Alien Acts in the Age of Emancipation: Mobility Control and Executive Power in the British Caribbean, 1820s–1830s
Keywords:
revolutionary, legislatures, alien acts, migration controls, increasingly, examinesAbstract
In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.
References
1
Joseph Planta, Foreign Office, to Robert Wilmot-Horton, Colonial Office, 24 and 30 May 1825, The National Archives of the UK, Kew (hereafter TNA), Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 318/99; Wilmot-Horton to Planta, 3 June and 6 July 1825, TNA, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 27/345; Minute of Mr Stephen on power of Governors of Trinidad and St Lucia to remove aliens from those Islands, 6 Jan. 1826, TNA, CO 137/176, fols. 154r–v; Christophe de Chabrol-Crouzol, Minister of the Navy, to Maxence de Damas, Foreign Minister, 17 Mar. 1826, Archives des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve (hereafter AAE), Mémoires et Documents (hereafter MD), Amérique, vol. 61, fols. 35r, 120r–v; Note, H. Taylor, West India department [ca. 1827], TNA, CO 318/103.
2
John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s–1820s,” Past & Present 255 (2022): 189–231.
3
See the early regulations in Jamaica: 32 Geo. III, c. 34 (1791); 34 Geo III, c. 8 (1793), in The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2 (St. Jago de la Vega: Alexander Aikman, 1802), 659; vol. 3 (Jamaica: Alexander Aikman, 1811), 58; Assembly of Jamaica, 6 Dec. 1791; 28 Feb. and 6 Mar. 1792, in Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica [hereafter JAJ], vol. 9 (Jamaica: Alexander Aikman, 1805), 50, 82, 85; Dominica: “An Act to prevent the residence of his Majesty’s enemies in this Island” (1793), TNA, CO 73/10; Antigua: “An Act to restrain the abode or residence of aliens” (1794), TNA, CO 8/21, fols. 109–11; Bahamas: “An Act to Prohibit the Selling, Purchasing, Hiring or Employing, of Certain Foreign Slaves” (1795), in Acts of Assembly of the Bahama Islands, vol. 1 (Nassau: Eve and Owen, 1801), 41–46; Saint Vincent: Alien Act, Saint Vincent, 28 July 1797, in The Laws of the Island of St. Vincent and Its Dependencies (England: B. Partridge, 1811), 296.
4
See e.g. Trinidad: Proclamation by Governor Hislop, 1 Aug. 1803, TNA, CO 295/7, fol. 11; Grenada: Proclamation by Governor Home, 29 Jan. 1793, National Archives of Grenada, Saint George’s, EAP295/1/2, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP295-1-2-2.
5
Elizabeth Sparrow, “The Alien Office, 1792–1806,” The Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (1990): 361–84; Caitlin Anderson, “Britons abroad, Aliens at home: Nationality Law and Policy in Britain, 1815–1870” (Cambridge University D.Phil. thesis, 2004), ch. 1.
6
Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 27–55; Frederick Cooper, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 45–75; René Koekkoek, The Citizenship Experiment: Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
7
Caitlin Anderson, “Old Subjects, New Subjects and Non-Subjects: Silences and Subjecthood in Fédon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795–96,” in War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830, ed. Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt, and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), 201–217; Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World.”
8
J.R. Dinwiddy, “The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation under the Alien Act, 1793–1826,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41, no. 104 (1968): 206–210.
9
John Jeremie, Chief Justice, to Governor Lorenzo Moore, 8 Nov. 1827, TNA, CO 253/23.
10
Alien Act, Barbados, 29 June 1819, CO 28/95, fols. 171r–172r; “An Act for securing the Peace and Tranquillity of the Virgin Islands” (s.d.), TNA, CO 239/18; this act was referred to by Charles Lloyd to Woodcock, Provost-Marshall, Virgin Islands, 15 July 1827, TNA, CO 239/20.
11
George Canning, Foreign Secretary, to Jules de Polignac, French Ambassador, 1825, AAE, MD, Amérique, vol. 61; Robert Wilmot-Horton to Joseph Planta, 6 July 1825, TNA, FO 27/345; Jeremie to Moore, 8 Nov. 1827, TNA, CO 253/23.
12
See, for overviews, Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, ed. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alison Bashford and Jane McAdam, “The Right to Asylum: Britain’s 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law,” Law and History Review 32, no. 2 (2014): 309–50; Daniela L. Caglioti, War and Citizenship: Enemy Aliens and National Belonging from the French Revolution to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Hardeep Dhillon, “The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law,” Law and History Review 41, no. 1 (2023): 1–42.
13
On the importance of empire in alien legislation before the First World War, see Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist, “The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 3 (2012): 409–37.
14
On the history of British subjecthood, see John W. Salmond, “Citizenship and Allegiance,” The Law Quarterly Review 17 (1901): 270–86, and 18 (1902): 49–63; Polly J. Price, “Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin’s Case (1608),” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9, no. 1 (1997): 73–145; Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000); Keechang Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rieko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 2003); Anderson, “Britons abroad”; Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Amanda Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
15
Renaud Morieux, The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3–10, 30–76; Clare Anderson, Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 100–132; Jan C. Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie, “Introduction,” in Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830, ed. Jansen and McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 19–26.
16
Taranqini Sriraman, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xxvii; Jan C. Jansen, “Registration and Deportation: Refugees, Regimes of Proof, and the Law in Jamaica, 1791–1828,” in Jansen and McKenzie, Mobility and Coercion, 173–93.
17
39 Geo. III, c. 29 and c. 30, passed on 14 Mar. 1799, in The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 511.
18
Alien Act, Saint Vincent, 28 July 1797, in The Laws of the Island of St. Vincent, 296.
19
Jan C. Jansen, “Grenzfälle: Perspektiven der neuzeitlichen Im-/Mobilitätsgeschichte,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 64 (2024): 26–29.
20
For overviews, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Identification: Genèse d’un travail d’État, ed. Gérard Noiriel (Paris: Belin, 2007).
