The revolutions and military confrontations that rocked the world during the decades around 1800 saw forced movements – both old and new – on a massive scale. It was during these years that the transatlantic slave trade reached its peak; that decades of almost uninterrupted inter-imperial warfare drove hundreds of thousands of soldiers and military agents across the globe, causing the number of prisoners of war and captives to rise to unprecedented heights; that long-standing imperial practices of convict transportation went into high gear; and that political refugees and exiles emerged as a mass phenomenon. Bold attempts by state authorities to control and regulate mobility led to new legal practices and statuses and to further waves of deportation.

Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c.1750–1830 brings this explosion in forced mobilities into full view. Rather than describing forced migrations as an aberration in a period usually identified with national independence struggles, the quest for liberty, and new concepts of citizenship and democratic participation, this book recognizes these mobilities as a crucial dimension of the momentous transformations that were underway. By putting the history of exclusion and forced removal center stage, Mobility and Coercion recovers the fundamental messiness, violence, and contingency of the era often described as the cradle of political modernity.

An Age of Wars, Revolutions, and Coerced Mobility

The decades between 1750 and 1830 comprise a chaotic and momentous period in world history. A long-standing, mainly Western, intellectual tradition has referred to this period as the transition to (Western) modernity. This Sattelzeit (saddle period), to borrow a term coined (half-seriously) by the historian Reinhart Koselleck, was marked by simultaneous transformations in politics, societal structures, and economic production, and by the attendant emergence of new worldviews, some of which permanently altered the experience of time and historicity.Footnote ¹ Most scholars of non-Western and global history have cautioned against universalizing concepts of historical change that, in many cases, only apply to a subsection of Western European regions and peoples during this period. Yet most global accounts of the period agree on its transformative character, especially with regard to political and geopolitical upheaval in many parts of the world.Footnote ²

Building on this characterization of the years between 1750 and 1830, Mobility and Coercion emphasizes two forces that shaped this era: revolution, on the one hand, and warfare, on the other. These dual “expressions of mass human violence” have long been understood as defining features of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although they are usually studied in isolation.Footnote ³ A long-standing historiographic tradition has referred to the revolutions of this period as the cradle of Western political modernity. This Age of Revolutions came to scholarly life as an elite-centered picture of the American and the French Revolutions and their interconnections.Footnote ⁴ Over time, historical scholarship has broadened this focus on the North Atlantic to include the major political convulsions across Latin America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and southern Europe.Footnote ⁵ In so doing, historians have brought into view an increasingly diverse set of actors, including Indigenous communities across the Americas, West African jihadists and war captives, rebellious ship crews and privateers, and enslaved and free insurgents from Haiti and other American slave societies.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, our understanding of the Atlantic Age of Revolutions has grown to recognize the revolutions’ inherent imperial character.Footnote ⁷ Instead of following narratives of national self-liberation and exceptionalism, scholars now tend to highlight the imperial frameworks within which the era’s great political revolutions unfolded, and they argue for a better understanding of the dialectics of continuity and change that shaped this period.Footnote ⁸

Scholarship that looks beyond the Atlantic world and seeks to understand the Age of Revolutions within even wider vistas must recognize that empires, rather than nation-states, functioned as political superstructures and that established chronologies were created from Eurocentric perspectives and should therefore be viewed critically. For British historian C. A. Bayly, the Atlantic Age of Revolutions was just one variant of a “world crisis,” a confluence of fiscal and military shocks that unsettled not just the colonial empires of Western European states but also those ruled by the Russian tsars, the Ottomans, the Qing in China, the Crimean Tatars, and the Mughals.Footnote ⁹ While these crises seldom led to complete imperial breakdowns, and while they affected the regions of the world in varied and uneven ways, they ushered in lasting geopolitical shifts: the worldwide expansion of European overseas empires, in particular the ascendancy of the British Empire to global supremacy, soon thereafter sustained by the increasing socioeconomic divergence between Europe and Asia.Footnote ¹⁰ In the Pacific and Indian oceanic worlds, expanding Western empires encountered, clashed with, or coalesced with manifold Indigenous efforts toward political and social reordering and state-building.Footnote ¹¹ The decades around 1800 also saw a higher level of subaltern unrest at sea – seaborne revolutionary action, mutinies, and rebellions – across the world’s oceans.Footnote ¹² This myriad of sociopolitical upheavals at land and at sea brought about a complex web of global interactions whose origin and impetus often lay outside of Europe and the (North) Atlantic world.

The upheavals of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “world crisis” were violent affairs, and the dividing line between revolution and warfare cannot be drawn sharply. Each of the great revolutions in North and South America, in the Caribbean, and in Europe involved large outbursts of civil war violence. Revolutions also grew out of major interstate wars, starting with the Seven Years War (1756–63), which has already been correctly described as a true world war.Footnote ¹³ The wars of US American, Haitian, and Latin American independence, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars across Europe, and revolutionary and religious wars in West and Central Africa yielded a state of almost ceaseless warfare across the globe, one in which long-standing geostrategic interests were overlaid by the new ideological and political front lines of the era. The formation and reformation of empires and polities in South Asia became entangled with increasing European incursions in the wake of revolutionary conflicts, linking the world of the Indian Ocean with that of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁴ The world had long known major military conflicts. But after 1750, large-scale armed conflicts became more frequent, and they expanded massively in their geographic scope, both on land and at sea. These sustained armed conflicts also transformed the practice of warfare: In the decades around 1800, states built up massive naval forces, and military strategists put new and greater emphasis on artillery on the battlefield. As armies grew, civilians were increasingly drawn into warfare, a process exacerbated by the elaboration of the concept of “irregular” guerilla warfare (“small war”).Footnote ¹⁵ Considering revolution and war as equally defining – and inextricably connected – features of the years between 1750 and 1830 improves our understanding of the period’s military and political history. It helps us better grasp the transformative character of warfare well beyond the battlefield, and it illuminates the violent, disruptive, and contingent realities that are too often overlooked in a teleological view of the Age of Revolutions.

