This research examines laws in the colony of Virginia created by a powerful landowning planter class that attempted to draw a color line separating three descent groups: an indigenous native population (Indian), an immigrant population from Europe (English), and an imported population from Africa (Negro). Textual analysis of the Laws of Colonial Virginia shows that the English lawmakers had to learn they were the White component of a color line; they did not, for many years, refer to themselves as White. Contrary to some widely held views that race relations began as soon as these groups came into contact at some point in the seventeenth century, the analysis of written law suggests it took over 100 years, until near the middle third of the eighteenth century in Colonial Virginia, before a definitive concept of race was socially-constructed and a color line was drawn in Black and White.

Scholars have treated British colonial rule in India and the internal colonization of the United States in the nineteenth century as analytically distinct moments. Yet these far-flung imperial projects shared a common set of anxieties regarding land and labor. This paper seeks to conceptualize the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India and the Indian Appropriation Acts of 1851–1871 in the United States as part of a congruent effort to manage and define the labor force in the context of the intensified expropriation of land. In the complement to agricultural improvement programs, British and American colonizers sought to rehabilitate itinerant populations to create a labor pool endowed with suitable qualities for unleashing the productive capacity of land. While in India the cumulative effect of criminal tribes legislation was inclusive in that members of criminal tribes were purportedly reformed in preparation for joining the colonial labor force, reservation policy in the United States excluded Native Americans from lands that were the preserve of white labor while simultaneously laying the groundwork for assimilation.