This special issue aims to present empirically grounded reflections on concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee during the long Age of Revolutions, before the emergence of the modern international refugee regime. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homelands, prompting authorities and exiles themselves to reflect on and negotiate the status of newcomers and their rights and obligations. What it meant to be a refugee mattered, especially at a moment of imperial crisis and reconfiguration. Thus, building on the emerging field of refugee history, we ask: Who was a refugee, for what reasons, and with what concrete implications? How did one claim refugee status? Who was denied refugee status? How translatable were the concepts of refugee, exile, and asylum across societies? And what other terms might overlap with or replace the concept of refugee? To what extent did these concepts create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, between desirable and undesirable newcomers to host societies? The contributors to this special issue explore these questions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

Refugee and forced migration studies scholars largely ignore the early modern period when they discuss modern refugee crises, thus overlooking the transhistorical, cultural origins of refugee identity formation. Following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, around 200,000 Huguenots fled France for the wider diaspora. Often depicted as republicans, if not anarchists, bent on the destruction of Christianity and the French sacral monarchy, Huguenots sought refuge for their own safety and in the process reimagined themselves first as religious refugees and then as political ones. As religious refugees, Huguenots like the theologian Pierre Jurieu donned the mantle of the Ancient Israelites, as a means to maintain their community against French purgation of the Calvinist sect. As political refugees, Huguenots like Rabaut Saint-Étienne developed several strategies at courting the favor of the Bourbon monarchy, many of which challenged the French sacral state to imagine itself in secular terms. In developing a political refugee identity, these Huguenots created the empathetic, cultural refugee, which could transcend religious affiliation in favor of promoting a national identity.

In 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, the burning of Cap-Français led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic World, many of whom ended up in French port cities. The French government decided to grant them financial relief, in the form of monthly amounts of money. However, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France,” depending on the period considered, did not encompass the same populations. This contribution examines how the requirements for relief evolved between 1793 and 1802, when Napoleon sent the Leclerc expedition to reassert his domination over Saint-Domingue. It shows the passage from legislation that granted relief to all the displaced imperial populations, including former slaves, to a more restrictive law focusing on property owners only during the Directory (1795–1799), and then to a racialised relief prioritising white owners at the end of the Consulate (1802). These restrictions were linked to the sacralisation of private property during the French Revolution, but were also symptomatic of the permanence of a colonial relation between Saint-Domingue and its metropole, leading to the creation of an “imperial nation” in which white owners were considered full citizens, whereas people of colour were relegated to the margins of the empire.

With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, thousands of people sought refuge in neighbouring British Jamaica, or ended up there as prisoners of war. This contribution examines how colonial authorities responded to a mass influx of people in a time characterised by political uncertainty. It sheds light on a system of registration employed in 1790s Jamaica to manage refugees and to gauge who would be entitled to assistance. This system was built on surveillance, categorisations of people, and a language of deservingness, made use of both by colonial administrators, on whose deliberations access to support effectively depended, and refugees in their own narratives. The article shows how refugee registration was not a top-down process but rather one that was actively influenced from below, as refugees themselves made use of the unclearness of categorisations and hijacked the system in order to gain access to specific sets of relief funds.

This article delves into the emergence of Havana as site of refuge for exiles from the Greater Caribbean between approximately 1790 and 1810. It examines the institutional and political governance of relief to Spanish and foreign exiles in Havana, looking at the intricate intersection between notions of imperial relief, loyalty, and subjecthood. It scrutinises the confluence of two waves of exile migration to Havana from the island of Hispaniola, underscoring how both migratory flows were intricately linked and influenced one another. One involved the exile of French settlers from Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), while the other entailed the relocation of Spanish-speaking settlers from Santo Domingo following the Treaty of Basel (1795), which officially ceded the Spanish colony to the French Republic. Through the lens of relief policies, this article shows how colonial officials in Cuba aimed to present an imperial self-image of benevolence towards Spanish subjects and foreigners in exile who were perceived as loyal to the Spanish crown. Focusing on the category of emigrados, this article correspondingly highlights the instrumental use by these exiles of concepts of imperial loyalty and subjecthood, and their role in claiming special entitlements to material and financial assistance from Spanish colonial authorities.

