Chapter 2 sheds light on the liberals’ public and private work and discourse within the authoritarian and repressive sociopolitical context from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s. It particularly focuses on their “hidden” and not so hidden transcripts, in other words their work beyond their seeming silence and absence, to shed light on their ongoing active engagement despite the contextual conditions forcing them to largely go underground. It argues that while the liberal democrats were eclipsed by the region’s authoritarian regimes, by illiberal leftists, and conservatives such as the pan-Islamists, they nonetheless remained vital and continued to have a sociopolitical impact through other means than via direct political engagement and a focus on the institutions of the State.

This chapter explores how punitive mobility expanded the reach of convicts’ political beliefs, including the ideologies for which they had been punished. The first section of the chapter employs examples from the Dutch and English East India companies, and the Danish-Norwegian empire, from the seventeenth century onwards, the chapter traces the spread of resistance to imperial governance in the early-modern period by people subjected to punitive mobility, including through religious practice. The second section centres on the history of penal transportation and servitude in Ireland, revealing its global dimensions, and foregrounding its relationship to convict unrest in Britain’s hulks and penal colonies. Finally, the chapter suggests that there were important continuities between insurgency, politics, and religion in the Spanish Empire and its successor nation states, including in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. Overall, the chapter also reveals some of the ways in which penal colonies became sites of cosmopolitanism and cultural transformation. If convicts carried political ideologies to their punitive destinations, their mobility also facilitated cultural and religious dissemination, adaptation and transformation. Thus, punitive mobility was a vector for community formation, nationalism, and resistance to the changing geopolitical formations created by empires.

In this chapter, I argue that the formation of intellectual property was enabled by a cultural transformation, involving the embrace of natural legality, a transformation that parallels, in significant respects, the Christianization of imperial Rome. In this cultural transformation, traditions of Roman law were rediscovered as a naturalistic foundation for sociability and national economic life. The commodification of human creativity and inventive discovery, through intellectual property rights, made sense, within the culture of natural legality, as a justified response to natural, but extraordinary, powers of human creativity, and became part of a broader strategy for national empowerment. The combination of Roman law with interpretations of Christian obligation that emphasized natural sociability and legality gave new form to a natural rights tradition, one that providing legitimating foundations for the recognition of intellectual property under principles of English common law. The chapter concludes with a focus on the U.S. constitutional convention of 1787, and the embrace of intellectual property as part of the constitutional framework for a powerful, national state.

The chapter explores the collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the Contested Region. The overland Underground Railroad networks in the region were quickly being bypassed by the railroad transportation in the 1850s. Nevertheless, the high-profile fugitive rescues in the Free Soil Region convinced slave catchers that their efforts were better focused farther south, and as a result slave catching accelerated in the Contested Region in the middle and late 1850s. This led to a series of confrontations in which the behavior of the slave catchers and accompanying US Marshals was egregiously violent. Attempts by local and state authorities to bring the assailants to justice were frustrated by federal judges who fully sanctioned their recourse to the violence of mastery. These cases rendered the region’s conditional toleration of slave catching untenable. The result was a striking shift in the culture of violence as the region embraced the outright defiance that had long characterized Free Soil communities. As a consequence, in the late 1850s, the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act collapsed outside the narrow strip of territory that comprised the Borderland.