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Labelling and Looking for Refuge during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: An Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2026

Thomas Mareite Open the ORCID record for Thomas Mareite [Opens in a new window]  and
Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero Open the ORCID record for Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero [Opens in a new window]
Thomas Mareite*
Affiliation:
University of Tübingen, Germany
Nicolás Alejandro González Quintero
Affiliation:
Department of History, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
*
Corresponding author: Thomas Mareite; Email: thomas.mareite@ehess.fr
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Abstract

This special issue aims to present empirically grounded reflections on concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee during the long Age of Revolutions, before the emergence of the modern international refugee regime. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homelands, prompting authorities and exiles themselves to reflect on and negotiate the status of newcomers and their rights and obligations. What it meant to be a refugee mattered, especially at a moment of imperial crisis and reconfiguration. Thus, building on the emerging field of refugee history, we ask: Who was a refugee, for what reasons, and with what concrete implications? How did one claim refugee status? Who was denied refugee status? How translatable were the concepts of refugee, exile, and asylum across societies? And what other terms might overlap with or replace the concept of refugee? To what extent did these concepts create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, between desirable and undesirable newcomers to host societies? The contributors to this special issue explore these questions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

Keywords

refugee categorisationexileasylumAtlantic worldMediterranean worldAge of Revolutionsimperial revolutions

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Introduction
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Itinerario , First View , pp. 1 - 13
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History.

Introduction

The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva on 28 July 1951, defined the criteria for determining the eligibility and parameters of asylum for individuals categorised as “refugees” in accordance with international law. Its subsequent global expansion in 1967 has remained the foundation of the contemporary refugee regime, which for over half a century has clearly distinguished “refugees”—and their right to seek asylum—from non-refugees. Because of this particular codification in the field of international law, the determination of “refugee” status—granted unevenly and increasingly selectively to people seeking to flee situations of violence and oppression—and the ensuing provision of asylum presently endure as subjects of debate and contention. These contests are by no means a contemporary development. Long before the second half of the twentieth century, refugee categorisation and the set of protections, rights, and entitlements associated with it have been the subject of much debate and mobilisation on the part of refuge-seekers and their representatives, host societies, national and international governments, and non-governmental organisations.Footnote 1

In recent years, some specialists in the field of refugee history, and migration studies at large, have urged us to rethink the analytical conceptualisation and use of the refugee category beyond its current definition in international law. The history of refugees goes beyond the 1951 declaration, and so did refugees’ agency in shaping the legal frameworks and labels that affected their lives. They were not passive subjects. On the contrary, as Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Novak, and Peter Gatrell have suggested, refugees “historically crafted their own spheres of being that can be obscured by an adherence to the categorical order imposed by modern states and the refugee regime.”Footnote 2 Fully aware of the concrete implications of these categories on their experiences of exile, refugees actively engaged with their own characterisation, negotiating with the state what it meant to be a refugee and the consequences of this labelling.Footnote 3

These problems form the core of the present special issue. It contributes to this larger debate by presenting empirically grounded reflections on the concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee before the emergence of the modern international refugee regime, with a specific emphasis on the Atlantic and Mediterranean spaces. Scholars of early modern Europe have studied how the trajectories of religious refugees brought about new languages of humanitarian aid and belonging.Footnote 4 But that was not all. As David de Boer and Geert H. Jansen have stated, refugees, seeking religious freedom and legal protection, have also influenced the creation of new languages regarding their status and rights.Footnote 5 These discussions continued in the long Age of Revolutions—which stretches from the early 1760s to the 1840s—as hundreds of thousands of refugees and exiles fled their homelands as consequence of the revolutionary upheavals occurring around the world.Footnote 6 Focusing mostly on the Spanish and French imperial spaces, this special issue shows how the crisis of empires and the subsequent mass population movements in areas such as the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Worlds prompted authorities and exiles themselves to reflect on and negotiate the status of newcomers, and their rights and duties. What it meant to be a refugee mattered, especially in a moment when empires were trying to respond to revolutionary challenges and restructured themselves to minimise losses and expand their power in other areas. Debates over imperial belonging and over rights to assistance and asylum—both within empires and across imperial boundaries—deeply structured, and were themselves reshaped by, the experiences of thousands of people on the move.

