Abstract
In 1806, two Frenchmen met in Palestine. A Capuchin friar known as Brother Clément recounted to Chateaubriand how the French Revolution had driven him to seek refuge there. The same upheaval had likewise compelled his companion, a man of noble birth, to flee to the United States in 1791. From the New World to the Holy Land, the trajectories of these two men reveal the vast geographical dispersion of those displaced by the French Revolution. Such chance encounters – shaped by wandering, successive safe havens, and sudden reversals of fortune – abound in the volume edited by Jan C. Jansen and Kristen McKenzie. Reading it, the familiar image of the world between the 1750s and the 1830s as a dense, organised, and interconnected web gives way to that of a restless and overcrowded anthill thrown into disarray by repeated shocks.
This perspective profoundly reshapes our understanding of the period as the cradle of Western modernity. Alongside the familiar triad of liberty, citizenship, and independence, the volume foregrounds the displaced populations produced by emerging nation-states: those whose lack of freedom rendered them movable at will; those unable to secure a place as citizens within new political formations; and those whom states dispatched across the globe, often in military formations, to secure imperial or national ambitions. The eleven chapters collected in this volume focus on individuals uprooted by war and revolution, a phenomenon encapsulated by the title's notion of “forced mobility”. Drawing on a concept shaped by the spatial turn in the social sciences, the contributors emphasise the geographical dimension of these experiences while significantly refining conventional approaches to migration history. Migration no longer appears as a linear, permanent, or easily classifiable movement – whether voluntary or coerced – but rather as circular, provisional, multidirectional, and situated along a continuum between freedom and constraint. Such an approach opens new analytical space for examining forms of adaptation, resistance, and circumvention.
The contributors identify five main categories that, between the 1750s and the 1830s, came to fall under the broader framework of forced mobility. None of these categories was entirely new; what changed was the unprecedented scale on which such movements occurred. Slaves, transported convicts, prisoners of war, outlaws and displaced persons, as well as political exiles: all were deeply connected to the socio-political and military transformations of the period 1750–1830, marked by near-continuous interstate and revolutionary warfare that increasingly assumed ideological dimensions and drew civilian populations into the conflict. The chapters range geographically across much of the world affected by these upheavals, from the Mediterranean to Australia. The significance of the volume is further highlighted in the conference scheduled for June 2026 at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne by the Research Group on Colonial Orders (Groupe de recherche sur les orders coloniaux, GROC), which extends the chronological scope of inquiry from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.
The book's major contribution lies less in uncovering previously unknown forms of constrained mobility – many of which have already received scholarly attention – than in its sustained effort to dismantle historiographical compartmentalisation. Bringing together twelve specialists working on different forms of coerced mobility and diverse geographical contexts during a series of conferences held between 2018 and 2021, the editors and contributors demonstrate that the apparent exceptionalism of these mobilities stemmed largely from the fragmentation of existing historiographies. Once examined relationally, these movements appear not only widespread but also deeply interconnected and, at times, overlapping. Those subjected to forced mobility should therefore not be understood merely as the obverse of the supposedly free travellers of the modern world – tourists, merchants, settlers, or explorers. Some trajectories in fact straddled several categories simultaneously. The colonists of Saint-Domingue dispersed throughout the Atlantic world, for instance, were refugees both from the Haitian Revolution and from the French Revolution, while simultaneously envisioning themselves as future colonists in Russia, the United States, or Australia.
By combining micro-historical perspectives with global history, these eleven chapters ultimately call conventional categories into question so fundamentally that the distinction between migrant and refugee appears more than ever as a legal fiction. These labels emerge primarily as instruments through which states attempt to classify and regulate mobile populations. Yet, the legal practices and statuses thereby produced were themselves constantly negotiated, appropriated, or resisted, while centres of political decision-making struggled to establish norms capable of accounting for the endless variety of individual trajectories circulating across imperial spaces. In bringing the massive phenomenon of forced mobility between 1750 and 1830 into sharp analytical focus, this volume establishes disorder, violence, and contingency as central dimensions of modernity within a world shaped as much by interconnection and porous borders as by nation-states asserting secure and coherent identities.
