The history of British imperialism, so often narrativized through rise and fall paradigms, has recently been the subject of newer research agendas that seek to shift away from reading empire in a framework of ascendance to instead reading it as routinely troubled (Burton, 2015). Far from triumphal narratives of global empire, scholars more frequently caution against reading the state through the hubris of imperialism, and assuming that the letter of the law and the principle of colonial disciplining were synonymous with their practice and realization. Rather, an emerging spate of scholarship on empire suggests that the workings of colonialism on the ground rarely unfolded without provoking circumvention, co-option, and contention among a range of subaltern actors. Set against the backdrop of this developing literature, this panel engages topics of intimacy, revolution, performance, and prostitution to contribute new perspectives on why empire was so often troubled.

Papers on this panel are concerned with the everyday procedures of empire in South and Southeast Asia at different scales and sites across the nineteenth and twentieth century. Our papers take up multiple themes of ‘trouble’ in empire: crossing the limits of international borders and forbidden intimacies, petitioning against colonial injustice via kinship networks, fugitivity and mobility amid colonial surveillance, and the circulation of information among resisting agents. Panelists move between the spaces of the home, the courtroom, the police station, forums, performance halls, ports of entry, and brothels to explore how actors such as migrant women, revolutionaries, performing artistes, and sex workers disrupted colonial order, classifications, and imaginaries. Papers broadly cover the geographies of the Indian subcontinent and the Malay Peninsula, but also move in and out of these spaces through the subjects of Chinese migrant women in colonial Malaya, revolutionary men within wider networks of anti-imperialism, Indian dancers traveling to Europe, and French sex workers crossing borders to India. Working with multiple kinds of transnational connectivity, our papers also reflect on how empire worked in dispersed ways across uneven terrains of power.

By shifting from forms of control in empire to forms of trouble in empire, this panel reads colonial, international, vernacular, and personal records to consider a new kind of history-writing on the British Empire where colonial fault lines rather than colonial command are at the forefront of the research agenda. In examining acts of petitioning, escaping, and circumventing that socially, culturally, and politically troubled imperial order, this session ultimately explores the limits and possibilities of centering routine forms of ‘trouble’ in emerging studies on empire.