The colonial migration state

Abstract

This article sheds new light on the historical roots of contemporary migration politics by introducing the notion of the colonial migration state. Bringing together research on colonial population politics and the political science literature on the ‘migration state,’ we compare modes of migration management in three distinct cases of colonialism – settler colonialism in Algeria, protectorate colonialism in Egypt, and corporate colonialism in Saudi Arabia. We show that migration management in these three colonial spaces operated according to similar hierarchically-structured logics of economic extraction and legal-political differentiation. At the same time, these produced different local migration regimes based on variations in modalities of colonial rule, imperial economic interests, and pre-existing local institutions. Through a careful empirical exploration of migration and mobility practices in colonial peripheries, we contribute both to the global history of colonialism and empires, and to more recent work that rethinks the ‘migration state’ concept and its application to contexts across the Global South. We draw attention to the relationship between historical and contemporary forms of hierarchically structured regimes of mobility management, including the enduring importance of racial and religious categories as significant markers of differentiation in global migration, and suggest ways in which contemporary mobility regimes intersect with larger structures of economic extraction and socio-legal differentiation.