This dissertation is composed of conversations with Sudanese male and female migrants in Lebanon and with returnees and their families in Sudan about their migratory lives and labor. The migrants convey an intergenerational experience of increased precarity and an idea of a future that has become increasingly out of reach. Informed by this multi-sited fieldwork, the dissertation examines the relationship between migrants’ life-making, through friendship, kinship, political alliances and desires of living, and the material demands of livelihood that keep migrants bound to their families and political demands back home. In Lebanon, migrant workers are not allowed to marry, have children, or to organize politically. And yet, generations of Sudanese migrant workers have built communities of kin, organized with other groups for rights and recognition – both in Sudan and transnationally – and formed mutual aid economies through which they have survived crises, wars, structural violence and racism. This apparent split between legal and socioeconomic belonging articulates through Sudanese migrants’ ambiguous political status as workers without labor rights in Lebanon, and as expat-citizens who come from marginalized subsistence farming communities in Sudan. I show how a tension between these subject positions manifested during Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019-20, when migrants organized a mass movement calling for their citizen “right of return”. Following in the footsteps of migrants who returned from Lebanon to Sudan in 2020, in the midst of political and economic transformations in both countries, I argue that their return interrupted the narrative of migration as a male becoming and a journey forward, and broke expectations of what migration could provide; even as new relations emerged amid this crisis.

Circular mobility to settlement; casual laborer to national worker; citizen back to migrant. This dissertation examines the history of Singapore’s port and the everyday life of its migrant workers as the city moved from British imperial port integrated into the region of Malaya to inexplicable city-nation-state. Port workers’ everyday lives were structured by the flows of migration and capital around the Indian Ocean that underpinned the British empire, defined the relationship between port worker and labor contractor, and produced ethnicized urban and social life. As an imperial port, Singapore developed thick historical connections with other British colonial ports. Chinese and Indian capital knitted together Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bombay and made them the hubs of their respective regions reliant on a constant supply of migrant labor. Previously connected and functionally similar, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bombay began to diverge in the 1950s as the post-war trends of decolonization, the Cold War, and containerization changed their importance as models of Asian urbanism. These trends reshaped working practices, composition of worker gangs, and the urban fabric of the Singapore port to co-opt the transnational lives of port workers into the new nation. Drawing on port authority reports, police reports, kinship association records, and oral history collections, this dissertation intervenes in the historiography of Singapore by showing how the economic miracle of Singapore was built on forgetting the port’s place in the Malay and Indian Ocean worlds and port workers’ visions and experiences of a Singapore that was deeply connected to its region and the liberation movements of the Global South.

This dissertation investigates the historical construction of the foreigner as a category of subjectivity. It does so by tracing a set of procedures and regulations devised by British imperial authorities to bring the Gulf pearl industry, which was one of the largest sources of natural pearls in the world for several millennia, under their control in the period between the signing of the first Anglo-Arab treaty at the turn of the nineteenth century and the effective demise of Gulf pearling in the early 1930s. I argue that imperial concerns about the mobility of pearl fishers shaped the production of this novel category of subject, the migrant foreigner, in three ways. In the first place, the yearly influx of scores of pearl fishers to the shaikhdoms that lined the Gulf's western littoral at the advent of the main diving season hindered British attempts to establish expansive jurisdictional claims in these polities. It was in the context of the effort to rein in the excesses of pearling labor mobility that British imperial institutions were first constructed in the Gulf shaikhdoms. In the second place, Britain also shaped the comportment of these mariners by policing their movement. Since Britain portrayed itself as a guardian of the Gulf pearl trade through the treaties and agreements it signed with Gulf shaikhs throughout the nineteenth century, it restricted behaviors that it considered detrimental to the success of that trade. Chief among these was the ability of indebted pearl fishers to run away to neighboring shaikhdoms to take on a fresh cash advance unencumbered by the debt they had accumulated elsewhere, a practice that British officials deemed absconding. In the third place, Britain eventually institutionalized the measures it took to govern migrant pearl fishers in the shaikhdom of Bahrain, which became ground zero for British operations in the region from 1900 onward. In doing so, British officials incorporated methods of governance initially devised to regulate the movement of an itinerant group of workers within the juridical scope of their jurisdiction over all foreigners in Bahrain. By demonstrating the constitutive effects of this effort, which rendered deportations and constraints on collective labor agitation a regular tool in the repertoire of imperial and shaikhly power, this dissertation presents a new way to understand the nature and legacies of British rule in the Gulf and a different set of historical coordinates to locate the origins of the foreign worker as a category of legal and political subjectivity in the region.

