Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

by Nandita Sharma

In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Immigration, Geography, Political Science

384 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2020

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

If politics everywhere is now marked by ascendant 'nativisms' and outpourings of aggression directed at migrants and 'foreigners', Nandita Sharma's Home Rule has got to be among the clearest maps of how we got here. She begins with a simple observation: for the longest time, empires (think: England, France, the Ottomans) would do everything they could to gobble up populations so as to engorge themselves with the power that sheer numbers of people would bring in tow. To have people - tax payers, soldiers, laborers - just was to have power. But with the dissolution of empires and coalescence of the global regime of nation-states, never has more energy been spent on keeping flows of populations... if not exactly out, then at least rigorously and sometimes even murderously controlled. This reversal - in fact epochal in consequence - has been the tectonic propellant of nearly every major event in post-war history, and to live in the present is to live in the tributary of these developments.

Yet not discontinuity but rather continuity in history is what Sharma is everywhere keen to highlight. For even before the end of empires, the abolition of slavery in the 19th century threatened to turn into a crisis of labour: without slaves, who would tend the fields? In response were the first budding policies of immigration control, used in novel fashion to regulate movement within empires, which, up until then, allowed free passage among subject states. Instituting, in place of slavery, a 'coolie system' of almost equally indentured albeit formally 'voluntary' labor, this near forgotten episode of world-spanning drudgery would play the vanishing stepping stone on the way to a globe carved up by the hardened borders of nation-states. With the end of imperialism, so too came the end of coolieism, but which left behind, like a dark sediment, the apparatuses of control whose use has only ever accelerated since. From slavery to the present day then, has the same problematic of labor governed the behavior of states in a way in which we have still to contend.

But this alone is the prelude to the real story told within, which is that of the nationalization of sovereignty. That is, of the way in which states, casting around for a solution to the 'problem' of the abolition of slavery and cooliesm, hit upon - what else? - 'the separation of natives and migrants'. By codifying and institutionalizing a distinction between 'people of a place' - tied to distinct units of territory - and 'people out of place', the native/migrant distinction has been used as a cudgel ever since to discipline labor on behalf of capital. As an extension of the colonial strategy of 'divide and conquer', no longer imperialism but capitalism itself rules by this basis. With chapters covering key moments in the history of this codification, Home Rule works to reshape the telling of world history itself: from the institution of the coolie system in Mauritius in 1835, to British imperial labor anxiety over the Indian Rebellion of 1857, up until and beyond the establishment of Bretton Woods and the UN after WWII, each of these episodes and more are treated in a grand recounting of how we arrived exactly here.

Iconoclastic in tenor, Sharma's wielding of the native/migrant distinction as the prism through which history is told also allows her to slay some of the more sacred cows of left historiography. In her sights are celebrations of postcolonial nationalisms, which, far from guaranteeing freedom in the wake of imperialism, have instead worked to contain decolonial energies. By striving for equal standing among a system of inherently discriminatory nation-states, for Sharma, postcolonialism has been nothing but the blunting of decolonialism. Equally targeted are theories of 'neoimperialism', which, by missing the distinctiveness of the nation-state system, have worked to entrench the duality of native and migrant in ways detrimental to all. Rich in both arguments and facts (and I've really underplayed here just how much data Sharma brings to the table: there are practically continent-by-continent analyses here that are truly exhaustive if not exhausting in scope), this is one of those books that, by unflinchingly insisting on seeing our world as it is, illuminates just how much of it we have yet to win.

[Zackary · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book's vision is utopic in content and scope. And while it offers much worth consideration, the project it takes up is questionable. Sharma has opted to align themselves against scholars like Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Y. Okamura, and Haunani-Kay Trask. See, for example, Sharma's ludicrous remarks in the Hawaiian Journal of History (2010, Vol. 33, pages 107-110) in which they equate indigenous decolonial politics to just another blood and soil ideology. Certainly (though Sharma's reckless comparison leaves such certainty in question), it is obvious that any comparison that equates indigenous sovereignty to the politics of the Third Reich is ill-conceived at best. Such a stance is all the more concerning as it comes about in the very same moment that the decolonial thought of indigenous scholars (such as Trask) has finally begun to achieve the attention such work deserves.
And while the utopic vision of a borderless world that Sharma presents is something of a noble goal, such abstract visions ignore the very real, and very violent, struggles indigenous people continue to face across the globe. Recognizing that such struggles arise with reference to national sovereignty, territoriality, and indigeneity is not to deny the merits of an imagined borderless world. Rather, recognizing the category of "native" allows for a more honest, and less abstract, account of how power actually functions to oppress indigenous peoples as indigenous. At best, this book is a utopic vision of a world not our own. At worst, it is yet another scholarly "settler move to innocence" (see, Tuck and Yang's "Decolonization is not a metaphor").

TLDR: Go read Fujikane and Okamura's Asian Settler Colonialism instead.

[Tee · Rating 5 out of 5]

*** 4.75 Stars ***

Home Rule By Nandita Sharma is an excellent book on how national sovereignties were born.
Sharma is very knowledgeable on the topic and provides extensive details on it. There is not one chapter where she does not include multiple detailed examples from all over the world.

Sharma explains how after colonialism/imperialism, we have what she calls Post Colonial New World Order, this is based on the politics of autochthony, and the separation of "natives" from "migrants" and the creation of citizenship and immigration controls.
What she is really trying to explain to the reader is the fact that we did not really get rid of imperialism, we just shaped it into a new world order.
The "modern" world that we live in today is not so different from the premodern world. It just has different practices of racism that are masked under the idea of national homeland and security.

If you want to challenge your line of thought about borders, home rule, national sovereignties, and the idea of native vs. migrant, then I highly recommend this excellent read. This book is extremely organized and it offers such a unique perspective on racism within nation states.
My only complaint is that sometimes it felt repetitive. But other than that, it is a very important read.

[Drew Chapados · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharma's argument is really well done. My only critique is her misusing Genesis 1-11 and specifically ignoring some of the key verses as she attempts to make a foundation for her argument.
She specifically ignores God's reasoning as presented in Genesis chapter 11 along with God's solution in Genesis 12.
Her argument did not require such a misreading of the text as her argument is really well done.

[Benjamin Solidarity · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the most important and thought provoking books I've read in a long time. Really radical innovative ideas on national identity and the post colonial capitalist nation state.

[ia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm gonna sit down with this for a while

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit long-winded, but packs some really important insights.

[Sophie Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction explains post-colonialism so helpfully