In the 1790s, hundreds of refugees arrived in Philadelphia from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Though it is well known that the Alien Acts were promulgated at least in part in reaction to the large French presence on US soil and the threat of war with France, other barriers to entry and to remain on US soil are not often connected to the arrival and presence of French refugees. Using records of the Philadelphia courts, prison, and almshouse, this article situates the French refugee experience within the early United States’ broader kaleidoscope of restrictions on mobility, assistance, and rights to remain. For the French Black population, their race and class rendered them especially vulnerable to forms of mobility control focused on criminals and the mobile poor. Though the French were not ultimately deported for their political activities, a small number of French Black refugees convicted of theft were set on the move once again.

This paper traces enslaved people’s attempts at staking out liberty in Hamburg and attendant reactions by Hamburg inhabitants and authorities. It argues that in the decades before Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws were passed in 1837, treatment of people of African and Asian descent intersected strongly with ever-stricter alien laws. Based on extensive research in archival sources as well as newspapers and other printed material, the article contains two parts: First, it examines Hamburg’s few existent traces of attempted flights from slavery, pointing to conditions of escape and recapture. Second, the paper links these findings to Hamburg’s legal history leading up to its 1837 anti-slave-trade law, examining alien legislation, poor relief regulations, and domestic workers’ legislation. It also highlights how these policies affected individual lives. In combining legal historical and micro-historical/prosopographical approaches, the paper contributes to studies of Black German history, free soil policies, and questions around the policing of aliens.

This article examines the resettlement of Algerians fleeing French colonial rule after 1830 in the Ottoman Empire (Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia) to analyse the formation of the legal and administrative category of muhacir. It argues that the Algerian case offers a privileged vantage point for understanding how this status emerged and was gradually consolidated over the nineteenth century. Because Algerians migrated over a long time span and were not the initial targets of Ottoman resettlement policies - initially designed for migrants from Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans - their progressive inclusion into muhacir entitlements makes it possible to trace how this category expanded beyond its original contexts and became a standardized instrument of migration governance. The article shows that Algerians first received assistance through discretionary measures, before being progressively incorporated into a regime of standardized rights after the Crimean War (1853-6). Under Abdülhamid II, access to these rights increasingly became conditional upon Ottoman naturalisation and the renunciation of French colonial subjecthood, revealing how migration policy, legal status, and imperial sovereignty became tightly intertwined. By following Algerian migrants across the French and Ottoman imperial spaces, this paper highlights how late Ottoman migration policy functioned not only as a tool of population management, but also as a key site for the juridical redefinition of imperial belonging in an age of colonial expansion.

This article delves into the Republic of Colombia’s emigration policies and émigrés’ petitions to return to the new republican regime in the early 1820s. During the Spanish American Revolutions, thousands abandoned their homelands with the hope of eventually coming back. However, returning was not an easy endeavour. The influx of returnees sparked many questions for the nascent government. Consequently, émigrés and their relatives employed various strategies to facilitate the return of the former to Colombia. This article argues that the constant back-and-forth movements experienced by émigrés during the war allowed them to highlight the temporary condition of emigration and, therefore, to embrace or reject the status of émigrés strategically. Concerned by the doubts about their return, expatriates, many times, rejected the epithet of “émigré.” Aware of the politicization of the term, they emphasised that they did not abandon the country out of political loyalty but out of fear. Furthermore, they appealed to ideas of belonging to the republic, family reunification, and national reconciliation to advocate for their return and formal recognition as Colombian citizens. In doing so, expatriates left the label of “émigré” behind, challenging the Colombian government’s prior perception of emigration and promoting wider conceptions of republican citizenship.