In Labor, Race & Visuality in Argentina’s Sugar Industry 1868-1904 I examine the relationship between racialization and mechanization in the growing sugar industry in Argentina’s northern province of Tucuman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the sugar industrial project yielded an important visual record which foregrounded machine labor at a time when demands on human labor reached a fever pitch. This emphasis on machine labor obscured the existing labor conditions in these industrial landscapes, which involved race-based forms of exploitation. I focus on the particular strategies (posing, framing, lighting and emplacement) that photographers and engravers used to incorporate workers into images of railroad construction sites, factories and plantations—in booster books and state reports related to the sugar industry. Reformers and state officials used these photographs to illustrate arguments that advocated the primacy of one race of worker—creole or European—over the other, and picture ideal labor conditions that contradicted the observations of critics at the time. Laborers in these photographs were often discussed in terms of their capacity for industrial labor and categorized by race. Given the interdependence between the state and private capital on this industrial project, the distinction between creole, indigenous and European workers was not only believed central to the growth of the sugar industry but also to the unity of the nation-state. The photographic and textual records, including political speeches, express the importance of race as an unstable proxy for the forms and conditions of labor. Labor, Race & Visuality in Argentina’s Sugar Industry 1868-1904 is divided into three parts, each addressing the different relationships between the state and industry. In my first chapter, “The Instruments of a New Argentina,” I focus on railway photography depicting the construction of a project intended to connect the plantations of the North to the expansive littoral market. Here I focus on how the figure of the capitalist was instrumentalized by statesmen to argue for increased immigration from Europe as a means of industrializing the nation. In the second chapter, “Beyond the Frame,” I explore the graphic documentation of the sugar industry in Tucumán to show how the representation of masses of workers heralded the mass migration of European workers to Tucumán was an ultimately failed project—creole workers predominated in the industry, and in the images the heralded masses built only to a small crowd. Finally, in “His continuous force makes him the machine,” I examine how the first state-commissioned report on the working class depicted relationships between factory workers and the new industrial machines, aestheticizing European workers through their physical proximity to machines and creole workers through their capacity for machine-like labor. Although many studies about labor and race in industrializing Argentina are historiographical and limited to particular regions, my approach is to mobilize the comparative history of visuality to situate imaginaries of capital within a national and hemispheric context. In addition, by setting my investigation in the context of the Caribbean and North America, my work compares the formation of capital across the Atlantic world and shows how these processes are key to the formation of the Argentine nation-state. By emphasizing the role of creole workers in industrial production, my dissertation challenges commonly-held focus on European immigration in narratives about industrialization and race in Argentina. My dissertation demonstrates that creole workers were in fact central to debates about industrialization and labor within the expanding Argentine nation-state, and that photography is a critical site for understanding how their role was minimized in state narratives.

This dissertation examines the evolution of institutions and legal rules regulating and prohibiting the slave trade into a global regime for the regulation of international labor migration between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the spread of anti-slavery norms increased Western demand for African and Asian contractual workers; but it also upturned labor recruitment networks in the Senegal River valley and the Pearl River delta, which relied on coercive practices that Western governments now prohibited. As a result, imperial powers, indigenous authorities, and labor-source communities competed to set and enforce new rules for the lawful recruitment of West African and Chinese laborers for Western enterprises. I argue that jurisdictional competition between these groups produced legal regimes that determined mobility and economic opportunity for Asian and African workers. As novel legal arrangements both facilitated and restrained African and Asian migration to worksites across the globe, labor-source societies in West Africa and China grew conscious of their shared existence within a Western-dominated world order and engaged in global debates over slavery, labor, and civilization. I trace the origins of these debates to two phenomena: the early modern global trade expansion and the subsequent emergence of the anti-slavery movement. These developments transformed political ideologies not only in Western imperial metropoles, but also in Sahelian West Africa and across the South China Sea. I also uncover African and Asian critiques of domination, discrimination, and inequality in international and imperial legal orders. This project thus elucidates how labor mobilization produced new identities and solidarities across Africa and Asia. It further reveals how the regulation of migration produced global disparities of wealth and sovereignty.