Mobility and Coercion also emphasizes a third characteristic of the period that was closely connected with the era’s sociopolitical and military confrontations and with the broader transformations then underway: greater human mobility. Against the idea of a long-term shift from “unfree” to “free” (labor) migration – still widespread in general accounts of migration history – the chapters in this volume highlight the ubiquity, persistence, and expansion of coerced mobility. Building on important advances in the historical scholarship on mobility and labor, Mobility and Coercion departs from the classic idea of migration as a free, linear movement between a clear starting point (place of origin) and a clear endpoint (place of permanent settlement).Footnote ¹⁶ This normative account only ever concerned a slice of human mobility, not only between 1750 and 1830 but also during any other period in world history.

Mobility and Coercion seeks to shift and expand the scholarly conversation on migration by following three key principles. First, the essays collected in this volume challenge the notion of “free” and “unfree” mobility as two discrete types of human migration and instead regard them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. The agency exercised by individuals who were moved against their will and the forms of resistance, strategies, and choices they deployed in response to systemic forces are central concerns of this book. Second, the case studies introduced in subsequent chapters emphasize the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the importance of transit and temporary destinations. Third, the featured case studies underscore the importance of coerced immobility, the crucial and yet largely understudied role played by border controls, forms of identification and registration, the regulation of legality and illegality, and of practices of expulsion and deportation, and the undoing of migration in the history of mobility.

Major Areas of Forced Mobility

The forms of forced movement that characterized this age of wars and revolutions had very different origins and trajectories. Although political refugees, as a mass phenomenon, date to our period of focus, most forms of forced mobility that we address have much longer histories. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade, for example, had already been conducted as a large-scale system of forced migration for several centuries. The same can be said of the transportation networks for convicted criminals. Nonetheless, all of the forms of forced mobility addressed in this volume entered into a particular stage during the globe-spanning political and military upheavals between 1750 and 1830. For the sake of clarity, we distinguish between five major areas of forced mobility that feature prominently throughout this volume:

• Slave trade: Almost six million enslaved Africans were boarded onto ships to the Americas between 1750 and 1830, accounting for half of the estimated 12.5 million Africans who were forced to cross the Atlantic between the early sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ In the 1790s, the transatlantic displacement and enslavement of Africans reached both an all-time high and a crucial breaking point. While the extent and decisive causes of the nineteenth-century abolitions of the slave trade and slavery are still subject to debate, we argue that revolutions and wars were crucial factors.Footnote ¹⁸ Seen most clearly in the case of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the contestation of slavery was integral to all revolutionary struggles throughout the Atlantic world.Footnote ¹⁹ It was central to the revolution in France and had repercussions across the French Empire as well. The American Revolution and the various independence struggles across Spanish America were likewise shaped by the involvement of enslaved people and by conflicts over emancipation. Even more important, arguably, was the destabilizing impact of war. Disruptions caused by inter-imperial and civil wars and the access to arms and military service provided crucial paths to emancipation and put greater pressure on the slavery-based plantation system.Footnote ²⁰ The short- and medium-term effects of warfare and revolutions on the slave trade and slavery were complex. Under the pressure of self-liberation, particularly in Haiti, and of state-led efforts to ban both the trade in and ownership of slaves, the locus of the slave trade shifted to places where Atlantic slavery continued (or started) to thrive, such as Brazil and Cuba. The British ban on the slave trade in 1807 itself produced new forms of bondage and unfree movement, such as the trade in indentured “recaptives,” “liberated Africans,” and “prize slaves,” and the ongoing clandestine trade in enslaved Africans in the Atlantic was accompanied by not-so-hidden slave trades in other parts of the world.Footnote ²¹

• Convict transportation: From the early fifteenth century, the transportation of convicted criminals and their use for forced labor had been a long-standing form of punishment practiced by all major Western, and some non-Western, empires.Footnote ²² The multidirectional displacement of convicts to penal colonies created wide-ranging networks between colonies and metropoles across the globe. Important overlaps existed between the movement of convicts and other forms of forced labor (such as indentured labor) and labor-based punishment. Convict transportation also proved crucial in times of war and political upheaval, when the criminal justice system could be used for forced military service and impressment or to expel recalcitrant political opponents or unruly slaves. The independence of the thirteen North American colonies in the 1780s, hitherto an important destination for British convicts, ushered in the rise of the Australian penal colonies. At the same time, Russia began to use Siberia more systematically as a place of exile for criminals and political dissidents alike, and the British East India Company established new convict transportation systems. An increasing number of political exiles found themselves alongside “regular” criminals and undisciplined soldiers in other European extraterritorial possessions, such as French Guiana and (after 1830) North Africa.Footnote ²³

