‘Managing Mobility reconceptualises the role of the British state in pan-imperial emigration schemes in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through meticulous research on Irish famine emigration, liberated African resettlement, and Indian indentured labour, Philip Harling reveals rich and geographically expansive histories of state engineering that provide a new perspective on Victorian liberalism.’
Clare Anderson - University of Leicester
‘Philip Harling’s latest book is impressive for its incisive case studies of human mobilities and global migration. But it is also greater than the sum of its parts in reforging the ways we understand the British imperial state. Placing free, coerced, and unfree migration in the same framework enhances our understanding of each - and the British state seeking to shape them.’
Richard Huzzey - Durham University
‘In this richly documented and detailed book, Philip Harling demonstrates how there was nothing absent minded, or laissez-faire about how the mid-Victorian state managed emigration to the empire. Ambitious social engineering policies were put in place as state policy makers sought to match appropriate populations to the varying labour market needs of the different parts of the empire.’
Richard N. Price - University of Maryland, College Park
‘In the mid-nineteenth century the British government ambitiously moved masses of people far around the globe. Here we see how emancipated Africans, poor Irish, Indian indentured labourers and subsidized white settlers crossed oceans to British colonies. Philip Harling re-visions Victorian migration to show the British imperial state’s large-scale social engineering.’
Angela Woollacott - Australian National University
'Informed by an excellent command of the various regions under discussion, this rich work - as accessible as it is ambitious - sheds light on the darker side of the Victorian state's role in the millions of migrations that built the empire and shaped the contemporary world.'
Fabrice Bensimon
Source: Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle
‘Managing Mobility is an impeccably researched and finely crafted study that breaks new ground in our understanding of a crucial period in the making of global modernity. It convincingly ties the presumptively 'spontaneous' departures of millions of midcentury migrants to the (at once) coercive and incentivizing practices of the imperial state … What makes Harling’s approach so original is his multipronged pursuit of three (or indeed four) distinct migration streams - the post-famine exodus from Ireland, the tilt toward free labor in the Australian penal colonies, and the effort to 'rescue' the emancipated sugar economies of the Caribbean by recourse to 'volunteers' from West Africa and indentured laborers from South Asia. It is an ambitious undertaking, requiring the synthesis of vast specialist literatures that rarely speak to each other - from the 'settler revolution' to the expulsion of poor Irish migrants to the advent of the much-maligned 'coolie.'’
Stuart Ward
Source: American Historical Review
‘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 … It is an insightful, fascinating study of the British imperial state’s mid-nineteenth-century efforts to regulate and structure migration patterns throughout the empire.’
Jonathan Connolly
Source: Journal of British Studies
‘Migration has often been treated as a sub-field and poor relation of British Empire history. Harling’s book offers a corrective: a dynamic way of writing about migration, closely bound up with wider imperial policy and ideology, and inseparable from class, race and gender-based priorities which dictated how colonial territories would be ruled and how Britain would maintain global trade supremacy. This is a dense and complex analysis, but Managing Mobility remains a highly readable and absorbing book. Each chapter begins with an arresting story of a migrant ship upon arrival or departure, an illustrative, in some cases chilling, text for what follows. It draws on a rich and exhaustive historiography in each field alongside original research in Colonial Office records. Historians should find it an inspiring model for how to write about migration.’
A. James Hammerton
Source: The Journal of Transport History
‘… Managing Mobility is an impeccably researched and finely crafted study that breaks new ground in our understanding of a crucial period in the making of global modernity. It convincingly ties the presumptively “spontaneous” departures of millions of midcentury migrants to the (at once) coercive and incentivizing practices of the imperial state. In identifying common patterns in a highly dispersed human drama, Harling has made a compelling case for the role of coherent ideology and overarching design - even if room for argument remains about how systematically, or indeed deliberately, these larger objectives were pursued.’
Stuart Ward
Source: The American Historical Review
