Differences of Scale: Racial Taxonomies and the Legal Governance of South Asian Populations in British Columbia, 1900–60

This article documents changes in the racial taxonomies that shaped how Canadian state institutions governed the immigration and citizenship of South Asian populations between 1900 and 1960. Drawing on extensive archival research, it analyzes three bodies of bureaucratic correspondence to illustrate how these practices of governance were conditioned by racial and legal categories that acquired their varied logics and scales from the shifting dynamics of anti-Asian racism as well as the exigencies of governing anti-colonial Indian groups in Canada. This article documents how bureaucratic actors interpreted and deployed an array of legal categories to negotiate the complex political status of Indians in Canada, who were, until 1947, classified as British subjects but legally precluded from entering Canada or acquiring citizenship there. By tracking changes in how South Asian populations have been classified and governed as “Asiatic,” “Oriental,” and “Asian,” it also reveals the contingent scale and dimensions of such racial categories as they have been embedded in law. This article ultimately demonstrates that correspondence between bureaucratic officials was not incidental to the state’s legal authority over immigration but, rather, was formative of how state institutions undertook and negotiated the racial governance of South Asian populations in Canada.