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The migration of "free" labor : contracting freedom -- Disciplinary power and the colonial state : the bureaucracy of migration control -- Gendered nationalism, the racialized state, and the making of migration law : the Indian "marriage question" in South Africa -- Race, nationality, mobility : a history of the passport

The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctures. The suggestion diverges from the conventional analytical approach that divides and demarcates the world into separable entities—whether they be described as the mutually exclusive categories of metropole and colony, Europe and its Others, a set of distinct nations, first and third world, or indeed of areas and regions—and studies these distinct entities in isolation from, or in comparison with, each other. In contrast, Cohn's proposition asks for an analysis of how such demarcations are produced and of how, rather than being discrete entities with autochthonous formations, they are co-produced through a complex array of related and relational historical events. It is a call, in other words, to shift the analytical framework from one that functions, implicitly or explicitly, on the basis of comparison, to one that operates on the basis of co-production. Such an approach, this essay demonstrates, is especially necessary for a thoroughly historicized understanding of nation-state formation, particularly since the nation-state constitutes a preeminent category of and for comparative analysis.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation -- 1. Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries -- Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire? -- Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History? -- Empire and ''the Nation'': Institutional Practice, Pedagogy, and Nation in the Classroom -- We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already? -- Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial -- Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond) -- 2. Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within -- Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity -- Notes on a History of ''Imperial Turns'' in Modern Germany -- After ''Spain'': A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography -- Making the World Safe for American History -- Asian American Global Discourses and the Problem of History -- Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport -- 3. Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony, Globe -- Periodizing Johnson: Anticolonial Modernity as Crux and Critique -- The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851 -- Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era -- The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress -- The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories -- Britain's Finest: The Royal Hong Kong Police -- One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire -- The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s -- Selected Bibliography -- About the Contributors -- Index