Philip Harling’s Managing Mobility is an insightful, fascinating study of the British imperial state’s mid-nineteenth-century efforts to regulate and structure migration patterns throughout the empire. The book argues that an “ideological framework” shaped these efforts—that they reflected and aimed to enact particular visions of labor, land use, order, and civilization (12). Nineteenth-century European emigration is often viewed as a spontaneous phenomenon guided by impersonal forces and atomized decision-making. In brilliant contrast, Harling shows how imperial migration policy functioned as “social engineering” to shape the development of colonial societies (9).

Focused on the 1840s and 1850s, the book cuts across regional field boundaries and is expansive geographically. Chapter 1 focuses on Famine-era emigration from Ireland. Acknowledging that much of this migration was unassisted by government, Harling nonetheless illuminates the ideological roots (providential and economic) of nonintervention—“passivity in the righteous garb of theodicy,” as he writes (49). In so doing, he argues convincingly that Famine migration served a broader, state-supported effort to transform Irish land use and displace subsistence farming in favor of export agriculture. Chapter 2 shifts to convict transportation and assisted migration to Australia. After examining both transportation’s essential labor function and the rise of anti-convict sentiment, Harling demonstrates that free migration from Britain to Australia was hardly “spontaneous or laissez-faire” (61). Instead, it depended on state subsidies funded through the sale of crown lands. In turn, it served a particular vision of colonial order aimed at limiting dispersion and encouraging wage labor.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Caribbean and link migration policy to wide-ranging conflicts over emancipation and free trade. Chapter 3 examines the indentured migration of “liberated Africans” from Sierra Leone to the West Indies. Emphasizing the unsteady, “improvisatory” nature of this effort along with high rates of shipboard mortality, the book lays bare the complex linkage between Britain’s anti-slave trade suppression policy (through which the Royal Navy captured liberated Africans from foreign slave ships) and the intensification of race-based labor control in the post-slavery empire (107). This analysis continues in chapter 4, which examines early efforts to recruit Indian indentured laborers to work on Caribbean sugar plantations. We start with a ship, the Glentanner, once used to transport liberated Africans, now carrying Indian migrants to British Guiana. But instead of taking for granted the rise of the Indian indenture system, Harling reveals a contingent early history. The creation of an elaborate regulatory bureaucracy helped legitimize indenture, distinguishing it from slavery. But at the same time, inconsistency, disease, and resistance fractured both imperial aims and the experience of indenture during the 1840s.

Chapters 5 and 6 move forward in time through the 1850s. Chapter 5 returns to Australia to examine subsidized assisted migration alongside extensive unassisted migrations, overseas and internal, spurred on by the explosive growth of gold mining. Scrutinizing gendered conceptions of social order, Harling argues that the Colonial Office used the assisted migration of women (particularly from Ireland) to balance the largely male flow of mining labor. Then, attending to simultaneous efforts to encourage European and limit Asian migration, the chapter locates the origins of a “White Australia” policy in midcentury debates over labor and social immorality (211–216). Chapter 6, by contrast, tracks the economic triumph of Indian indenture in the Caribbean and the hardening of a very different vision of race and labor there.

These case studies offer a wealth of detail involving ideological conflict and experience in historically different contexts. But taken together, they also contribute to a set of larger, cross-cutting interventions. First, the book reinterprets the mid-Victorian liberal state and the complex relation between free trade and imperial expansion. Harling explores the ramifications of free-trade ideals, and of economic liberalism as policy, on frequently violent projects of imperial reordering. We see this in Famine migration and depopulation in Ireland; in recruitment and subsidies for long-distance migration to Australia; and in the use of indenture to lower wages as free trade put pressure on the post-slavery sugar economy. Harling sees state efforts to remake land and labor markets through migration as stemming from (not as a betrayal of) a more general midcentury commitment “to create an ostensibly ‘natural’ global economic order” (16). In its turn to free trade, the “minimal state” was simultaneously an interventionist state that “sought to mobilise and direct labour to where it was (supposedly) most needed.” (16).

Second, the book reveals a set of global connections across regions typically studied separately. In part, this involves recovering the global perspectives of historical actors. The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, for instance, oversaw migration policy for Australia, South Africa, and the Caribbean simultaneously. The book’s multisited approach makes this administrative structure visible. In addition, it reveals common themes of potential interest to historians of different parts of the empire. The mirror image of migration and land in imperial thinking on Ireland and Australia, or the similar association between smallholding and primitiveness projected onto Ireland and the Caribbean—linkages like these across the book’s chapters may inspire conversation across fields.

Third, the book’s analysis of migration offers a new way of understanding the “bifurcation” of the empire along racial lines (21). The structural alternation between Australia and the Caribbean in chapters 2–6 amplifies this point. Assisted emigration and restrictions on non-European labor contributed to making Australia a white settlement entitled to responsible self-government. In the Caribbean, where political rights were not extended after abolition, state-regulated migration reinforced the class structure of plantation society, creating “Black and Brown zones of ongoing coercion and subordination” (260). Divergent migration policies help us understand, in other words, the racialized division of freedom in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Finally, Managing Mobility is a model for how we might study the history of migration not as a subtopic—separate from other histories—but rather as a constituent part of broader forms of historical development. In this regard, the book will inspire historians of the British Empire and beyond, for its approach is relevant to all those interested in how migration helped make labor and trade markets, notions of race and gender, and ideas of social and global order.