated 12.5 million Africans who were forced to cross the Atlantic between the early sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries.Footnote 17 In the 1790s, the transatlantic displacement and enslavement of Africans reached both an all-time high and a crucial breaking point. While the extent and decisive causes of the nineteenth-century abolitions of the slave trade and slavery are still subject to debate, we argue that revolutions and wars were crucial factors.Footnote 18 Seen most clearly in the case of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the contestation of slavery was integral to all revolutionary struggles throughout the Atlantic world.Footnote 19 It was central to the revolution in France and had repercussions across the French Empire as well. The American Revolution and the various independence struggles across Spanish America were likewise shaped by the involvement of enslaved people and by conflicts over emancipation. Even more important, arguably, was the destabilizing impact of war. Disruptions caused by inter-imperial and civil wars and the access to arms and military service provided crucial paths to emancipation and put greater pressure on the slavery-based plantation system.Footnote 20 The short- and medium-term effects of warfare and revolutions on the slave trade and slavery were complex. Under the pressure of self-liberation, particularly in Haiti, and of state-led efforts to ban both the trade in and ownership of slaves, the locus of the slave trade shifted to places where Atlantic slavery continued (or started) to thrive, such as Brazil and Cuba. The British ban on the slave trade in 1807 itself produced new forms of bondage and unfree movement, such as the trade in indentured “recaptives,” “liberated Africans,” and “prize slaves,” and the ongoing clandestine trade in enslaved Africans in the Atlantic was accompanied by not-so-hidden slave trades in other parts of the world.Footnote 21

  • Convict transportation: From the early fifteenth century, the transportation of convicted criminals and their use for forced labor had been a long-standing form of punishment practiced by all major Western, and some non-Western, empires.Footnote 22 The multidirectional displacement of convicts to penal colonies created wide-ranging networks between colonies and metropoles across the globe. Important overlaps existed between the movement of convicts and other forms of forced labor (such as indentured labor) and labor-based punishment. Convict transportation also proved crucial in times of war and political upheaval, when the criminal justice system could be used for forced military service and impressment or to expel recalcitrant political opponents or unruly slaves. The independence of the thirteen North American colonies in the 1780s, hitherto an important destination for British convicts, ushered in the rise of the Australian penal colonies. At the same time, Russia began to use Siberia more systematically as a place of exile for criminals and political dissidents alike, and the British East India Company established new convict transportation systems. An increasing number of political exiles found themselves alongside “regular” criminals and undisciplined soldiers in other European extraterritorial possessions, such as French Guiana and (after 1830) North Africa.Footnote 23

  • Dispossession and expulsion: The political emancipation of European settler societies in the Americas went hand in hand with the shrinking autonomous spaces of Indigenous populations. Aggressive frontier colonization, land dispossession, and the state-sponsored displacement of nomadic and hunting populations on the American continents were part of a global push of White-settler land expropriation that could also be seen in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and southern Africa.Footnote 24 If convict transportation was fundamental to the economic and geostrategic needs of imperial expansion, so too was it central to the ethnic violence of settler colonialism and the forced removal of Indigenous populations.Footnote 25 Imperial strategies of dispossessing and expelling colonized populations and Indigenous resistance leaders resulted in particular iterations of forced removal, particularly variants of banishment and transportation, that either utilized intracolonial networks or took advantage of internal methods of isolation, often on islands.Footnote 26 Neither these practices nor the local resistance they encountered were confined to the Americas or the Global South. The connection between state-building and ethnically motivated mass expulsions also became apparent in the struggles between the Ottoman Empire and national independence movements in southeastern Europe, especially, for example, during the Greek War of Independence.

  • Military mobility: Decades of virtually uninterrupted warfare saw the massive buildup and projection of armies across the world, making war “an arena for heightened human mobility.”Footnote 27 The resulting mobilities of soldiers and sailors were the most obvious expression of sustained imperial wars. The treatment and movement of captives and prisoners of war and of demobilized military personnel and veterans on a global scale were major issues faced by belligerent states.Footnote 28 Lacking standing armies, warring states satisfied their insatiable hunger for military recruits through coercive means, ranging from the impressment of (formerly) enslaved individuals and convicts to early experiments in compulsory military service. Prisoners of Central and West African wars also made up a significant proportion of the enslaved captives crossing the Atlantic. As a result, major outbursts in the constant state of war that was slavery, such as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica (1760), look like extensions of African military history.Footnote 29 In the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and other later slave uprisings of the era, African-born captives were in both the armed resistance against planter regimes and (when drafted into the military) the counter-insurgency.Footnote 30 The military action of the era was also significantly defined by self-appointed military agents and entrepreneurs – veterans, mercenaries, “volunteers,” “adventurers,” semi-official advisers – who offered their military expertise and weaponry from one geopolitical conflict zone to another.Footnote 31 “Undisciplined” soldiers and deserters made up an important portion of convicts sent across the globe, including to France’s infamous military penal colonies in North Africa.Footnote 32

