Neilesh Bose, ed, South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Global Lives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 250 pp.
This book attempts to situate a richly textured analysis of specific systems, pathways and individual experiences of migration spiralling out of South Asia within a global history framework. Bose’s introduction champions the necessity of mapping the inevitable entanglement and co-constitution of global and local/regional histories. Bose argues that the focus on South Asia can be particularly illuminating for such a project, given the significance of indentured labour migration in the making of the modern world. The essays in this collection are organised into three thematic sections, which discuss indenture and its afterlives, legal regimes governing migration and historical biography, respectively.
In the first section, essays by Vahed and Wright introduce new perspectives on the abolition of indenture and its legacy. Vahed focuses on the role played by Henry Polak—a Jewish lawyer and close associate of Gandhi—in advocating for the end of indenture in moderate and middle-class political circles in India. The essay convincingly demonstrates how the end of indenture in Natal ultimately served different interests of divergent groups, namely moderate Indian nationalists and white settlers in Natal. Yet, by focusing on Polak, Vahed ultimately loses the opportunity to read the abolition of indenture as a moment of imbrication of nationalist history, imperial place-making and global labour histories. Wright’s essay, in contrast, is particularly effective in illustrating how imperial legacies and post-imperial economies can intersect to exert control over migrant labourers. She demonstrates how the dominance of South Asian labour in the Gulf oil fields, instead of being a natural manifestation of global wage differentials, is historically produced. Unionised Khaliji labour was replaced by a more docile and disposable South Asian labour force using bureaucratic regimes of emigration originally created to extract and manage indentured labour flows. While Wright illustrates how oppressive labour practices are enabled by ‘free’ or consensual contracts, Kumar’s essay focuses on the detailed legal and bureaucratic apparatus for recruiting indentured labourers to the sugar colonies to make the opposite claim. He argues that the ‘consent’ promised in the indentured contract had substantive implications, allowing indentured labourers some freedom to negotiate the conditions of work (e.g., the diet provided onboard ships) as well as the freedom to break a contract, albeit at the cost of a short period of imprisonment.- Reproduced

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646231203729