The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity?

This chapter situates the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović in the context of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Serbian Great Migration, which facilitated the dissemination of Western European thought throughout Serbia. Obradović’s travels typified this process. As a young man, he fled from a monastery and spent much of his life traveling through Germany, France, Italy, England and elsewhere in Europe. He paid his way by teaching languages, and when he returned home, he translated European works into the Serbian vernacular. His oeuvre brought the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant to Serbian literature and introduced readers to the works of Fénelon, Rousseau, and Marmontel. Obradović’s writings, particularly his autobiography, not only shaped eighteenth-century Serbian culture, but also influenced South Slavs, Greeks, and Romanians in the Balkans. .

The Turkish Refugee as Vagrant Slave: Spaces of Disconnection and Dispossession in Ishmael Bashaw’s Refugee Narrative

The final chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of The Turkish Refugee (1797), which is presented by its anonymous English author as a narrative gleaned from his conversations with Ishmael Bashaw, who was enslaved by Spanish captors before finding a refuge from slavery in England. Although sales of The Turkish Refugee were intended to support Bashaw, neither the narrative nor the language it is written in belong to him. Instead of employing the conventions of the Arabic riḥlah and masālik literary traditions, the text shapes Bashaw’s experiences in exile into a story of his conversion to Christianity that confirms Islamaphobic eighteenth-century representations of Muslims. Bashaw’s redemption through Christianity does nothing to end the series of forced relocations that structured his life in England.

Orientalism in Transit: Company Men, Colonial Historiography, and Other Handmaidens of Empire

Chapter seven examines the work of a group of men affiliated with the East India Company through the writings they sent to John Bruce, the Company’s “official historiographer” between 1793 and 1817. Bruce solicited the help of these otherwise obscure men in writing a history that would represent favorably in London the transnational work the Company was doing in South Asia. Their accounts are a fascinating combination of ethnography; theoretical disquisitions about the significance of political and cultural histories of places in which the Company invested; and statements about the epistemological relationship between India and Britain. These men show off particular kinds of expertise derived from their displacement from Britain, allowing us to see the history of empire as a history of work done by migrants..

At Home on the Prairie? Black Hawk, Margaret Fuller, and American Indian Dispossession

This chapter compares Black Hawk’s description of his people’s resistance to Illinois settlement in Life of Black Hawk or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (1833) with Margaret Fuller’s description of the settler’s territorial gains in her travel account Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Where Black Hawk relates his people’s belonging to the land through a shared body of Sauk oral tradition and collective forms of testimony, Fuller narrates U.S. settlers’ claims through a similarly shared body of classical allusions and employs the Western logic of translatio studii. Both of these accounts frame nineteenth-century Sauk dispossession within a larger temporal arc, showcasing competing and culturally specific rhetorics of belonging beyond the state. Recognizing these texts culturally specific accounts of statelessness highlights the unsettling nature of their competing epistemologies of land ownership.

Byron’s Ambivalent Modernity: Touring and Forced Migration in Don Juan

The first chapter argues that Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824) anticipates current conversations of refugee status and migration. Byron’s revision of the epic form suggests that modern epic must operate in a world ruled by what Cindi Katz calls “vagabond capitalism,’ a world in which human beings are disabled as moral and political agents. Byron’s epic satire presents migration through a split lens, juxtaposing the aristocratic narrator’s witty sophistication with Juan’s hapless, erotic physicality. The forced migration of the poem’s hero, Juan, is presented through the voice of Byron’s aristocratically urbane narrator—a voice that appears to eschew the vulnerability of the slave or refugee. Over the course of the epic, their differences dissolve, as both figures suffer from precarity. Ultimately, Byron’s satire undermines distinctions between tourists and vagabonds, and unravels the imagined independence of the nation-state along with the aristocrat’s imagined freedom from exile and forced migration.

“An Alien to my Country”: Migration and Statelessness in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer

Chapter five argues that Frances Burney’s final novel The Wanderer (1814) uses the familiar plight of the French émigré to critique insular British nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel’s protagonist Ellis seeks safety from the violence of the French revolution in her native England, where she attempts to re-make her identity by inhabiting a range of socioeconomic positions and geographical spaces that mediate her relationship to the broader British community. By figuring Ellis’s socially liminal position in geographic terms, Burney engages with a trend in literature of the 1790s that politically re-maps Britain in the revolutionary context. Her wanderings highlight the conflict between her allegiances to multiple social groups and her interior self, as her constant motion severs the connections by which she is bound to these communities and leaves her stripped of any sense of national belonging..

Transatlantic Masculinities: Military Leadership and Migration in the South American Wars of Independence

Chapter three examines discourses surrounding masculinity and migration in the South American travel narratives of British mercenaries and adventurers, especially those of Captain Basil Hall, Lord Thomas Cochrane, and W. B. Stevenson. These European mercenaries and merchants assessed the South American Wars of Independence, analyzing the military strategies of Francisco José de San Martín in Peru and Criollo masculinity more generally. Ultimately, the discussions of San Martín and Criollo leadership in these texts reveal little about San Martín himself; instead, they voice these mercenaries’ anxieties about the challenges commerce and empire posed to existing European and British forms of masculinity. Through the figure of San Martín, they negotiate their distance from hegemonic forms of British masculinity, which were marked by wisdom and restraint, and newer and more mobile mercenary forms of masculinity, which operated outside that nation-state and were marked by unrestrained avaricious and personal gain.

Diasporas: Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince

Chapter two argues that Thomas Pringle’s experiences of exile and displacement informed his editorial contributions to The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first narrative of a black woman’s life published in Britain. While critics have looked at Pringle’s contributions to emphasize the intercultural aspects of the History and slave narratives more generally, few have attended to the transnational elements of Pringle’s own background. In 1820, the collapse of his family’s fortune forced Pringle and his family to leave Scotland and sail for the Cape Colony, where he led a party of Scottish immigrants to newly opened settlements along the frontier. Tensions with colonial officials forced Pringle to leave, and he resettled in London, where he became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and crossed paths with Prince. As a product of a Scottish diaspora, Pringle’s contribution manifests a partial identification with Prince, while providing its own distinct expression of dispossession..

Introduction: A Literary History of Migration, 1750–1850

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are central to recent influential theories and histories of migration because they saw the rise of urbanization, industrialization, and imperial expansion in the western world. Yet, despite the centrality of the wanderer and exile as a figure in Romantic literature, there is relatively little work on the literature of migration prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Literary history might seem like an odd lens through which to study migration, but this introduction contends that one of the primary means of understanding the migrant experience is through stories, whether those of historical individuals or those recounted in literary works. By focusing on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, this collection explores alternatives to the stories of migration as a form of either irrevocable loss or transcendent gain that crystallized later in the nineteenth century.