Ep 9: A colonial history of the passport. With Radhika Mongia (English).

The passport emerges as a document that purports to assign a national identity, not a racial identity. So it conceals race and the racist motivations for controlling mobility in a guise of the reciprocal arrangements between states. So that was a very serious grave concern. How do we make law that does not mention race? Because then the edifice of the British Empire is going to crumble. Which is claiming that all bitter subjects will be treated without distinction of color, the origin, race or creed. Welcome everyone to an English episode of The Fabranners, a podcast on Europe's borders and resistance against them. I'm Nesca Beiveld. And I am Viberhautenberg. The Fabranners is Dutch for Haraga, an Arabic word used in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Haraga literally means "those who burn" and is used to speak of people who cross European borders without permission. It refers to the burning of identity papers. So those who do Haraga burn Europe's borders. Our guest today is Radika Mungia, Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto. We talked to Radika about her 2018 book Indian Migration and Empire, a colonial genealogy of the modern state. Nowadays, states have a monopoly on migration control. And because this is the case, we tend to think of this monopoly as a natural and inherent element of state sovereignty, as something that has been around for as long as states have existed. Haraga's book shows that this is not the case. Migration control is a very recent aspect of state sovereignty, one that developed in a world that shifted from being dominated by empire states to being dominated by nation states. The regulation of colonial and racialized migrations played a crucial role in bringing about the world we know today, a world in which states get to determine how people move around the globe. In our conversation today, we discussed this transformation in roughly two steps. In the first part of our conversation, we talked about the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 and the global movement of Indian migrants that followed. Americans who were to take the place of former slaves in the British plantations as indentured laborers. Haraga explains how the movements of these Indians was crucial to the emergence of the first forms of state control over mobility, even though the aim at the time was to facilitate these migrations, not to restrict them. In the second part of the conversation, we look at how those first forms of state control grew into the system that we know today. Throughout the conversation, Haraga emphasizes the entanglements of the colonial state and the modern state, as well as a crucial role that race and racism is played in shaping the passport inequality we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, we recommend everyone to read Haraga's book, which is packed with much more detail than we were able to discuss today. And of course, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. As always, you can leave us a comment on our Instagram or Twitter or send us an email. Enjoy. Welcome Haraga. We are extremely excited to have you join in today and to talk about your book. Thank you for joining us. Thank you both for inviting me. It's a pleasure to do this and it's been fun to kind of return to the book in order to prepare for this podcast. So in your book, you set out to historicize aspects of recurrent border regime and you really look in close detail at a number of technologies that are crucial to the functioning of borders today and how borders emerged historically in the context of colonialism and particularly colonial empire states. So to start off, we were wondering what you believe a historical perspective can do to help us think differently about borders and migration to help us kind of denaturalize our current ways of thinking about borders. Sure, this of course, it's a book in that I do the historical work in order to draw attention to the peculiarity of the present and indeed any moment is peculiar, something we might tend to forget. I think critiquing aspects of the world requires that we can also offer alternative visions or even alternative realities. And to my mind, there are various strategies one can use to accomplish this. So for instance, we have, you know, utopian thought that uses the work of the imagination to offer radically different and idealized worlds from the ones that we inhabit. There's also dystopian thought, you know, that paradoxically can sometimes have similar effects. And that it will also, you know, it will often push to the limit some aspect of everyday life to suggest the dangers inherent in recent or certain everyday formations. A good example here would be the alarms that are raised with regard to the multiple surveillance and documentation technologies we see today in all the concerns around privacy, right? So and you have lots of dystopian sci-fi narratives around this. One can also offer alternatives by reference to different societies, highlighting how things are different in different parts of the world. And I think the work of historicization can be understood as a subset of this approach. It's not for nothing that it said that the past is a foreign country. So historicization can not only show how things were differently arranged in the past, but particularly if we adopt a genealogical approach as I do in my book, it can also help to trace how the present took the shape it did. So genealogical work does not see the present as the inevitable and the only possible outcome of the past. Instead, it tracks the processes and the contingent forces that produce the present. So you know with regard to your question about denaturalizing aspects of our current migration regime, I framed my book in terms of an overarching current assumption, which is the view that the nation state has an uncontested authority to control migration and that this is a defining and immemorial aspect of state sovereignty. As my book shows, or I think it shows, a historical investigation does not support this assumption. Yeah, and I think, relatedly, you chose in your book not to focus on Indian migration or on any migration per se, but on the emergence of borders as we know them today and also on the emergence of states and sovereignty and nationalism as we know them today. And you tell this history of the modern state through examining a