Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

This chapter introduces the essay collection Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750 – 1830. It argues that the history of exclusion and forced removal must be put center stage in order to understand the era often described as the cradle of political modernity. The collection argues against a dichotomy between free and unfree mobility, rather regarding them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. It emphasizes both the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the counterforces that kept people in place. It draws together hitherto separated scholarship on the mobilities of enslaved individuals, convicts, soldiers and war prisoners, refugees, and displaced Indigenous communities. The result is a set of entangled histories that together break down assumptions about geographies and chronologies, and interrogate the dynamic interplay between systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.