Still, as this special issue shows, concepts of being a refugee and granting refuge were applied unevenly and remained contested and malleable across societies at a global scale. Building upon the emerging field of refugee history by focusing on a period connecting the early modern and modern periods, the contributions of this special issue ask: Who was a refugee, on what grounds, and with what concrete implications? How did one make a claim to refugee status? How was asylum granted and by whom? In turn, who was denied the status of refugee? What constituted the experience of exile, and how was it narrated? How translatable were the concepts of refugee, exile, and asylum across societies? And what other terms might overlap with the concept of refugee or replace it? To what extent did these concepts create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, between desirable and undesirable newcomers to host societies? The contributors of this special issue explore this set of questions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

Dialectics of labelling

Early scholars of refugee history during the 2000s deplored the historical field’s limited attention and relative amnesia towards refugees.Footnote 7 It is safe to argue that this assessment no longer holds true, particularly when considering perspectives beyond the English-speaking academic realm. In fact, the very establishment of refugee history as a distinct area of study has raised apprehensions among certain experts who caution that this emerging subfield may inadvertently perpetuate the artificial division created by international and national laws between individuals labelled as “migrants” versus “refugees,” by adopting these categories as unquestionable analytical tools.Footnote 8 As the contributions of this special issue show, paying attention to ground-level practices of categorisation and self-identification of historical actors as refugees, or their local and historical equivalents, unveils the pitfalls of uncritically applying the refugee/migrant binary as analytic framework while signalling the historical depth of experiences and dynamics of “labelling” of people on the move.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the field of refugee history has undergone significant expansion, encompassing a broader range of geographical and temporal contexts. Initially rooted in the history of refugee protection under international law and the refugee crises of the Cold War era during the latter half of the twentieth century, this field has now extended its scope beyond these initial focal points and, in its wake, new insights have emerged on the long history of refugee categorisation.Footnote 9 In recent years, several prominent scholars have emphasised the need for and undertaken extensive investigations into regimes of refuge and the question of labelling “refugees” before the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Nineteenth-century Europe’s history has been one of the main fields of application of this new approach, with fresh research into the impact of political turmoil and revolutions which compelled individuals to seek refuge across national borders while also prompting states to expel or deport political dissidents. New research—for instance, about France’s history as both producing and welcoming refuge-seekers—has increasingly recognised the significance of exile as a framework for re-evaluating traditional histories of state-building, nationalism, and transnational political activism. More directly relating to this issue’s core questions, recent scholarship has examined the development of institutional labelling practices and surveillance systems targeting individuals on the move who were classified as “refugees” or perceived merely as ordinary immigrants. In the process, this new literature has conducted thorough investigations into the categories associated with exile, delving into the various terminologies employed to describe refuge-seeking and refuge-offering within diverse European contexts.Footnote 11

Thus, historians have begun realising the importance of historicising both the concept of refugee and the labelling practices associated with it. As Dan Stone has recently argued, “part of the problem for historians is understanding that, in writing the history of refugees, they need to be alive to the process of constructing refugees and not simply to take ‘refugee’ as a pre-existing category that simply exists in the world.”Footnote 12 This special issue therefore seeks to underscore what Roger Zetter referred to decades ago as dynamics of “refugee labelling,” that is, processes by which the category of refugee was ascribed in a complex interplay between top-down identification (most often by state officials and host communities) and self-identification from below by historical actors claiming the refugee label for themselves or, conversely, seeking to distance themselves from it.Footnote 13

Most of this issue’s contributions unearth from an emic standpoint how these dialectics of identification and self-identification as refugee played out in different historical settings, with an emphasis on (trans)imperial and colonial contexts, which have received less scrutiny than (trans)national contexts in recent explorations of the origins and development of the refugee category.Footnote 14 They shed light on the historicity of refugee as a category during a time of global political turmoil, and show how a variety of local idioms, all carrying a different legal, political, and sociocultural baggage, expressed it, with crucial implications for people falling under or being excluded from this category.

Jannik Keindorf’s article in this issue, for instance, probes the ambiguities that characterised the classification of people from the French colony of Saint-Domingue who sought refuge in Jamaica during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). For them, being labelled either as “emigrants” or “prisoners of war” in the midst of Franco-British warfare entailed very different treatments in the British colony. Keindorf reveals that refugees took advantage of the labelling system’s loopholes and grey zones to negotiate their statuses. This negotiation—to fall under the most advantageous categorisation—happened between refugees who sought to counteract the suspicions of Jamaica’s colonial authorities and local officials who oversaw crafting alien legislation on the island. Therefore, Keindorf demonstrates that insertion in these categories proved to be a rather hybrid process that depended as much upon refugees’ actions as it did upon top-down administrative practices.