  • Political flight and exile: Each of the major revolutions and the upheavals they generated put tens of thousands of people on the move.Footnote 33 The American Revolution pitted champions of independence against those who remained loyal to the British Crown, with the exodus in 178283 of at least 60,000 Loyalists in the aftermath of the American Revolution.Footnote 34 Roughly 150,000 individuals who opposed the course of the French Revolution left France in the early 1790s and scattered across Europe and the Americas.Footnote 35 Some 20,000 to 30,000 people left the French colony of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, and thousands more escaped a number of smaller revolutions (or the consequences of their failures) across Europe and the Caribbean.Footnote 36 A few years later, in several movements, tens of thousands of exiles from Spanish America arrived in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.Footnote 37 In total, more than a quarter of a million people left or were forced to leave their homes as a result of political conflicts and civil wars in the Atlantic world alone. While exile and asylum had much older precedents, the period between 1750 and 1830 stands out as the moment when people escaping political change and revolutionary violence became a mass phenomenon, with far-reaching consequences. Along with the motives for flight, the radii of forced movement changed dramatically. The refugees did not disperse, as in the preceding centuries, along religious or confessional trajectories but rather across a dynamic political map that shifted with the moving front lines of revolutionary and civil wars. Due to their political context, revolutionary-era refugees became prime targets of heightened mobility control, surveillance, and deportation by receiving states.Footnote 38

Each of these forms of coerced mobility has its own historiography. Some of them – the scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and on convict transportation, in particular – have been, for generations, among the most productive fields of international research into forced mobility, unfree labor, and confinement and into transcontinental, imperial, and oceanic history writ large. Others, such as the historical study of refugee mobilities, are still only, if rapidly, emerging. Whatever the extent of their genealogies, these fields share a tendency toward disciplinary compartmentalization and containment. These fields revolve around (allegedly) discrete types and categories of mobility and generate their own research questions and concepts. The histories of enslaved individuals, of convicts, of prisoners of war, of displaced Indigenous communities, and of refugees are usually studied in isolation from one another, despite the fact – as we will see throughout this volume – that people often fell into more than one category, moved in the same space, crossed paths, and interacted with one another, and in so doing forged new connections that invite new comparisons.Footnote 39 Comparative or entangled approaches that cut across these forms of coerced (and free) mobility have been extremely rare, although a few publications by leading specialists on the slave trade and convict transportation make a strong case for such perspectives.Footnote 40 As a result, the full extent of the explosion of all kinds of coerced mobilities during the age of wars and revolutions has been occluded by seemingly particular and disconnected histories of (forced) migrations.

Mobility and Coercion goes beyond such compartmentalized approaches to offer new perspectives on this explosion of coerced mobilities. To be sure, the chapters in this volume build on specialized scholarship and present fresh, empirically grounded research, and their focus and arguments are often reflective of their respective author’s specialized background. The chapters by Christian G. De Vito and by Brad Manera and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart bring in perspectives from the histories of convict transportation in the Spanish and British Empires, respectively, while the contribution by Anna McKay emerges from the history of military mobility and war captivity. Many other chapters take the histories of various refugee movements and political migrations as their starting point: British Loyalists and French émigrés, respectively, as in Liam Riordan’s and Friedemann Pestel’s chapters; refugees from the Haitian Revolution in the chapters by Nathalie Dessens and Jan C. Jansen; exiles during the revolutions in Spanish America in Edward Blumenthal’s and Karen Racine’s chapters; political mobilities during the revolutions in southern Europe in Maurizio Isabella’s chapter; and practices of political deportation in British-controlled India and the Cape Colony in Kirsten McKenzie’s chapter.

For all their distinct concerns and topics, the chapters in Mobility and Coercion nevertheless delineate the contours of a shared history integrated by a multitude of overlaps, interconnections, and permeable boundaries. Across multiple points of intersection, we pursue this shared ambition in two major directions. In the first place, we show how approaching the age of wars and revolutions from the point of view of coerced mobilities can break down entrenched assumptions about geographies and chronologies. Second, we challenge the clear-cut typological distinctions that still inform understandings of migration, and we interrogate the dynamic interplay between these systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.

Geographies and Chronologies

Scholars have long recognized the emergence of new borders and sovereignties as central to the age of wars and revolutions. What has received far less emphasis is the manner in which changed geographies both triggered forced mobilities and were, in turn, shaped by them. If this holds true for geography, then it is equally applicable to chronology. In response, Mobility and Coercion avoids clear delineations in either area – instead of insisting on overly rigid definitions of geographic spheres such as the “Atlantic world,” or chronological units such as the Age of Revolutions, the volume points to interlocking geographies, as seen from micro- and macro-historical perspectives, and favors an encompassing approach to chronologies in which continuities, slow change, and rupture mix. Our case studies also undercut normative ideas about the temporal and geographic structure of migration. Instead of presenting a linear movement that occurs in a clear time frame, they emphasize moments of transit, transience, sojourning, and circular movements as integral dimensions of human mobility. We approach these questions across the volume at different scales, from the granular to the expansive.

In some instances, coerced mobilities occurred in close connection with the formation of new borders, sovereignties, and regions that have long been the focus for research on this period. Even if this outcome had not been pursued, or even anticipated, by virtually any contemporaries, most of the revolutionary upheavals brought about newly independent states and upended long-standing notions of sovereignty and political membership. Blumenthal demonstrates how exiles and émigrés in Chile and the Río de la Plata (caught up in political and civil war dislocation) entered into fluctuating alliances with Indigenous groups in Mapuche country to both reinforce and disrupt nascent international borders and underpin evolving sovereignty. As imperial state structures broke down, émigrés found refuge with Indigenous groups, creating new alliances and alternative sovereign structures. Spaces of exile opened and closed as borders shifted in response to territorial conflicts and realignments. Turning to Louisiana as a borderland in the northern part of the American continent, Dessens emphasizes the crucial role of Saint-Domingue refugees in the early US American republic. While they participated in US nation-building, the refugees also connected New Orleans to a reconfigured map of the Atlantic world and the Caribbean.