• Dispossession and expulsion: The political emancipation of European settler societies in the Americas went hand in hand with the shrinking autonomous spaces of Indigenous populations. Aggressive frontier colonization, land dispossession, and the state-sponsored displacement of nomadic and hunting populations on the American continents were part of a global push of White-settler land expropriation that could also be seen in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and southern Africa.Footnote ²⁴ If convict transportation was fundamental to the economic and geostrategic needs of imperial expansion, so too was it central to the ethnic violence of settler colonialism and the forced removal of Indigenous populations.Footnote ²⁵ Imperial strategies of dispossessing and expelling colonized populations and Indigenous resistance leaders resulted in particular iterations of forced removal, particularly variants of banishment and transportation, that either utilized intracolonial networks or took advantage of internal methods of isolation, often on islands.Footnote ²⁶ Neither these practices nor the local resistance they encountered were confined to the Americas or the Global South. The connection between state-building and ethnically motivated mass expulsions also became apparent in the struggles between the Ottoman Empire and national independence movements in southeastern Europe, especially, for example, during the Greek War of Independence.

• Military mobility: Decades of virtually uninterrupted warfare saw the massive buildup and projection of armies across the world, making war “an arena for heightened human mobility.”Footnote ²⁷ The resulting mobilities of soldiers and sailors were the most obvious expression of sustained imperial wars. The treatment and movement of captives and prisoners of war and of demobilized military personnel and veterans on a global scale were major issues faced by belligerent states.Footnote ²⁸ Lacking standing armies, warring states satisfied their insatiable hunger for military recruits through coercive means, ranging from the impressment of (formerly) enslaved individuals and convicts to early experiments in compulsory military service. Prisoners of Central and West African wars also made up a significant proportion of the enslaved captives crossing the Atlantic. As a result, major outbursts in the constant state of war that was slavery, such as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica (1760), look like extensions of African military history.Footnote ²⁹ In the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and other later slave uprisings of the era, African-born captives were in both the armed resistance against planter regimes and (when drafted into the military) the counter-insurgency.Footnote ³⁰ The military action of the era was also significantly defined by self-appointed military agents and entrepreneurs – veterans, mercenaries, “volunteers,” “adventurers,” semi-official advisers – who offered their military expertise and weaponry from one geopolitical conflict zone to another.Footnote ³¹ “Undisciplined” soldiers and deserters made up an important portion of convicts sent across the globe, including to France’s infamous military penal colonies in North Africa.Footnote ³²

• Political flight and exile: Each of the major revolutions and the upheavals they generated put tens of thousands of people on the move.Footnote ³³ The American Revolution pitted champions of independence against those who remained loyal to the British Crown, with the exodus in 1782–83 of at least 60,000 Loyalists in the aftermath of the American Revolution.Footnote ³⁴ Roughly 150,000 individuals who opposed the course of the French Revolution left France in the early 1790s and scattered across Europe and the Americas.Footnote ³⁵ Some 20,000 to 30,000 people left the French colony of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, and thousands more escaped a number of smaller revolutions (or the consequences of their failures) across Europe and the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁶ A few years later, in several movements, tens of thousands of exiles from Spanish America arrived in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.Footnote ³⁷ In total, more than a quarter of a million people left or were forced to leave their homes as a result of political conflicts and civil wars in the Atlantic world alone. While exile and asylum had much older precedents, the period between 1750 and 1830 stands out as the moment when people escaping political change and revolutionary violence became a mass phenomenon, with far-reaching consequences. Along with the motives for flight, the radii of forced movement changed dramatically. The refugees did not disperse, as in the preceding centuries, along religious or confessional trajectories but rather across a dynamic political map that shifted with the moving front lines of revolutionary and civil wars. Due to their political context, revolutionary-era refugees became prime targets of heightened mobility control, surveillance, and deportation by receiving states.Footnote ³⁸

Each of these forms of coerced mobility has its own historiography. Some of them – the scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and on convict transportation, in particular – have been, for generations, among the most productive fields of international research into forced mobility, unfree labor, and confinement and into transcontinental, imperial, and oceanic history writ large. Others, such as the historical study of refugee mobilities, are still only, if rapidly, emerging. Whatever the extent of their genealogies, these fields share a tendency toward disciplinary compartmentalization and containment. These fields revolve around (allegedly) discrete types and categories of mobility and generate their own research questions and concepts. The histories of enslaved individuals, of convicts, of prisoners of war, of displaced Indigenous communities, and of refugees are usually studied in isolation from one another, despite the fact – as we will see throughout this volume – that people often fell into more than one category, moved in the same space, crossed paths, and interacted with one another, and in so doing forged new connections that invite new comparisons.Footnote ³⁹ Comparative or entangled approaches that cut across these forms of coerced (and free) mobility have been extremely rare, although a few publications by leading specialists on the slave trade and convict transportation make a strong case for such perspectives.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a result, the full extent of the explosion of all kinds of coerced mobilities during the age of wars and revolutions has been occluded by seemingly particular and disconnected histories of (forced) migrations.

