The military, political and social upheavals of the period between 1750 and 1900 were marked by an explosion of mobilities, both free and unfree. States and societies across the world sought to develop new tools for regulating the mobility of specific population groups as they grappled with questions of subjecthood, citizenship, identification and control in the face of migration, military confrontation, and popular resistance. While often recognized as the cradle of new concepts of belonging (citizenship) and sovereignty, the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century also saw a surge of regulations aimed at aliens and their mobilities as states sought to reconfigure the boundaries of political communities and redraw the lines between insiders and outsiders. In the wake of these efforts, the modern inter-state border control regime began to take shape over the long nineteenth century. At the same time, this regime remained deeply engrained in plural legal spaces and in coexisting systems geared towards controlling or preventing unwanted mobilities of particular population groups—domestic and foreign, free and unfree alike: the poor, the enslaved, the contagious, the delinquent, the convict, the dangerous, the refugee, the enemy alien etc.

This workshop seeks to draw together these different histories of mobility controls and seeks to understand if and how these various practices of mobility control intersected (or not) and coalesced (or not) in the reshaping of civic status (alien, subject, citizen), state sovereignty, and emerging inter-state migration control systems. We seek contributions from all geographies that focus either on regulatory regimes around alienness during this period, or on mobility control as a means of enforcing social boundaries (e.g slavery and marronage, deportation, penal transportation, prisoners of war). We particularly welcome fresh work from historians and social scientists working in the fields of legal history, migration and (im)mobility studies, diplomatic history, colonial and imperial history, labor history, border and security history, and histories of slavery, convict transportation and warfare. Participants are encouraged to focus on specific regulatory tools deployed by governmental authorities as well as populations’ strategies in navigating and resisting mobility control.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- national, colonial and imperial alien legislations
- legal categorizations of legal/illegal mobilities
- practices of deportation, removal, expulsion
- practices of registration and identification
- intersections between poverty and vagrancy laws, slave codes, quarantine regimes, security policies, labor laws, convict transportation systems, imprisonment and alien laws
- narratives, concepts and metaphors used to describe and regulate mobilities
- genealogies of the modern international border regime

The workshop will be held in person in Tübingen based on written papers pre-circulated five weeks in advance. The workshop language is English. The organizers will cover basic expenses for travel and accommodation.

A published collection (special issue or edited volume) will be planned from the workshop.

Submission:

Please submit a proposal of 400 words and a short CV of two pages by October 16, 2023 to applications-modern-history@histsem.uni-tuebingen.de, under the following header: Surname_AlienessWorkshop.

This workshop is organized and hosted by the DFG Project “Ambiguity and Disambiguation of Belonging – the Regulation of Alienness in the Caribbean during the Revolutionary Era (1780s–1820s)”. For more information on the project: https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/geschichtswissenschaft/seminareinstitute/neuere-geschichte/forschung/ambiguity.