Description
The so-called liberal international order is routinely defined through the principle of sovereignty that is ordered through territorial nation-states demarcated by borders. Borders are thus a necessary condition for creating “the international”. Yet, an imperial order preceded the postwar international order. Empires fought wars and drew lines on the ground to simultaneously create new and limit older possibilities of movement across those lines. In this paper, I examine imperial bordering practices by focusing on the mobility-management regimes and infrastructure of the British Empire in the early twentieth century. These practices created and calcified notions of the “external” and “internal”, providing blueprints for the international and the domestic. Imperial bordering served not only to delineate and fortify colonial possessions but also to produce racialized identities and maintain racialized distance from colonized populations. I examine the emergence and growth of the infrastructure of bordering practices—passports, stop lists, visa regulations, immigration checks—across the expanse of the British Empire to show how these laid the foundations on which the “liberal international order” came to stand. In so doing, I also emphasize the role of non-Western countries and former colonial territories in the making of such an international order.
