Managing Mobility with Philip Harling
Thu, May 15
|Managing Mobility with Philip Harling
Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840-1860. Jill Bender will join Philip Harling in conversation.


Time & Location
May 15, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Managing Mobility with Philip Harling
About the event
Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840-1860. Jill Bender will join Philip Harling in conversation.
_____
"Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone. Managing Mobility examines how the British imperial state facilitated the mass migration of its impoverished subjects as labor assets, shipped across vast expanses of ocean to contribute to the economy of the Empire. Philip Harling analyzes the ideological framework which underpinned these interventions and discusses the journeys taken by emigrants across four continents, considering the varied outcomes of these significant projects of social engineering. In doing so, this study demonstrates how the British imperial state harnessed migration to ensure and maintain a racialised global economic order in the decades after Emancipation."
_____
Phil Harling is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. In addition to Managing Mobility, he’s the author of The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779-1846 (Clarendon Press, 1996), The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Polity, 2001), and various articles and book chapters. He’s started work on what he hopes will turn into a monograph on the (starkly contrasting) relationships between taxation and the military in metropolitan and colonial contexts in the 1840s and 1850s.
Jill C. Bender is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her research has received support from several funding bodies, including the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. Bender is currently working on a book project, in which she examines the famine-era migration of women from Ireland’s workhouses to colonies in Australia, Canada, and southern Africa.