Just as people made borders, so too did borders make people. For Riordan, the conflict and violence in North American border regions made coerced migration a common experience for all who inhabited those spaces. Riordan tracks repeated waves of expulsion across one region (what would become the borderlands of the United States and Canada) over an extended period of time. Rather than emphasizing distinct histories of population displacement, he takes a longer view and employs a layering approach that demonstrates the connections between one forced removal and the next. Thus, the struggles of Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki who resisted and fled attempted genocide cannot be separated from the ethnic cleansing of the French Catholic Acadian settlers or the purging of American Loyalists after the conclusion of the American Revolution. Shifting or tightening territorial borders during this period turned people more neatly into insiders and outsiders, even in territories where more flexible forms of belonging had long existed. For Jansen, the revolutionary era saw sprawling alien regulations and border controls that bolstered states’ powers to deport unwanted foreigners, especially refugees, and that often raised thorny questions about the criteria for distinguishing outsiders from insiders. As described by Isabella, the Greek War of Independence saw the brutal expulsion of those who were not considered part of the emerging nation of Greeks. In both cases, however, gray zones of conditional, partial, or multiple belonging continued to exist, and canny individuals were able to shape and negotiate their belonging to states.

The individual chapters in this volume deploy different lenses; whereas some highlight the experiences of specific individuals or zero in on moments of crisis, others take a broader view of systems and chronology. In McKay’s account, we see how imperial practices collapsed under pressure of victory as well as defeat. The huge numbers of prisoners of war captured by the British between 1793 and 1815 stretched their existing arrangements to the breaking point and led officials to institute new systems of global forced mobility. But analogous systems could also prove persistent and resilient. De Vito argues that historians should zoom out and view the period between 1770 and 1820 as part of a much longer project within the Spanish Empire in Europe and beyond, a project that stretched back to the 1500s and involved relocating soldiers, convicts, and vagrants to meet its military needs. Rather than generating these practices, the revolutionary era intensified and accelerated them, establishing systems and procedures that sent French refugees and convicts from Haiti into the Spanish Caribbean, while simultaneously channeling men from Europe and North Africa throughout the empire to sites where they were needed to work or fight. Similarly, McKay and also Manera and Maxwell-Stewart demonstrate the longue durée dependence of a British army on enforced mobile labor – whether their own (felons) or foreign (prisoners of war and enslaved) populations.

As with both Blumenthal and Riordan in the borderlands of the Americas, Dessens shows how waves of forced migrations overlapped and intersected in New Orleans. In so doing, she moves that city from the margins of the Atlantic world to the center of a Caribbean world in the revolutionary era. As an asylum of choice for those displaced by regional conflict, New Orleans was redefined by significant waves of free and forced migration that also changed the city’s place in the world. Dessens demonstrates how Saint-Domingue refugees – both free and enslaved – reoriented the city southward at the very moment it was incorporated into the United States after the Louisiana Purchase. Refugee flows and their corresponding cultural, economic, and political ties helped transform New Orleans into a new center of gravity for the Saint-Domingue diaspora and a nodal point of exchange within a reconfigured Caribbean world.

While the Atlantic world, broadly defined, has long been a point of emphasis in the historiography of this period, many chapters in this volume speak to the increasing trend of globalizing the revolutionary moment. Some of the borderlands in this volume were long-standing regions of mobility, and the movements between 1750 and 1830 only reactivated them. In other instances, new territories were drawn into existing systems of displacement. Dessens and De Vito discuss the interconnection between the Caribbean and the Atlantic through the coerced mobilities of refugees, convicts, and prisoners of war, both free and enslaved. Where battlefields were global, so too were the movements of people and resources, as the chapters by Manera and Maxwell-Stewart, McKay, Isabella, and De Vito all make clear. Developments were frequently ad hoc and contingent. McKay documents the mobilities of prisoners of war who were captured by the British and detained, sold, and put to work across the empire – in numbers so high that the old system was pushed to breaking point, leading officials to move prisoners across oceans and continents, remaking empire in the process.

Pestel reminds us that such geographies were as much imagined as real. He recounts how, as exile dragged on, leading French émigrés engaged in debates about potential places for the permanent settlement of their diaspora. While still strongly rooted in a France-centered worldview, their schemes considered resettlement as a global endeavor, ranging from the North American backcountry and the Antilles to Russia and the Pacific Ocean. The idea of French political emigration to Australia, however, was also used as a rhetorical tool by French republicans to ridicule their exiled opponents. Political developments in France allowed for most émigrés’ return, and their far-reaching resettlement plans never materialized. This stands in contrast to the case of the Saint-Domingue refugees who, after a series of transient and provisional arrangements, gravitated toward US-owned Louisiana as a place for permanent settlement. Along with the resettlement of American Loyalists in America’s Northeast (Riordan), Pestel’s and Dessens’s accounts of émigré communities, real and imagined, remind us of the patterns that turned forced migrants – religious refugees, convicts, enslaved fugitives – into settlers. Imperial systems of resettlement that did not just posit imperial expansion and settler colonialism as causes of displacement (of Indigenous populations) but also as a solution to it obviously persisted into the era of political exile.Footnote 41