As several contributions emphasise, exiles claimed the label of refugee for themselves, especially when it entailed access to protection and support, navigating through and at times shaping the very regimes of asylum they fell under. For instance, Thomas Mareite’s contribution explores the extent and limits of imperial relief granted by the Spanish colonial state to colonists from Hispaniola in exile in Havana and its surrounding countryside against the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution. It shows that, although the initial intent behind such assistance program was to cater exclusively to Spanish subjects who had been residing in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo prior to its cession to the French Republic in 1795, a significant number of exiles of French descent, hailing from neighbouring Saint-Domingue, managed to assert entitlement to allowances disbursed to the so-called emigrados by the Spanish colonial state. By doing so, they articulated an inclusive conception of Spanish subjecthood. This was the result of a twofold operation. On the one hand, colonial officials sought to portray the Spanish realm as a benevolent empire eager to support exiles who belonged or were loyal to the Spanish nation. On the other hand, refugee colonists politicised their loyalty and subjecthood, looking to demonstrate their deservingness to be assisted by the Spanish monarchy as consequence of their belonging to the Spanish community of subjects.

Thus, both the state and refugees played key roles in shaping the meaning of the refugee label and relief practices directed to assist people affected by the wars and uprisings rocking the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds during the Age of Revolutions. Scholars have underscored how the long nineteenth century saw the emergence of the modern category of refugee and incipient forms of humanitarianism directed to populations labelled as such. As noted by Caroline Shaw, “nineteenth-century debates over the category of refuge bequeathed to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the moral possibilities and conundrums that remain so far to the ‘refugee question.’”Footnote 15 Some historians have argued that rising compassion for the hardships endured by others led to a “humanitarian revolution” of sorts starting by the end of the early modern period, ushering in a new era of philanthropic assistance to refugees that gradually transcended strict confessional divides and differences in subjecthood.Footnote 16

Scholars of the Americas, by contrast, have mostly stressed the segmented and often exclusionary nature of assistance to people on the move in different historical contexts. In particular, they have shown how politics of compassion and practices of relief to exiles were strongly conditioned by regimes of racial difference in this space moulded by imperialism and colonialism. Ashli White, for instance, has shed light on the racialised foundations of assistance provided to Saint-Domingue refugees in the United States.Footnote 17 However, this does not mean that providing refuge was exclusively a function of white colonial solidarity across the Atlantic World. Historians have shown us that places of refuge that have long been marginalised and relegated to the fringes of historical memory such as independent Haiti became important beacons of asylum.Footnote 18

The contributions in this issue correspondingly explore how the label of refugee was unevenly and polemically applied to diverse sets of populations in exile, often underpinned by and strengthening pre-existing regimes of differences (particularly in terms of race, social and economic status, gender, and subjecthood/nationality).Footnote 19 Looking at people who were not identified as refugees eligible to a right to asylum and assistance and those who were illuminates how labels of refuge became useful tools of population governance for modern states. They were crucial in integrating and supporting newcomers deemed deserving, or by contrast, in distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate mobility, thus “gatekeeping” undesirable individuals.

Sibylle Fourcaud’s article in this issue explores this topic. She studies the exile of colonists from the French colony of Saint-Domingue to metropolitan France during the Haitian Revolution, delving into debates about who among them should be entitled to state assistance through financial relief. By analysing evolutions in relief policies from the early 1790s onward, Fourcaud points out how criteria used for determining who qualified as colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France (as opposed to politically undesirable émigrés), and therefore who was deserving of support, changed over time. She demonstrates that the French state favoured white property owners over other types of refugees over the years—the preference was such that the French state aided them until the early years of the twentieth century. As Fourcaud argues, this decision to support white property owners was, in part, a consequence of the transformation of France into an imperial nation that sought to keep plantation economies as the core of its colonial enterprise.

These discussions occurred in other locales of the Atlantic World. Megan Maruschke’s article in this issue looks into Philadelphia as a hub of refuge during the Early American Republic. Maruschke unveils two key issues: First, she shows that refugees, mainly French speaking, landed in a country increasingly interested in regulating mobility from outside and inside its borders. Second, Maruschke demonstrates how narratives of deservingness and belonging factored in the decision to provide or deny relief to diverse groups of newcomers, and to determine who was entitled to remain in Philadelphia. Maruschke’s contribution stresses how these newcomers, in turn, sought to shape legal structures of inclusion and exclusion from the city through their own advocacy. That was not something exclusive of Philadelphia. As Mareite shows in his article, the distribution of relief in Cuba depended on particular statuses of race and class, overcoming appeals to monarchical benevolence based on a shared identity as emigrados and tropes of imperial loyalty. Regimes of differences—who belonged to the community and under which circumstances and statuses—defined, in many cases, the right to asylum and support.

