The British imperial state’s immigration projects examined in this book were always improvised, frequently challenged, often attenuated, and always circumscribed. Nevertheless, its relationship with the worldwide movement of poor people at the dawn of the first age of mass overseas migration provides an important way of understanding how, two generations after Emancipation, the Empire remained deliberately bifurcated – between white zones of relative freedom and autonomy and Black and Brown zones of ongoing coercion and subordination.