number of technologies that emerged to regulate colonial Indian migrations. And could you talk about this choice you made to focus on borders rather than on migration? You know, you're right, the book is and is also not about Indian migrations. It is about the subject in so far as I think we can learn quite a bit about Indian migrations from it, but it's not like a sweeping macro history of Indian migrations. I see the book more as a story of the state. So I analyze Indian migration to provide an account of one increasingly important facet of state formation, namely the regulation of human movement. I consider the regulation of migration as an important site of state formation and state transformation in a global frame. So it is not that certain kinds of states will logically implement certain kinds of regulations. That's not my approach. My approach is what are the specificities of the way the state regulates migration that changes the character of the state. So it's the reverse question that I find interesting. And this kind of story required firstly, you know, in the period I'm considering nationalism doesn't make sense. It's an imperial word. The subjective relations of people, the legal techniques that organize people, these are all shaped within the horizon of an imperial world. So I couldn't even if I wanted to follow a methodological national, let's perspective. And actually let me rephrase that because indeed lots of people do follow that perspective, even though they're studying that period. However, I didn't find it possible too. So my book is not a story of the Indian state. It is a story of the state as such. So in the period that you consider, Indians traveled across the rich empire and also to other empires, how did you decide which places to focus on and could you talk a little bit more about the process of conducting research for this book? You know, the book did not take shape in the manner that we encourage students and ourselves to conduct research. So I didn't follow the path of having a proposal or an outline. I ended up taking a more undisciplined but also a more exciting path. My archival journey began with the archives in London and continued to archives in India. And it's after those archival ventures that I also visited archives in Mauritius and South Africa. In terms of the specific foresight, it was really a matter of what I saw as important. So for instance Mauritius became crucial to the project because it occupies the preeminent position in the making of the indenture regime and what was called the great experiment of the 19th century. And what this experiment was trying to determine was whether free labor could be as profitable as slave labor. The chapter on Canada and the tenure debate on the passport system is actually what got me started on the project. So I began there and then moved backward. South Africa became key to the book not only so I could address the issue of marriage licenses but also because I got frankly quite obsessed with the county who then lived in South Africa. So those are some of the ways that the book took shape. Well perhaps this is a good moment to really dive in. In the first chapters of your book you look at some of the first efforts that the British Empire made to regulate how Indians were able to move across the British Empire. And we're talking about the early 19th century here. A time when in principle British subjects were able to move freely across empire precisely because colonial powers had made a tremendous effort to actually entrenched the idea of the principle of free movement in order to justify their colonialism, their colonial endeavours. So your book really tells a history of how this principle of free movement was reversed and for whom it was reversed. Something a reality that we still live with today. And so you start your analysis in around 1834 with the abolition of plantation slavery in the British colonies. Would you talk a little bit more about the significance of the abolition of slavery in the context of your book? So how did the abolition of slavery generate this demand for cheap labour on the part of plantation owners and how is this demand met with indentured Indian labour in different corners of the British Empire and how did this movement of Indians spur the British empire to start to regulate how they were able to move? Sure. The British Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833 and it provided for gradual abolition. So in most cases other than a few sites it was going to be six years and then later that six years was reduced to four years before slaves would actually be emancipated. And I think other empires also followed a similar trajectory for emancipation, a gradual emancipation rather than an immediate emancipation. So in this period of gradual emancipation you begin to see plantation owners getting increasingly anxious about the possibility of former slaves providing a continued source of labour for their plantations. Keep in mind the plantation was the site of trauma and torture for slaves. So to continue working there was not on the top of their list of things to do. And these plantation owners were also unwilling to offer the former slaves fair wages. In addition they were worried about how to expand their enterprises without an increase in the supply of labour. And in this context they began searching around the globe, it wasn't only Indians, they experimented with Chinese labour, they thought about Madagascar, various sites to try and recruit labour. And one of the benefits of this kind of recruitment of labour from the perspective of plantation owners is that you recruit a batch of workers on fixed contracts, bring them to a foreign place and are more able to discipline them and exploit them and conduct expropriation. So indenture was a more feasible scheme from the perspective of planters than offering former slaves a fair wage. And it turned out that Indian indenture particularly to other British colonies, you know, just made the whole system work very well for the planters. So that's how you get the beginnings of the indenture system. And I should note it wasn't called indenture, it was called free migration because that was the whole point of the exercise, right? If you abolish slavery then you need to support free migration and free labour. But that's interesting and significant. Yeah, yeah. So indenture actually is a word that enters the archives much later. The entire