This article focuses on penal transportation to Hokkaido and considers the role of convict transportation in nation-state building and empire building in Japan. In the course of its discussion, the fluidity of the status of the new Japanese territory of Hokkaido will be examined along with continuities of transportation and incarceration. Although Hokkaido was officially incorporated into Japan only in 1869, many Japanese politicians and intellectuals had believed ideologically that it had been a Japanese territory since the early modern period. Depending on the domestic and diplomatic matters confronting them, the Japanese modified the status of Hokkaido and their policy towards it. For example, to secure their borders with Russia, the Japanese introduced penal transportation on the French model in 1881, but the Japanese Ministry of Justice later shifted their legal system to the German model and articles concerning transportation were deleted from the penal code. Nonetheless, the Japanese government continued to send long-term prisoners to Hokkaido, which was reframed as incarceration in a mainland prison.

More than 800,000 people were exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century. Exile was a complex administrative arrangement that involved differentiated flows of exiles and, in the view of the central authorities, contributed to the colonization of Siberia. This article adopts the “perspective from the colonies” and analyses the local dimension of exile to Siberia. First, it underscores the conflicted nature of the practice by highlighting the agency of the local administrators and the multitude of tensions and negotiations that the maintenance of exile involved. Secondly, by focusing on the example of the penal site of Tobolsk, where exile and imprisonment overlapped, I will elucidate the uneasy relationship between those two penal practices during Russian prison reform. In doing so, I will re-evaluate the position of exile in relation to both penal and governance practice in Imperial Russia.

After ignoring its holdings in Africa for the first half of the nineteenth century, the European scramble for colonies in the 1880s forced the Portuguese state to adopt a new policy to cement its tenuous hold on its two largest African colonies: Angola and Mozambique. This challenge occurred just as the penal reform movement of the nineteenth century was arriving in Portugal, with a new penitentiary in Lisbon and new legal codes aimed at reforming convicts through their labour. This article examines the rationale and impact of the Depósito de Degredados (Depot for Transported Convicts) in Luanda, Angola, the larger of the two prisons established to supervise the work of convicts sent from Portugal and Portugal’s Atlantic colonies of Cape Verde, Portuguese Guinea, and São Tomé.

This article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the “loss” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, foregrounding “perspectives from the colonies”, I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

Examining intra-colonial punitive relocations during the first decade of US occupation in the Philippines, this article shows how colonial police and prison officials used incarceration and transportation in tandem to suppress incipient populist revolutionary movements. They exploited historic regional and religious tensions in their effort to produce new modes of racialized and gendered prison and labor management. Finally, while colonial officials sought to brand certain imprisoned subjects as criminal outlaws, rather than political prisoners, many of these anticolonial fighters actually sharpened their ideas about freedom through their experience of being criminalized, incarcerated, and forcibly relocated.