Mobility, as Tim Cresswell has famously argued, is not simply movement. It is movement imbued with meaning, shaped by power, lived through experience, and regulated through politics (On the Move [2006]). To move from point A to point B tells us little unless we attend to who moves, under what conditions, and with what consequences. This distinction is particularly productive for understanding the late eighteenth century, a period in which movement intensified dramatically while the boundary between free and unfree mobility remained persistently unstable.
Two literary works bracket this moment and stage the problem with remarkable clarity. In Voltaire's Candide ([1759]), movement is incessant, global, and frequently violent, yet responsibility is diffuse. Characters are displaced by war, disaster, and institutional coercion, but just as often drift along with events, carried by chance rather than deliberate choice. Mobility appears ubiquitous but politically underdetermined. By contrast, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas ([1810]) presents mobility as a direct confrontation with legal and national order. The attempt to move exposes injustice; subsequent forced movement becomes punitive and radicalizing, ultimately triggering revolt. Between these two works lies a historical moment in which mobility itself becomes an object of governance, suspicion, and control.
Across its twelve chapters, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions can be read as a historiographical exploration of this problem-space. Rather than narrating forced migration as an exception within an age of liberty, the volume examines the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period in which mobility was actively produced, regulated, and coerced across imperial and national contexts. Its central intervention lies in rejecting binary distinctions between free and unfree movement in favor of a spectrum of constrained mobilities shaped by war, empire, and state formation.
The editors’ introduction explicitly aligns with a Cresswellian understanding of mobility. Movement is not treated as a neutral act of displacement but as a socially produced process involving circulation, temporary settlement, repeated displacement, and enforced immobility. Crucially, the volume insists that different forms of coerced mobility, enslavement, convict transportation, military captivity, political exile, and Indigenous dispossession be analyzed together. Individuals frequently shifted between these regimes, and imperial systems depended on their overlap. Mobility, in this account, is neither accidental nor marginal; it is a key technology of power.
Several chapters exemplify this approach particularly well. Liam Riordan's study of forced migrations in northeastern North America, spanning the period from 1755 to 1815, traces the cumulative effects of successive expulsions of Wabanaki communities, Acadian settlers, and Loyalists. Rather than treating these movements as discrete episodes, Riordan demonstrates how each wave reshaped the political and spatial conditions encountered by the next. Mobility emerges as a structuring force in regional history, revealing how displacement produced new borders, legal regimes, and hierarchies of belonging.
Christian G. De Vito's chapter on punitive relocations across the Spanish Empire during the long eighteenth century reinforces the volume's emphasis on continuity beneath apparent rupture. By reconstructing networks of soldier, convict, and vagrant relocation, De Vito shows how revolutionary-era coercion intensified long-standing imperial practices rather than inaugurating new ones. His analysis foregrounds the infrastructures that made mobility governable, underscoring the administrative and logistical foundations of coerced movement.
Nathalie Dessens's chapter on Saint-Domingue refugees in New Orleans, focused on the period from the Haitian Revolution through the first decades of US rule (roughly 1791–1830), provides a vivid illustration of mobility's experiential and political dimensions. Dessens demonstrates how waves of displaced people, free and enslaved, reoriented New Orleans toward a Caribbean world even as it was incorporated into the United States. Refugees were not merely objects of coercion; they actively reshaped economic networks, political alignments, and urban space. The chapter exemplifies how forced mobility could simultaneously reinforce imperial structures and generate alternative spatial imaginaries.
Jan C. Jansen's chapter on registration and deportation in Jamaica, from the 1780s through the 1820s, foregrounds the emergence of mobility control as a defining feature of revolutionary governance. Through an analysis of documentation, surveillance, and expulsion, Jansen shows how states sought to render political flight legible and manageable. Refugees emerge as legal subjects whose claims to belonging were differentially structured by race and place of birth, revealing the fluid boundary between coercion and agency that runs throughout the volume.
Maurizio Isabella's “Crossing the Mediterranean in the Age of Revolutions” shifts the volume's focus toward the Mediterranean by examining the intertwined mobilities generated by the revolutionary wave of the 1820s. Using Sicily as a decentered vantage point, Isabella traces how travel, exile, and military participation connected Palermo to Naples, Greece, and the Iberian Peninsula, complicating liberal-nationalist narratives of revolutionary movement. Revolutionary “volunteering” emerges as entangled with older Mediterranean trajectories of professional migration and imperial rivalry, while large-scale refugee flows triggered by the Greek War of Independence reveal the coercive underside of these mobilities.
Read through Cresswell's distinction between movement and mobility, these chapters collectively demonstrate how the late eighteenth century transformed movement into a political problem. The period is thus framed between Candide's diffuse coercion and Michael Kohlhaas's juridical violence: a moment when mobility ceased to be merely a fact of life and became a site of contestation, regulation, and resistance.
If the volume has a limitation, it lies in the occasional flattening of differences between regimes of coercion. While the emphasis on entanglement is productive, it sometimes underplays the asymmetries between slavery, penal transportation, and political exile. Yet this is less a flaw than an invitation for further work building on the book's conceptual vocabulary.
Ultimately, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions succeeds in making mobility visible as a historical problem rather than a background condition. By connecting theory, literature, and empirical history, the volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking political modernity through the politics and experience of movement.