Mobility and Coercion goes beyond such compartmentalized approaches to offer new perspectives on this explosion of coerced mobilities. To be sure, the chapters in this volume build on specialized scholarship and present fresh, empirically grounded research, and their focus and arguments are often reflective of their respective author’s specialized background. The chapters by Christian G. De Vito and by Brad Manera and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart bring in perspectives from the histories of convict transportation in the Spanish and British Empires, respectively, while the contribution by Anna McKay emerges from the history of military mobility and war captivity. Many other chapters take the histories of various refugee movements and political migrations as their starting point: British Loyalists and French émigrés, respectively, as in Liam Riordan’s and Friedemann Pestel’s chapters; refugees from the Haitian Revolution in the chapters by Nathalie Dessens and Jan C. Jansen; exiles during the revolutions in Spanish America in Edward Blumenthal’s and Karen Racine’s chapters; political mobilities during the revolutions in southern Europe in Maurizio Isabella’s chapter; and practices of political deportation in British-controlled India and the Cape Colony in Kirsten McKenzie’s chapter.

For all their distinct concerns and topics, the chapters in Mobility and Coercion nevertheless delineate the contours of a shared history integrated by a multitude of overlaps, interconnections, and permeable boundaries. Across multiple points of intersection, we pursue this shared ambition in two major directions. In the first place, we show how approaching the age of wars and revolutions from the point of view of coerced mobilities can break down entrenched assumptions about geographies and chronologies. Second, we challenge the clear-cut typological distinctions that still inform understandings of migration, and we interrogate the dynamic interplay between these systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.

Geographies and Chronologies

Scholars have long recognized the emergence of new borders and sovereignties as central to the age of wars and revolutions. What has received far less emphasis is the manner in which changed geographies both triggered forced mobilities and were, in turn, shaped by them. If this holds true for geography, then it is equally applicable to chronology. In response, Mobility and Coercion avoids clear delineations in either area – instead of insisting on overly rigid definitions of geographic spheres such as the “Atlantic world,” or chronological units such as the Age of Revolutions, the volume points to interlocking geographies, as seen from micro- and macro-historical perspectives, and favors an encompassing approach to chronologies in which continuities, slow change, and rupture mix. Our case studies also undercut normative ideas about the temporal and geographic structure of migration. Instead of presenting a linear movement that occurs in a clear time frame, they emphasize moments of transit, transience, sojourning, and circular movements as integral dimensions of human mobility. We approach these questions across the volume at different scales, from the granular to the expansive.

In some instances, coerced mobilities occurred in close connection with the formation of new borders, sovereignties, and regions that have long been the focus for research on this period. Even if this outcome had not been pursued, or even anticipated, by virtually any contemporaries, most of the revolutionary upheavals brought about newly independent states and upended long-standing notions of sovereignty and political membership. Blumenthal demonstrates how exiles and émigrés in Chile and the Río de la Plata (caught up in political and civil war dislocation) entered into fluctuating alliances with Indigenous groups in Mapuche country to both reinforce and disrupt nascent international borders and underpin evolving sovereignty. As imperial state structures broke down, émigrés found refuge with Indigenous groups, creating new alliances and alternative sovereign structures. Spaces of exile opened and closed as borders shifted in response to territorial conflicts and realignments. Turning to Louisiana as a borderland in the northern part of the American continent, Dessens emphasizes the crucial role of Saint-Domingue refugees in the early US American republic. While they participated in US nation-building, the refugees also connected New Orleans to a reconfigured map of the Atlantic world and the Caribbean.

Just as people made borders, so too did borders make people. For Riordan, the conflict and violence in North American border regions made coerced migration a common experience for all who inhabited those spaces. Riordan tracks repeated waves of expulsion across one region (what would become the borderlands of the United States and Canada) over an extended period of time. Rather than emphasizing distinct histories of population displacement, he takes a longer view and employs a layering approach that demonstrates the connections between one forced removal and the next. Thus, the struggles of Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki who resisted and fled attempted genocide cannot be separated from the ethnic cleansing of the French Catholic Acadian settlers or the purging of American Loyalists after the conclusion of the American Revolution. Shifting or tightening territorial borders during this period turned people more neatly into insiders and outsiders, even in territories where more flexible forms of belonging had long existed. For Jansen, the revolutionary era saw sprawling alien regulations and border controls that bolstered states’ powers to deport unwanted foreigners, especially refugees, and that often raised thorny questions about the criteria for distinguishing outsiders from insiders. As described by Isabella, the Greek War of Independence saw the brutal expulsion of those who were not considered part of the emerging nation of Greeks. In both cases, however, gray zones of conditional, partial, or multiple belonging continued to exist, and canny individuals were able to shape and negotiate their belonging to states.

The individual chapters in this volume deploy different lenses; whereas some highlight the experiences of specific individuals or zero in on moments of crisis, others take a broader view of systems and chronology. In McKay’s account, we see how imperial practices collapsed under pressure of victory as well as defeat. The huge numbers of prisoners of war captured by the British between 1793 and 1815 stretched their existing arrangements to the breaking point and led officials to institute new systems of global forced mobility. But analogous systems could also prove persistent and resilient. De Vito argues that historians should zoom out and view the period between 1770 and 1820 as part of a much longer project within the Spanish Empire in Europe and beyond, a project that stretched back to the 1500s and involved relocating soldiers, convicts, and vagrants to meet its military needs. Rather than generating these practices, the revolutionary era intensified and accelerated them, establishing systems and procedures that sent French refugees and convicts from Haiti into the Spanish Caribbean, while simultaneously channeling men from Europe and North Africa throughout the empire to sites where they were needed to work or fight. Similarly, McKay and also Manera and Maxwell-Stewart demonstrate the longue durée dependence of a British army on enforced mobile labor – whether their own (felons) or foreign (prisoners of war and enslaved) populations.