This article discusses key tenets from the conceptual history of exile and asylum during the half-century around 1800. During this transformative period, political refugees took shape as a recognizable mass phenomenon, although they remained closely intertwined with other forms of migration and mobility, both free and unfree. Their often-tortuous itineraries occasioned manifold interactions with societies and states of origin, transit, and destination, remodeling preexisting concepts of exile, or generating new ones. As state bureaucracies, host societies, and mobile actors used these categories to negotiate status, access to protection, relief, compensation, and various layers of belonging, the contours of a transformative period in the conceptual history of refuge become apparent. This period was marked by a hybrid vocabulary, informed by both historical notions of (religious) asylum and by emerging concepts of politicized mobility and state membership; it was the period in which ancien régime ideas of deservingness were refracted by the prism of political loyalty, and in which relief practices could give way to large-scale reparation schemes; and a period in which a fuzzy vocabulary of asylum and alienness sustained, and complicated, the lines between insiders and outsiders in a world marked by an uneasy coexistence of empires and nation-states.

This special issue brings together contributions from scholars covering different imperial formations in Africa to discuss the changing aspects of European identities and the complexities surrounding the concept of being ‘European’ in colonial settings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The articles examine different strategies and mechanisms employed by historical actors and their continual adaptation of their identities to the local and global transformations surrounding them. This introductory text offers a reflection on why identity remains a useful lens through which to examine colonial frameworks and dynamics of power and expand our knowledge of the role of evolving local societies in shaping modern imperialism.

This article illuminates the variety and diversity of mechanisms and strategies of (European) identification that were used by Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya. The Indo-German was born into a German Indian (Brahmin) family in service of the Protestant Basel Mission from Switzerland. Having spent his youth in India, Germany, and Switzerland, he later became a planter in India before managing a cotton plantation in German East Africa (GEA). Producing his identity in a visual source and two German publications released during WWI, the examination of Kaundinya’s sources offers a perspective on how an individual developed an (European) identity in colonial frameworks and dynamics of power across three continents and two empires. In the field of tension between race, class, gender, and religion, he drew on the image of a virile, white colonial hunter and on the self-image of an experienced colonial planter. He further attempted to distance himself from his Brahmin descent and to exploit the Christian part of his family history instead. Moreover, he criticized British colonial rule of India. He even envisioned his own European identity and a vague Indo-German alliance. Amalgamating major ideas of Orientalism, racist thought, and geopolitical theories prominent at the fin du siècle, he called this alliance ‘Indo-Germania.’

During the colonial period, Lebanese migrants in Dakar played a significant role in the local economy, benefiting from a historical and evolving French imperial framework in the Levant. From the 1930s onwards, their presence was increasingly perceived as a threat by white settlers, culminating in the post-1945 period when Maurice Voisin articulated a rhetoric of “Frenchness” to exclude them from Senegalese colonial society. This rhetoric, invoking economic, cultural, and political arguments, sought to defend a supposed imperial community uniting French settlers and African subjects. Yet archival evidence reveals that Voisin’s vision was increasingly disconnected from French imperial strategic interests, which recognized the Lebanese as clients and valuable intermediaries. Drawing on colonial administrative archives and press sources, this article examines how Lebanese migrants navigated these challenges, asserting their agency and negotiating their position both within Dakar’s society and the broader imperial order. By highlighting the clash between settler rhetoric, imperial policy, and migrant strategies, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of Lebanese identification in French West Africa and the complex dynamics of colonial power, belonging, and transnational ties in the aftermath of the Second World War.

This article contributes to the history of the British cultural project in the late empire by examining the role of the “British way of life” (BWL) in the rhetoric of late colonialism. In the decade between the end of the Second World War and the first African independence, British colonial policy balanced two objectives: redefining the legitimacy of empire while preparing the transition to independence through a shift from direct control to sustained influence in postcolonial states. The promotion of the BWL formed a key component of this strategy. Conceived by the Colonial Office as a set of values, social norms, and political ideals associated with modernity, it aimed to strengthen ties between Britain and colonial populations and to encourage continued affiliation with the Commonwealth after independence. This article defines the concept of the BWL and analyses two principal instruments of its dissemination: Colonial Office publications and the activities of the British Council in East Africa, especially Kenya. It argues that cultural policy was central to Britain’s attempt to transform imperial authority into post-imperial influence.