Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often blurred and frequently renegotiated. Rather than a formally sanctioned doctrine and legal category, deportation should be understood as a crude tool for solving a variety of problems. Although the forced removal of criminals, religious minorities or political opponents was not a new instrument to the late eighteenth century, it is often ignored that political deportation was also a widely used legal practice in the Indian Ocean during the ‘age of revolutions’. In this region, deportation was used by imperial centres to get rid of political enemies, but also by regional authorities, without referring to metropolitan orders. It was usually not a judicial punishment, but an administrative measure justified in the name of political necessity. This article focuses on three small colonial enclaves, French Reunion, Danish Tranquebar, and British Pondicherry, where a siege mentality and fear of political sedition were omnipresent in this period. Contemporaries believed, with some justifications, that a single conspiracy linked these three colonial theatres, involving the same set of protagonists, who redeployed their projects as they were removed from one place to the next. But in these three sites and societies, deportation raises different issues. Dumping radicals on a foreign shore might have been a short-term fix, but it rarely solved problems in the long term: deportees often returned after some time, which was a direct consequence of the colonial authorities’ reluctance to take irreparable decisions, and of the entanglement of empires and polities in the Indian Ocean.

中文翻译：

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被压迫者的回归：革命时代印度洋的政治驱逐


从 18 世纪下半叶到 19 世纪初，印度洋成为欧洲帝国国家发动的全球战争的战场。本文比较了法国、丹麦和英国殖民领土上的三个殖民大国如何应对相互关联的政治威胁，而该地区的帝国主权和管辖权界限往往模糊不清，并且经常重新谈判。驱逐出境不应该是一个正式认可的教条和法律类别，而应该被理解为解决各种问题的粗略工具。尽管强制驱逐罪犯、宗教少数群体或政治反对派在 18 世纪后期并不是一个新工具，但人们经常忽视的是，在“革命时代”，政治驱逐也是印度洋广泛使用的法律做法。在这个地区，帝国中心使用驱逐出境来摆脱政敌，但地方当局也使用驱逐出境，而不参考大都会命令。这通常不是司法惩罚，而是以政治需要的名义提出的行政措施。本文重点介绍三个小型殖民飞地，即法国留尼汪岛、丹麦特兰克巴尔岛和英国本地治里岛，在此期间，围攻心态和对政治煽动叛乱的恐惧无处不在。同时代的人认为，尽管有一定的道理，但有一个阴谋将这三个殖民地剧院联系在一起，涉及同一组主角，当他们从一个地方转移到另一个地方时，他们重新部署了他们的项目。但在这三个地点和社会中，驱逐出境引发了不同的问题。 将激进分子倾倒到外国海岸可能是一个短期的解决方案，但从长远来看，它很少能解决问题：被驱逐者往往在一段时间后返回，这是殖民当局不愿做出不可挽回的决定以及印度洋帝国和政体纠葛的直接后果。