As these contributions illuminate, the limits of inclusion and exclusion—shaped voluntarily or otherwise by state actors and people on the move themselves—reveal how the status of refugee and the limbo condition of non-refugee were reflective of broader fault lines dividing host societies. Assistance and labelling did not occur in a vacuum. On the contrary, pre-existing racial, statutory, and gender-based regimes of categorisation often decisively moulded the status and condition of refugees as well as the aid that they received from state authorities.

Spaces of exile and asylum

Scrutinising labels of exile conjures up issues of space and scale. The nation-state has long provided a self-evident unit of analysis for refugee history which the recent historiography, under the influence of transnational and global history, has relativised over the last years.Footnote 20 Adopting a regional—and even at times hemispheric—approach to understanding exile, new studies have paid attention to the refugee migrations across the Caribbean and American continent resulting from the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, as well as political and military upheavals across Spanish America. In doing so, they have shed light on how the revolutionary period entrenched a division between counterrevolutionary and loyalist “émigrés” and revolutionary “exiles”—a schematic opposition which several contributions in this issue seek to nuance—that reflected a rising politicisation of labels of refugee migration.Footnote 21 Other studies have helped refine our understanding of the connections between the Atlantic and Mediterranean spaces in terms of conceptions and practices of exile, with political refugees physically and intellectually connecting these two worlds.Footnote 22 From this scholarship have emerged new insights on the circulation of labels of exile across the Atlantic World and imperial divides, such as the vocable emigrado, derived from the French word émigré, which gained traction throughout the Iberian Atlantic during the late eighteenth century.Footnote 23

Correspondingly, this special issue probes concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds in a long sequence of imperial revolutions, and often in colonial contexts.Footnote 24 By examining the origins and manifestations of these categorisations within various imperial contexts (e.g., the use of the “émigré, emigrado, emigrant” label across the Caribbean), we can uncover transimperial commonalities and influences that uncover shared patterns in how race, status, class, and gender impacted the provision of asylum and assistance across different empires. This issue’s main geographical focus stems from two premises. First, that the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions—along with the imperial revolutions that simultaneously took place, as in the Spanish and Ottoman contexts—transformed concepts of subjecthood and citizenship and shattered divides between freedom and slavery. Second, that those transformations turned this vast connected space into a laboratory of sorts for the complex creation of modern refugee regimes in a variety of imperial and national spaces. Furthermore, delving into this period allows us to explore how narratives of belonging and deservingness factored in the treatment of populations in exile, and how the refugee label created distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate mobilities across this broad geographical setting well before the advent of the modern refugee figure.

Although the genealogy of these processes can be chiefly historicised and mapped in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, they were not limited to these areas, as they often took trans-imperial and global forms. Unfortunately, investigating spaces with alternative conceptualisations and practices of exile and asylum beyond the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds goes beyond the ambition of this special issue. Although in the last two decades the field of refugee history has expanded far beyond Europe, it would be a welcome contribution to this literature to examine the complex ways in which societies in Asia, Oceania, and Africa conceived and practiced the phenomena described in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds as “exile” and “asylum,” particularly before the twentieth century.Footnote 25

When moving beyond singular geographies towards intercontinental connections, what’s more, unexpected “refugee” figures before the emergence of its modern version as (narrowly) defined by international law often arise, as well as previously neglected spaces of refuge.Footnote 26 For example, Annika Bärwald’s article in this issue shows how a handful of enslaved people sought to abscond from their enslavers in the port city of Hamburg as a consequence of its growing interconnection to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans from the mid-eighteenth-century onwards. Bärwald proves that Hamburg was not a “safe haven” for self-emancipated bondspeople. This low toleration to enslaved people seeking refuge in Hamburg was linked to ascending alien policies that considered foreign people, especially non-European ones, as undesirable subjects. Despite the abolition of slavery and the declaration of the city as a free-soil territory in 1837, policies to control the entrance and residence of foreign people hindered any efforts to turn the city into a more hospitable place for non-European populations. In line with an argument made by Damian A. Pargas about self-emancipated Black people across North America, Bärwald’s study urges us to reconsider these so-called runaways as refugees from slavery, although legal and administrative gatekeeping structures did not recognise them as such.Footnote 27

Continuities and breaks

The Age of Revolutions saw the creation of new spaces and scales of exile, but many elements used to categorise and manage exiles during the early modern period persisted and evolved. Religion was one of them. Some of this special issue’s contributions underline this transformation, advising against the temptation to posit a neat distinction and linear transition from early modern, religion-based notions of asylum to modern, post-confessional refugee protection regimes rooted primarily in political grounds.Footnote 28 As mentioned earlier, the Age of Revolutions saw the advent of political refugee migration on an unprecedented scale, going in tandem with a long-term monopolisation of the provision of asylum by state institutions. During this time, asylum became closely tied to and hinged on issues of state sovereignty, border and migration control, security, and public order. New research has also stressed the process of relative de-confessionalisation of refuge, simultaneous to a massification of exile, in different historical settings.Footnote 29 That being said, religious foundations of refuge did not simply fade away with the advent of the modern political refugee, and some scholars in the field caution against uncritically and rigidly separating religious and political exile as opposing phenomena, emphasising instead their mutual influence.Footnote 30

