Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire

The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations

Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper b...