Licensing liberal imperialism: The ‘rogue recruiter’ and the racial logic of low-wage labor supply chains

Within much contemporary migration policy, labor recruiters are often understood as unscrupulous and state-evading actors embedded in informal networks of brokerage who profit from the demand for cheap labor abroad. To historians and other scholars of the British imperial indenture system, however, private labor recruiters of the late 19th century are understood as firmly situated within the imperial state’s apparatus of plantation labor recruitment and management. This paper seeks to bring analyses of scholars of indenture recruitment into closer conversation with critical migration scholarship on the contemporary regulation of labor recruiters in India. Drawing insights from these literatures together with archival data primarily on the 19th century Allahabad-Trinidad and indenture migration corridor which illuminates the structure and operation of indenture recruitment networks in the region that is present-day Uttar Pradesh, we examine the colonial repertoires of recruiter regulation that form the foundations of subcontracted recruitment networks in the region today. In particular, we foreground how two mechanisms of control and regulation—pyramid subcontracting and licensing—were vital in establishing a class of informalized, commission-based recruiters at the lowest tiers of the network. Drawing upon Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the racial dialectic, we highlight the enduring use of licensing and subcontracting as a “colonial racial arsenal” which has always failed to effectively regulate recruiters and their networks. We foreground how, both then and now, these tools have instead served to delineate first-mile recruiters as racial rule-breaking subjects in an otherwise orderly and fair migration regime.