Therefore, assessments of the resilience and continued relevance of the religious foundations of notions of “asylum” and “exile” in different historical contexts well into the nineteenth century warn us against assuming that religious refuge linearly gave way to political refuge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this issue, Bryan Banks explores the (self)-identification of Huguenots during the long eighteenth century both as religious fugitives and political refugees. Banks’s contribution sheds light on different articulations of the Huguenot refugee identity, with both religious and political underpinnings, from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) to the French Revolution. In doing so, he explores the discursive dynamics at play behind their return as new French citizens in revolutionary France. This article stresses in particular how Huguenot writers in exile sought to overcome a refugee identity originally based upon tropes of religious persecution by crafting a more explicitly non-religious and political refugee identity that transcended confessional affiliation and embraced nascent revolutionary conceptions of French national identity.

Similarly, Salma Hargal’s article in this issue explores the categorisation of Algerian people resettling into the interior of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of French imperial colonisation from the 1830s onwards, as well as exiles from the Crimean War (1853–1856).Footnote 31 By exploring the label of muhajir, as they were referred to, Hargal delves into the fusion of confessional and post-confessional identities that shaped their treatment under Ottoman imperial law. She demonstrates how this originally religious identity gradually crystallised into a full-fledged administrative status that carried expectations of asylum and relief, and underpinned notions of imperial belonging. But far from delineating a linear transition from religious to political refuge, both contributions point to the continued relevance of religion in the making and unmaking of refugee categories during the nineteenth century, challenging implicit divides between early modern (religious) and modern (political and post-confessional) exile. Looking beyond the strict dichotomy of religious and political exile, they instead underline how mutually constitutive both became in different historical contexts.Footnote 32

Finally, the issue of what constitutes the “end” of exile forms another thread connecting several of these contributions. Refugees—through their own doing, or through state-decreed policies of inclusion and amnesty—stopped being considered as such and (re)integrated their welcoming polity.Footnote 33 As the contributions highlight, however, ends of exile were seldom neat and unproblematic, but rather often came as long-winded and ambiguous processes of integration that frequently entailed new forms of exclusion and banishment. The ends of exile often revealed the lasting influence of categories on refuge-seekers’ lives beyond the initial moment and experience of exile itself.

While Fourcaud’s article dives into the impossibility of return in the context of Haiti’s independence in 1804 and the formal recognition of its sovereignty by France in 1825, Nicolás González Quintero’s article in this issue explores the complex issue of returning home in newly independent Colombia during the early 1820s. Thousands of people were thrown into exile by revolutions and warfare across Spanish America, owing to their support to revolutionary and royalist factions, or simply seeking to flee from violence. González Quintero’s article shows the predicament which abandoning an ambiguous and politically loaded refugee identity to integrate the incipient body of national citizens in the new Republic entailed. This contribution reveals how people in exile who sought to return to the new post-imperial nation in formation raised problematic issues of political belonging in the transition from empire to independent state. González Quintero shows how the inertia of the category of emigrados, upon whom suspicions of loyalty to the Spanish Empire remained cast, shaped lines of exclusion from Colombia’s community of citizens and jeopardised returns from exile. In that sense, his study provides yet another illustration of the fact that politics of refugee labelling were (and are) never neutral and apolitical.

Thus, studying the continuities and breaks of refugee semantics allows us to understand not only the complex relation between religious and political exile but also the processes of integration of refugee communities to host societies and political entities—be they imperial or post-imperial. Refugees’ identities were oftentimes associated both with their condition of expatriates and their desire to return to their home countries. The definition of refugee was not fixed, and it was not exclusively associated with religious or political terms. As some of the contributions of this special issue demonstrate, religious and non-religious understanding of refuge often coexisted, and refugees often emphasised one or the other so as to be accepted and receive support in their host or home communities. More generally, this dynamic shows us that refugees actively participated in shaping the labels of exile, asylum, and refugee during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with an acute understanding of the protections, rights, and privileges—or lack thereof—that these labels implied. With this issue, we seek to contribute to historicising the concept of refugee beyond its current definition, and to emphasise the importance of studying the debates and contests around the abovementioned labels in larger historical and regional contexts.