As with both Blumenthal and Riordan in the borderlands of the Americas, Dessens shows how waves of forced migrations overlapped and intersected in New Orleans. In so doing, she moves that city from the margins of the Atlantic world to the center of a Caribbean world in the revolutionary era. As an asylum of choice for those displaced by regional conflict, New Orleans was redefined by significant waves of free and forced migration that also changed the city’s place in the world. Dessens demonstrates how Saint-Domingue refugees – both free and enslaved – reoriented the city southward at the very moment it was incorporated into the United States after the Louisiana Purchase. Refugee flows and their corresponding cultural, economic, and political ties helped transform New Orleans into a new center of gravity for the Saint-Domingue diaspora and a nodal point of exchange within a reconfigured Caribbean world.

While the Atlantic world, broadly defined, has long been a point of emphasis in the historiography of this period, many chapters in this volume speak to the increasing trend of globalizing the revolutionary moment. Some of the borderlands in this volume were long-standing regions of mobility, and the movements between 1750 and 1830 only reactivated them. In other instances, new territories were drawn into existing systems of displacement. Dessens and De Vito discuss the interconnection between the Caribbean and the Atlantic through the coerced mobilities of refugees, convicts, and prisoners of war, both free and enslaved. Where battlefields were global, so too were the movements of people and resources, as the chapters by Manera and Maxwell-Stewart, McKay, Isabella, and De Vito all make clear. Developments were frequently ad hoc and contingent. McKay documents the mobilities of prisoners of war who were captured by the British and detained, sold, and put to work across the empire – in numbers so high that the old system was pushed to breaking point, leading officials to move prisoners across oceans and continents, remaking empire in the process.

Pestel reminds us that such geographies were as much imagined as real. He recounts how, as exile dragged on, leading French émigrés engaged in debates about potential places for the permanent settlement of their diaspora. While still strongly rooted in a France-centered worldview, their schemes considered resettlement as a global endeavor, ranging from the North American backcountry and the Antilles to Russia and the Pacific Ocean. The idea of French political emigration to Australia, however, was also used as a rhetorical tool by French republicans to ridicule their exiled opponents. Political developments in France allowed for most émigrés’ return, and their far-reaching resettlement plans never materialized. This stands in contrast to the case of the Saint-Domingue refugees who, after a series of transient and provisional arrangements, gravitated toward US-owned Louisiana as a place for permanent settlement. Along with the resettlement of American Loyalists in America’s Northeast (Riordan), Pestel’s and Dessens’s accounts of émigré communities, real and imagined, remind us of the patterns that turned forced migrants – religious refugees, convicts, enslaved fugitives – into settlers. Imperial systems of resettlement that did not just posit imperial expansion and settler colonialism as causes of displacement (of Indigenous populations) but also as a solution to it obviously persisted into the era of political exile.Footnote ⁴¹

Finally, as this volume repeatedly shows, following individual life trajectories often recasts our knowledge of historical geographies. The story of Agustín Iturbide, exiled ex-Emperor of Mexico, highlights the unexpected connections that could be drawn between London and the Americas. Conspiring with local and global networks of imperial and commercial interest, Iturbide sought to manipulate these networks in an ill-fated quest to return to power (Racine). Isabella’s shapeshifting revolutionaries allow us to see the Mediterranean world from Palermo, expanding our understanding of philhellenism as not just a revolutionary form of liberalism but also as an imperial ideology and an emerging Mediterranean tradition. The Mediterranean emerges as an oceanic world populated with figures from the Napoleonic Wars who washed up on its shores and never left – officers, soldiers, mercenaries, agents, traders, and diplomats. Informal agents advanced an array of imperial interests and created new humanitarian and financial networks from a range of unstable and opportunistic subject positions. Dessens demonstrates that the strategies of Saint-Domingue refugees to increase both their economic and symbolic capital underscored the French identity of New Orleans at the very moment when it became absorbed into the United States by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Networks of people and information linked regions both within and across empires. Unsurprisingly, given the ascendancy of British imperialism at this moment, London emerges as a significant node of connection in this volume. Dyani Tshatshu, a Xhosa chief who visited London in 1837, was reportedly most impressed not by railroads or steam engines but by what he saw in a House of Commons debate: “a little company of men – not taller than I am here – touch the spring that moves the world.”Footnote ⁴² Historians have found it convenient to divide their histories by regional focus, but such conventions would have made little sense to those who sought to control Tshatshu’s machinery of change. In fact, three chapters in this volume (Racine; Jansen; McKenzie) show British members of Parliament and colonial officials (sometimes the very same historical actors) wrestling with issues central to this volume at the very same time. In 1824, within months and sometimes days, these men were ignoring the exiled ex-Emperor of Mexico’s overtures and demands (Racine), arguing about the subjecthood and forced removal of free people of color from Jamaica (Jansen), and managing the fallout from the exile of newspaper editors in Bengal and the Cape Colony (McKenzie). Colonial officials managing a set of problems unfolding “everywhere and all at once” clearly recognized that a flare-up in one region could easily be weaponized by activists in another.Footnote ⁴³