discussion in the 1830s was about free labour. Yeah, and you write that as early as 1835, the British administration in India already installed mechanisms of state control to monitor all of this movement, even if the point was to facilitate it, but what was the significance of this early state involvement given that principle free movement at a time? Thank you for that question. It's a sort of radical shift. So there was all this discussion about what is this form of labour, is this a new slave trade? And in order to silence these criticisms or address these criticisms, the state said, no, it's not a new system of slavery because in fact, we're going to make sure that each immigrant appears before a district magistrate and says that they are going willingly. So this is how the state came to organize this movement in an attempt to ensure that it was addressing the criticisms of various factions. But even as it was addressing these criticisms, you had people objecting to the intervention because they thought that this was impingement on the liberty of the subject, that this was an unjust, justifiable tyrannical imposition. Yeah, so I guess state control over these movements of Indians to form our plantation societies was introduced at the time as an exception to the then prevalent principle free movement, but really with the aim of facilitating this movement. So there's quite a few steps actually that from present days' eyes are a little bit, you know, hard to digest almost because it's so different from how state control over movement is organized today. Yes, indeed. So what we find is that the state authorised contract comes to be at the heart of the regulation of indenture. We also find actually resolving the issue of whether the state has the authority to control movement by saying we'll make an exception as you just noted. In this specific instance and the justification for this exception is falling into the classic colonial thinking that this was part of the civilising mission. So the natives were not sufficiently civilised, they therefore needed this extra tutelage and extra protection and the state was in fact protecting their freedom by giving them the option to sign pre-authorised contracts. Yeah, and in the book you discussed this dynamic beautifully and when you do, you write about what Partha Chattarji I believe is called the Rule of Colonial Difference and can you explain Chattarji's notion of the rule of colonial difference and how it helped justify the state's involvement in the regulation of the movement of indentured Indians at the time? Certainly. You know, in my understanding, Chattarji offers this notion of the rule of colonial difference to address a persistent problem with the contradictions between liberalism and colonialism. On the one hand, you have the liberal theory espousing the universal equality of all humans or certainly of all men since women often were not included. On the other hand, you have the patent formal legal inequality between men. So historically we have endless instances from colonial formations across the world where what our called universal principles are suspended. And Chattarji calls this operation where the colonial situation requires an exception to what are otherwise held to be university valid principles, the rule of colonial difference. I have to say it's a bit of a mind-man-bender and a paradox because it makes no logical sense. But the way it works is that you proclaim the non-universal applicability of universal principles. So if it seems confusing, it's because it is. You know, it's not that you're not understanding the matter. This is sort of the historical situation. History rarely is logical or how things unfold, you know, and fortunately or unfortunately do not follow logic. So I want to actually go back to the smarter of how it came into play for the initial regulations. In that case, legal minds at the time were of the view that while on the one hand, Indians were British subjects and thus eligible for the same treatment as other British subjects, on the other hand, colonial societies they argued could not be governed by the same rules since the so-called natives were at a different stage of civilization. So they needed to make an exception to the universal principle to address the difference of the colony. But paradoxically, the point of the exception was sort of to affirm the principle of free movement. So their logic and justification is very convoluted because they are grasping here at straws, right? And at any rate, even though they're grasping at straws, they did put in place a system and justified it as a temporary exception to both the principle of free movement and a temporary exception to how sovereignty was thought. So in both cases, it was seen as just necessitated by the peculiar circumstances, but certainly not university valid. Yeah, so when I was reading your book, I actually kept on thinking like how much of this made sense at the time and how much of this didn't make sense at the time either. There must have been people who also saw that at the time, right? Yes, they were. But in overarching terms, all the people who had the power to make the decision were interested in ensuring that these plantation economy survived, right? Because they were interested in ensuring that Britain survived. Where are you going to get the sugar for your working class, which substantially increased the caloric intake of workers in Britain? If you don't have your sugar plantation colony. Yeah, ensuring that these plantation economy survived and also ensuring that the principle of free movement for white European survived. