Looks at James Simpson’s early career. Discusses the situation of Gibraltar and Tangier, the importance of Simpson’s diplomatic network and how it became Americanized over time as a result of the extensive diplomacy needed in the region.

Examines the growth of the early US consular system, why individuals became consuls, and how they were appointed.

This considers Gibraltar as a special case in the history of Britains developing empire. Captured by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1704, assigned to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the rock was devoid of the resources and potential for agricultural development that might justify the violence entailed in its conquest. This was a problem for an early observer (the poet John Breval, who described the place in Calpe, 1717), but the development of a taste for unimproved and mountainous landscapes, and a more confident sense of British power as civilizing, made it easier for later observers to justify British possession. The great siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783) cemented the rocks status as British: its bare features acquired an iconic status as a symbol of British independence and freedom, a reference point that could be evoked in the context of other imperial conquests.

This chapter establishes the reach of punitive relocation across a range of imperial contexts, from the late Middle Ages into the twentieth century. It employs a series of case studies from the European empires to stress its importance as a source of unfree labour and as a means of governing colonized populations. Sometimes, convicts and their descendants became settlers, and when they did not, they laid the ground for free migration or satisfied wider imperial ambitions by clearing land and building basic infrastructure. Sometimes, they were also able to work for their own profit. Of especial importance to the British Empire was the use of convicts to build naval infrastructure in the nineteenth-century stations of Bermuda and Gibraltar. All the convicts were men, and they were prohibited from settling, revealing the importance of a temporary, mobile labour force for bolstering naval power. This was quite different to practice in the Australian colonies. In all these penal sites, convicts resisted their fate in numerous ways. However, imperial administrations responded to it with brutal retribution and spectacular levels of violence, and this meant that though everyday forms of resistance impacted on working practices and productivity, rebellions, mutinies, and escapes usually failed.

Focused on a discussion of escape within and across national and imperial borders, the first part of this chapter analyses events following convict escape to other jurisdictions. It covers absconding to and from British, Spanish, French, and Danish islands in the Caribbean, and from British Gibraltar to the Spanish peninsular. The second part focuses on French Guiana, because the scale of transportation to the colony from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, coupled with a highly organized traffic of convicts over river and sea borders, enabled and facilitated large numbers of escapes. It especially focuses on a group of 1848 convicts who fled to the USA and became involved in anti-slavery movement. Overall, the chapter stresses that convict absconding not only offers insights into convict agency and experience, but had profound and enduring legal consequences, notably a series of international agreements and ultimately laws on extradition and deportation. The experiences of these runaways varied widely, and whilst they sometimes demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of legal process, and ingenuity and ambition in determining their fate, the difficulties of remaining at large often confounded their desire for freedom. At the same time, their testimony on appalling conditions contributed to growing global anti-transportation.

It is common to think of languages and countries as simply matching up, but this is by no means always so. Most people in England do speak English; the citizens of France mainly speak French; the language of Germany is German; people in Spain speak Spanish; and in Italy they use Italian. But things are actually much more complicated than that.

This chapter explores the influence of public opinion on official policy towards detention, by looking at the cases of two leaders removed in the 1880s from Egypt, which was neither a colony nor a protectorate, but was under de facto British control after the invasion of 1882. The first case involves Ahmed Urabi Pasha, the Egyptian nationalist leader whose removal from power was the aim of the invasion. Given that the invasion itself represented a political volte-face for Gladstone, and in view of the support Urabi had attracted from influential Britons, the British wanted to ensure that Urabi was seen to have a fair trial in an Egyptian court. They consequently used their influence to broker a settlement under which Urabi was expelled from Egypt, and lived in voluntary exile in Ceylon. By contrast, in the second case, that of the Sudanese leader and notorious slave trader Al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, the Foreign Office and Colonial Office were content to hold him in detention under an ad hominem ordinance at Gibraltar, at the behest of the military. With no political supporters to defend his case in London, the British authorities had no qualms about detaining him without trial.

This chapter reveals circuits of exchange among boards of health and European consuls serving in the Middle East that fashioned a European biopolity centered upon quarantine practice. It argues that, contrary to scholarship that has depicted quarantine prior to the 1850s as an improvised and irregular precursor to a late-century regime of international health, reciprocal correspondence among boards of health fostered a system that was durable and adaptable. The centerpiece of the chapter focuses on the events surrounding the passage of the 1825 Quarantine Act in Britain, in which an attempt to liberalize quarantine regulations led to a Continent-wide quarantine against British shipping. The spectacle only concluded when the Privy Council backed down. Rather than demonstrating British ambivalence, however, the reaction of the government in London shows how seriously politicians and advocates regarded membership in what one MP called the “family compact” of quarantine.

Chapter 5 shows just how influential Tulloch’s work was by analysing its effect on the American School of ethnologists. Debates about the origins of man, and specifically about the unity of the human species, had been ongoing since the middle of the eighteenth century, but crystallised in the 1840s and 1850s into a debate between monogenists and polygenists. In their attempt to prove that black and white people were fundamentally and innately different, the polygenists turned to the publications of British military surgeons and particularly to those of Alexander Tulloch. His work proved, they thought, that races could not become assimilated to different climates and that black people had been made for the African climate, not shaped by it. As a publication of the British army, American polygenists asserted that Tulloch’s work offered vital and impartial support for their claim that Africans and Caucasians were of different species.