Activists and authorities alike understood implicitly that debates around press legislation or the line between alien status and subjecthood could not be bound within one jurisdiction. Refugees from one locality forced the issue of legal definitions in another. Exiles and opportunists made their way to these global metropolitan centers and emanated from them as well. As Racine’s account of fallen Mexican Emperor Agustín de Iturbide shows, the fallout from the end of the Spanish Empire played out in unexpected places, including the drawing rooms of a provincial watering place such as Bath. Pestel, too, positions London as a point of intersection in the revolutionary world, connecting French émigrés with plantation interests with revolutionary Saint-Domingue and turning them into driving forces behind the ill-fated British military intervention in the Haitian Revolution. All such new arrivals tapped into, sought to exploit, and were, in turn, exploited by local politicians. Metropolitan and regional nodes were perfect hubs for plotting exiles who sought funds and forces to return home. These nodes were likewise well suited for the mobilization of prisoners of war and the deployment of transported and military labor.

Systems and Individuals

The case studies presented in this volume challenge the clear-cut typological distinctions that still prevail in both academic and nonacademic discourse about migration. Starting in the 1990s, social scientists and historians began dissecting rigid terminologies of migration, pointing out their pitfalls. An important subbranch of refugee studies has drawn attention to legal and bureaucratic processes of labeling and discursive distortion to which refugees and forced migrants have been subject.Footnote ⁴⁴ In recent years, political scientists and anthropologists have offered pointed critiques of the binary distinction between “migrant” and “refugee” as a “legal fiction” with wide-ranging legal, political, economic, social, and cultural implications for people on the move.Footnote ⁴⁵ Most of the border-crossers that fill the pages of this book fit between allegedly discrete categories of migrants, defying any neat binary between free and unfree movement.

Categories, typologies, and classificatory systems have their analytical limits and are also profoundly complicated by the entanglement of individuals with systems in real-world situations. More than three decades ago, Roger Zetter drew an analytical link between structure and agency in pioneering the concept of refugee labeling.Footnote ⁴⁶ Labels, he later reflected, not only provide a “tangible representation of policies and programmes” but are also open to manipulation by individual and institutional interests. They are both a “process of identification and a mark of identity,” whether resisted or embraced.Footnote ⁴⁷ Across the chapters that follow, we seek to unknot the tangled relationship between the structures of forced mobility and the agency of those caught up in their toils. Some authors take as their starting point large-scale histories, whether of geographies or of systems, then drill down toward the individuals who were navigating these treacherous waters of population displacement and political upheaval. Others move in the opposite direction, using case studies focused on particular historical actors to draw out expansive themes of forced migration and the possession and dispossession of human beings that eventuated.

That exile and forced movement resulted in unintended outcomes or brought together strange bedfellows becomes apparent in multiple ways throughout this volume, including in Pestel’s account of the alliance between the Knights of Malta and the French planters of Saint-Domingue. Planning global émigré outposts, he argues, was an attempt to build bonds among communities in exile, fostering a sense of shared belonging as well as marshaling outside support for those excluded by revolutionary forces. The Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Isabella explains, allowed Ottoman Christian mercenaries from diasporic Greek communities to travel, in the process shifting the definition of what it meant to be Greek. Many of the chapters in this volume, whether directly or obliquely, thus question the usefulness of ideological coherence as an analytical tool for understanding individual or group motivations within the age of wars and revolutions. Whether it was the search for opportunity or safety on the part of individuals, or the needs of military and economic force on the part of state actors, expediency often trumped conviction in determining patterns of mobility.

Scores of those who roamed revolutionary-era southern Europe eluded clear categorizations as “volunteers,” political exiles, mercenaries, economic migrants, or foreign advisers (Isabella). Pestel shows how French émigrés began to imagine themselves as both political refugees and settler colonists in the Americas, Russia, and Australia. Because of the porous boundaries of warfare, sailors and whalers became mixed up with soldiers in the mass of prisoners of war and “captives” taken by the British Army (McKay). Many other cases highlight groups and individuals that cut across two or more types of coerced mobility. The British West India regiments and the Royal African Colonial Corps, discussed in depth by Manera and Maxwell-Stewart, filled their ranks with recruits who were often soldiers, convicts, and enslaved people at the same time. Coerced mobilities relating to the Haitian Revolution and the revolutionary Caribbean were particularly complex. The refugee movements from revolutionary Saint-Domingue that spread to other Caribbean islands and to North America included men and women of all races who had been born free, newly emancipated men and women, and enslaved individuals brought along by other (free) refugees (Dessens; Jansen). Their legal status notwithstanding, many Saint-Domingue refugees of African origin or descent were re-enslaved and forced into a thriving informal inter-imperial slave trade. Refugees also became mixed up with prisoners of war and convicted criminals, something British and Spanish authorities in the Caribbean grappled with (De Vito; McKay). Moving armies included thousands of quasi-indentured former slaves (“prize slaves”), convicted criminals, and enslaved men, the last of whom were either forcibly recruited or self-enlisted as a means to gain personal freedom (Manera and Maxwell-Stewart). The deployment of regiments largely composed of unfree Black and White soldiers in the slave societies of the Caribbean led to rifts between British authorities and White slave-holding elites.