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our gratitude to the extended Atlantic Exiles team—Jan C. Jansen, Sibylle Fourcaud, Ana Joanna Vergara Sierra, Jannik Keindorf, Ruby Guyot, Friedemann Pestel, Megan Maruschke, Donovan Fifield, Martin Biersack, Sabine Hanke, and Sophie A. Rose—as well as to the editors of Itinerario and its anonymous reviewers and copyeditors for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank the contributors to this special issue. This publication would not have been possible without them.

Funding statement

Funded by the European Union: research for this article was supported through funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (Grant Agreement no. 849189) research and innovation programme. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. Nicolás González Quintero would like to thank the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) for supporting this publication (Project 2022/03781-2). Thomas Mareite completed the final stages of this publication with the support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon Europe programme (Grant Agreement no. 101203324).

References

1 Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

2 Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Nowak, and Peter Gatrell, “What Is Refugee History, Now?,” Journal of Global History no. 17 (2022): 2.

3 Marianne Amar, Susanne Lachenicht, Isabelle Lacoue-Labarthe, Mathilde Monge, and Annelise Rodrigo, “Introduction,” Diasporas 36 (2020): 7–20; Anne Friedrichs and Bettina Severin-Barboutie, “Mobilités, catégorisation et appartenance: Un défi de réflexivité,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 76:3 (2021), 445–55; Anne Friedrichs, “The Re-making of a Europe of Differences: Mobile Lives and the Globalization of Categories in Revolutionary and Post-imperial Times (c. 1770–1970),” European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’Histoire 32:1 (2025), 20–44; Banko, Nowak, and Gatrell, “What Is Refugee History, Now?,” 2.

4 Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, eds., The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora (Boston: Brill, 2014); Dagmar Freist and Susanne Lachenicht, eds., Connecting Worlds and People: Early Modern Diasporas (London: Routledge, 2017); David de Boer and Geert H. Janssen, eds., Refugee Politics in Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

5 De Boer and Janssen, Refugee Politics, 1.

6 The notion of a transatlantic revolutionary sequence during this period—forming a single Age of Revolution, or Age of Revolutions in its most recent form—originated from historians such as Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot. It has since then expanded beyond its original timeframe (c.1760–1800) and main geographical focus (the North Atlantic space) to encompass spaces such as Latin America and the Indian Ocean, not simply as mere receptacles of revolutionary ideas and practices—as in a diffusionist perspective—but rather as generating revolutionary cultures of their own. See Robert R. Palmer, The Age of The Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959); Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, translated by Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965); María Teresa Calderón and Clément Thibaud, eds., Las revoluciones en el mundo atlántico (Bogotá: Taurus, 2006); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). On the Age of Revolutions as an Age of Exile, see Jan C. Jansen, “Flucht und Exil im Zeitalter der Revolutionen: Perspektiven einer atlantischen Flüchtlingsgeschichte (1770er–1820er Jahre),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44:4 (2018), 495–525; Friedemann Pestel, “The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile,” in French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, ed. Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 205–31; Juan Luis Simal, “El exilio: Un fenómeno global entre la revolución y la contrarrevolución, 1814–1834,” Avances del Cesor no. 8 (December 2011), 63–79, https://doi.org/10.35305/ac.v8i08.833; Jan C. Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie, eds., Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

7 See especially the argument made in Philip Marfleet, “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 26:3 (2007), 136–48. See also Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

8 See among others Katy Long, “When Refugees Stopped Being Migrants: Movement, Labour and Humanitarian Protection,” Migration Studies 1:1 (March 2013), 4–26; Karen Akoka, L’asile et l’exil – Une histoire de la distinction réfugiés/migrants (Paris: La Découverte, 2020); Rebecca Hamlin, Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2021); Fabrice Langrognet, “The Refugee-Migrant Distinction and the Need for Bridging Analytical Divides in the Historiography,” Journal of Migration History 9:3 (2023), 245–68.

9 Early-twentieth-century-focused—works in the field include Michael Marrus, The Unwanted European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999). The examination of Huguenot migrations, in particular, has involved expanding the field of refugee history to encompass the early modern era. See among others Susanne Lachenicht, “Refugees and Refugee Protection in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (2017), 261–81; David van der Linden, Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). For more exhaustive panoramas of the global evolution of refugee history, see Peter Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?,” Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (June 2017), 170–89; Banko, Nowak, and Gatrell, “What Is Refugee History, Now?,” 1–19.

10 See for instance Delphine Diaz, En exil: Les réfugiés en Europe, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 2021).

