The Transformation of the World (31 page)

A further characteristic makes the special path of the Caribbean even clearer. The slave system was destroyed earlier in the Caribbean than in Brazil or the United States: partly as a result of a slave revolution (Saint-Domingue/Haiti,
1791–1804), partly as an effect of legislation in the metropolitan countries (Britain, 1833; France, 1848; Netherlands, 1863). These societies entered their own post-emancipation “nineteenth century” only with the abolition of slavery. Free immigration played only a very small role after the end of the slave trade, and numerous whites fled the region during the period of revolution and emancipation. Only Cuba continued to attract those who wanted a stake in the sugar boom: it drew 300,000 new settlers, overwhelmingly from Spain, in the years between 1830 and 1880. Elsewhere whites were unwelcome (Haiti) or saw few prospects in the stagnant island economies. In general, population growth in the Caribbean did not vary much between 1770 and 1870, while the demographic composition of the population underwent radical change. At the end of the eighteenth century, first-generation immigrants set the tone in Caribbean societies, whereas by 1870, native-born populations predominated.
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The transatlantic slave trade bridged the early modern period and the nineteenth century. It reached a peak during the decades around 1800, ensuring that the institution of slavery would survive the abolition of the trade by several decades. The formation of immigrant societies in the Western hemisphere entered a new phase in the second half of the nineteenth century, when forced migration across the Atlantic played a much lesser role than before. However, a visitor to the West Indies, Brazil, or the United States did not take long to realize that the nineteenth-century Americas were also a piece of Africa.

4 Penal Colony and Exile

Siberia—Australia—New Caledonia

What new elements in migration history are observable in the nineteenth century? Let us leave aside for the moment the opening of new frontiers, which will be discussed in
chapter 7
, as well as migration within individual countries, about which it is hard to say anything general. A newly popular institution was the penal colony, where malefactors and political opponents were exposed to isolation, privation, and the rigors of a harsh climate. Siberia had been used as a penal colony since 1648, and under Peter the Great, also as a location for prisoners-of-war. A growing number of offenses came to be punished with banishment. Rebellious serfs (until 1857), prostitutes, troublesome outsiders who were a burden to villagers, vagrants (sometimes the majority of deportees in the nineteenth century), and after 1800, Jews who had not paid their taxes three years in a row all found themselves being shipped off to Siberia. In the eighteenth century, compulsory hard labor (
katorga
) on state building sites became widespread. Only after the abortive Decembrist rising of 1825 did northern Asia start to be used on a large scale as a place of
political
exile. One wave of anti-Tsarist radicals followed another into the wastelands of Siberia. In 1880 there were still many who had been banished there since the Polish uprising of 1863;
soon they were joined by the first Marxists and anarchists. Few found conditions there as pleasant as the famous anarchist Mikhail Bakunin did, a relative of the governor who was to some extent allowed to share the social life of the local upper class. Many others had to perform hard labor in the coal or gold mines. Usually exiles were not kept behind bars and took some part in the life of society; some even had a family with them.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Russian courts sentenced an average of 3,300 to 3,500 persons a year to deportation. In January 1898, official statistics revealed the presence of 298,600 deportees in Siberia, and if family members are included the total must have been around 400,000, or nearly 7 percent of the total population of Siberia. Shortly before 1900 the number of banishments to Siberia began gradually to fall off, but then it rose again after the 1905 Revolution.
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Banishment to Siberia was repeatedly denounced in Western Europe as a sign of the “barbarous” nature of the Tsarist Empire. On the other hand, a statistical comparison shows that at the end of the nineteenth century—to take a generally applicable indicator–the death penalty was carried out more rarely, in proportion to total population, in the Russian empire than in the United States (where it was ten times more frequent), Prussia, England, or France.
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Even mortality among prisoners was below the level in the tropical penal colonies of the French Republic. In the nineteenth century, the thinking behind the Siberian system was that it would provide a “prison without a roof” for political opponents and marginal social groups, while at the same time providing a labor pool for the giant state projects of colonizing and “civilizing” the region. It was a colonial development program that had much greater affinities with the colonial corvée system than with the pioneering advance into the American West driven mainly by market forces and voluntary decision.

