Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System

Abstract

From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal governance through which racialized life came to be constituted via convention and statute.

Persistence of Practice in Law's Parwana and Palm Leaf Empire

“…As clerks filled in the blank spaces in those forms, information about pass holders was simultaneously put in registers, complete with cross-indexing and racialized descriptors. 42 Fingerprints, photographs, and tattoos only intensified the work of registration and the pretensions to command labor that the registers and passes contained. 43 The ambitions in law's paper empire may never have been fully achieved.…”