States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

This chapter addresses the major syntactic (and partly semantic) topic of argument structure. Argument structure alternations have been central in the development of syntactic theory since Chomsky’s original transformational approach to passivization, and particularly since Fillmore’s work on ‘Case’ relations. In Pāṇinian grammar, the kāraka system provides a highly sophisticated model of argument structure, which has influenced developments in the modern Western tradition, and which also differs from modern argument structure approaches in interesting ways. The kāraka system is explained and illustrated, and compared and contrasted with modern approaches to argument alternations.

This chapter focuses on an illustrative phenomenon that has presented challenges for previous theories: non-nominative subjects. A summary of preceding literature is given, highlighting the relevant subjecthood properties of the Icelandic preverbal datives, as well as the subject-licensing syntactic positions in that language. A contrast is then drawn with similar dative arguments in German, concluding that the German obliques do not behave as subjects with respect to control properties, and do not occupy Spec,TP like the Icelandic datives. Before investigating the subjecthood of the Faroese datives, a detailed overview of what is currently known of Faroese clause structure is presented to establish the evidence for argument-licensing positions in the language. The standard subjecthood tests are applied to the Faroese dative-experiencer predicates, which demonstrate that the Faroese datives behave very similarly to those in Icelandic with respect to subjecthood properties. Given that the dative arguments in such sentences appear to be true subjects, and therefore the subject licensing position of Spec,TP seems to be the same in both Faroese and Icelandic, the differences in object case and number agreement with a plural object remain to be explained. This is explored in Chapters 3–7.

Chapter 2 looks at seamen who were ‘aliens’ (non-subjects), and shows that legal distinctions ultimately mattered little to the Navy. Britain was rather open to immigration, and during wartime most residual disabilities of non-subjects were eased for common sailors, who were needed and overall welcome. At the same time, military necessity meant that any advantages which their status as subjects of a different sovereign should have afforded them, most notably protection from impressment (forced service), were often ignored in practice. In courts martial, special accommodations and concessions were granted informally, as a result of perceived cultural ignorance, rather than on the basis of legal status. Finally, naturalisation was liberally bestowed on naval seamen, but it was, this chapter argues, a largely irrelevant benefit. The state was very quick to revoke its protection if this clashed with native allegiances, and during wartime the alien sailor, already allowed to work in both the Navy and merchant vessels, did not stand to gain much from being naturalised. If individual seamen strategically navigated legal status and national allegiances, so did the state itself: when in need of manpower, it did not hesitate to treat its own legal categories and subjecthood boundaries as pliable.

Indigenous resurgence scholars have theorized the concept of grounded normativity as a relational, place-based, and nation-specific framework from which to pursue Indigenous freedom. Though primarily a turn away from settler colonial relations and towards Indigenous forms of subjecthood and agency, grounded normativity can also serve as a turn outward and a basis for diplomacy. This occurs, for example, when Indigenous resurgence movements invite others to stand with and act alongside them. This chapter reflects upon three such engagements with Indigenous resurgence movements, which refuse the sense of permanence and limited political possibilities that settler colonialism produces. This chapter argues that these engagements constitute a politics from below that complements grounded normativity, which generates relational and place-based collectivities that are informed by ethics of responsibility and reciprocity expressed within Indigenous legal orders. These collectivities form networks of democratic movements that, in recognizing Indigenous political authority, offer alternative forms of subjecthood and agency that disrupt the concretization of settler colonial relations.

This chapter centres on case studies from the Assam frontier and Baluchistan, arguing that key logics of colonial frontier administration originated in these regions rather than along the Punjab frontier. It identifies two distinct moments and forms of British administrative intervention in frontier regions. The earlier mode of ‘frontier governmentality’ involved the relocation of entire frontier communities to fully governed state territory. This policy intermingled ideas of ‘improvement’ with logics of punishment and incarceration. They were also notably unsuccessful on their own terms, generating substantial resistance from their subjects and either collapsing or dwindling shortly after their creation. The second set of case studies examines the types of administration implemented with the colonial state’s permanent expansion from the late 1860s onwards into Baluchistan and uplands to the south of Assam. Government in these regions took on exceptional forms, with state sovereignty rooted in the discretionary authority of individual administrators.

The developing idea of a social identity based in the Odia language became politicized during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1903 an organization called the Utkal Sammillani was created to lobby for the amalgamation of all Odia-speaking areas under a single provincial administration. The Sammillani quickly came to serve as the most prominent pan-Odia site for presenting Odia interests to the colonial authorities. In Chapter 3, I show that debates within and about the Sammillani frequently turned to discussions about the meaning of politics, citizenship, and the status of the Odia constituency in relation to the colonial state. I describe the ways in which the demand for an Odia province reconfigured nineteenth-century Odia cultural activism into a clearly articulated argument for the political representation of the Odia people as a unified constituency. By including a brief discussion of emergence of colonial franchise and the changing attitudes of the Indian National Congress towards linguistic politics during this period, I show that the politicization of the Odia public into a liberal representative category is part of a larger narrative of the politicization of the Indian masses.

Chapter 1 follows the movement of voluntary migrants from the Russian Empire to Canada to Paraguay between 1870 and 1926. It shows that members of this cohort underwent a contentious process of integrating state citizenship and Mennonite unity into their collective narratives or rejecting it in favor of local narratives that prized religious separation. The chapter makes three contentions: First, it shows that Canadian officials transitioned from identifying Mennonites as enterprising and valuable German-speaking settlers in the 1870s – when they were promoting a narrative of Canadian national expansion – to identifying them as insular and subversive German-speaking dissidents in the 1920s – when they were promoting a narrative of Canadian national cohesion. Second, it demonstrates how Canada’s Mennonites developed contrasting narratives about Canadian citizenship. Associative Mennonites believed that God willed them to carve out a place within Canada’s national narrative. Separatists believed that God willed Mennonites to accept perpetual migration as a necessary burden of faith. Third, it contends that separatist Mennonites harnessed modern transnational technologies – such as transportation, communication, and financial systems – to secure the transchronological goal of living as early-modern subjects. In other words, separatist Mennonites used the tools of nationalism and modernity in an attempt to flee from them.

This chapter concentrates on individuals and their actions during the pre-independence electoral struggle. It narrates the move towards convincement in political opinions and the hardening of political blocs in the borderland, particularly in the opposition of nationalist propagandists and their local chief over the question of rightful authority. Nationalists countered the chief’s violent attitude towards dissent with stubbornness and the frank declaration of their political truth. After noting the shifts in political speech surrounding the tainted local elections in 1960, the chapter then examines a full-scale insurrection that followed, as nationalists in the borderland attacked their political opponents and rejected both colonial and chiefly authority. It observes the prevalence of the word ‘advice’ as a euphemism for political violence, and examines the rapid success and swift repression of the rebellion. It argues for a consideration of the conception of authority as given by the subject, and considers the ‘citizen-making’ violence of political dogma. It ends with a coda on the assassination of Prime Minister-elect Prince Rwagasore and the transition to independence.