This chapter explores how punitive mobility expanded the reach of convicts’ political beliefs, including the ideologies for which they had been punished. The first section of the chapter employs examples from the Dutch and English East India companies, and the Danish-Norwegian empire, from the seventeenth century onwards, the chapter traces the spread of resistance to imperial governance in the early-modern period by people subjected to punitive mobility, including through religious practice. The second section centres on the history of penal transportation and servitude in Ireland, revealing its global dimensions, and foregrounding its relationship to convict unrest in Britain’s hulks and penal colonies. Finally, the chapter suggests that there were important continuities between insurgency, politics, and religion in the Spanish Empire and its successor nation states, including in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. Overall, the chapter also reveals some of the ways in which penal colonies became sites of cosmopolitanism and cultural transformation. If convicts carried political ideologies to their punitive destinations, their mobility also facilitated cultural and religious dissemination, adaptation and transformation. Thus, punitive mobility was a vector for community formation, nationalism, and resistance to the changing geopolitical formations created by empires.

Focused on a discussion of escape within and across national and imperial borders, the first part of this chapter analyses events following convict escape to other jurisdictions. It covers absconding to and from British, Spanish, French, and Danish islands in the Caribbean, and from British Gibraltar to the Spanish peninsular. The second part focuses on French Guiana, because the scale of transportation to the colony from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, coupled with a highly organized traffic of convicts over river and sea borders, enabled and facilitated large numbers of escapes. It especially focuses on a group of 1848 convicts who fled to the USA and became involved in anti-slavery movement. Overall, the chapter stresses that convict absconding not only offers insights into convict agency and experience, but had profound and enduring legal consequences, notably a series of international agreements and ultimately laws on extradition and deportation. The experiences of these runaways varied widely, and whilst they sometimes demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of legal process, and ingenuity and ambition in determining their fate, the difficulties of remaining at large often confounded their desire for freedom. At the same time, their testimony on appalling conditions contributed to growing global anti-transportation.