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and to have these plantation economy survive, the British Empire needed cheap labor, which was provided by indentured Indians. And their labor and movement had to be defined as "free". They could distinguish it all from slavery, which was just abolished. So in your book, you talk about how the labor contract actually played a crucial role in tying this all together. Could you maybe talk about the labor contract and the role that it played in defining the movement of indentured Indians at the time as "free"? Sure. So the contract is the state authorized contract is at the heart of the regulation of indenture because the contract is what was thought to mark the difference between freedom and slavery. So if there is one characteristic of indenture, it is the contract. So how it actually worked is that the state in conjunction with representatives for planters devised a contract that specified the terms of labor, of wages, the penalties for breach of contract, that actually, by the way, incorporated corporate punishment and criminalization. So they came up with this contract and then potential immigrants were required to agree to the contract. Okay. In theory, I guess they could disagree. So you could either consent or not consent to the contract. But what it didn't include is the ability to bargain over the terms of a contract. So this contract did not have that. And in fact, the regime lives on in our present moment, right? Especially with seasonal workers, guest workers, etc. Every individual is not making an individual contract. You're presented with a standard contract, which you can either accept or reject. So what I found interesting while I was doing this research is that if you read the archival material alongside reading the work of legal historians and legal theorists, I found a very strange picture emerging. So legal historians and legal theorists have noted that there was a very profound shift in the 19th century with respect to contract. The first thing they note is that consent becomes the most fundamental aspect of a valid contract. And the importance of other aspects of a contract like there's no fraud, there's no duress and most importantly that the contract is fair and have what is called in legal parlance equality of exchange. These other features tended to recede. So in the past, if a contract didn't meet all these conditions, you know, with consent being just one of them, you could render the contract invalid. But in the 19th century, you found that consent became the only issue of concern. So even if you consented to a patentally unfair contract, since you had consented, that was the end of the story. So especially concern with fairness completely receded and was seen as paternalistic, you know. So we don't need to judge the fairness of a contract. We allow a well-positioned to judge it for themselves. Or that is how it was justified. And there's been a lot of debate on how and why and when this occurred. And people have offered different explanations like it's the rise of industrialization, it's the growth of, you know, more widespread markets. And that contract law became more sympathetic to the commercial classes or to capitalists. But by my account, the debates over freedom provoked by slavery, by the abolition of slavery, I think might provide the best explanation for the reconfiguration of freedom in a recalibrated labor contract. I know that's quite dense, but I guess the main thing is that consent as the chief element of freedom gets congealed at this time. Yeah, I liked also in your answer there was this moment where you linked to present-day examples of this. And one thing is that the way you write about consent, but also how you spoke about it now, really reminds me, first of all, of how we sometimes deal with consent in the social sciences, like how we deal with participants basically. But it also reminds me of how we're made to accept the terms and conditions of basically all the technologies that we use, which we are dependent on as well. But we have to consent to the terms and conditions. And I thought it was maybe somehow similar. I think there are really good points. You know, because of this work that I've done, I think both the examples you use deserve greater scrutiny. So a lot of consent forms for social science research have become just a procedure. Right. And that is exactly how consent worked with indenture. It was just staging of free will. You know, it is just literally a drama. And I think we're doing the same thing oftentimes with our research protocols where keep in mind, you know, I think the logic is also the same. So if in the 19th century the British Empire was trying to find a cover for, you know, is this free or is this slavery. Right now, universities are ensuring that they are protected from legal lawsuits. Right. Exactly. So it isn't about concern for the participants. It's about concern for oneself and the risks that that poses. And in the matter of having to consent to all these thousands of apps, etc. You know, there is no option, right? You have to consent because otherwise you can't use your phone. Yes. And then you can't use your phone. whether endangered Indians consented to these contracts or not, as kind of a hallmark of whether their labor was 'free'. So how did these initial efforts that were in a way still modest lead up to what would be the second half of the 19th century transform into this huge bureaucracy of medical workers, health inspectors, police officers, recruitment agents and others that will monitor every aspect of the movement of these Indians? Yes indeed, you know, we see the formation of an absolutely massive huge bureaucracy. It didn't of course come into being in one, you know, in one wave or one fell swoop, but developed incrementally with more and more legislation, rules, regulations and increasing number of officials and explosion in the number of reports and records that what we're supposed to produce. And what you see when you look at this archive is the formation of a massive modern bureaucracy. I mean, it rivals any bureaucracy we have now, you know, people are conducting transcontinental correspondence about every small point, they're constantly refining the rules. So, you know, in the beginning, the first legislation passed was like seven pages, some 20 years later the legislation had expanded to and it's rules were something like 40 pages, another 10 years later, it's become 150 pages. And this is just the legislation, then you have, you know, all the small rule books, etc, which is going to hundreds and hundreds of pages. And it is impossible for anyone to follow all those rules. It's kind of, you see also the insanity of a bureaucracy, because no one could actually follow all those rules. And so often the rules were not followed, then you'd have to have an inquiry, then you have more rules. So if you started with 10 rules, at the end of the inquiry, you had 40 rules, you know, more and more minute monitoring of every single aspect. So, I think that the detail of the system, I think I leave it there because the detail is excruciated. Yeah, and we refer people to the book to get into all of that detail in particular chapter two. Yeah, I mean, in some regards, it's also