Finally, as this volume repeatedly shows, following individual life trajectories often recasts our knowledge of historical geographies. The story of Agustín Iturbide, exiled ex-Emperor of Mexico, highlights the unexpected connections that could be drawn between London and the Americas. Conspiring with local and global networks of imperial and commercial interest, Iturbide sought to manipulate these networks in an ill-fated quest to return to power (Racine). Isabella’s shapeshifting revolutionaries allow us to see the Mediterranean world from Palermo, expanding our understanding of philhellenism as not just a revolutionary form of liberalism but also as an imperial ideology and an emerging Mediterranean tradition. The Mediterranean emerges as an oceanic world populated with figures from the Napoleonic Wars who washed up on its shores and never left – officers, soldiers, mercenaries, agents, traders, and diplomats. Informal agents advanced an array of imperial interests and created new humanitarian and financial networks from a range of unstable and opportunistic subject positions. Dessens demonstrates that the strategies of Saint-Domingue refugees to increase both their economic and symbolic capital underscored the French identity of New Orleans at the very moment when it became absorbed into the United States by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Networks of people and information linked regions both within and across empires. Unsurprisingly, given the ascendancy of British imperialism at this moment, London emerges as a significant node of connection in this volume. Dyani Tshatshu, a Xhosa chief who visited London in 1837, was reportedly most impressed not by railroads or steam engines but by what he saw in a House of Commons debate: “a little company of men – not taller than I am here – touch the spring that moves the world.”Footnote 42 Historians have found it convenient to divide their histories by regional focus, but such conventions would have made little sense to those who sought to control Tshatshu’s machinery of change. In fact, three chapters in this volume (Racine; Jansen; McKenzie) show British members of Parliament and colonial officials (sometimes the very same historical actors) wrestling with issues central to this volume at the very same time. In 1824, within months and sometimes days, these men were ignoring the exiled ex-Emperor of Mexico’s overtures and demands (Racine), arguing about the subjecthood and forced removal of free people of color from Jamaica (Jansen), and managing the fallout from the exile of newspaper editors in Bengal and the Cape Colony (McKenzie). Colonial officials managing a set of problems unfolding “everywhere and all at once” clearly recognized that a flare-up in one region could easily be weaponized by activists in another.Footnote 43

Activists and authorities alike understood implicitly that debates around press legislation or the line between alien status and subjecthood could not be bound within one jurisdiction. Refugees from one locality forced the issue of legal definitions in another. Exiles and opportunists made their way to these global metropolitan centers and emanated from them as well. As Racine’s account of fallen Mexican Emperor Agustín de Iturbide shows, the fallout from the end of the Spanish Empire played out in unexpected places, including the drawing rooms of a provincial watering place such as Bath. Pestel, too, positions London as a point of intersection in the revolutionary world, connecting French émigrés with plantation interests with revolutionary Saint-Domingue and turning them into driving forces behind the ill-fated British military intervention in the Haitian Revolution. All such new arrivals tapped into, sought to exploit, and were, in turn, exploited by local politicians. Metropolitan and regional nodes were perfect hubs for plotting exiles who sought funds and forces to return home. These nodes were likewise well suited for the mobilization of prisoners of war and the deployment of transported and military labor.

Systems and Individuals

The case studies presented in this volume challenge the clear-cut typological distinctions that still prevail in both academic and nonacademic discourse about migration. Starting in the 1990s, social scientists and historians began dissecting rigid terminologies of migration, pointing out their pitfalls. An important subbranch of refugee studies has drawn attention to legal and bureaucratic processes of labeling and discursive distortion to which refugees and forced migrants have been subject.Footnote 44 In recent years, political scientists and anthropologists have offered pointed critiques of the binary distinction between “migrant” and “refugee” as a “legal fiction” with wide-ranging legal, political, economic, social, and cultural implications for people on the move.Footnote 45 Most of the border-crossers that fill the pages of this book fit between allegedly discrete categories of migrants, defying any neat binary between free and unfree movement.

Categories, typologies, and classificatory systems have their analytical limits and are also profoundly complicated by the entanglement of individuals with systems in real-world situations. More than three decades ago, Roger Zetter drew an analytical link between structure and agency in pioneering the concept of refugee labeling.Footnote 46 Labels, he later reflected, not only provide a “tangible representation of policies and programmes” but are also open to manipulation by individual and institutional interests. They are both a “process of identification and a mark of identity,” whether resisted or embraced.Footnote 47 Across the chapters that follow, we seek to unknot the tangled relationship between the structures of forced mobility and the agency of those caught up in their toils. Some authors take as their starting point large-scale histories, whether of geographies or of systems, then drill down toward the individuals who were navigating these treacherous waters of population displacement and political upheaval. Others move in the opposite direction, using case studies focused on particular historical actors to draw out expansive themes of forced migration and the possession and dispossession of human beings that eventuated.

That exile and forced movement resulted in unintended outcomes or brought together strange bedfellows becomes apparent in multiple ways throughout this volume, including in Pestel’s account of the alliance between the Knights of Malta and the French planters of Saint-Domingue. Planning global émigré outposts, he argues, was an attempt to build bonds among communities in exile, fostering a sense of shared belonging as well as marshaling outside support for those excluded by revolutionary forces. The Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Isabella explains, allowed Ottoman Christian mercenaries from diasporic Greek communities to travel, in the process shifting the definition of what it meant to be Greek. Many of the chapters in this volume, whether directly or obliquely, thus question the usefulness of ideological coherence as an analytical tool for understanding individual or group motivations within the age of wars and revolutions. Whether it was the search for opportunity or safety on the part of individuals, or the needs of military and economic force on the part of state actors, expediency often trumped conviction in determining patterns of mobility.

