Afterword: The Politics of Migration and the End of Empire

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

“…3 Examining this “punitive mobility” through a “focus on slaves and ordinary people on the move disrupts our global northern-centric understanding of migration as largely a European phenomenon, usually with a ‘start’ and ‘end’ point”, and also demonstrates “the importance of coercion in effecting the journeys that networked distant parts of the world, and the labor exploitation that ultimately underpinned global expansion” (De Vito et al, 2018: 2, 1). Of “the 36,598 white inhabitants of New South Wales at the time of the 1828 census”, for instance, over 40% (15,728) were convicts (Harper and Constantine, 2010: 49); and Khosian, Māori, and Aboriginal people were also drawn into the convict system (Harman, 2012). Assisted passage and supported migration schemes helped change the demographics of Australia, as did the banning of transportation in New South Wales (1840), Victoria (1850), Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania (1852), and Western Australia (1868) (Harper, 2001: 51).…”

“…Following the abolition of slavery, the southern colonies became the setting for a staggering amount of indentured labour migration, with Indians forming 85% of the total overseas indentured immigration in the British Empire between 1834–1920 (Harper and Constantine, 2010: 150). As Anderson has shown, “Bay of Bengal mobility far outnumbered other contemporary migrations, including the better known European flows to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand” (2016a: 182).…”

“…“Blackbirding” and kidnapping became a common feature of the South Pacific due to the spread of plantation economies in Australia (Northrup, 2001: 94). The sugar cane industry in the colony of Queensland alone was the site of the indentured labour of “around sixty thousand men, women, and children from diverse islands in the southwestern Pacific” (Banivanua Mar, 2007: 1), while in Fiji plantation owners “brought in 26,460 Melanesians and Micronesians between 1863 and 1911” (Harper and Constantine, 2010: 154; see also Graves, 1986 on indentured labour migration in New Zealand and the western Pacific). Although revisionist studies of indentured labour in the long nineteenth century have aimed to recognize the agency of labourers and their active participation in cosmopolitan trade networks, Banivanua Mar nonetheless stresses the fact that despite “all the exercise of agency on the part of Islanders, the labor trade was not, as many have written, a benign labor migration.…”