On Learning Lessons from the Past: Slavery, Freedom, and Migration Regulation

Abstract

My very sincere thanks to Cultural Dynamics, particularly the editor Michaeline Crichlow, for convening a forum on my book, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (2018), and to Jennifer Chaćon and Nandita Sharma for taking the time to serve as interlocutors. Their astute and generous commentaries traverse several issues explored in my book and raise numerous potential threads I could pursue in my response. However, given the constraints of space, I will use their commentaries to largely address only two themes. First, drawing on Chaćon’s commentary, I develop further the importance of the 1772 decision in Somerset v. Stewart, that deemed a slave brought to England legally free, thus preventing his forcible departure to Jamaica. Though Lord Mansfield rendered the decision almost 250 years ago, it has long been understood as a landmark habeas corpus case and has emerged as significant in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Department of Homeland Security et al. v. Thuraissigiam (2020). Second, I take up two interrelated issues that Sharma identifies as important contributions of my book: namely, what I call the “logic of facilitation” and the “logic of constraint” in migration regulations and the centrality of the labor contract to the regime of Indian indentured migration, that followed in the wake of the 1834 abolition of slavery in British colonies. Before directly addressing these issues, to situate my discussion, I provide a brief summation of the chief arguments of the book. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is an investigation into the history of state control over migration. The book considers colonial Indian migration from about 1834, when Britain abolished slavery in its plantation colonies, up to about 1914, when the world confronted a new geopolitical reality with the onset of World War I. In the course of less than a century, we see profound transformations in the logics, rationales, institutions, and legal forms of state control over mobility. My analysis argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative understandings of the modern state. Traversing a diverse array of British colonial formations, including Mauritius, the Caribbean, India, Canada, and South Africa, the book foregrounds the analytical modality of co-production to inquire into the relational processes, across these varied sites, that produced a state monopoly over migration. This monopoly, accompanied 1020923 CDY0010.1177/09213740211020923Cultural DynamicsAuthor’s Response book-review2021