This chapter establishes the reach of punitive relocation across a range of imperial contexts, from the late Middle Ages into the twentieth century. It employs a series of case studies from the European empires to stress its importance as a source of unfree labour and as a means of governing colonized populations. Sometimes, convicts and their descendants became settlers, and when they did not, they laid the ground for free migration or satisfied wider imperial ambitions by clearing land and building basic infrastructure. Sometimes, they were also able to work for their own profit. Of especial importance to the British Empire was the use of convicts to build naval infrastructure in the nineteenth-century stations of Bermuda and Gibraltar. All the convicts were men, and they were prohibited from settling, revealing the importance of a temporary, mobile labour force for bolstering naval power. This was quite different to practice in the Australian colonies. In all these penal sites, convicts resisted their fate in numerous ways. However, imperial administrations responded to it with brutal retribution and spectacular levels of violence, and this meant that though everyday forms of resistance impacted on working practices and productivity, rebellions, mutinies, and escapes usually failed.

As Company servants struggled to maintain their expansive presence on the West Coast of Sumatra, they gradually judged it more expedient to maintain or acquire the powers they sought by dominating the newly transitioning and emerging polities on the Coast. In the absence of wider imperial frameworks of power and legitimacy, Company servants assumed imperial authority for themselves, placing the Company at the summit of local hierarchies. Company servants sought to re-arrange the West Coast of Sumatra as their own imperial domain, controlling local pepper production, breaking with local political traditions, assuming sovereign authority over fortified settlements and directly exercising suzerain rights over Malay subordinates. And while the polities of the West Coast found themselves increasingly shaped by the ambition of individual Company servants, they proved more than successful in resisting their subjugation, heavily circumscribed as Company servants were by East India House’s demand for fiscal and military retrenchment and the need to ensure the profitability of their pepper settlements. With little human or material resources to support their imperialism, Company servants found themselves locked in a cycle of incessant conflict and violence with the surrounding Malay communities, demanding obedience but unable to enforce this for any prolonged period through armed force. Ultimately, empire on the West Coast of Sumatra in the short-term proved unprofitable and unsustainable, and in the long-term ultimately impossible.

In this last chapter, I focus exclusively on the monumental work of history the Shiji, by Sima Qian, the Grand Archivist at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han empire. Out of the 130 chapters of the Shiji, I focus on the two, namely the “Huozhi Liezhuan” and the “Pingzhun shu,” that primarily deal with the economic history of the entire civilized world, up to the time of the Han empire. I argue that Sima Qian mobilized historical narratives to offer a sharp critique of what he perceived to be the problems with Han imperialism as it developed under Emperor Wu. The Shiji, in this sense, was a critical deployment of the field of the past; Sima Qian engaged with the past less to advance a new political order than to deconstruct an existing one. The Shiji was a critique all the way down.