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.

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.

In this way, the fourth-century philosopher Bishop Synesius of Cyrene argued that every Roman household, even the most modest, had Gothic slaves. In this chapter, I examine how late antique writers, Synesius among them, dealt with the enslavement of foreigners. Foreigners here refer to non-Roman and non-Greek people outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire, conventionally called ‘barbarians’. War on the frontiers stimulated commerce in humans – namely, slave trade – and vice versa: the activities of slave merchants at least partly motivated warfare in the frontier regions. Non-Roman groups took captives, Romans among them, and made a profit selling them as slaves or returning them for ransom. For their part, Romans took captives and sold them into slavery. We also have several attestations of kidnappers who abducted people during peacetime and even within the Roman Empire. Late antique bishops complained about the slave trade of Roman citizens. Augustine, for example, condemned the business of so-called ‘Galatian’ slave traders.