Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy—in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present through the memories and experiences of their descendants, who collected their own remnants of empire in albums and curio cabinets. We encounter women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage whose family stories upend ethnonationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas. What emerges is a social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, one that offers a new methodological approach to the historian’s craft.

PRESENTED BY

Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

History, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts

Historical Studies, New School for Social Research

Julia Stephens

Event Speaker

Mira Siegelberg

Director and Associate Professor of Politics

Sam Dinger

Postdoctoral Fellow