Scores of those who roamed revolutionary-era southern Europe eluded clear categorizations as “volunteers,” political exiles, mercenaries, economic migrants, or foreign advisers (Isabella). Pestel shows how French émigrés began to imagine themselves as both political refugees and settler colonists in the Americas, Russia, and Australia. Because of the porous boundaries of warfare, sailors and whalers became mixed up with soldiers in the mass of prisoners of war and “captives” taken by the British Army (McKay). Many other cases highlight groups and individuals that cut across two or more types of coerced mobility. The British West India regiments and the Royal African Colonial Corps, discussed in depth by Manera and Maxwell-Stewart, filled their ranks with recruits who were often soldiers, convicts, and enslaved people at the same time. Coerced mobilities relating to the Haitian Revolution and the revolutionary Caribbean were particularly complex. The refugee movements from revolutionary Saint-Domingue that spread to other Caribbean islands and to North America included men and women of all races who had been born free, newly emancipated men and women, and enslaved individuals brought along by other (free) refugees (Dessens; Jansen). Their legal status notwithstanding, many Saint-Domingue refugees of African origin or descent were re-enslaved and forced into a thriving informal inter-imperial slave trade. Refugees also became mixed up with prisoners of war and convicted criminals, something British and Spanish authorities in the Caribbean grappled with (De Vito; McKay). Moving armies included thousands of quasi-indentured former slaves (“prize slaves”), convicted criminals, and enslaved men, the last of whom were either forcibly recruited or self-enlisted as a means to gain personal freedom (Manera and Maxwell-Stewart). The deployment of regiments largely composed of unfree Black and White soldiers in the slave societies of the Caribbean led to rifts between British authorities and White slave-holding elites.

But the chapters in Mobility and Coercion do more than merely demonstrate that many cases simply did not fit into clear-cut classificatory systems. In line with recent research on the historical semantics of migration and exile, they delve into the classifications and categories that were used and contested by actors on the ground.Footnote 48 In so doing, they provide deep insights into a period in which new systems of categorizing and regulating mobilities took shape, but during which most of these categories and legal statuses still remained highly malleable. Authorities in places such as Jamaica and New Orleans, where different sets of refugees had washed up, both differentiated and blurred their vocabulary of exiled groups (Jansen; Dessens). As a result, people did not just move between places but also between legal statuses and classificatory frameworks. Legal scholars of slavery and labor history have amply shown that distinctions between personal freedom and unfreedom were in practice much less clear-cut and more porous than in legal theory.Footnote 49 Social practice complemented – and complicated – the law. In a similar fashion, the individuals in this volume moved between legal categories of “free” and “unfree” mobility, and (above all) between different legal categories of coerced mobility. Enslaved individuals briefly became refugees, only to become enslaved again; convicts turned into soldiers and, as a consequence of war, prisoners of war. Even if the vocabulary was blurred, such classifications had profound consequences, since they had a concrete impact on the lives of the individuals categorized as such. Mobile individuals and state actors alike wrestled to turn these legal frameworks and their loopholes to their advantage. Free people of color from Saint-Domingue in Jamaica knew exactly why they sought the status of prisoner of war and not the one of refugee (McKay).

States responded to these blurred categories by attempting to pin down and systematize barriers, yet historical actors still managed to slip through them, time and again. In other instances, state actors sought to keep their own classification systems flexible, indistinct, and open, while individuals tried to claim specific categories for themselves. In a world where track-and-trace systems were emerging in state structures, where the rise of the information state increased technologies of surveillance, paper identities became an increasingly important factor in mobility. Tickets of leave, musters, ship manifests, and slave and foreigner registrations – all were mechanisms by which both identity and movement were pulled more and more under state control.Footnote 50 In multi-imperial borderland regions such as the Leeward Islands, continuous warfare and the fear of revolutionary “contagion” gave rise to surveillance systems that cut across different colonies.Footnote 51 De Vito shows how new categories were created within the Spanish Empire to classify and manage different kinds of exiles from the conflagration of Saint-Domingue. Yet these systems were never totalizing, as several chapters show. In McKenzie’s chapter, we meet James Silk Buckingham, a British-born resident of Bengal who was subject to the East India Company’s practices of forcible exile, known as “transmission.” Buckingham tried to bypass this rule and protect his Calcutta newspaper by putting ownership into the hands of Francis Sandys, who as a Bengal-born subject was exempted from transmission. Refugees, in particular, were assiduous in expanding their opportunities to turn such systems to their own benefit. The Saint-Domingue refugees studied by Jansen deftly navigated discriminatory legal measures in Jamaica through their own bureaucratic efforts to fix a more favorable identity or subject position for themselves or their heirs. Refugees, though untrained, were shrewd in their vernacular use of the law to counter forces of state control through alien status. If paperwork trapped some, then it enabled others, as in Isabella’s chapter, which demonstrates how renegotiated “national” identities could mean taking advantage of documents and facilities to secure passage.

Tracking individual fates and state actions complicates any easy relationship between forced removal and legal regimes. Though few prisoners were directly sentenced to conscription, as De Vito, and Manera and Maxwell-Stewart point out, royal prerogatives and other judicial maneuvering and pretrial legal wrangling could be used to push men into the army. Inconsistent legal regimes were usually figured out in situ at the margins. Distinctions along the lines of race, gender, and social status, or between free and enslaved peoples, shaped these ad hoc legal frameworks according to the needs, prejudices, and fears of local officials. State authorities and individual actors also had to navigate plural legal systems and uncertain jurisdictions that grew out of the intersection between different European legal traditions, as in the Cape Colony; between Indigenous and European imperial law, as in the American borderlands; or between contradicting local colonial and overarching imperial law, as in British Jamaica (McKenzie; Riordan; Blumenthal; Jansen).Footnote 52 This had both advantages and disadvantages. For authorities in the Cape and Bengal (McKenzie), the peculiarities of peripheral legal regimes at first looked advantageous in removing troublesome subjects, but what seemed expeditious could easily backfire when subject to scrutiny from the metropole. Likewise, a particular set of alien legislation seemed to offer Jamaican authorities leeway to quell domestic unrest, until what had been practiced for several decades got caught up in fierce debates in the imperial center (Jansen). In an era in which all major European empires underwent profound constitutional transformations, individual cases of coerced migration could resonate with major debates. The actions and fates of particular historical actors became points where controversial topics, like the shifting terms of state belonging, the fundamental rights of political members (subjects/citizens), the rule of law, or freedom of the press, crystallized.

