Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State by Radhika Mongia, and: Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67 Stan Neal (review)

Countless steams of migration have helped to shape the modern world we know today. Not least among these was Asian indentured migration, a form of bonded, contract labor (re)introduced to colonial sugar plantations following Emancipation. Thus, in order to meet an ever-more insatiable demand for labor, the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw 1.37 million Indian migrants travel across the British Empire—to colonies as far flung as Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Fiji, Malaysia, and Natal—to work on plantations, and later in mines and the expansion of colonial infrastructure.¹ This rapidly expanding labor force was also supplemented through the intermittent introduction of a further 87,451 Chinese indentured laborers, to various British colonies and territories, to fulfil similar roles as their Indian counterparts.² Despite the explicitly global scale of this migration, and its consequences, much of the historiography of indentureship has continued to engage with the system's history through a somewhat narrow frame of reference. This has been put best by Richard Allen, who has noted that the lives of indentured migrants have continued to be discussed "within highly circumscribed social, economic, and political contexts."³ Fortunately, this is the case in neither Mongia's nor Neal's works, whose respective studies of Indian and Chinese migration deserve considerable praise for their effective recontextualization(s) of the histories of both of these systems.

The central argument of Neal's work, on Chinese migration, is that colonial Singapore served as a "contact-zone," in which racialized ideas about the desirable characteristics of Chinese migrants first came to crystallize. After exploring the history of British encounters with the Chinese in Singapore, in chapter one, and the solidification of discourses about the "Chinese character," in chapter two, the work then explores how these ideas influenced subsequent experiments with Chinese labor across the British Empire. In chapter three, for instance, Neal explores "failed" experiments with introducing Chinese labor into Assam and Ceylon, illustrating how these helped to establish new, racially stratified hierarchies of labor. Likewise, chapter four illustrates the social and racial prejudices which underpinned resistance to the introduction of Chinese laborers into Australian territories in the 1830s. In doing so, Neal illustrates how the xenophobic discourses surrounding Chinese migration in the latter half of the nineteenth century, often seen as the precursor to White Australia, were evident from this earlier date. Finally, chapter five illustrates how, despite Hong Kong becoming the chief entrepôt for Chinese indentured migration to the British Caribbean, the system's organization and justifications remained underpinned by ideas originally birthed in Singapore.

By contrast, Mongia's work proposes a "colonial genealogy" for the foundations of the modern state; using four pivotal moments in the history of Indian migration to illustrate their influence upon the formation of modern state controls over migration. Starting with a discussion of the early justifications offered for encouraging indentured migration, in chapter one, Mongia illustrates how these were linked to broader debates about the limits of state sovereignty, as well as the paradoxical fact that colonial governments sought to regulate nominally "free migration" to ensure that it was indeed "free." Chapter two then considers the ever-growing number of checks and balances introduced to regulate indentured migration, leading Mongia to conclude that these controls came to represent a "thoroughly modern bureaucratic formation" (p. 84). Next, chapter three explores the controversies surrounding the legitimacy of polygamous Indian marriages in South Africa; with Mongia illustrating how legislative efforts to restrict the same laid the foundations for enforcing gendered access to mobility...