The Remaking of Untouchable Labor Across Asia During the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This paper examines varieties of caste and race-based categorizations of “untouchable” occupations across Asia after the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s abolition and waves of legal administrative action banning enslaved labor. A rich scholarship has shown how as empires struggled to refashion economic worlds after slavery, the question of what distinguished free from unfree labor became central to the workings of imperial rule. Looking across the British, French, Japanese, and Korean empires, formal and informal, across South, Southeast and East Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries, I am interested in how—under what material and discursive conditions, through what regulatory processes—imperial powers redefined so-called traditional forms of labor, especially those performed by groups associated with putatively unclean, impure, or polluted tasks. From professed “discoveries” of indigenous debt bondage arrangements in India and Burma to relabelings of low-status occupations according to formal status hierarchies in Korea and Japan, the ways by which empires embarked upon such projects and the racialized, caste and caste-like categories employed were sometimes similar, sometimes different, shifting in sync at some moments while diverging at others. By way of tracing diverse imperial formations as such, both between and among Asian and European powers, this paper hopes to reflect more broadly on when and how mimetic learning among empires occurred (or did not) from a comparative and trans-regional perspective.