highly entertaining. And they're taking when you spend too much time in the archives, right. And maybe to get back to one of the starting points of this conversation, namely the importance of historical perspectives, could you maybe speak to how all of what we've been speaking of so far. So the regulation of quote unquote free movement speaks to the sort of Eurocentric view that in the 19th century mobility was largely unregulated. You know, that view of that the 19th century was a period of unregulated mobility, I think is exactly that it's Eurocentric. So the situation in Europe is thought to describe a universal global situation. If we turn to our attention outside Europe, we find something different. We find, as I mentioned a moment ago, this huge modern apparatus in bureaucracy for regulating. But with the distinction in contrast to our present moment, the distinction is that the regulation was directed at facilitating not restricting or prohibiting or preventing the movement. And that distinction is an important one. Yeah, and that's exactly what the second part of your book is about because so far we've talked about the emergence of state control over indentured Indians only with the aim of facilitating this migration. But at the same time, most Indian migration occurred outside of indentured because there were traders and merchants and many others. So at the time in the 19th century, most Indian migration still occurred outside of the purview of the state. And then you show in the book that they shifted in the early 20th century, especially when white settler colonies started to try to prohibit and not facilitate Indian migration. And they used a whole range of inventive legal schemes and technologies that you talk about and that we loved reading about. So I guess in the second part of the conversation will focus on this shift. Could you talk about how and why the shift was set in motion in white settler colonies. And I guess, especially in the context of an increase of migration of Indians and these negatively racialized colonial Indians who were not indentured and so who could not be regulated under the indentured system. Yes, I mean in part I will reiterate what you you know just explain. Thank you for that. So the state regulated at least in terms of Indian migration only the movement of indentured labor initially just to the former slave colonies. Towards the later 19th century, you know, it was used as a system to provide labor to or kinds of other colonies so not to replace or displace former slaves, but simply as a source of labor. So it just became a generalized phenomena for dispersing labor around around empire or redistributing it. But the regulation only related to those who signed a contract for manual labor unskilled manual labor prior to their departure to certain destinations. So if you for instance signed a contract for skillet labor for instance as a security card, let's say in penang or in Hong Kong, you didn't come under the regulation. And in some ways it's all more or most more surprising right because most of Indian migration occurred outside of state, the purview of the state. So in that regard perhaps the Eurocentric folks are right that 19th century migration occurred outside of state control. So at any rate, you know, the regulations did not encompass all movement. As a consequence, you know, especially with changes in shipping and often in fact with soldiers stationed or the security guards etc. Stations in places like Hong Kong, Singapore or wherever. Thought well hey, there's a ship going to Canada, I'll go there, you know. And they're arriving in places like Canada or the US or in fact sites like Argentina. You know what these more free free migrants as I call them, what they provoked in all these disparate white settler colonies from Australia to Canada is profound racial anxieties. So now the project was, how do we stop this? If in the 19th century the project was, how do we facilitate it? Now a different question came to the four, which is prevention. Yeah, and in a moment we'll really dive into this in the context of Canada. But for now, I just wanted to ask you about something that keeps on coming back in your book and that I guess I keep on coming back to as well. And it's something that we in a way discussed earlier when we talked about the rule of colonial difference. And it's something that to me seems like the core tension that all these authorities and legal experts were trying to reconcile that they were kind of dealing with when writing these pieces of legislation. And it's the tension that seems vital to understanding how exactly white settler colonies went about restricting Indian migration. And that's the tension between their efforts on the one hand of installing a race based migration regime that would allow white Europeans to move freely throughout empire but would restrict Indians from doing so. And on the other hand, the principle on which at least on paper the empire was based that a theory all British subjects were equal. So the idea that there shall not be in the eyes of the law any distinction of color, origin, race or creed. And this principle that in theory all British subjects were equal was really core to the to the edifice of the British empire. So could you talk about the significance of of this tension in relation to these efforts to start to regulate Indian migrations? Sure. So this tension between the theory of liberal equality and the practice of colonial inequality was being rigorously questioned by all kinds of people. You know, ranging from more reformist, you know, legislatively oriented organizations to revolutionaries. And these different kinds of groups, of course, each had different views and different views under or the way to get rid of this problem. This included the solution of violent overthrow of the British Empire. So in the empire in order to survive, it needed to find a way to thought these different challenges and find a way to not make race based distinctions, particularly in law. So we may know that does not mention race because as you were saying, Neska, because then the edifice of the British empire is going to crumble, which is claiming that all British subjects will be treated without distinction of color, origin, race or creed. So, yeah, it's a massive tension. So in the context of the nation's head world that we live in today, and especially in societies that were formal colonizers, we are actually