Elusive Refugees: Revisiting Terms of Exile and Asylum in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract This article discusses key tenets from the conceptual history of exile and asylum during the half-century around 1800. During this transformative period, political refugees took shape as a recognizable mass phenomenon, although they remained closely intertwined with other forms of migration and mobility, both free and unfree. Their often-tortuous itineraries occasioned manifold interactions with societies and states of origin, transit, and destination, remodeling preexisting concepts of exile, or generating new ones. As state bureaucracies, host societies, and mobile actors used these categories to negotiate status, access to protection, relief, compensation, and various layers of belonging, the contours of a transformative period in the conceptual history of refuge become apparent. This period was marked by a hybrid vocabulary, informed by both historical notions of (religious) asylum and by emerging concepts of politicized mobility and state membership; it was the period in which ancien régime ideas of deservingness were refracted by the prism of political loyalty, and in which relief practices could give way to large-scale reparation schemes; and a period in which a fuzzy vocabulary of asylum and alienness sustained, and complicated, the lines between insiders and outsiders in a world marked by an uneasy coexistence of empires and nation-states.