In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles—outcasts of the new French citizenry—and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana’s exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. Empire and Underworld discovers in Guiana’s wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century’s most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation.

Prizes

Winner of J. Russell Major Prize 2013,Nominated for Frederick Douglass Book Prize 2013,Winner of George L. Mosse Prize 2013,Nominated for James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History 2012,Nominated for George L. Mosse Prize 2012,Nominated for James Willard Hurst Prize 2013,Nominated for Gilbert Chinard Prize 2013,Nominated for David H. Pinkney Prize 2013,Nominated for Oscar Kenshur Book Prize 2012,Nominated for Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize 2012

Although [this] remarkable book concerns a marginal place, its insights and implications should be of compelling interest to historians across a wide range of subfields and regional specialties...Refreshingly original, deeply researched, and elegantly argued, Spieler's study could also be seen as a call for further research, from Parchman Farm to Guantanamo. -- John Savage * American Historical Review *
By interweaving narratives of outcasts in metropolitan France with those in French Guiana, Spieler vividly illustrates the relationship between metropolitan France and its colonies. -- Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss * Journal of World History *
An original and provocative study that recasts the relationship between metropole and colony in the nineteenth century, while also raising broader questions about law and incarceration relevant to today’s world…Spieler elegantly enacts her original ‘thought experiment’ of moving Guiana across the Atlantic and treating it as an integral, if unrecognizable, part of France. The feat involved in researching and holding together these two sides of the story sets a new standard in the historiographical reorientation toward studying colony and metropole as one. -- Thomas Dodman * Journal of Modern History *
Spieler’s original analysis merits attention, usefully complicating liberal accounts of law as well as French colonial history. -- Peter Redfield * New West Indian Guide *
This highly original book offers a history of the penal colony of French Guiana. More importantly, it also provides a sophisticated meditation on the intersections of space, law, and imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. -- Jennifer Heuer * The Historian *
Cultural historians, scholars of empire, and intellectual historians will all take great value from this well-researched, well-argued book. -- Erica Foss * Essays in History *
A subtle and sophisticated study of a complex historical process, Spieler’s book refocuses our way of seeing colonial space and suggests how the highly refined legal innovations of a modern state can be discerned beneath the surface of an apparent wilderness. -- Michael Clinton * Middle Ground Journal *
This striking, original, and very intelligent book is concerned with a vast theme: the contrast between the principles of 1789 (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the realities of the lives of deportees in Guiana. In an age concerned with human rights, this book is of universal relevance. These pages may seem to be about the heart of colonial darkness in a far away place, but they are in fact about the heart of darkness in France itself. -- Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University
This sophisticated study illuminates the history of French Guiana and enriches our understanding of the intertwined histories of France and the Caribbean. Braiding together vivid narratives of exile and imprisonment with detailed legal history, Spieler brilliantly analyzes the complexities of the French colonial order. -- Laurent Dubois, Duke University
In this provocative book, we learn how the juridical order of a nation—even a democratic one—can create an administrative space which definitively erased its inhabitants from the civil sphere. In French Guiana, émigrés from the French Revolution, then slaves and ex-slaves, deported convicts and indentured workers were rendered invisible before the law. Inspired by the Australian and the Algerian experiences and also by Catholic and Socialist utopias, this process required juridical imagination as well as the ambiguities of empire. While set in nineteenth-century colonial France, Spieler's powerfully illuminating story has deep relevance for today's world. -- Jean M. Hébrard, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
This terrific book extends well beyond its apparent subject: late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonial Guiana...It is to Spieler's great credit that she manages to reconstruct from the available archival fragments a remarkably rich and fascinating story of a colony's contingent evolution toward an end that was never foreordained. -- Malick W. Ghachem * Law and History Review *

Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.