At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Western public opinion had long regarded deportation and forced labor as anachronistic and extremely hard to justify. In China, too, it had lost its usefulness to the state, having reached its peak in the eighteenth century. In 1759 the Qianlong Emperor completed the conquest of large tracts of land in Central Asia and immediately began to explore the possibility of using inhospitable borderlands as places of banishment. In the following decades tens of thousands of people, among them adherents of “evil” creeds that the state disapproved of, were exiled to what is now the province of Xinjiang, where they were subject to a regime that may be described as an exile
system
akin to the one that developed in Russia. Here, too, the goal of punishment was combined with the colonization of border areas. The Qing state continued the experiment until approximately 1820, but although it lingered on until the fall of the dynasty in 1911, the authorities lost interest as the problems multiplied and the conditions for new settlements became increasingly difficult. In China, government officials and army officers made up a high proportion of those punished with internal exile; the system generally allowed families to accompany the deportee, and a high value was placed on the aspect of moral reeducation. It was not
unusual for an official to resume his career in the emperor's service after he had spent three to ten years in exile. Imperial China was more restrained than many parts of ancien régime Europe in its use of capital punishment; banishment was a common way of commuting death sentences. The transportation of prisoners and deportees to Xinjiang was painstakingly organized and was one of the great logistical achievements of the Qing state. Figures are not available.
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The French state deported political troublemakers after the unrest of 1848 and 1851. Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, more than 3,800 insurgents were sent in nineteen convoys of ships to the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia, a colony under French rule since 1853; the deportation was conceived as a means of “civilizing” both the indigenous kanaks and the Communard revolutionaries, and that was the spirit in which it was carried out.
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Previous attempts to settle ordinary French people there had fallen afoul of the climate. Until 1898 a yearly average of 300 to 400 convicts were sent to New Caledonia.
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The other French place of banishment was the climatically even harsher colony of Guyana, in the northeast of South America—one of the most inhospitable lands in the world, which came to world public attention at the latest in 1895, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus (later found to be the victim of a conspiracy) was sent in an iron cage to the offshore Devil's Island. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French Guyana had a system of prisons and forced labor that encompassed roughly a fifth of its total population (not including indigenous tribes and gold prospectors). Banishment to the “pepper islands” was abolished only in 1936.
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Australia served on a grand scale as a penal colony: in fact, it owed its existence as a colony of any kind to the sending of the “first fleet,” whose eleven ships and 759 convicts sailed into Botany Bay (close to today's Sydney) on January 18, 1788. The loss of the North American colonies had put the British state in the position of having to find somewhere else to send convicts. After a number of extreme alternatives—such as an island in the Gambia River in West Africa—were rejected on humanitarian grounds, someone remembered Captain Cook's discovery of Botany Bay in 1770. Although other motives, such as the maritime rivalry with France, should not be excluded, this spectacular solution would probably not have been adopted had it not been for the acute convict crisis of the mid-1780s. In any event, Australia was little more than a huge penal colony during the early decades of its colonial history. The first settlers were forced immigrants, dispatched by an English judge to faraway Oceania.

By the time of the last convict ship in 1868, 162,000 people had been transported as prisoners to Australia. Most of them were products of the growing criminal subculture in Britain's early industrial cities: burglars, pickpockets, swindlers, and so on, along with a small number who had been sentenced on political grounds. The government began to encourage free emigration to the Antipodes in the late 1820s, but that did not bring any slackening of the transports. On the contrary: 88 percent of the convicts left England for Australia after 1815. The peak was reached in the 1830s, when 133 ships with an average of
209 convicts arrived between 1831 and 1835 alone, after a sea voyage lasting four months or more.
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Most of them still enjoyed at least the basic rights of a British citizen. From the beginning, the convicts were able to represent their interests in a court of law and were not totally at anyone's mercy in their choice of work. This was an important reason why Australia gradually developed a civil society without experiencing dramatic revolts.

