Banishing troublesome and deviant people from society was common in the early modern period. Many European countries removed their paupers, convicted criminals, rebels and religious dissidents to remote communities or to their colonies where they could be simultaneously punished and, perhaps, contained and reformed. Under British rule, poor Irish, Scottish Jacobites, English criminals, Quakers, gypsies, Native Americans, the Acadian French in Canada, rebellious African slaves, or vulnerable minorities like the Jews of St. Eustatius, were among those expelled and banished to another place. This book explores the legal and political development of this forced migration, focusing on the British Atlantic world between 1600 and 1800. The territories under British rule were not uniform in their policies, and not all practices were driven by instructions from London, or based on a clear legal framework. Using case studies of legal and political strategies from the Atlantic world, and drawing on accounts of collective experiences and individual narratives, the authors explore why victims were chosen for banishment, how they were transported and the impact on their lives. The different contexts of such banishment – internal colonialism ethnic and religious prejudice, suppression of religious or political dissent, or the savageries of war in Europe or the colonies – are examined to establish to what extent displacement, exile and removal were fundamental to the early British Empire.

This book places banishment in the early Atlantic world in its legal, political and social context.

*** Danish Historical Society Award Winner (2018) “Historical research result of the year” *** Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World discusses how the storytelling of the lower classes shaped antagonisms and struggles for agency in the early modern Atlantic. It takes a mutiny carried out by a group of convicts and sailors on board a Danish ship, the Merman, in 1683 as its central case study. En route to Denmark's Caribbean colony of St. Thomas, the mutineers seized the ship, murdered the captain and six others and elected a former convict as their new leader. This event brought the West India Company to the brink of destruction and changed the course of the fledgling Danish maritime empire forever. Arguing that the mutiny on the Merman was informed by stories and rumour that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic and echoed on the lower deck of the ship itself, Johan Heinsen explores the role of such stories in the social worlds of early modern colonialism. He argues that sites such as ships, colonies and even prisons resonated with words, paying particular attention to how such storytelling created bonds and enabled action. In making the point that historians should pay careful attention to the power of the words of colonial and maritime lower class subjects, Heinsen draws on comparable cases across the early modern seas. Heinsen's study brings the Danish Empire to a new Anglophone audience, expanding our knowledge of the Atlantic world. It brings a fascinating new perspective to topics such as the history of penal transportation, coerced labour and historiographies of storytelling and rumour, making it an important book for students and scholars of Atlantic, maritime, imperial and global labour history.

While the number of federally recognized Native nations in the United States are increasing, the population figures for existing tribal nations are declining. This depopulation is not being perpetrated by the federal government, but by Native governments that are banishing, denying, or disenrolling Native citizens at an unprecedented rate. Since the 1990s, tribal belonging has become more of a privilege than a sacred right. Political and legal dismemberment has become a national phenomenon with nearly eighty Native nations, in at least twenty states, terminating the rights of indigenous citizens. The first comprehensive examination of the origins and significance of tribal disenrollment, Dismembered examines this disturbing trend, which often leaves the disenrolled tribal members with no recourse or appeal. At the center of the issue is how Native nations are defined today and who has the fundamental rights to belong. By looking at hundreds of tribal constitutions and talking with both disenrolled members and tribal officials, the authors demonstrate the damage this practice is having across Indian Country and ways to address the problem.

Edward Rugemer’s comparative history, spanning 200 years, reveals the political dynamic between slaves’ resistance and slaveholders’ power in two prosperous slave economies: Jamaica and South Carolina. This struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other.

This second volume of the Yearbook of Transnational History offers readers new perspectives on historical research. This Yearbook is the only periodical worldwide dedicated to the publication of research in the field of transnational history.

A ground-breaking exploration of exile and diaspora as they relate to place, language, religious tradition, literature and the imagination.