This paper maps out global trajectories through the prism of two imperial schemes that displaced incarcerated people to colonial spaces. In 1824, women and men, released from prisons and workhouses in German Mecklenburg, colonized the borderlands of Brazil’s newly-independent empire. Thirty years later, adolescent boys left the correctional facility of English Redhill to be placed with families of British settlers in the Cape of Good Hope. An analysis of these two projects reveals unexpected continuities of ideas about deviance and (re)integration, of plans for displacement and fixation, as well as of conceptions of work in rural and urban spaces. Our reading of individual trajectories from these three standpoints unravels constant interactions between local and global scales. Taking a transimperial approach makes us see that spatial thinking became a problem, a solution, a way of resistance, and a technology of control that continued to affect individuals across the Atlantic.

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