My dissertation provides a social, cultural, and intellectual history of incarceration and its afterlives in Europe and the colonies between 1790 and 1900. In recovering the trajectories of previously imprisoned adolescents, I argue that how these individuals reintegrated into society formed an international quandary whose ramifications extend into the present. The project sheds light on key elements of European modernity, including citizenship, the right of residence, labor as a coercive practice, and social mobility. I show that such modern formations materialized across local, national, and international scales rather than being exclusively state-driven processes. My research resists top-down, institutional perspectives that replicate nineteenth-century dynamics of spatialized confinement. Instead, I analyze life histories drawing on my research in twenty-five archives across Europe and the Americas. As it foregrounds individuals’ agency in navigating forced reintegration measures, my approach queries the establishment of the very regimes of governmentality and frontier-making that imposed such measures. Expanding on the multi-faceted nature of borders and architectures of confinement, I challenge reductive historiographical frames that remain confined to the walls of “The Prison.” 

Thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during the first half of the nineteenth century. Among them were individuals marked by incarceration: men, women, and adolescents transported from prisons in Europe to faraway destinations. From the ports of Hamburg, London, and Liverpool, vessels carried them to new, unfamiliar homes. In the early 1820s, formerly incarcerated men and women from the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin arrived on Brazil’s southern frontier, and in the late 1840s, adolescent boys left the correctional facility of Red Hill in England for the British Colony of Natal. Our project explores how the histories of these individuals are related. These state-sponsored transportations were integral to an expansive imperial geography of carcerality. A network of interconnected ideas about the exercise of control through family settlements framed the Atlantic as both a physical and conceptual space. Individuals were not simply sent away; they were defined by their confinement, their perceived inability to integrate, and the hope that distance might achieve what incarceration alone could not. 

Developed with Miqueias Mügge (Princeton University).