This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks 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. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects 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, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Joseph Addison’s alignment of fugitive print with the idea of ‘accidental reading’ in The Spectator, as an important context for Samuel Johnson’s later theorisation of fugitive literature and ephemerae in the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter explores the importance of the new medium of the handbill and in particular its role in paper wars of the 1790s.