Introduction

Abstract

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 MobilityThe 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 1