11 The research program known as AsileuropeXIX has played a leading role in examining the categorisation of refuge. On exile to (and from) France during the long nineteenth century, see among others Gérard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national. Le droit d’asile en Europe (1793–1993) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991); Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés: Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010); Delphine Diaz, Un asile pour tous les peuples? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers en France au cours du premier XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014); Alexandre Dupont, Une internationale blanche: Histoire d’une mobilisation royaliste entre France et Espagne dans les années 1870 (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). At a European scale, see Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, eds., Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).

12 Dan Stone, “Refugees Then and Now: Memory, History and Politics in the Long Twentieth Century: An Introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice 52:2–3 (2018), 101–6.

13 Roger Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20:2 (June 2007), 172–92.

14 A valuable counterexample to this argument is provided by Freist and Lachenicht, Connecting Worlds and People. See also the last section of De Boer and Janssen, Refugee Politics.

15 Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11. On Britain in the nineteenth century, see also Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Sabine Freitag, ed., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003).

16 On the paradigm of “humanitarian revolution” and the rise of empathy towards strangers, see Norman S. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37:2 (1976), 195–218; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). The fact that, during the early modern period, Dutch transnational religious solidary underpinned a self-image of the Netherlands as “republic of the refugees” illustrates that narratives of humanitarianism and national identity dovetailed as early as the seventeenth-century. See Geert H. Janssen, “The Republic of the Refugees: Early Modern Migrations and the Dutch Experience,” Historical Journal 60:1 (2017), 233–52. On the argument of a rise of humanitarian sentiment towards refugees beyond confessional divides in early modern Europe, see Geert H. Janssen, “The Legacy of Exile and the Rise of Humanitarianism,” in Remembering the Reformation, ed. Brian Cummings et al. (London: Routledge, 2020), 226–42; David De Boer, The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). On refugee history and contemporary humanitarianism, see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013); J. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Fabian Klose, In the Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

17 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

18 Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117:1 (2012), 40–66; Claire Bourhis-Mariotti, “‘Go to Our Brethren, the Haytians’: Haiti as the African Americans’ Promised Land in the Antebellum Era,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 142:1 (2015), 6–23; Johnhenry González, “Defiant Haiti: Free-Soil Runaways, Ship Seizures and the Politics of Diplomatic Non-Recognition in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Slavery & Abolition 36:1 (2015), 124–35; Brandon R. Byrd, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

19 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

20 For a synthetic discussion of transatlantic exile, with transnational and global life trajectories, during the nineteenth century, see Romy Sánchez and Fabrice Bensimon, “European Homelands, Global Vistas,” in Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 205–40. On exile across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, see among others Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Marieke Polfliet, “Émigration et politisation: Les Français de New York et la Nouvelle-Orleans dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (1803–1860),” (PhD diss., Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 2013); Michel Cordillot, Utopistes et exilés du Nouveau Monde: Des Français aux États-Unis de 1848 à la Commune (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2013); Heléna Tóth, An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

21 On the British Empire and North America, see among others Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kit Candlin, “The Expansion of the Idea of the Refugee in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Slavery & Abolition 30:4 (2009): 521–44; Evan Taparata, “‘Refugees as You Call Them’: The Politics of Refugee Recognition in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38:2 (2019), 9–35; Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s–1820s,” Past & Present no. 255 (2022), 189–231. On Spanish America, see among others Jesús Ruiz de Gordejuela Urquijo, La expulsión de los Españoles de México y su destino incierto (Seville: CSIC, 2006); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, “Con la mira puesta en el Perú: Exiliados peninsulares en Río de Janeiro y sus expectativas políticas, 1821–1825,” in El ocaso del antiguo régimen en los imperios Ibéricos, ed. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy and Margarita Eva Rodríguez García (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2017), 101–25; Nicolás A. González Quintero, “Exile and Empire in the 19th Century Spanish Caribbean” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2020); Nicolás A. González Quintero, “Struggling against Independence: Loyalist Exiles’ Views on Imperial Rule During and After the Spanish American Revolutions,” Almanack, no. 36 (April 2024), https://doi.org/10.1590/2236-463336ed30323; Sarah C. Chambers, “Expatriados en la madre patria: El estado de limbo de los emigrados realistas en el Imperio Español, 1790–1830,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 32:2 (2021), 48–73, https://doi.org/10.61490/eial.v32i2.1719; Scarlett O’Phelan and Georges Lomné, eds., El exilio en la independencia Iberoamericana (Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad del Pacífico, 2025); Edward Blumenthal and Romy Sánchez, “Towards a History of Latin American Exile in the Nineteenth Century. Introduction,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 32:2 (2021), 7–21, https://doi.org/10.61490/eial.v32i2.1717.

