Cast Out : Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective

A. L. Beier, Paul Ocobock

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780896802629
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences.This is the first book to consider global laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied. Vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine the migration of labor, social and governmental responses, poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. Cast Out includes discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• IntroductionVagrancy and Homelessness in Globaland Historical Perspective
• 1: “A New Serfdom”
• 2: The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England
• 3: “Takin’ It to the Streets”
• 4: Vagrant India
• 5: Vagrancy in Mauritius and the Nineteenth-Century Colonial Plantation World
• 6: Doing Favors for Street People
• 7: Vagabondage and Siberia
• 8: “Tramps in the Making”
• 9: Between Romance and Degradation
• 10: The “Travelling Native”
• 11: Thought Reform
• 12: Imposing Vagrancy Legislation in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
• 13: Subversive Accommodations
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index