Introduction

Summary

Managing Mobility tells the story of the British imperial state’s involvement in the huge mid nineteenth-century migrations around the burgeoning British Empire. These migrations involved the ostensibly minimal mid Victorian imperial state in big social-engineering projects that had deeply ambivalent moral consequences. Irish Famine emigration implicated that state in mass death while showing its commitment to convert the Irish countryside from a subsistence economy of peasants and potatoes to an export economy of cattle and sheep. The transition from convict to assisted emigration showed the imperial government’s new commitment to transforming Australia from a set of penal colonies to conspicuously moral colonies of free white settlers. The emigration of ‘freed’ enslaved people from West Africa and indentured workers from India to Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana showed the British imperial state’s commitment to saving plantation society in the British Caribbean from the twin threats posed by slave emancipation and free trade in sugar. The social-engineering projects examined in Managing Mobility provide a novel way to understand the most important story about the British Empire in the mid nineteenth century: its bifurcation into a white zone of growing freedom and autonomy and a Black and Brown zone of ongoing coercion and subordination.