This paper explores narratives of imprisonment and exile written those banished to the plantations in the early modern era. Taken up as political and religious dissenters, prisoners of war and rebels, and as common criminals, these men and women experienced a transatlantic bondage that began in the British Isles and left them on the distant shores of America as bond servants. A surprising number of them wrote accounts of their experiences—as letters, petitions, memories—that bore witness to historical practices but also constituted imaginative portraits of imprisonment and exile. All of the captives protested their fate, but they did so in various ways; for example, either English judges or creole planters might be cast as tormentors, and either initial imprisonment or American bondage were condemned as most barbarous. Likewise authors condemned their usage as transgressive on relatively universalistic or particularistic grounds—as Christians, freeborn Englishmen, whites or simply innocents. These narratives thus linked ideas about bondage and exile and mapped them onto the Atlantic spaces they traversed.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 