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INTRODUCTION
Penal transportation, deportation, and exile have played a crucial role in the history of nations and empires. Without them, many colonial projects would not have materialized, or only at a much later stage. Punitive mobility helped to govern and manage populations, expand empires, and bring coerced labour to the peripheries of empires. It reinforced spatial hierarchies, created new circuits of imperial movement, and allowed colonial powers to deploy a repertoire of punitive measures within and beyond the criminal justice system. In addressing these themes, the articles in this special issue are situated at the intersection of the history of punishment, of labour, and the New Imperial History. 1 We focus on the modern period because more global powers employed penal transportation during the third quarter of the nineteenth century than at any other point in world history. Interestingly, this was at precisely the time when states unified their legal systems, modern prisons putatively emerged as sites of discipline and punishment, and forms of penal mobility and confinement diversified, owing in part to political factors. 2 These penal transportations, usually to territories outside the jurisdiction of imperial parliaments, allowed for politically expedient deflections from these projects of unification of the administration of justice. In the colonies, the punitive relocation of colonial subjects both enabled and enacted imperial modes of governance and population control. At the same time, the relocation of convicts served the purpose of empire-building, which, in terms of geographical reach and scale, was at its height between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The routes of penal transportation, deportation, and exile were determined by a hierarchically ordered relationship between different parts of the empire. Colonial subjects were rarely deported to Europe, whereas hundreds of thousands of Europeans (and if we include Soviet Russia, millions) were sent to the outskirts of colonial empires. Moreover, empires moved colonially convicted imperial subjects and citizens around colonial peripheries to a remarkable degree. 3 Since these movements were crucial for the population of sparsely or non-settled territories, they were also often permanent. However, though convicts were sometimes the first choice in terms of labour supply, in some locations, at a later stage, non-punitive migration might take over. This was the...