How, then, does the history of race look different once archives and frameworks from multiple imperial contexts are brought into dialogue? To what extent did an overarching idea of racial superiority pervade imperial governance? And how did differences in national contexts and imperial policies change ideas of race? The four papers in this panel take a comparative and connective perspective, focusing on three modern colonial empires and covering a broad temporal arc from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. They not only trace connections between different territories within the same imperial realm (such as Jamaica and India, or India and Egypt), but also shed light on inter-imperial relations – connections as well as differences — in diverse arenas, such as caste-based labor organization in imperial governance, or international congresses on race and imperialism. By bringing these papers together, the panel investigates how competing and converging ideas of race emerged in the context of modern imperialism. It shows that languages of race must be understood in their global historical contexts, with due attention to convergences and divergences of their meanings across imperial boundaries.

Drawing upon a wide range of regional expertise and archival knowledge, the panel examines the multiple languages and meanings of race in the context of imperial governance. Beginning with Tiraana Bains’s investigation of the language of “blackness” in early British colonial India and Jamaica, the panel moves on to divergences and equivalences of racial concepts in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Alice Conklin traces the divergence of meanings of the word “race” in Anglophone and Francophone imperial contexts, while Diana Kim’s interrogation of the category of “untouchable” in the Japanese empire shows the imperial redefinition of multiple categories of labor. Anticolonial leaders, as Aniket De’s paper analyzes, investigated this colonial deployment of the language of race to assert antiracist and anti-imperialist struggles in international arenas. The panel’s focus on the multiple languages of race, with their convergences and divergences in meaning across imperial contexts, provides a sophisticated comparative and connective framework for studying the relationship between race and imperial governance.