This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

This chapter explores a global panorama of settlement projects by French émigrés in the 1790s. These projects – partly realized, planned, or imagined – aimed at transforming the émigré diaspora into defined territories. Situated between the Americas, the Caribbean, North Africa, the Russian Empire, and Australia, these projects allow, on the one hand, for analysis of the émigrés’ political options and spatial imaginaries of exile in relation to political loyalty and the possibility of a return to France. On the other hand, they highlight the émigrés’ strategic and situational relationship toward French, British, and Spanish imperialism and colonial slavery. Such a spatialized perspective on political migration helps in reconsidering the agency of French émigrés. No longer appearing as “absentees” from the revolution, their mobility and awareness about the global impact of the “age of emigrations” provided them with alternative options to the radicalizing revolution in France that also impacted the post-revolutionary order.

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.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

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

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.

This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

INTRODUCTION

American belligerency coincided with the deepest maritime crisis of World War I, when the U-boats were sinking one in every four ocean-going vessels clearing British ports. Only some 10 per cent of the lost tonnage was being replaced; moreover, damaged ships were generally out of service for several months and some for the duration of the war. In the month of America’s intervention, almost 900000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping was lost by enemy action, the vast bulk of it to the submarines. The British were reduced to a few weeks’ supply of grain and only ten days’ stock of sugar but the most serious shortage was that of oil, vital to all arms. Successful interdiction of the supply reduced the Grand Fleet to half speed and any further constriction would cripple the anti-submarine effort. The British public was kept in the dark about this dire situation but ministers and shipping officials were becoming restless at the Admiralty’s self-confessed incapacity to discover a solution. It was in these doom-laden circumstances that a new member of the coalition, distant from it in more than one sense, had to be integrated into the Allied war effort. The disturbing fact that the United States was so woefully unprepared for war rendered her absorption into the coalition all the more difficult. For a time the Americans were likely to prove a military liability and a drain on resources until their own war effort had taken off. Moreover, the Americans, half afraid that they might soon find themselves alone against the power of Germany and her allies, remained wary of committing themselves too deeply to their new associates. They clung to as high a degree of independence as seemed consistent with ensuring the Allies’ survival and an ultimate victory. As Benson’s biographers explain:

INTRODUCTION

American entry into the war coincided with the worst period of the submarine campaign. In April 1917, sinkings of Allied and neutral merchantmen approached 250000 tons per week, well above the German target. Moreover, the onset of longer daylight raised the prospect of yet higher losses. Most sinkings took place in the Western Approaches but there were substantial losses, too, in the Mediterranean, the English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea. British food stocks were estimated at between three and ten weeks’ consumption, while fuel oil was reduced to six weeks’ supply. The critical level of supplies necessary to maintain the Allied armies and civilian populations was 32 million tons per annum and this mark was being approached rapidly by the end of June. The U-boats were sinking shipping far faster than it could be replaced – Allied building capacity was only 130000 tons per month. The destruction of U-boats was not increasing. Between 54 and 58 had been sunk since the war began and the current rate was about three a month – at a time when the Germans were turning out three per week. The morale of the crews was high and the new boats incorporated many improvements [127, 164].

In view of this dire situation, it is not surprising that Sims’s first report to Washington declared that ‘Control of the sea is actually imperilled’ and that Page should call it ‘the sharpest crisis of the war’. Sims observed that the Royal Navy was ‘dangerously strained’ and Page referred to ‘a great depression in naval circles’ [127, 129, 151, 152, 182]. Jellicoe told Carson ‘we shall be very hard put to it unless the United States help us to the utmost of their ability’ and urged De Chair to ‘keep constantly before the US Authorities the great gravity of the situation’ [130]. A British correspondent of House called it ‘a race against time’ and British leaders from Lloyd George downwards, supported by Page and Sims, urged both the despatch of every available anti-submarine vessel and, more importantly, a huge emergency programme of mercantile construction, estimated at six million tons per annum by Lloyd George. A decrease in sinkings would not enable the target to be reduced as even more shipping would be needed to transport and supply the AEF.

At this point Reynard spotted the farmer, and this prom-ised to be a cause for rejoicing because he was carrying a large ham. Reynard laughed and said, “Listen to this, my Lord Isengrim!” “What's that, kinsman?” “Would you like to try some of that meat?” Isengrim and the family all declared that they would indeed.

Reynard got up and went over to a spot where he knew the farmer would have to pass, lifted up one foot, and began to limp heavily, and at the same time he bowed his back as if he had been beaten. The farmer yelled at him and dropped the ham onto the grass, because he was still after the white fur around Reynard's throat. He was carrying a fearsome-looking club. Reynard looked around, then lured him toward the forest. Isengrim jumped up, and before the farmer could do anything, he grabbed the ham and just as quickly started to gobble it up, forgetting entirely about Reynard. The farmer gave up the chase and wanted to retrieve his ham, but then he saw Isengrim, his nemesis, in the distance. He complained loud and long, but there was no sign of meat or bones, so he fell down on the grass and bewailed the loss of his ham.

Isengrim started to laugh. “Reynard's a good companion for me,” he said. “We couldn't have gotten a better dinner, and it's all thanks to him.” He had no idea, however, of where this would all lead in the end. Reynard came back with a smug look on his face and said, “Now where's my share?” Isengrim replied, “You’d better ask your kinswoman if she has saved any of hers.”

“Sorry, Reynard,” said the she-wolf, “I found it all far too tasty, but your reward will be in heaven! Don't be cross! It won't happen again.” [449–498]