Policing mobility through protection: Social knowledge and legal practices in the 19th-century British Empire

Abgeschlossenes Forschungsprojekt

This project studied how the social and administrative framework of ‘protection’ provided the historical site for the development and implementation of legal practices aimed at making the mobility and circulation of indentured labourers and Indigenous peoples governable and profitable for the British colonial state. Their mobility, in fact, was not to be halted but instead regulated by law, and thereby divested of any disorderly feature or criminal potential. From this perspective, protection was intimately connected with policing, which, from the early 19th century onward, was increasingly understood as a crime-prevention activity. The language of protection also offered a justification for the acquisition of social knowledge about these potentially troublesome imperial subjects; data collection and intelligence gathering provided, in turn, the investigatory work preliminary to the outlining of social policies and the passing of legal measures.

The framework of protection was wide enough to include individual legal actors who embraced a rhetoric of protection and the administrative departments officially tasked with the implementation of protective policies. By combining the approaches of legal and biographical history, this project analysed some crucial figures who performed protective roles in Britain’s Australian colonies in the early 19th century. The research also focused on the least studied type of protective office, which was also the most strongly tied to the government purpose of containing and regulating mobility: the Protectorates of Chinese Immigrants. These were established mid-century in Hong Kong and the Australian colony of Victoria, and subsequently opened across the Straits Settlements, starting with the Singapore Chinese Protectorate in 1877.

This project analysed the interrelation between the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the equally self-arrogated imperial duty to police and govern the mobility of subjects perceived as potential security threats to the order of colonial societies. It therefore looked at, among other aspects, debates around the necessity to recognise Indigenous peoples as entitled to the legal status of British subjects and thus subject to English law; at ordinances and laws regulating the movement and employment of indentured labourers; and at the criminalisation of supposedly ‘habitual’ lawbreakers by the colonial state.

Research published within the context of this project include:

Journal Articles

Contributions to Collected Editions