Individual fates in this conflagration of war and revolution were profoundly gendered. The timing of the pregnancy of Charlotte Lecesne, and the birthplace of her son Louis Celeste Lecesne, two of the exiles studied by Jansen, were details that figured importantly in ensuing debates about their status and subjecthood in early 1800s Jamaica. The legal status of mother and son differed, but in each case, their status was contentious and carefully fashioned in the face of a hostile bureaucratic regime.Footnote 53 Family connection and community formation were part of the refugee movements (real and imagined) explored by Dessens, Riordan, and Pestel. The connection to family was even stronger for those who claimed royal status and saw themselves in relation to their dynasties. As Racine shows, plotting in London and Bath, Iturbide was concerned to ensure the proper education of his children as well as to regain his throne in Mexico. Meanwhile, as British Admiralty registers of prisoners of war demonstrate, even ostensibly male-dominated systems of forced mobility had to account for women, children, and noncombatants in their logistical organization and consider the fates of families (McKay). And, of course, the relocation of immense numbers of men was never a gender-neutral phenomenon. The consequences of an unbalanced sex ratio in new convict colonies on the Australian continent sparked persistent concerns about sex between men, or (as was the usual phrase) “unnatural crime.”

Where our authors focus on the opportunities of mobility in this volume, they emphasize that these were restricted not only to men but also to particular types of men. Race and class determined how individuals fared within systems of coercion, and whether a prisoner of war, for example, was enslaved or liberated. The fate of those men who either seized the opportunities of mobility or were forcibly removed were bound up in the identities they asserted, and in many instances these identities were carefully manipulated. The journalists at the heart of McKenzie’s account, for example, presented themselves within a particular model of reforming middle-class masculinity that gained traction in the early nineteenth century against the backdrop of aristocratic “Old Corruption.” They served as avatars of the independent European merchant class in colonial entrepôts, representing the politically and economically motivated critics of local administration. Those exiles put on trial in absentia in the wake of the Chacay Massacre (Blumenthal) were similarly adept at manipulating emerging networks of public opinion through publication. For Blumenthal and McKenzie, as well as for Jansen, media could be used across borders to launder the opinion of exiles in one space so as to facilitate their return to another.

Decades of global war not only changed militarized masculinity on an individual level but also undergirded the violence of forced mobility and imperial expansion. In the “legion of the damned” (Manera and Maxwell-Stewart), we meet Joseph Wall, whose background before enlistment included not only sexual assault but also the killing of a friend in a duel over a matter so trivial that Wall could not recall the cause.Footnote 54 As lieutenant governor in Gorée, West Africa, Wall commanded a regiment made up of enslaved Africans, British convicts, and disgraced soldiers. During Wall’s command of the African Corps, he was accused of the arbitrary detention and suspension from command of his junior officers, the wanton imprisonment and brutal flagellation of his troops, the extortion of African leaders and traders, and the embezzlement of provisions and naval and military stores for his private enrichment. Facing an inquiry, he fled. After twenty years on the run, Wall was finally arrested and put on trial. Convicted of murder, he suffered the agonizing and prolonged death of a botched execution in 1802. Wall’s sadism was noted and condemned even by his contemporaries. But what of the more widespread impacts of trauma on large groups of men who served in “condemned battalions” made up of slaves, “deserters and culprits from the hulks”?Footnote 55 Many went from disease-ravaged service in the West Indies to convict guard posts in Australia, where they were caught up in frontier conflict or made the journey (both physical and mental) in the other direction.

If these patterns underscore the way in which human mobility connects theaters of empire not normally studied together, what consequences did these connections have for individual action? In different ways, the chapters in this volume point to the intersection between the military, penal labor, and slavery that lay at the heart of “war capitalism.”Footnote 56 The voracious demand for troops, and the acceptance of disposable recruits, made for inherently brutalizing systems. These were not operated by disembodied forces, but by men who – whether attracted to violence or damaged by trauma – took one set of experiences with them to their next deployment. While historiography has paid increasing attention to “imperial careering,” there has been less emphasis on tracing these intersecting systems and their consequences both for individual behavior and for more widespread assumptions about militarized masculinity.Footnote 57

***

In pulling together new research from different historiographic strands, Mobility and Coercion does more than present a comparative panorama of discrete case studies and episodes. The individual chapters are informed and linked by an interest in the larger contexts, connections, interstices, and gray zones that emerge from different histories of coerced mobility. Together, they advance perspectives that go beyond the conceptual and historiographical specificities of their respective case studies. In so doing, they deliberately disrupt assumptions about the appropriate focal points of scholarly emphasis, and they caution against the divisions that have hitherto separated certain fields or approaches. As a result, the chapters might seek the political machinations of Latin American revolutions in the salons of Bath, England, or trace the impact of convict settlements in Australia on the imagination of French émigrés. None of the chapters focuses squarely on slavery and the slave trade, but the ubiquity and importance of the mobility of enslaved people is apparent in at least half of them. None offers a squarely military history, but the ubiquity of global war or the threat of war infuses all of them. Whether approached at the macro or the micro level, the subsequent chapters examine the intersection of mobile individuals and systems of mobility. In tracking individuals and groups who were caught up in moments of profound upheaval, we see that even under the most constrained conditions, individuals who moved under coercion aspired to agency and actively sought to shape their own fates in various ways – by slipping through categories, seeking out opportunities, manipulating legal regimes, and spreading the consequences of war and revolution around the globe.