22 Jordi Canal, ed., Exilios. Los éxodos políticos en la historia de España, Siglos XV–XX (Madrid: Silex, 2007); Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Agostino Bistarelli, Gli esuli del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); Juan Luis Simal, Emigrados: España y el exilio internacional, 1814–1834 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales – Asociación de Historia Contemporánea, 2012); Gabriel Paquette, “An Itinerant Liberal: Almeida Garrett’s Exilic Itineraries and Political Ideas in the Age of Southern European Revolutions (1820–1834)” in Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century, ed. Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 43–57; Alessandro Bonvini, Risorgimento Atlantico: I patrioti Italiani e la lotta internazionale per la libertà (Rome: Editori Laterza, 2022); Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023), 218–54.

23 Juan Francisco Fuentes, “Imagen del exilio y del exiliado en la España del Siglo XIX,” Ayer no. 47 (2002), 35–56; Romy Sánchez and Juan Luis Simal, “Lexiques et pratiques du destierro: L’exil politique espagnol en péninsule et à l’Outre-mer, de 1814 aux Années 1880,” Hommes & Migrations no. 1321 (2018), 23–31.

24 On the notion of imperial revolution, see Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113:2 (2008), 319–40.

25 Ronit Ricci, ed., Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016) is a notable exception. However, most of the studies in this field remain focused on the twentieth century, with uneven attention to the dialectics of “labelling.” To name only but a few references, see Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016); Stephen R. MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Bei Gao, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); R. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Glen Peterson, “The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong, and Indonesia,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25:3 (2012), 326–43; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press, 2007); Benjamin Thomas White, “Refugees and the Definition of Syria, 1920–1939,” Past and Present 235:1 (2017), 141–78; Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire (1815–1914): The Birth of a Concept and International Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Victoria Abrahamyan, “Citizen Strangers: Identity Labelling and Discourse in French Mandatory Syria, 1920–1932,” Journal of Migration History 6:1 (2020), 40-61; Jill Rosenthal, “From ‘Migrants’ to ‘Refugees’: Identity, Aid, and Decolonization in Ngara District, Tanzania,” Journal of African History 56:2 (2015), 261–79; Bonny Ibhawoh, “Refugees, Evacuees, and Repatriates: Biafran Children, UNHCR, and the Politics of International Humanitarianism in the Nigerian Civil War,” African Studies Review 63:1 (2020), 568–92; Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020); Baxter Tavuyanago, Tasara Muguti, and James Hlongwana, “Victims of the Rhodesian Immigration Policy: Polish Refugees from the Second World War,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38:2 (2012), 951–65; Joël Glasman, “Seeing like a Refugee Agency: A Short History of the UNHCR Classification in Centra Africa (1961–2015),” Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (2017), 337–62.

26 See for instance the analysis of two precolonial forms of refuge from enslavement in West Central Africa called Vatira and Shimbika (or Tombika) in Esteban Salas, “Refuge-Making in West Central Africa: The Other Side of the Age of Revolutions,” Age of Revolution, 19 June 2023 (https://ageofrevolutions.com/2023/06/19/refuge-making-in-west-central-africa-the-other-side-of-the-age-of-revolutions/, accessed 26 June 2023).

27 Damian A. Pargas, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Recent studies born out of the research group “Beacons of Freedom: Slave Refugees in North America, 1800–1860” have reconceived fugitive slaves as refugees from slavery too: Viola F. Müller, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Thomas Mareite, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803–1861 (Boston, Brill: 2022).

28 This model is often used implicitly, more than explicitly, in accounts of the long-term history of refugee categorisation and protection. See, for example, Philipp Ther, The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).

29 To mention a recent example, Caroline Shaw has traced the expansion of the application of the refugee label, originally attached to the Huguenots, to Catholic foreigners in exile in Britain from roughly 1790 to 1860. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 15–40.

30 See for instance Diaz, En exil.

31 On the Ottoman Empire as hosting both Ottoman and foreign subjects in exile during this period, see Ella Fratantuono, Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024); Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2024); Jared Manasek, “Protection, Repatriation and Categorization: Refugees and Empire at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (2017), 301–17; Dawn Chatty, “Refugees, Exiles and Other Forced Migrants in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32:2 (2013), 35–52; György Csorba, “Hungarian Emigrants of 1848–49 in the Ottoman Empire,” in The Turks, vol. 4, ed. Hasan Celâl Güzel, C. Cem Oğuz, and Osman Karatay (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Publications, 2002), 224–32.

32 See also the continued relevance of religious motives and forms of organisation in nineteenth-century humanitarian activism and relief campaigns: Abigail Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National,” Historical Journal 57:4 (2014), 1157-75.

33 On return from and memories of exile, Sylvie Aprile and Laure Godineau, “Returns and Memories,” in Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 241–78.