The penal colony, indelibly imprinted on the mind through Franz Kafka's eponymous short story (written in 1914, first published in 1919), was a worldwide institution characteristic of the imperial nineteenth century, though even today it has not completely disappeared. In the flow of emigration from Europe, deportation remained an important element. Spain shipped delinquents off to Cuba or North Africa; Portugal, to Brazil, Goa, and above all Angola. British citizens might find themselves headed for Bermuda or Gibraltar. Convicted colonial subjects, too, were deported in convict ships: Indians, for example, to Burma, Aden, Mauritius, Bencoolen, the Andaman Isles, and the Malay Straits Settlements. The deportations did not always achieve their intended purpose; the deterrent effect was as questionable as the “civilizing” of the prisoners. Their forced labor did generally contribute to economic development in the region to which they were sent, but the colonial administrations in Burma or Mauritius, for instance, were interested only in strong and youthful work crews, not in the average Indian convict population.
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Convict labor was rational only so long as no other labor pool was available.

Exile

Political exile, as a fate for individuals or small groups, was nothing new in the nineteenth century. There had always been refugees from war, epidemics, and famine, and in the modern age, especially in Europe, these had been joined by religious refugees (Muslims and Jews from Spain, Protestant Huguenots from France, Nonconformists from orthodox Protestant England). Figures are here very difficult to find. What is clear is that in comparison with the scale of the problem during and after the First World War, collective displacement was not a major form of migration in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the phenomenon did become more significant. There were several reasons for this: (1) more intense persecution of political opponents in the ideological atmosphere of a nonreligious civil war that first became manifest during the French Revolution and its repercussions in the whole of Europe; (2) a liberalism gap between states, which meant that some of them aspired to become bulwarks of liberty and were prepared within limits to give sanctuary to freedom fighters from other countries, thus contributing to the emergence of a transnational civil society;
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(3) the greater scope for wealthier societies to offer foreigners at least a temporary living.

The refugees who differentiated the nineteenth century from others—anyway until the 1860s—were not so much the ones who came anonymously in large
numbers as the individually conspicuous ones, often from a prosperous and well-educated background. The waves of revolution brought forth such exiles: the 60,000 empire loyalists who in 1776 fled the North American colonies to Canada and the Caribbean; the émigrés of 1789 and the subsequent years who remained loyal to the Bourbons; the victims of the repression of 1848–49 following the failed uprisings in many parts of Europe. Switzerland, for example, took in 15,000 exiles after 1848, most of them Germans and Italians, while 4,000 Germans ended up in the United States.
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The Karlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the German Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 unleashed smaller waves. The most important legal watershed was the July Revolution of 1830, as a result of which the right to political asylum—and hence protection from politically motivated extradition—was firmly rooted in the legal systems of Western Europe, especially France, Belgium, and Switzerland. In the European revolutions of 1848–49, this principle found practical application. It was associated with public welfare support for political refugees, and also with the possibility of indirectly influencing their conduct.
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The links between exile and revolution are complicated. In 1830 the revolution in France awakened hopes for freedom in other nations and encouraged them to rise up in revolt—and at the same time it created political conditions that made France itself become a coveted place of refuge. In 1831, following the collapse of the November Revolution of 1830 in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland, a large part of the Polish political elite—some nine thousand, more than two-thirds of them from the (very extensive) Polish nobility—marched in triumph through Germany to France. This Great Emigration (
Wielka emigracja
), most of whose participants settled in Paris, took cultural creativity and political initiative abroad with it. It came to be seen as a “metaphysical mission,” whose sacrificial bearers represented all of Europe's oppressed.
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In order to occupy the more unruly elements among the revolutionary refugees, the French government founded the Foreign Legion in 1831.