In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.

This chapter uses the example of Fernando de Noronha (Brazil) to introduce the main theme of the book: the larger regional and global history of punitive mobility. It argues that its survival in the 1890s disrupts the dominant narrative of carceral history: the rise of the prison. It suggests that into this period convicts were sent long distances as unfree labour. This was due to a close and enduring connection between punishment and nation and empire building. Convicts satisfied geo-political and social ambitions, and were connected to colonization, resource extraction, and productivity. At the same time, it argues that punitive mobility is connected to the history of governance and repression. Further, it produced new kinds of classifications and social structures in which governments encouraged and nurtured family formation as a route to both convict reform and permanent settlement. Despite this, convict expertise made a vital contribution to the local practices and global circulations that together shaped contemporary scientific knowledge production and straddled nations and empires. Convicts and penal colonies occupy an important place in the making of the modern world, with respect not just to the history of punishment, but of governance, labour, nation and empire, and global knowledge exchange.

The way Spinoza lived and died has often played a part in the interpretation of his thought. Because his life is poorly documented, there is no lack of fictive anecdotes about his person and reputed character. This chapter offers an up-to-date scholarly account, based on a critical examination of the sources. After a discussion of method, issues, and background, it deals chronologically with the places where Spinoza lived. He was born (1632) and grew up in Amsterdam. In the years between his expulsion from the Jewish community (1656) and the earliest known correspondence (1661), Spinoza’s whereabouts are unknown. Apparently, he acquired renown as a philosopher in that period. From there we can trace the development of Spinoza’s oeuvre, as he moves from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, where he wrote his first published work, Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, thence to Voorburg, where he spent most of his time composing the Theological-Political Treatise, and eventually to The Hague. He had already started on his Ethics in Rijnsburg but only finished it in The Hague. In the year before Spinoza died, he began writing the unfinished Political Treatise. The chapter takes into account recent work on his health and demise (1677)

Contemporary discussions of Jews in the diaspora often draw a distinction between diaspora and exile, arguing that by the Hellenistic era, most Jews in the diaspora no longer viewed themselves as in exile, having exchanged the traditional biblical view of exile and return for a "diaspora theology" in which they took pride in the diaspora, viewing it in positive terms. This chapter argues that there is in fact no evidence to support such a claim. Whereas it is often claimed that the Septuagint systematically weakens the prophetic verdict on exile, a closer look at the evidence shows otherwise. The chapter concludes by arguing that while it is true that many Jews lived prosperous and happy lives in the diaspora, the fact that they remained subject to the whims of foreign rulers and the frequency with which Hellenistic Jewish texts portray the diaspora as a continuation of exile cannot be dismissed. The chapter concludes that there is simply no evidence that Jews in the Hellenistic diaspora regarded the period of exile as having ended and significant literary evidence to the contrary.

The system of collective security had a significant bureaucratic dimension to it. The creation of an Allied security agency, the implementation of uniform passport procedures, and the censorship and banishment of persons deemed a threat to the new system of peace and security were met by resistance in occupied France.Hotbeds of radicalization arose, and even Wellington was personally threatened by the rising number of blacklisted persons, terrorists and exiles. The Allied Council had attempted to strike a balance between fighting terror and restoring harmony to post-Napoleonic Europe, but the scope and breadth of the ‘Allied Machine’ was beginning to be questioned. What was the nature and scope of the authority of the Allied Council, and should the ministers become a European police directorate?

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.

This chapter takes a foundational Muslim tradition known from early Arab sources and widespread in Muslim Southeast Asia, namely Adam’s banishment from paradise and his landing in Sarandib (the Arabic name for Sri Lanka), as a starting point to ask whether Adam’s fall to earth in this particular site mattered to, or shaped in some way, Malay perceptions of exile to colonial Ceylon, and if so, how? Based on references to Adam and his plight found in Malay sources from Sri Lanka, Arabic sources, among them Ibn Battuta’s Travels, and the Javanese Serat Menak Serandhil (a volume of Menak tales narrating the life of the Prophet’s uncle Menak Amir Hamza, which unfolds in Sarandib), the chapter argues that the ancient story of Adam’s banishment from paradise to earth, a paradigm for all future banishments, was deployed to frame and partially give meaning to exile to Ceylon. Recalling Adam’s fall shifted the temporal frame of political exile under colonial domination and located contemporary, worldly events within a divinely determined chronology.