But the chapters in Mobility and Coercion do more than merely demonstrate that many cases simply did not fit into clear-cut classificatory systems. In line with recent research on the historical semantics of migration and exile, they delve into the classifications and categories that were used and contested by actors on the ground.Footnote ⁴⁸ In so doing, they provide deep insights into a period in which new systems of categorizing and regulating mobilities took shape, but during which most of these categories and legal statuses still remained highly malleable. Authorities in places such as Jamaica and New Orleans, where different sets of refugees had washed up, both differentiated and blurred their vocabulary of exiled groups (Jansen; Dessens). As a result, people did not just move between places but also between legal statuses and classificatory frameworks. Legal scholars of slavery and labor history have amply shown that distinctions between personal freedom and unfreedom were in practice much less clear-cut and more porous than in legal theory.Footnote ⁴⁹ Social practice complemented – and complicated – the law. In a similar fashion, the individuals in this volume moved between legal categories of “free” and “unfree” mobility, and (above all) between different legal categories of coerced mobility. Enslaved individuals briefly became refugees, only to become enslaved again; convicts turned into soldiers and, as a consequence of war, prisoners of war. Even if the vocabulary was blurred, such classifications had profound consequences, since they had a concrete impact on the lives of the individuals categorized as such. Mobile individuals and state actors alike wrestled to turn these legal frameworks and their loopholes to their advantage. Free people of color from Saint-Domingue in Jamaica knew exactly why they sought the status of prisoner of war and not the one of refugee (McKay).

States responded to these blurred categories by attempting to pin down and systematize barriers, yet historical actors still managed to slip through them, time and again. In other instances, state actors sought to keep their own classification systems flexible, indistinct, and open, while individuals tried to claim specific categories for themselves. In a world where track-and-trace systems were emerging in state structures, where the rise of the information state increased technologies of surveillance, paper identities became an increasingly important factor in mobility. Tickets of leave, musters, ship manifests, and slave and foreigner registrations – all were mechanisms by which both identity and movement were pulled more and more under state control.Footnote ⁵⁰ In multi-imperial borderland regions such as the Leeward Islands, continuous warfare and the fear of revolutionary “contagion” gave rise to surveillance systems that cut across different colonies.Footnote ⁵¹ De Vito shows how new categories were created within the Spanish Empire to classify and manage different kinds of exiles from the conflagration of Saint-Domingue. Yet these systems were never totalizing, as several chapters show. In McKenzie’s chapter, we meet James Silk Buckingham, a British-born resident of Bengal who was subject to the East India Company’s practices of forcible exile, known as “transmission.” Buckingham tried to bypass this rule and protect his Calcutta newspaper by putting ownership into the hands of Francis Sandys, who as a Bengal-born subject was exempted from transmission. Refugees, in particular, were assiduous in expanding their opportunities to turn such systems to their own benefit. The Saint-Domingue refugees studied by Jansen deftly navigated discriminatory legal measures in Jamaica through their own bureaucratic efforts to fix a more favorable identity or subject position for themselves or their heirs. Refugees, though untrained, were shrewd in their vernacular use of the law to counter forces of state control through alien status. If paperwork trapped some, then it enabled others, as in Isabella’s chapter, which demonstrates how renegotiated “national” identities could mean taking advantage of documents and facilities to secure passage.

Tracking individual fates and state actions complicates any easy relationship between forced removal and legal regimes. Though few prisoners were directly sentenced to conscription, as De Vito, and Manera and Maxwell-Stewart point out, royal prerogatives and other judicial maneuvering and pretrial legal wrangling could be used to push men into the army. Inconsistent legal regimes were usually figured out in situ at the margins. Distinctions along the lines of race, gender, and social status, or between free and enslaved peoples, shaped these ad hoc legal frameworks according to the needs, prejudices, and fears of local officials. State authorities and individual actors also had to navigate plural legal systems and uncertain jurisdictions that grew out of the intersection between different European legal traditions, as in the Cape Colony; between Indigenous and European imperial law, as in the American borderlands; or between contradicting local colonial and overarching imperial law, as in British Jamaica (McKenzie; Riordan; Blumenthal; Jansen).Footnote ⁵² This had both advantages and disadvantages. For authorities in the Cape and Bengal (McKenzie), the peculiarities of peripheral legal regimes at first looked advantageous in removing troublesome subjects, but what seemed expeditious could easily backfire when subject to scrutiny from the metropole. Likewise, a particular set of alien legislation seemed to offer Jamaican authorities leeway to quell domestic unrest, until what had been practiced for several decades got caught up in fierce debates in the imperial center (Jansen). In an era in which all major European empires underwent profound constitutional transformations, individual cases of coerced migration could resonate with major debates. The actions and fates of particular historical actors became points where controversial topics, like the shifting terms of state belonging, the fundamental rights of political members (subjects/citizens), the rule of law, or freedom of the press, crystallized.

