In this highly readable volume, Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton continue their long-standing interest in the involuntary movement of people around Britain's Atlantic world. Turning their attention to the varied types of banishment used by governments to exclude “undesirables” from mainstream society, the authors range widely across time and space. Morgan and Rushton begin their story in the seventeenth century. Before the outbreak of war in the three kingdoms in 1642, banishment took many forms and was especially distinguished by the regime under which it occurred. Scotland practiced a distinctive policy of exile, which focussed on excluding individuals from the kingdom but showed little interest in where they went. This changed with the war, and it was at this time that authorities began to view England's young colonial territories as the natural destination for individuals with whom they wished to dispense. From this point onwards, banishment involved not only an order to leave the kingdom, but also an arrangement for removal to a distant colony whence return would be extremely difficult. The Catholic Irish were among the first groups singled out by Oliver Cromwell for transportation to the English Caribbean, with the practice becoming so ubiquitous that “to be barbadosed” became a euphemism for transportation in the 1650s. Religiously motivated banishment to the colonies was never taken up so enthusiastically in the other parts of the British Isles, but Scottish Covenanters, Quakers, and the perpetrators of the 1685 Western Rebellion did suffer similar fates, suggesting that Cromwell's methods had brought about a wider shift in the practice of banishment.

Although religious conflict retreated in the eighteenth century as a motivation for banishment, the measure continued to be popular. With the imperial state looming ever larger in people's lives, the authors argue that the new legal justifications that accompanied eighteenth-century banishments operated more as a “fig leaf” (230) to cover up the unpleasant truth that authorities were merely using their power to dump society's “undesirables” on the colonies. The banishments of Jacobites after the 1715 and 1745 rebellions, for example, were mostly justified through the legal process. It was also in the eighteenth century that British authorities outside the metropole embraced the possibilities of banishment on a larger scale. Starting with an account of the Acadian expulsion from Nova Scotia, the final chapters of Morgan and Rushton's story emphasize both the growing attractiveness of banishment and the increased might of the British state. In particular, the major wars of the second half of the eighteenth century created enemies that required removal from societies in which they were viewed as potentially disruptive to the political ambitions of the ruling authorities. In Revolutionary Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and St Eustatia, Quakers, Patriots, and Jews were all banished because they were deemed a threat to the power of the authorities. Banishment had now become the weapon of choice not only of the British state, but also of the Revolutionary Pennsylvanian authorities, and the British Navy.

Pioneering in its consideration of such a wide range of banished peoples in so many different settings, this book offers a highly successful narrative that lays bare the connections between what happened in the three kingdoms during the Civil War and the subsequent growth of empire. With this broad-brush approach, Morgan and Rushton demonstrate the value of an Atlantic perspective and show how working on a large canvas can reveal a widespread belief in the necessity of exclusion, as well as the divergent methods used to pursue the goal of excluding. The book's conclusions raise many valuable questions for further research. Perhaps most noteworthy is the assertion that the growth of the state increased its ability to move subjects around its territories at will. With the role of the British state in enforcing mercantilism and expanding the slave trade under recent examination, Morgan and Rushton's attention to its sponsorship of banishment speaks to a growing body of work that probes more broadly than before the goals and ideologies of the government with regard to its empire. From the point of view of the banished, the book also opens up enticing avenues for further work. Did being banished become less problematic for the individuals involved when the practice was swept up in an Atlantic world of perpetual motion? Within the Atlantic world itself, was it just race that marked out the banished from other groups of involuntarily relocated people, most obviously the enslaved? Indeed, the plethora of further questions that Banishment in the Early Atlantic World raises is testimony to the rich seam of inquiry that Morgan and Rushton have opened up with this book.