The British Raj defined official migration routes and criminalized all others

Evidence

Among the important British exports from the Indian colonial center, alongside the reserve workforce, were experiments in colonial statecraft, governance, police enforcement, and military rule. They created important parameters for, and precursors to, contemporary contract-based labor migration. Through varied policies of governance, the British Raj sent indentured workers to other parts of the empire, establishing o≈cial patterns of migration; through this institutionalization, it also made other historical trade and migration routes used by South Asians extra-o≈cial—that is, it placed them outside the purview of colonial sovereignty. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 457

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters on the global racial system and to the author’s overall thesis on race and labor. Also relevant to modern debates on ‘legal’ vs ‘illegal’ migration as a construct.
• QUESTION: Which specific historical trade routes were made extra-official, and what happened to the communities that depended on them?