The histories of migration, unfreedom, and incarceration now enjoy well-developed historiographies thanks to a recent expansion of research into these fields. Accordingly, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions proposes not to add its eleven case studies to this existing literature, but rather to challenge what its editors call “disciplinary compartmentalization and containment” (p. 13). Instead of perceiving a series of discrete categories of mobile people – free, unfree, indentured, convicted, exiled, or displaced – the authors look beyond the historical labels and categories claimed by migrants or imposed upon them by the law or by structures of class, race, gender, and nationality.
This thesis is established with clarity in Jan Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie's stimulating introduction. Social historians will be particularly interested in this section for its discussion of the fluidity of migrant identification. Not only could coercively mobile people move or be moved between categories – from transported convicts into settlers, for example – so, too, they could fit into “grey zones” (p. 15) between them. Migrants also had the agency to at least attempt to shape their categorization in pursuit of being recognized as belonging to one that afforded them greater freedom. In doing so, they could move along a “continuum of varying degrees of coercion” (p. 6) rather than between binary states of freedom and unfreedom. When it came to the categorization of migrants by imperial and local authorities, “social practice complemented – and complicated – the law” (p. 22).
Jansen and McKenzie insist upon a relatively high degree of continuity with early modern practices. The forcible relocation of labour, for example, was “intensified and accelerated” (p. 16) into a qualitatively new phenomenon by the revolutionary age but was not, of course, established by it. The transformations set in motion by political and social revolution are also nuanced by the attribution of equal importance to war, which was certainly not a new experience for European imperial states. Post-1750 conflicts saw much greater demand for labour in the military and in geopolitically and economically strategic colonial locations. Again, however, this was met by scaling up existing methods of mobilizing people through coercion as well as by establishing new ones.
The book's perspective is said to be global, comparative, and entangled, and the contributors make use of all three approaches by connecting their analyses to the introductory argument and to each other. Each chapter nonetheless studies a defined category of coerced migrant and sometimes a particular region. Liam Riordan and Edward Blumenthal address connections between the forced migrations of Europeans and the mass displacement of entire Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Riordan notes the “multiple mobilities” (p. 28) of European and Indigenous groups in the northeastern borderlands of North America resulting from a succession of deportation, refugee flight, and displacement. Blumenthal demonstrates the role of exile in the early territorialization of South American republics, with the movement of troublesome émigrés causing newly independent states to impose their authority upon the provinces and autonomous Indigenous jurisdictions. Through the recasting of defeated dissidents as agents of settlement and territorialization, both examples show that coerced mobility was integral to state formation at the expense of Indigenous autonomy.
Friedemann Pestel, Nathalie Dessens, and Karen Racine focus on exiles and refugees. For Pestel, French émigrés fleeing the Revolution were important vectors of its global significance. Their settlement projects provided a far-reaching political and psychological alternative to revolutionary expropriation. Dessens argues for similar émigré agency, emphasizing the ability of refugees from Saint-Domingue in New Orleans to connect the city to an increasingly dynamic Caribbean. Their connections to the region played a role in raising the relative importance to the United States of intra-American trade circuits. Racine's singular exile, the ex-emperor Agustín de Iturbide, shaped Mexico's political and economic relationships from afar by integrating himself into British high society and marketing his knowledge to prospective investors in his home country. In all cases, refugees and exiles – far from being mere absentees – connected their home and host societies.
The mobility of Britain's prisoners is the subject of two chapters. The first, by Anna McKay, deals principally with prisoners of war during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many of whom embarked on long journeys while in captivity. This placed them alongside other categories like enslaved people, sailors, and emigrants and allowed for the exchange of these identifications. The second, by Brad Manera and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, explores the impressment of convicts into military service. Demand for sailors and soldiers called for the reallocation of labour to fill a deficit in the military, a need that governments could meet by reassigning the categories held by men already in state custody: convict for conscript. The legal labels imposed upon coercively mobile people were contingent and exchangeable.
McKenzie and Christian G. De Vito address deportation and administrative removal. De Vito strongly asserts the book's thesis that historians need to study multiple forms of forced migration simultaneously. Only by doing so, he argues, is he able to trace Spanish systems of punitive relocation and their transformation to specific practices of power which could change over time, in this case imperial law. McKenzie agrees that the power of deportation was not necessarily an unassailable, unchanging domain of the executive, as British authorities became aware that its improper use could cause empire-wide crises of governance. Importantly, she notes the resulting introduction of criteria and categories like alienness and subjecthood into deportation practices to guide their use. The legal and political basis of coerced mobility could be fluid and often fragile, creating opportunities for individual or structural challenges to it.
Jansen elaborates on possibilities for pressure from below. The drive to control migration from the 1790s saw British authorities move to codify and consolidate the rules governing migration. Following recent work by legal historians, he also shows how those without legal training could work within or around new legislation to assert claims through “vernacular” (p. 23) use of the law. (Readers might wish to refer to Jansen's more detailed article in Past & Present for more on this.)Footnote 1 Maurizio Isabella also addresses identification from a social and cultural rather than legal viewpoint. The emergence of the revolutionary volunteer as a political and social actor in the Mediterranean, Isabella argues, co-existed with traditional categories like mercenaries and refugees. “Shapeshifting” (p. 18) individuals could assume these appearances when circumstances caused them to travel or migrate willingly or unwillingly. Overall, newly forged identifications could be manipulated by individuals looking to assert control over their mobility, ensuring that traditional patterns of travel and migration remained accessible alongside new ones.
The authors acknowledge the importance of the coercive immobilization of would-be migrants but tend to collapse it back into mobility, leaving the difference (or lack thereof) unclear. Jansen and McKenzie propose state surveillance and control of migration as examples of immobility, including deportation (p. 6). However, several chapters highlight the development of identification, the establishment of new regulations, and the state-directed removal of inadmissible or undesirable persons as aspects of mobility rather than its inverse. A more detailed discussion of why it is difficult to completely disentangle the two phenomena would clarify this seeming contradiction. It might also allay the concerns of some global historians about a perceived “mobility bias” in the field by recognizing how immobility and sedentarism remained the predominant experience for most.Footnote 2 How, for example, might new international migration controls have complemented formal or informal domestic controls on mobility like vagrancy laws or incarceration?
Enslavement is given little space of its own within the book. The editors do recognize the slave trade as the first of their five areas of forced mobility that characterized the age of wars and revolutions (pp. 6–12). Several contributors also examine the interconnections between the coerced mobilities of enslaved people and those of other legal and social categories, although usually from the point of view of these other groups. Given that studies of slave mobility are at a more advanced stage than those of other forms of forced migration, it is reasonable to not include a dedicated chapter on the topic in this volume. Readers, however, must bear in mind that enslaved people, especially racialized Africans, were central to coerced mobility in the Atlantic and elsewhere.
The thematic introduction and all contributions are clear and engaging. Although a short conclusion to round off the case studies would have been welcome, the introductory chapter's concise argument mostly obviates this. Despite a small number of areas where the book's brevity necessitates a slightly incomplete analysis, Mobility and Coercion presents and substantiates a strong methodological case.
