Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.

It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

Academia can instigate policy debates. Data collection instruments like the Census are framed in a monolingual mindset that makes it difficult to obtain a full picture of language diversity, while the smart city concept can be applied to language to capture a wider range of data. In using language to determine origin and entitlement to refugee status, we interrogated prevailing concepts and enriched judicial procedures by offering new methods of analysis and interpretation, helping to ensure a more just consideration of claims. The chapter also describes the managerial culture of control over the public narrative around the value of modern languages that aimed essentially at protecting the sector and existing ontologies. The chapter concludes with a consideration of locality studies as a new, alternative framework through which to engage in the study of local languages and forge international connections.

The pro-Brexit campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum in the UK and in its aftermath was accompanied and driven by a narrative that was hostile to immigration and its cultural implications. Language played a role, with Leave campaigners criticising the presence of multiple languages in UK society and government agencies embarking on an 'English first' campaign that linked community languages to lack of integration and social incoherence. At the same time some arguments in support of foreign language learning embraced the Brexit narrative claiming that language skills will help post-Brexit Britain gain global influence. The chapter surveys different strands of UK language policy and concludes with an assessment of latest Census figures on language pointing to the increase in multilingualism.

A construction like the colonate is known in the Heroninos archive (249–268). It is the paramonè agreement, where the estate owner grants credit and the debtor provides labour at the wish of the creditor, as a kind of interest. For the period from 364 to 293 constitutions are considered as issued originally. Retrogradely, several additions become visible. In the middle of the fourth century the coniugium non aequale is applied to coloni and some groups of workers, as is the senatusconsultum Claudianum. In 319 the coloni on imperial estates may be recalled: the essential mark of subjection. The same is shown in 332 for coloni on private lands: they are alieni iuris, may be recalled, and tax must be paid for them. Connected with the similar condicio for monetarii in 319, the colonate may have existed essentially in the beginning of the fourth century and can now be connected with a rescript of 293/4.

This chapter takes us to the start of the 1930s, to explore the colonial production of knowledge on mental illness in mandate Palestine. It does so not through the writings of any psychiatric expert, but rather the report on the 1931 census and its extensive analysis of the return of the ‘insane’ population. Rooted in a very particular encounter around mental illness – between enumerator and enumerated – the census report’s analysis, and the debates surrounding it, reveals how the question of mental illness could be used to locate both Palestine, and its different communities, in relation to empire, development, and modernity. This chapter eschews the usual focus on identity in relation to the colonial census to instead foreground translation: from myriad terms in multiple languages to the single term – ‘insanity’ – adopted by the report; from the often messy testimonies of the enumerated to the record of the enumerator; and from encounter into theory.

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.

This chapter lays out the legal framework that enabled Hong Kong’s multiracial residents to engage with Britishness. It explains how the British nationality law enabled multiracial inhabitants in pre-war Hong Kong to make claims to Britishness. Using immigration cases, guidebooks, and census reports, this chapter shows when, by whom, and to what extent this inclusive legal status was recognized. Racial presumptions often prompted officials to deny people of colour access to their legal entitlements as British subjects. Nevertheless, colonial subjects in Hong Kong became increasingly aware of their British status, with some making active claims to their rights. In exploring the understanding and usage of British nationality law in 1910–45 Hong Kong, this chapter illuminates how nationality and citizenship were understood in an era when such concepts remained relatively new.

Chapter five explores definitions of citizenship in jurisprudence, royal law, and municipal ordinance. Ecclesiastical statutes tended to shape policy for indios under the assumption that they were to be administered in their own “republic” (i.e. within their own pueblos, separate from Spanish settlements). This chapter highlights how the city of Santafé responded when numerous indios ladinos emigrated out of their pueblos and into the settlement of Santafé.

Structural racism requires racialized economic agents. Racial identities are a strategically determined social norm, designed for governing differential access to resources, especially wealth, power, and information, as well as protection from other-group antagonism. When applied to the labor market, the differential power of racial groups means that racial identity is a sorting mechanism, such that persons of otherwise equal productive capacity will have racially differential access to employment, compensation, promotion, training, and the probability of layoff according to the manager–worker identity match. Racial identity norms evolve from social interactions between and among persons of alternative ancestral groups. Within these interactions persons select strategies that strengthen or weaken racial identity norms. These social interactions increase the productivity of persons if they are mutually altruistic. Mutually antagonistic social interactions reduce each person’s productivity. Racialization is an ongoing process of social and economic evolution. Self-identification and labeling conventions are social norms that emerge to distinguish social groups. Both actual and perceived skin shade and other physical differences are imprecise and subjective.

Nine servants were murdered on the night of October 23, 1789: five men and four women. In contrast to Dongo, his uncle, and the killers, every detail of the biographies of these working people has disappeared. This chapter attempts to restore their place in history by imagining what three of these humble employees did on the day of the crime, a recreation of the typical experiences of plebeian daily life in late eighteenth-century Mexico City.

Finally, in Chapter 10 I close the book by discussing some broader conclusions about the study of ethnicity and ethnic change, while also speculating about future prospects for the relationship between industrialization and assimilation. In the former case I focus on such topics as future quantitative work using data on ethnicity, our understanding of individuals who change their ethnic identities, the role of the state in enforcing or promoting ethnic identification and policy implications as regards promoting industrialization. In the latter case I return to my original dataset of country censuses from Chapter 4 to see if the relationship between industrialization and ethnic diversity changes over time. Upon introducing an interaction effect, I find evidence for a declining effect over time, although it appears that the interaction effect is driven by observations from the Americas, a result for which I find evidence in the secondary literature as well.

This chapter examines the development of modern population statistics, c.1860s–1910s. It describes the institutionalization of population statistics in Japan, first in tandem with the making of a modern official administration in the 1860s–1880s, and, from the 1890s, alongside colonial rule of Taiwan. It explores how the emerging cohort of individuals centering around bureaucrat Sugi Kōji established a scientific community, by taking advantage of their positions within the new government. At the same time, it depicts these modern statisticians’ coterminous position to political authority did not automatically grant them power to implement the scientific practices for which they lobbied. It illustrates this point by exploring their campaign to implement a national census in Japan. The chapter also shows how statisticians campaign came to fruition not in the metropole, but initially in the context of Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan. Gotō Shinpei, a high-ranking officer in colonial Taiwan, promoted a population census, deeming it a valuable tool for scientific colonial governance. Finally, this chapter examines the activities of Mizushina Shichisaburō to describe how the scientific practice and community thrived in Taiwan surrounding the census work, and how the Taiwanese experience ultimately fed back to the statistical activities in the metropole.