This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

This book focuses on the way in which ideas and discourses of security have shaped the conduct of international relations in the past. Its main concerns include how historical actors conceived of security as an idea, used it in their writings and discussions, pondered its implementation and turned conceptions into practice. Security efforts shaped international relations at a crucial moment in history, during the first half of the nineteenth century, when international systems and global divisions of power dramatically changed. International involvement with Mediterranean piracy reflected all of these changes. Yet, in order to better grasp the impact of security considerations, one must look at the means by which contemporaries made sense of, were swayed by and, also, turned against the concept. Security must be historicised.

The introduction lays out the book’s main arguments and themes, and compares the Royal Navy to the two different contexts which it straddled: the maritime world, and the armed forces. Naval service was more strictly regulated and anchored in the structures of the state than work in the merchant marine, and it was invested with explicit national and patriotic meaning. However, it also differed from service in the Army, as it required a good proportion of recruits to have specialised skills, and usually integrated them all into mixed crews, rather than establishing separate ‘foreign’ units. The Navy’s peculiar status, suspended between the military and national on the one hand, and the maritime and transnational on the other, is what makes it an important case study. If ‘foreign Jack Tars’ were in some senses mercenary fighters, they were also primarily – like ‘British’ Jack Tars themselves – a transnational, mobile, and often highly professionalised seafaring workforce. Studying them in the crucial historical juncture of the French Wars allows us to present a transnational history of a national institution, expose the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states, and probe and deconstruct the very meaning of the term ‘foreigner’.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.