This talk will examine how nineteenth‑century projects of penal reform and colonial expansion across Europe and the Atlantic—spanning deportations from Mecklenburg-Schwerin to Brazil and the emigration of boys from England to Natal—together reveal a transimperial system of displacement that linked carceral governance, migration, and empire‑building through intertwined logics of coercion, reform, and racialized fantasies of agrarian regeneration.
This presentation traces the intertwined histories of penal reform and colonial expansion across the nineteenth-century Atlantic world through two seemingly disparate cases: the deportation of men and women from a prison in Mecklenburg-Schwerin to Brazil and the emigration of boys from a Reformatory in England to Natal. Drawing on archives from Brazil, England, and Germany, the analysis uncovers how a shared set of ideas and practices connected these projects. Together, they reveal a transimperial grammar of displacement that linked European carceral and colonial regimes. As administrators in both imperial and non-imperial states articulated fantasies of whiteness, agrarian regeneration, and moral reform, they recast coercion as benevolence and exile as redemption. Yet these same ventures were also seeped in fears of disorder, idleness, and exposure. Both these sentiments marked the correspondence that sustained displacement, ultimately producing overlapping geographies of control, confinement, and colonization. By reading the Mecklenburg-Brazil and Redhill-Natal schemes in tandem, this talk reconsiders the relationship between migration, punishment, and empire-making. It shows how governance in the nineteenth century relied not only on establishing discipline within Europe but also on implementing the export ofmarginalized populations overseas. The Atlantic became a (post-)carceral space where unfreedom haunted emancipation.
Speakers:
Miqueias Mugge is a historian and academic research manager at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. His research focuses on the political economy of war, slavery, and empire-building in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on the Brazilian borderlands. He is the author, co-author, and editor of books exploring topics such as Brazilian militias, slavery, German immigration in 19th-century Brazil, and is currently finalizing the manuscript Building an Empire in the Age of Revolutions.
Victoria Bergbauer is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. A cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements, her research explores how carceral regimes and their aftermaths have shaped modern concepts of freedom and state formation. Berbgbauer is currently working on her manuscript Fragments of Freedom: Incarcerated Adolescents and their Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Europe and recently co-edited Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls (Jovis, 2025).