Review of Nandita Sharma's Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.

Here's my review of Nandita Sharma's Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. This was really a perfect follow-up to the Mamdani that I just read. Where Mamdani tracks the distinction between 'settler' and 'native', Sharma extends the analysis to the 'migrant' and the 'native'. A real nice paring. Interesting that they were both published in the same year! What I like about this book the most was the way in which it captured an entire arc of history that began with slavery and, frankly, still hasn't ended. This kind of contextualizing of the present is incredibly useful in orienting things, and I'm super grateful that I read this book, actually. A good way to start the year. Anyway, here's the review proper:

If politics everywhere is now marked by ascendant 'nativisms' and outpourings of aggression directed at migrants and 'foreigners', Nandita Sharma's Home Rule has got to be among the clearest maps of how we got here. She begins with a simple observation: for the longest time, empires (think: England, France, the Ottomans) would do everything they could to gobble up populations so as to engorge themselves with the power that sheer numbers of people would bring in tow. To have people - tax payers, soldiers, laborers - just was to have power. But with the dissolution of empires and coalescence of the global regime of nation-states, never has more energy been spent on keeping flows of populations... if not exactly out, then at least rigorously and sometimes even murderously controlled. This reversal - in fact epochal in consequence - has been the tectonic propellant of nearly every major event in post-war history, and to live in the present is to live in the tributary of these developments.

Yet not discontinuity but rather continuity in history is what Sharma is everywhere keen to highlight. For even before the end of empires, the abolition of slavery in the 19th century threatened to turn into a crisis of labor: without slaves, who would tend the fields? In response were the first budding policies of immigration control, used in novel fashion to regulate movement within empires, which, up until then, allowed free passage among subject states. Instituting, in place of slavery, a 'coolie system' of almost equally indentured albeit formally 'voluntary' labor, this near forgotten episode of world-spanning drudgery would play the vanishing stepping stone on the way to a globe carved up by the hardened borders of nation-states. With the end of imperialism, so too came the end of coolieism, but which left behind, like a dark sediment, the apparatuses of control whose use has only ever accelerated since. From slavery to the present day then, has the same problematic of labor governed the behavior of states in a way in which we have still to contend.

But this alone is the prelude to the real story told within, which is that of the nationalization of sovereignty. That is, of the way in which states, casting around for a solution to the 'problem' of the abolition of slavery and cooliesm, hit upon - what else? - 'the separation of natives and migrants'. By codifying and institutionalizing a distinction between 'people of a place' - tied to distinct units of territory - and 'people out of place', the native/migrant distinction has been used as a cudgel ever since to discipline labor on behalf of capital. As an extension of the colonial strategy of 'divide and conquer', no longer imperialism but capitalism itself rules by this basis. With chapters covering key moments in the history of this codification, Home Rule works to reshape the telling of world history itself: from the institution of the coolie system in Mauritius in 1835, to British imperial labor anxiety over the Indian Rebellion of 1857, up until and beyond the establishment of Bretton Woods and the UN after WWII, each of these episodes and more are treated in a grand recounting of how we arrived exactly here.

Iconoclastic in tenor, Sharma's wielding of the native/migrant distinction as the prism through which history is told also allows her to slay some of the more sacred cows of left historiography. In her sights are celebrations of postcolonial nationalisms, which, far from guaranteeing freedom in the wake of imperialism, have instead worked to contain decolonial energies. By striving for equal standing among a system of inherently discriminatory nation-states, for Sharma, postcolonialism has been nothing but the blunting of decolonialism. Equally targeted are theories of 'neoimperialism', which, by missing the distinctiveness of the nation-state system, have worked to entrench the duality of native and migrant in ways detrimental to all. Rich in both arguments and facts (and I've really underplayed here just how much data Sharma brings to the table: there are practically continent-by-continent analyses here that are truly exhaustive if not exhausting in scope), this is one of those books that, by unflinchingly insisting on seeing our world as it is, illuminates just how much of it we have yet to win.