Abstract
The chapter discusses two 1835 ordinances passed by the local Council of the British colony of Mauritius. Passed shortly after Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, these restrictions initiated the regulation and restriction of immigration within the British Empire. Seen as quite novel in their day, these ordinances employed the rhetoric of “protecting emigrants” to legitimize the new constraints they imposed on free human mobility. Today, when the national ‘logic of constraint’ (Mongia in Comparative Studies in Society and History 49: 384–411, 2007) on human mobility is almost uncontested, the idea that immigration controls protect migrants remains central to the discursive practices concerning ‘human trafficking’.
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Sharma, N. (2018). Immigration Restrictions and the Politics of Protection. In: Brace, L., O'Connell Davidson, J. (eds) Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90623-2_5
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