The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter continues the discussion of the relation between liberty and democracy. It then shifts to a discussion of "sites of unfreedom" as in the case of prisoners, immigrants and refugees, and trafficked persons in order to illustrate the value of the concept of liberty defended in the book.

What is territoriality, if we consider it from a maritime, rather than landed perspective? And how should borders be reconsidered, if we assume that the nonsovereign space of world seas is constitutive of politics, rather than exceptional to it? To answer this question, this chapter adopts a processual approach to international legal theory and outlines a vast trajectory. Sources from antiquity display an imagination of maritime spaces as an exteriority in relations to politics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical international lawyers formulated an international law of the sea that sought global applicability. This was what is called here “the first internalization” of the sea. A second internalization is currently underway, in which a central tenet of the first, freedom of movement at sea, is now being questioned. It is argued in this chapter that if we are to understand territoriality, we must reject the premise of universal territoriality and understand it (also) from the position of nonterritoriality which is offered to us by the sea. In other words, the two internalizations are crucial for a processual understanding of territoriality. The chapter concludes with reflections on how traces of exteriority, beyond both internalizations, can be utilized for the purpose of political action.

This chapter explores arguments for assistance and asylum (nonrefoulement) that those who are driven by climate to cross international borders can and should claim. It seeks to amend the standards developed by the Model International Mobility Convention and it draws upon the jurisprudence of the Teitiota Case and other recent cases that probe claims for asylum based on climate necessity. It addresses the 2022 Torres Straits Island Case and the significant additional protections it recognizes under international human rights law. It concludes that relying on general human rights conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not adequate and that a special convention focused on climate refugees is required along the lines of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which specifically addressed those facing “persecution” on grounds of “race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.”

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Citizenship and taxation are closely related. While only two countries tax on the basis of citizenship, residency as it is implicated in abode and domicile, determines taxation obligations, criteria, and rates. Countries tax on the basis of residency, applying a 183- day presence rule together with other tests that cluster around definitions of ‘the home’ to establish abode and/or domicile which are invoked to classify taxpayers and their payments. Since 1984, a number of countries have been offering Citizenship by Investment (CBI) and Residence by Investment (RBI) programmes as incentives to encourage High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) to migrate and settle within their jurisdictions. Competition for CBI and RBI has intensified since the turn of the twenty-first century. These programmes allow both states and their HNWI clients to negotiate abode, domicile, and home to reduce tax obligations. While anthropologists have long since abandoned assumptions that fix culture to specific places, tax authorities struggle to accommodate the mobile livelihoods that are instantiated in CBI and RBI programmes. While the majority of citizens continue to pay tax in place, HNWIs, with multiple homes in multiple places, treat citizenship as a commodity to reduce, and even entirely escape taxation.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

Literature about Russians abroad includes memoirs and other non-fiction narratives of exile and emigration, often by writers who wrote from first-hand experience. It also includes fiction by writers who may or may not have emigrated themselves. Emigration is at once a biographical fact and a literary phenomenon; this has led to conflicting approaches to its interpretation. This chapter centres on the protagonists found in works of émigré literature – universalising archetypal figures, minimally disguised authorial alter egos, and migrants who elicit an unexpected jolt of recognition – all created in their historical moment, yet open to new meanings beyond their time and émigré milieu. It concludes with an examination of the exodus of writers from Russia that began soon after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the concomitant need to re-evaluate the association between literary emigration and the émigré writer as a voice of moral authority.

As other chapters in this volume show, the EU remedies system is difficult to employ when it comes to EU fundamental right violations. When discussing (im)possibilities of procedural rules and how these encourage or discourage litigation, socio-legal scholars have referred to the concept of legal opportunity structures. In relation to this concept, the EU is a system with closed procedural legal opportunities: rules on directly accessing the CJEU severely limit the possibilities to pursue strategic litigation. At the same time, the EU has opened up legal opportunities as well, by bringing litigants a new catalogue of rights to invoke. In the context of fundamental rights accountability, strategic litigation is used extensively. This begs the question: how are actors (NGOs, lawyers, individuals) making use of the (partially) closed EU system and what lessons can be drawn therefrom? This chapter delves into several cases of mobilisation of the EU remedies system and describes the way in which the actors involved worked with or around EU legal opportunity structures, both inside and outside the context of formal legal procedures. The lessons drawn from these actions can inform future action in this field.

This chapter introduces Review Bodies as accountability mechanisms for fundamental rights violations by the EU executive. As an umbrella concept, Review Bodies includes all actors except courts that, upon individual petition, independently review potential fundamental rights violations by EU actors. For the EU, these Review Bodies are the European Ombudsman, Boards of Appeal, and Fundamental Rights Officers. Albeit vested with weaker authority than courts, Review Bodies offer two crucial elements for comprehensive access to justice. First, Review Bodies are complementary to courts, meaning that they are often more accessible and more specialized. Second, Review Bodies focus less on individual issues of legality but on structural problems that produce repeated fundamental rights violations. In principle, this would place Review Bodies in a prime position to advance executive accountability in the EU. However, too often, Review Bodies are underfunded and lack the ‘teeth’ to discipline EU executive actors. Therefore, to improve access to justice and remedy structural problems engrained into the Union’s burgeoning executive power, authority and funding of Review Bodies should expand and other actors, especially courts, should team up with Review Bodies to effectuate their structure-focused expertise through the ‘teeth’ of judicial authority and public pressure.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.