From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the use of convicted labor to supplement overseas garrisons was commonplace across colonial frontiers. While this practice has been the subject of recent study in the French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish Empires, the British military deployment of convicts has been comparatively neglected. This matters for two reasons. A focus on civil transportation systems appears to have led to a considerable underestimation of overall transportation numbers. Second, while much has been written about the manner in which Britain redirected transportation from the Atlantic to its new Australian colonial possessions in the late eighteenth century, the military deployment of convict labor remained centered on the Atlantic. In fact, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many more convicts served in the African and Caribbean colonial garrisons than were ever shipped to the Antipodes. In this chapter, we use a range of different sources to piece together the military deployment of convicted labor in the British Atlantic World in the period 1780–1820, and to explore its complex relationships with the transatlantic slave trade.

English imperial networks in the seventeenth century connected London, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, New England, and North Africa through intersecting commercial, religious, political, and intellectual commitments. These networks were populated by scholars, scientists, and slaves, as well as missionaries, merchants, and ministers. Their connections reveal relationships – between translation and conversion, commerce and religion, and English and Native peoples – that span from Malaysia to Massachusetts. This chapter focuses on the role of companies, violence, and translation in these multilayered global contexts and brings those features to bear on the way we understand American literary and cultural history and the role of puritanism in it.

This chapter follows the new mobilities and barriers across the Indian Ocean that arose with colonial capitalist wars beginning in the 1700s. Asian migrants, their experience of indentured labor, and their modes of contestation, endurance, and resistance feature centrally here.