Managing Mobility

Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone. Managing Mobility examines how the British imperial state facilitated the mass migration of its impoverished subjects as labor assets, shipped across vast expanses of ocean to contribute to the economy of the Empire. Philip Harling analyzes the ideological framework which underpinned these interventions and discusses the journeys taken by emigrants across four continents, considering the varied outcomes of these significant projects of social engineering. In doing so, this study demonstrates how the British imperial state harnessed migration to ensure and maintain a racialised global economic order in the decades after Emancipation.

Introduction; 1. 'An awful Remedy': Irish Famine migration and Laissez-Faire theodicy, 1846-1853; 2. 'A long Train of moral Evils': the end of convict transportation and the rise of assisted emigration to Australia, c. 1837-1853; 3. 'The most perfect skeletons I ever saw': 'liberated' African immigration and the free trade crisis in the British Caribbean, 1838-50; 4. 'A stranger to the facts will hardly credit the Negligence': Indian indentured immigration to the British Caribbean I. 1838-52; 5. 'Complaints are still made of inadequate clothing': administrative muddle, Indian casualties, and the fortunes of William Humphreys; 6. 'A new Epoch in the History of the experiment': Indian indentured immigration to the British Caribbean II. 1852-70; Conclusion: Migration, the imperial State, and the British Empire in 1860; Index.