Indigenous war captives and mobility-oriented punishments: An Atlantic-Mediterranean world perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores two well-known case studies involving the removal of Indigenous war captives from their places of origin to fortifications or to Mediterranean galley ships to do forced labor. I draw on known scholarship on Indigenous war captives in New England and New France during the seventeenth century to consider the local conditions in Europe and North America that created the possibility for the dispersal of captives. Europeans moved Indigenous captives for various reasons and responded to the actions and demands of Indigenous polities, particularly during times of warfare or raiding. Rather than placing Indigenous history into European power frameworks, I focus on how mobility-oriented punishments are simultaneously connected to events in interior continental Indigenous and the European mainland. By doing so, I offer a critique of the settler colonial paradigm.