quite familiar with these forms of undercover racism. And I guess people have called it racism without racist or racist racism. In the context where we live, in the Netherlands, this kind of undercover racism is usually located in time as something that emerged only after the Second World War. You now talk about it as something that actually existed decades earlier. Could you maybe speak about whether these are similar forms of racism and how they maybe relate to each other? Very similar forms. So, you know, I want to say two things here. Firstly, I do think that what we call cultural racism or racism without racist, Balebars, from your mention, is much earlier than the middle of the 20th century. And we can see that very clearly in some of the correspondence and debates that I chart. And there's also no doubt that cultural racism does become the predominant form of racism from the later part of the 20th century. But I think biological racism is never far behind. So in other words, cultural racism is precisely the generalization of disguising biological racism in more palatable or so-called non-racial terms. You know, I think it's hard to hold onto the idea of cultural racism in the face of all the violence we see visited on black and brown bodies. To my mind is just old fashioned biological racism. So now it is also simultaneously more complex with all the overlays of cultural racism. I don't know if that is clear, but I guess essentially what I'm saying is cultural racism is just biological racism dressed up. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] So in your book you discuss these themes by elaborating upon two cases. First you look at the settler colonial state of South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, and the attempts by the South African state to restrict Indian non-indenture migration as part of their political project of instituting and maintaining white supremacy. It's a beautiful chapter, and if listeners would like to learn more about this, we'd like to refer them to chapter three of your book. But for today we would like to focus on the following chapter, chapter four, and in it you look at Canada as you show how the passport was instituted as a key technology to regulate Indian again non-indenture migration to Canada, with the effect of nationalizing migration control along racial lines without race having to be mentioned. So could you set the scene for us for how Canada suggested a system of passports to restrict Indian migration and the response of the government of British India at the time? Sure, I could do that. What was interesting to me when I was doing the research is how even though both Canada and South Africa wanted to prohibit Asian migration, they took very different routes to do so, and that to me demonstrates the contingency of the emergence of the national in migration, or the different ways that it occurred. So I'm happy that we have the opportunity to talk about the Canadian mechanisms in South Africa. What happened in Canada was that in about 1905, 1906 it was noticed that there were about 2000 Indian men residing here, and various people were concerned about this migration due to racial anxieties. And tried to prohibit this migration by circulating a memo to both the Indian authorities and in places like Hong Kong or Singapore, saying that the climate here was not suitable for Indian migrants or that there wasn't sufficient employment, a variety of unconvincing reasons that Indian should not travel here. So this is what happened in 1905, 1906, but this attempt, this memo had very little impact because Indians continued to arrive. And in 1907 then then Prime Minister, then Canadian Prime Minister Wilfred Lourier asked the government of India to implement a passport system, requesting that the government issue a restricted number of passports to Indian seeking to come to Canada. So this is even though he called it a passport system, it was really a quota system for visas, is how we would understand it today. That's the first time we see the appearance of a passport system with respect to Indian migrants. And the government of British India, meanwhile, refused to agree to this passport system, saying that they had no legislative authority to do this, because you'll recall, I think we spoke about this earlier, that the legislation on migration in India related only to indentured migration. So in fact the government had no authority to regulate non-indentured migration. And the government of India also said, if we try to now bring in fresh legislation, there would be a storm of protest, that's what they called it, a storm of protest across India, since it would be evident that it was directed prohibiting entry into the dominions. And there was at that time rising anti-colonial sentiment. But the government of India also said, we understand your racial anxieties, I mean they didn't put it in these ways, they said, "Do I understand your racial anxieties?" So why don't you disguise your restrictions and require other kinds of qualifications like bringing a certain amount of money, so a head tax or requiring certain kind of physical fitness, so why don't you go ahead and do the restriction, just your name matters as race. So given this position of the government of India, how did the Canadian government address the situation then? Well, they took up the government of India's suggestion to impose a head tax, of $200 on each Indian immigrant seeking entry, and they also conducted this huge sort of fat finding mission. They inquired into why people were moving from district authorities in India, to why people were moving from Indians who had moved, let's say, to Hong Kong, why they were coming to Canada, so they conducted a huge fat finding mission. And out of this, they realized that some people were coming from India and some were coming from other colonies, and they came up with the most ingenious, and at the same time, most thinly disguised regulation, called the continuous journey regulation. And it said, regulation specified that passengers could be, oh no, let me be careful here, passengers shall be prohibited landing, unless they come from their country of birth or citizenship by continuous journey, and on through tickets purchased before starting. So what they wanted was a direct voyage from your country of birth or citizenship to Canada. Why this was, you know, with law, you don't have to explain why, right? So this was just a