Presentation short abstract

This paper will show how migration was fundamental to British colonial agricultural governance, dispossession, and racialised caste-making which produced landlord dominance and whose afterlives structure (often lower-caste) bonded labour and a complex web of (im)mobilities in Sindh, Pakistan today.

Presentation long abstract

Structures of legal violence have underpinned colonial and capitalist expansion, facilitating capital accumulation through extractivist regimes that dispossess communities while reordering human–environment relations on racialized terms. Across many colonial contexts, land reform, tenure reclassification, and juridical categories of personhood have functioned as structural mechanisms to dominate human and ecological mobilities; mechanisms that persist within contemporary neoliberal governance. These dynamics of dispossession, labour control, and mobility restriction form the backdrop for understanding bonded labour in Pakistan.

Bonded labour, a form of debt bondage, in Sindh, Pakistan in which landlord elites use exploitative strategies such as low wages and high interest rates for necessary loans is pervasive, particularly amongst lower castes (e.g. Dalits). This is a legacy of British colonial land and water management-based primitive accumulation which created a powerful class of landlords and a marginalised class of landless peasants made dependent. This unequal rubric of dispossession followed the ‘Science of Empire’, a racialising logic which categorised some (loyal) groups as having hereditary superiority over others, affording only upper caste groups powers of land, agricultural management, and (relatively) self-determined mobilities. This paper presents an expanded political ecology of migration showing that migration and displacement, particularly the (im)mobilities of lower-caste labour, were not consequences of but rather fundamental to the British racialisation of land and labour (Ranganathan, 2024). It will unpack how these (im)mobilities persist today, through detailing the configuration of bonded labour in webs of affecting (im)mobilities including literal bondage, caste discrimination, lack of land reforms, complicated legal systems, and intersectional subjectivities.