Abstract
AbstractThis article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the “loss” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, foregrounding “perspectives from the colonies”, I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.
Highlights
On 28 November 1896, two ships left the port of Havana in the midst of the cries, waved handkerchiefs, and threatening screams of the crowd on the dockside
It brings together the study of penal transportation and other forms of punitive relocation that originated from states of exception, that is, administrative deportation and sentences of transportation pronounced by military courts
I start by analysing the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces; I address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before going on to highlight the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole
Summary
The Napoleonic Wars (1808–1814) and the related process of independence in Latin America (1810–1820s) created a deep discontinuity in the history of the Spanish Empire. Throughout the century the prisons of Manila, San Juan, Havana, Puerto Principe, and the Isle of Pines remained hubs of penal transportation for a flexible convict workforce used for public works.[12] In Puerto Rico, between 1857 and 1886, Chinese contract labourers and enslaved Africans from Cuba, military convicts from Spain, and local prisoners built the Carretera Central, the 134-kilometre-long road that connected the northern and southern parts of the island.[13] In Cuba, prisoners were used in the construction of the Havana-Guïnes railway during the 1830s and the railway between Cardenas and Tucano forty years later.[14] They worked in stone quarries and in the construction and repair of Havana’s streets and buildings, sewers, and the aqueduct.
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