law. And they then pressured the one seam ship company that did operate a passage from India to Canada to stop this passage and to stop selling through tickets to Indians. They simultaneously, you know, of course, if you were coming, if you were Indian and were coming from Hong Kong, or Japan, or Singapore, or anywhere, since you weren't coming from your so-called country of birth or citizenship, then you could be denied entry. So this was their solution to coming up with some mechanism to prohibit Indian migration without naming race. It's called the continuous journey regulation. Yeah, and it's interesting that you just corrected yourself and initially said, "Can instead of shell?" Because in the book you write about how the wording of the continuous journey regulation was actually changed, I believe, from shell to may, with the arrival of a Russian and a Frenchman, who were denied entry upon arrival to Canada. And could you talk a little bit more about this incident? Yeah, sure. I'm glad you read it with such care. So the initial regulation said, "Passenger shall be prohibited entry." And then you had a Russian man and a Frenchman, so these two passengers who had boarded a ship in Japan and had arrived in Canada, and given the regulation, they had to be denied entry. And there was a secret agent who was floating around the harbour. As they do? Yeah, as they do. Indeed, who then wrote to the authorities and said, "I know that the regulation was not supposed to be implemented in what he called an absurd manner." So he found this absurd. So the regulation was reverted to state, "may be prohibited landing." Not "shall be prohibited landing." And the immigration officials were directed as to how to use this may phrase and deny entry to specifically to Indians and let in Europeans. I should also note that even though the continuous journey regulation was implemented, and it essentially prohibited Indians, both from India or from other places to come to Canada, it did provoke huge, vociferous protest and objection from Indians. So it wasn't like Indians couldn't see through what was going on. So there was a lot of contestation going on. And also the Canadian government had this enduring fear that some private entrepreneur would chart a relationship in India and just sail to Canada. And the kind of thing you could do in the early 20th century. So in this context, the Komagata Maro arrived in 1914, a ship. Can you maybe speak to the rival of this ship and the changes that its arrival provoked? Yes, thank you. The Komagata Maro, in fact, fulfilled the fears of the Canadian government. It was a ship hired by an Indian merchant, Gurdeed Singh, in Hong Kong. And it gathered Indian passengers from Hong Kong. It made stops in Japan and in China. And gathered more Indian passengers and then sailed to Vancouver. When it arrived here, it was refused docking in the Vancouver Harbour. However, what is so interesting about this is that the ship, in fact, was just outside the harbour for about two months. And a very, very complex series of legal vaccinations unfolded. It wasn't that the continuous journey regulation could simply be used to deny the passengers landing without any access to the courts. So it's very important to note that the continuous journey regulation, even though it was a regulation, it was absurd, it was fragile, and it could have been challenged and Gurdeed Singh certainly felt it could be challenged. So he was, in fact, challenging the regulation quite overtly. By arriving? By arriving. You know, the story is very, very complex. Unfortunately, we can't get into the details. What this ship provoked was a rapid transformation in the position of the government of India. That had been dismissing Canadian fears of exactly such a thing happening. By saying, "Oh, these are just hypothetical fears. We shouldn't give in to the hypothetical fears of the Canadian government about a direct voyage, etc." So now suddenly both Canada and India had to revisit the issue with kind of fresh eyes, one might say. But this fresh eyes yielded were a number of transformations. So firstly, the government of India had held fast to the idea of the complete freedom of his majesty's subjects to transport themselves from one part of empire to another. With the Canada Maru, this principle, the principle of free movement was abandoned or certainly revised. What we find in the kind of correspondence that went back and forth, and in the eventual acceptance actually of that passport proposal, was that they imported the idea of nationality as they surrogate for a race. So the Indian official said, "It's very important that we have here the appearance of reciprocity." So it has to be a mechanism that can conceal the racial dimensions and in law articulated as something else, and the idea that hit upon is nationality. They also, without justification actually, changed their position, and this is to reiterate the point around free movement, changed their position on whether or not people were allowed to move freely from one part of the empire to another. So instead of what you had until now, which is the regulation of migration in exceptional cases like in Densha, what we find is the introduction of a new logic, which is the regulation of migration in all cases. So you have in 1915 something called the Defence of India Criminal Law Amendment Act that made embarking on a journey from any port in British India, without a passport criminal offense. We should also note that by now the first fall of the poor is underway, so ideas of national security and threats posed by foreigners were very alive. So all this suddenly was making more sense, certainly to officials, that it had six months earlier. So there's a radical transformation at this moment in the logic that's used by the Indian government and by certainly the Canadian authorities to implement a generalized system of migration control. So to my mind, the Kamagata Maru really is a catalytic node in transforming how we think of migration control. And what we get is a state monopoly over migration that you can regulate all forms of movement. Well, there's a lot there. One thing I want to pick up on is that you mentioned that race was codified in the state document through nationality, with nationality doing the work of racial sorting. This race not having to be named explicitly. Yes, the passport emerges as a document that purports to assign a national identity, not a racial identity. You