Under the Radar of Empire: Unregulated Travel in the Indian Ocean

This article explores unregulated circulation of people from South Asia to Australia and argues that these movements constitute both an integral and a destabilizing element in the conceptualization of the nation state and diasporic movements in the19th and 20th centuries. Differential mobility for populations, depending on race, class, and gender, meant that attempts by imperial and colonial governments to control the movements of their subjects met with indifferent success. Such unregulated journeys were hard to monitor, difficult to police and, ultimately, impossible to regulate within the expanded imperial networks of communication and transport, which opened up new ways for people, ideas, and technologies to circulate under the radar of Empire.