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.

In the last half of the eighteenth century, the East India Company’s formal armies expanded from a few undermanned garrisons to a sprawling field force of more than one hundred thousand sepoys. How was the Company able to build such a force so quickly, and what drew recruits to the service? This chapter places the Company’s sepoy armies within the wider military landscape of India, focusing on the south where the Company’s earliest military expansion took place. Some of the Company’s first Indian officers, including Muhammad Yusuf Khan, saw its armies as unique professional opportunities through which to circumvent established political and social hierarchies in India. Company officials, though, were uncomfortable with such ambitions and quickly took steps to stymie them. As opportunities for advancement within the Company shrank, though, sepoys looked for more creative ways to realize their aspirations, including deserting the Company to seek further promotions in another army. The interplay between the Company’s ever-growing need for military labor and sepoys’ own desires to capitalize on their value as soldiers radically reshaped the military economy in South India and beyond.