This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Alison Searle examines the formal procedures connected to compassion in James Shirley’s The Sisters (licensed 26 April 1642). She focuses on the problems posed by outsiders: the compassion of bandits dwelling as an anti-society in the woodlands, the recurring trope of the vagrant/beggar/gypsy/actor used to interrogate histrionic techniques deployed to evoke compassion and the complexities of policing the performance of compassion within the early modern Protestant state. Shirley’s play elucidates the ways in which compassion could create new, dangerous communities, as well as exposing the limits of existing groups. By postulating the ruler as a potential object of compassion, the play proleptically examines one of the most pressing political questions of the English Civil War: can the monarch be an object of compassion? The play’s invitation to feel pity for the plight of the king creates a political space for subversive action. If one can empathise with the king, is he a potential peer?

This chapter investigates the governance of a diverse city over time, with a special emphasis on those institutions which interfaced between the imperial representatives and the local elites. In the Ottoman reform period, these consisted primarily of an array of different consultative councils at various levels (municipal and provincial). Notably under Saudi rule, these were slowly integrated into the emerging new Kingdom, accompanied by a gradual change in the urban elites controlling the city. The chapter also investigates the implementation of law and order. Finally, it tackles attempts to regulate immigration from Ottoman times to the early Saudi nationality law, and the different rationales behind attempts to limit or rather circumscribe the presence of foreigners. Policies were driven, in Ottoman times, by fears of imperial intervention and attempts at poverty limitation, while, in the Saudi period, an initially liberal approach to nationality soon gave way to more exclusive considerations.

The government’s early use of discipline and forced labor to reform male work practices reveals the close link between physical labor and citizenship. In 1961, Law 993 eschewed due process and gave the Ministry of the Interior authority to evaluate and sentence chulos and other “states of dangerousness.” Increasingly, agricultural labor was used to compel chulos and other antisociales to overcome prerevolutionary handicaps and gain revolutionary citizenship through economic utility. But between 1962 and 1964, Fidel and Che resolutely denied the existence of the rumored Guanahacabibes work camp and asserted instead that the Uvero Quemado rehabilitation center was the only institution bearing the name “Guanahacabibes.” In their refutations, these leaders promoted an alternative version of truth to that advanced by ordinary Cubans, who challenged the state narrative by spreading rumors. Contemporaries also identified the Guanahacabibes work camp as a precursor to the infamous UMAP work camps. But for all the state’s efforts, early attempts at reforming chulos and vagos were largely ineffective. The 1971 Law Against Idleness, which focused with renewed interest on the country’s unconventionally employed, illustrates how legislative changes replaced extralegal raids and contributed to the ever-narrowing definition of appropriate and legal revolutionary labor.