The Spanish Empire, 1500-1898

Scholars have paid relatively little, fragmented and discontinuous attention to the history of convict transportation in the Spanish Empire. The extensive literature on the galleys includes insights and figures on the convicted rowers but does not specifically address galley servitude as a form of convict transportation. Similarly, the important studies available on the legal system in distinct parts of the Spanish monarchy hardly look specifically at sentencing, let alone at the spatiality of punishment. And whereas single episodes and flows of nineteenth-century deportation have been addressed, even the few attempts to provide overviews have disproportionately focused on political deportees. Only two syntheses centred on convict transportation are available to date: Ruth Pike’s pioneering study on penal servitude in early modern Spain, published in 1983, and Lauren Benton’s more recent chapter in A Search for Sovereignty. Both focus on the flows directed to the presidios, or military outposts, in the five decades between the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) and the beginning of the process of Latin American independence (1810s–1830s). The history of convict transportation in the Spanish Empire, however, is much longer and includes a broader range of punitive regimes. The first two sections of this chapter take this expanded chronological and thematic frame in order to offer an overview, and to provide, respectively, a general description and periodization of the various forms of convict transportation and a preliminary evaluation of the quantitative scale of the phenomenon as a whole. In the subsequent sections I use the presidio perspective to explore aspects of convict transportation that can be equally investigated in relation to other mobility-oriented punishments. First, I seek to provide a comprehensive description of convict flows to the presidios and relate them to the structure of the Spanish Empire. I then foreground the distinctiveness of each route and the variety of groups of prisoners transported along different routes and standing in each destination, and point to the entanglements and disentanglements between the convict voyages and the journeys of other migrants. Finally, I address the relationship between the process of sentencing, the destinations of transportation and agency, and the role that punishment-related spatial mobility played in the lives of the convicts. All in all, the chapter foregrounds the way convict transportation was shaped by, and in turn impacted on, the structures, spatiality, conceptualizations and goals of the empire – a point that I especially highlight in the concluding section.