Individual fates in this conflagration of war and revolution were profoundly gendered. The timing of the pregnancy of Charlotte Lecesne, and the birthplace of her son Louis Celeste Lecesne, two of the exiles studied by Jansen, were details that figured importantly in ensuing debates about their status and subjecthood in early 1800s Jamaica. The legal status of mother and son differed, but in each case, their status was contentious and carefully fashioned in the face of a hostile bureaucratic regime.Footnote ⁵³ Family connection and community formation were part of the refugee movements (real and imagined) explored by Dessens, Riordan, and Pestel. The connection to family was even stronger for those who claimed royal status and saw themselves in relation to their dynasties. As Racine shows, plotting in London and Bath, Iturbide was concerned to ensure the proper education of his children as well as to regain his throne in Mexico. Meanwhile, as British Admiralty registers of prisoners of war demonstrate, even ostensibly male-dominated systems of forced mobility had to account for women, children, and noncombatants in their logistical organization and consider the fates of families (McKay). And, of course, the relocation of immense numbers of men was never a gender-neutral phenomenon. The consequences of an unbalanced sex ratio in new convict colonies on the Australian continent sparked persistent concerns about sex between men, or (as was the usual phrase) “unnatural crime.”

Where our authors focus on the opportunities of mobility in this volume, they emphasize that these were restricted not only to men but also to particular types of men. Race and class determined how individuals fared within systems of coercion, and whether a prisoner of war, for example, was enslaved or liberated. The fate of those men who either seized the opportunities of mobility or were forcibly removed were bound up in the identities they asserted, and in many instances these identities were carefully manipulated. The journalists at the heart of McKenzie’s account, for example, presented themselves within a particular model of reforming middle-class masculinity that gained traction in the early nineteenth century against the backdrop of aristocratic “Old Corruption.” They served as avatars of the independent European merchant class in colonial entrepôts, representing the politically and economically motivated critics of local administration. Those exiles put on trial in absentia in the wake of the Chacay Massacre (Blumenthal) were similarly adept at manipulating emerging networks of public opinion through publication. For Blumenthal and McKenzie, as well as for Jansen, media could be used across borders to launder the opinion of exiles in one space so as to facilitate their return to another.

Decades of global war not only changed militarized masculinity on an individual level but also undergirded the violence of forced mobility and imperial expansion. In the “legion of the damned” (Manera and Maxwell-Stewart), we meet Joseph Wall, whose background before enlistment included not only sexual assault but also the killing of a friend in a duel over a matter so trivial that Wall could not recall the cause.Footnote ⁵⁴ As lieutenant governor in Gorée, West Africa, Wall commanded a regiment made up of enslaved Africans, British convicts, and disgraced soldiers. During Wall’s command of the African Corps, he was accused of the arbitrary detention and suspension from command of his junior officers, the wanton imprisonment and brutal flagellation of his troops, the extortion of African leaders and traders, and the embezzlement of provisions and naval and military stores for his private enrichment. Facing an inquiry, he fled. After twenty years on the run, Wall was finally arrested and put on trial. Convicted of murder, he suffered the agonizing and prolonged death of a botched execution in 1802. Wall’s sadism was noted and condemned even by his contemporaries. But what of the more widespread impacts of trauma on large groups of men who served in “condemned battalions” made up of slaves, “deserters and culprits from the hulks”?Footnote ⁵⁵ Many went from disease-ravaged service in the West Indies to convict guard posts in Australia, where they were caught up in frontier conflict or made the journey (both physical and mental) in the other direction.

If these patterns underscore the way in which human mobility connects theaters of empire not normally studied together, what consequences did these connections have for individual action? In different ways, the chapters in this volume point to the intersection between the military, penal labor, and slavery that lay at the heart of “war capitalism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The voracious demand for troops, and the acceptance of disposable recruits, made for inherently brutalizing systems. These were not operated by disembodied forces, but by men who – whether attracted to violence or damaged by trauma – took one set of experiences with them to their next deployment. While historiography has paid increasing attention to “imperial careering,” there has been less emphasis on tracing these intersecting systems and their consequences both for individual behavior and for more widespread assumptions about militarized masculinity.Footnote ⁵⁷

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In pulling together new research from different historiographic strands, Mobility and Coercion does more than present a comparative panorama of discrete case studies and episodes. The individual chapters are informed and linked by an interest in the larger contexts, connections, interstices, and gray zones that emerge from different histories of coerced mobility. Together, they advance perspectives that go beyond the conceptual and historiographical specificities of their respective case studies. In so doing, they deliberately disrupt assumptions about the appropriate focal points of scholarly emphasis, and they caution against the divisions that have hitherto separated certain fields or approaches. As a result, the chapters might seek the political machinations of Latin American revolutions in the salons of Bath, England, or trace the impact of convict settlements in Australia on the imagination of French émigrés. None of the chapters focuses squarely on slavery and the slave trade, but the ubiquity and importance of the mobility of enslaved people is apparent in at least half of them. None offers a squarely military history, but the ubiquity of global war or the threat of war infuses all of them. Whether approached at the macro or the micro level, the subsequent chapters examine the intersection of mobile individuals and systems of mobility. In tracking individuals and groups who were caught up in moments of profound upheaval, we see that even under the most constrained conditions, individuals who moved under coercion aspired to agency and actively sought to shape their own fates in various ways – by slipping through categories, seeking out opportunities, manipulating legal regimes, and spreading the consequences of war and revolution around the globe.