Footnotes

1 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1979), 1: xv.

2 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004), 86120; Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2014), 5963; David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke and New York, 2010).

3 Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (London, 2021), 4.

4 Classic accounts include R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1956–64); Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation: L’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris, 1956); Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris, 1963).

5 For overviews of this scholarship, see Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1996); Wim Klooster, ed., The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2023); Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton, NJ, 2023); Joseph Miller, “The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolutions,’” in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, eds., Age of Revolutions, 101–24; David A. Bell, “The Atlantic Revolutions,” in David Motadel, ed., Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge, 2021), 3865.

6 See, for example, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1840 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York, 2014); Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2015); Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens, GA, 2016); Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (New York, 2016); Edgardo Pérez Morales, No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Nashville, TN, 2018); Christian Ayne Crouch, “The French Revolution in Indian Country: Reconsidering the Reach and Place of Atlantic Upheaval,” in Megan Maruschke and Matthias Middell, eds., The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization (Berlin, 2019), 85105; Vanessa Mongey, Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA, 2020).

7 Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 319–40; Manuel Covo and Megan Maruschke, eds., “The French Revolution as an Imperial Revolution,” French Historical Studies 44 (2021); Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton, NJ, 2017); Jan Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 219–50.

8 See, for example, Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, eds., Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2013).

9 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London and New York, 1989), 164–92; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 86–120.

10 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–1800 (London, 2007), 157217; C. A. Bayly, “The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760–1830,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 2847.

11 Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (London, 2020); in comparative perspective, including the Americas, see Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell, eds., Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, MD, 2018).

12 Niklas Frykman, Clare Anderson, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Marcus Rediker, eds., “Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: A Global Survey,” International Review of Social History 58, Special issue 21 (2013).

13 Marian Füssel, Der Preis des Ruhms: Eine Weltgeschichte des Siebenjährigen Krieges (Munich, 2019); Daniel A. Baugh, The Global Seven Years War 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest, new ed. (London, 2021).

14 Kaushik Roy, War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740–1849 (London, 2011).

15 David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare (Boston, MA, 2007); Martin Rink, “Der Kleine Krieg: Entwicklungen und Trends asymmetrischer Gewalt 1740 bis 1815,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 65 (2006): 355–88.

16 For a critique of the classic concept of migration as a free and linear movement, see Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1999), 1113; Clare Anderson, “Global Mobilities,” in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds., World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present (London, 2016), 169–96.

17 For regularly updated numbers, see the database www.slavevoyages.org; and for maps, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT, 2010).

18 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York, 2009); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, 2016); for the often-overlooked case of late antislavery struggles in Brazil, see Angela Alonso, The Last Abolition: The Brazilian Antislavery Movement, 1868–1888 (Cambridge, 2021).

19 On Haiti, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010); on France and the French Empire, see Yves Bénot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 1789–1794 (Paris, 2004); Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge, 2017); on the American Revolution, see Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia, SC, 2008); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009); on Spanish America, see Alfonso Múnera, El fracaso de la nación: Región, clase y raza en el Caribe colombiano, 1717–1810 (Bogotá, 1998); Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2007); Silvia C. Mallo and Ignacio Telesca, eds., “Negros de la patria”: Los afrodescendientes en las luchas por la independencia en el antiguo Virreinato del Río de La Plata (Buenos Aires, 2010).

20 Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, 2006); Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven, CT, 1979).

21 Christopher Saunders, “Liberated Africans in the Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 2 (1985): 223–39; Anita Rupprecht, “‘When he gets among his Countrymen they tell him that he is free’: Slave Trade Abolition, Indentured Africans, and a Royal Commission,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 3 (2012): 435–55; Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2017); Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy, eds., Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896 (Rochester, NY, 2020); Lisa Ford and Naomi Parkinson, “Legislating Liberty: Liberated Africans and the Abolition Act, 1806–1824,” Slavery & Abolition 42 (2021): 827–46.

22 For overviews, see Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London, 2018); Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “The Rise and Fall of Penal Transportation,” in Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2016), 635–54; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves (London, 2013); Clare Anderson, Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge, 2022).

23 Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900 (Stanford, CA, 2000); Miranda Frances Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Michel Pierre, Le temps des bagnes 1748–1953 (Paris, 2017).

24 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1780–1930 (Oxford, 2009); Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 322–91.

25 A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008).

26 For a discussion of these practices of forced removal used against Indigenous resistance leaders and colonized populations in Asia, the Indian Ocean world, and the Pacific, see Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge and New York, 2009); Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan, and Māori Exiles (Sydney, 2012); Michael Powell, “The Clanking of Medieval Chains: Extra-Judicial Banishment in the British Empire,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44 (2016): 352–71; Ronit Ricci, ed., Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (Honolulu, HI, 2016); Robert Aldrich, Banished Potentates: Dethroning and Exiling Indigenous Monarchs under British and French Colonial Rule, 1815–1955 (Manchester, 2018); Ann Curthoys, “The Beginnings of Transportation in Western Australia: Banishment, Forced Labour, and Punishment at the Aboriginal Prison on Rottnest Island before 1850,” Studies in Western Australian History 34 (2020): 5977.

27 Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (London, 2013), 7.

28 Renaud Morieux, The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2019), 131–82; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Spanish Prisoners: War and Captivity in Spain’s Imperial Crisis,” in Akiko Tsuchiya, ed., Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (Nashville, TN, 2016), 131–47; Juan Luis Simal, “Unexplored Connections: Spanish Prisoners of War and Political Refugees in France, 1808–1820,” in Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson, eds., Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles (New York, 2021), 199218.