know, since particularly now everybody needs a passport. Everybody's passport looks the same. In fact, all passports have to have similar kinds of information. You can see how this technology has been completely standardized around the globe. Indeed, it has to be standardized, right? Because the passport is addressed to other states. It's not addressed to your own state. So this is a peculiar kind of document. And the way it emerged, at least in this instance, and there are other histories of the passport that we make out. But it certainly is not something that emerges full blown with all nation states sitting around the table and deciding, hey, let's have this regime. It emerges in fits and starts, and now of course is fully standardized. And now I think that early 20th century kind of vision of it in this Canadian case of concealing race, of having it as a reciprocal document in some regards that dream has been achieved now, you know, precisely because everybody has a similar kind of document, except that the document works differently for different people, right? I don't know if you're aware of something called the Henley passport index. I only became recently aware of this. So this is an index compiled by a firm. I haven't been able to figure out what kind of company this is. But this passport, the Henley passport index ranks passports depending on the destinations to which the passport holder can travel without a prior visa. So this Henley passport index, you know, you have here in a nutshell, the ranking of access to mobility for different nationalities. Now, obviously the index is just a numerical tabulation, and it's presented as if it's just a natural feature of the world, you know, just try to tell you the worth of each passport. And my book tries, as you know, to show that it is a natural, and this differential access to mobility that is captured in the Henley passport index, is the outcome of certain choices, made at certain times, and to my mind they have little more or ethical justification. Yeah, that speaks to a broader theme that came up for us when reading the book, because most of the techniques you discuss at length live on. And what does this tell us about our modern system of regulating migration? Well, in my view, it tells us that colonial rule is alive and well, and is being strengthened rather than weakened in the current moment. So I think it's a generalizable condition, that exists in both a swine, metropoles, and a swine colonies. So I'm going to actually use a formulation I articulate in the book, where I say that if the chief characteristic of colonial rule is a set of legal defrensations, which entail differential entitlements and differential treatment for different subjects, then today all states embody a historically-produced colonial dimension, with the citizen migrant distinction, as perhaps the primary access of such differentiation. And I think this citizen migrant differentiation relates in fact not only to international migrants, so-called international migrants, but can also relate to internal migrants in certain sites. This is what we're beginning to see in India today. You know, in subregards, this kind of thinking, I guess we can call it national thinking, which is racial thinking, and it's divisive thinking. And of course, in settler societies like Canada, there is the important issue of indigenous sovereignty, so that complicates the picture even further. In places like Canada and the US, you do have entire pockets, which don't come under the complete sovereignty of the federal state, or the nation state. These are obvious outcomes of colonial rule, but I guess I'm drawing an analogy between what colonial rule was premised on, which is legal differentiation, and different entitlements between people. And I'm saying that that is what we see with the citizen migrant distinction now. It's really, for me, also really important to denaturalize this distinction, and it makes so much sense what you're saying. Basically, I think it really helps us to look differently at what we're seeing today. Yeah. So, so Radhika, are there any final reflections that you would like to share with our listeners? No, I think we've done a very thorough conversation, and I want to thank you for your deep engagement with my work and for this very invigorating conversation. I guess I would say that, you know, I can only kind of summarize my conclusions in this conversation, while what is important is the historical evidence that I provide in the book. In some ways, I think one has to read the book to believe the conclusions. I fully agree, and I would really encourage our listeners to buy the book and to read it. It's a beautiful book. Yeah, they don't even have to buy it. There is a life here. I agree, even better. And for us, like producing this from the Netherlands, I think it's really important to use your work to also rethink the Dutch history and rethink Dutch Empire through the lens of migration law and migration regimes. I think that's really powerful and something that there's a lot of work to be done in that regard. I fully agree. Oh, yeah, there is so much work to be done. And the Dutch Empire, you know, certainly in the 17th century was very key, as you know, to making of international law. But it would be interesting to see some of the later developments, you know. We've already done Stolars work, and they must be other historians who are working on this. Well, if there's any historians listening, drop us a line and let us know if you want to be featured on a future episode. We'd love to learn more about the history of the Dutch Empire. Well, thank you so much, Hadika, for being with us today. It's been a pleasure to read your book and to talk to you about it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Before closing this episode, we would like to thank a few people, collectives and organizations. Be it carrot for the illustrations we use on our social media accounts, Thomas from Dark Roast for the graphic design, Joa's and David and Ellen Aneska for the music, the MCAS had been a part for allowing us to use the space to record most of our interviews, and the VanVolo of Institute and the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of LIDA University, the LIDA University Fund and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for the Financial Supports. If there are any thoughts on this episode you'd like to share with us, please drop us a line.