29 Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 4, building on remarks by Olaudah Equiano.

30 John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” The Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 5880; Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807–1844 (Oxford, 2014); Christina Mobley, “The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery and Culture from Mayombe to Haiti,” PhD diss., Duke University, 2015.

31 Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolivar, Foreign Mercenaries, and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool, 2007); Clément Thibaud, République en armes: Les armées de Bolivar dans les guerres d’indépendance du Venezuela et de la Colombie (Rennes, 2006); Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2005).

32 Dominique Kalifa, Biribi: Les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée française (Paris, 2009).

33 For overviews, see Maya Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas,” in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, eds., Age of Revolutions, 3758; Jan C. Jansen, “Flucht und Exil im Zeitalter der Revolutionen: Perspektiven einer atlantischen Flüchtlingsgeschichte (1770er–1820er Jahre),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44 (2018): 495525; Friedemann Pestel, “The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile,” in Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul, eds., French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories (Basingstoke, 2019), 205–31; Delphine Diaz, Jeanne Moisand, Romy Sánchez, and Juan Luis Simal, eds., Exils entre les deux mondes: Migrations et espaces politiques atlantiques au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2015).

34 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011); Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (Boston, MA, 1972); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, MA, 2006); Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012).

35 Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel, eds., The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814 (Basingstoke, 1999); Friedemann Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen: Die “monarchiens” als Revolutionsemigranten (Berlin, 2015); François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York, 2014).

36 Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville, FL, 2007); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Alejandro E. Gómez, Le spectre de la révolution noire: L’impact de la révolution haïtienne dans le monde atlantique (1790–1886) (Rennes, 2013).

37 Edmundo A. Heredia, Los vencidos: Un estudio sobre los realistas en la guerra de independencia hispanoamericana (Cordoba, 1997), 6592; Paul Verna, Bolívar y los emigrados patriotas en el Caribe (Trinidad, Curazao, San Thomas, Jamaica, Haití) (Caracas, 1983); Karen Racine, “Imagining Independence: London’s Spanish-American Community, 1790–1829,” PhD diss., Tulane University, 1996; Edward Blumenthal, Exile and Nation-State Formation in Argentina and Chile, 1810–1862 (Basingstoke, 2019); Nicolás A. González Quintero, “Exile and Empire in the 19th Century Spanish Caribbean,” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2020; Edward Blumenthal and Romy Sánchez, eds., “Exilios latinoamericanos en el largo siglo XIX,” Estodios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 32 (2021): 7–21.

38 Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s–1820s,” Past & Present 255 (2022): 189231.

39 See, for example, Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008); Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Like Poor Galley Slaves’: Slavery and Convict Transportation,” in Maria Suzette Fernandes Dias, ed., Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007), 4861.

40 Pioneering works here include David Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, CA, 2002); Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley, CA, 2007); Anderson, “Global Mobilities”; Anderson, Convicts, 100–32; Morieux, The Society of Prisoners.

41 On the resettlement of religious refugees, enslaved fugitives, and convicts, see Susanne Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika: Migration und Integration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2010); Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford, 2019); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, IL, 1999); Anderson, Convicts.

42 Quoted in Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005), 1.

43 Kate Boehme, Peter Mitchell, and Alan Lester, “Reforming Everywhere and All at Once: Transitioning to Free Labor across the British Empire, 1837–1838,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60 (2018): 688718. Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, 2020).

44 Important work here includes Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 377404; Roger Zetter, “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity,” Journal of Refugee Studies 4 (1991): 3962; Roger Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20 (2007): 172–92.

45 Karen Akoka, L’asile et l’exil: Une histoire de la distinction réfugiés/migrants (Paris, 2020); Rebecca Hamlin, Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford, CA, 2021); Daniel Kersting and Marcus Leuoth, eds., Der Begriff des Flüchtlings: Rechtliche, moralische und politische Kontroversen (Berlin, 2020); on “legal fictions,” see Lon L. Fuller, Legal Fictions (Stanford, 1967).

46 Zetter, “Labelling Refugees.”

47 Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees,” 173.

48 Delphine Diaz and Alexandre Dupont, eds., “Les mots de l’exil dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle,” Hommes & migrations 1321 (2018); Michel Agier and Anne-Virginie Madeira, eds., Définir les réfugiés (Paris, 2017); www.migrationsbegriffe.de.

49 Rebecca J. Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 1061–87; Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labor History (Leiden, 2008), 1587; chapters by Heather Cateau, Clare Anderson, and Richard Huzzey in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and Keith McClelland, eds., Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World (Manchester, 2014); Jared Roos Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York, 2016).

50 For a recent analysis of this information technology in the Australian convict system, see Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860 (Basingstoke, 2022), 287–92.

51 Jeppe Mulich, In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge, 2020), 5880.

52 On legal pluralism and jurisdictional conflicts, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge and New York, 2002); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2016).

53 For in-depth studies of free and enslaved Black women’s shaping of freedom through intimacy and kinship, see Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers; Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA, 2020).

54 A Military Gentleman, An Authentic Narrative of the life of Joseph Wall, Esq late Governor of Gorée. To which is annexed a faithful and comprehensive Account of his Execution (London, 1802); Messrs Blanchard and Ramsey, The Trial of Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Wall for the Murder of Benjamin Armstrong … (London, 1802). With thanks to Brad Manera for alerting the authors to this case.

55 Fortescue, quoted in W. Y. Baldry, “Disbanded Regiments,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 14 (1935): 233.

56 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York, 2014).

57 David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006).

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