New Settler Colonial Histories at the Edges of Empire: “Asiatics,” settlers, and law in colonial South Africa Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15, 1 (2014) Neilesh Bose University of North Texas Abstract The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795–1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885 –1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as “Asiatic,” even though many Indians began to identify as Indians in the cont ext of political protest against discrimination. In this essay, I argue that a history of law governing “Asiatics” in colonial South Africa reveals important processes of settler colonialism in the British Empire that situate Indians as settlers in a complex landscape of power. Because of their ever-increasing settlements and attachments to land, legal regimes sought to control their movement and residence. Through a brief review of early Indian migration into the Cape region from the mid- seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century assumption of power by the British Empire, I discuss how Indians, though still categorized in a blanket “Asiatic” category by the colonial state, as in previous time periods, were increasingl y monitored and controlled because of their expanding settlements from 1885 to 1914. Such a process shows how Indians of South Africa fit into contemporary frameworks of settler colonialism, particularly those developed by Lorenzo Veracini, and the concept of an “exogenous others,” or set tlers who were blocked from indigenization in the process of empire. If extended into larger histories of “settler colonies” in the British Empire, such a new vantage point will allow histories of the Briti sh Empire that transcend narrow strictures of race, ethnicity, or community. Introduction The history of Indians in South Africa is a subject that has received renewed attention inside and outside of South Africa. 1 Though much new research has been conducted into sub-topics within this history, such as the story of Indian migrations of indentured laborers, the politics of Indian organizations in various periods of South African history and Indian presence in the region before indenture, developments in imperial history seem to have left behind Indian South Africans. As more research about this pivotal community that includes a young Mohandas Gandhi from 1893–1914, emerges, new reflections on the precise structures of settler colonialism and imperial history necessitate reflections on the meanings and importance of this history. Recent imperial history has not only explored links between metropole and colony, 2 but also engaged long-standing questions of how legal regimes produce certain types of subjectivities. 3 Resisting vague depictions of those historical agents involved in settler colonial states as either “Native” or “metropolitan,” many have sought to create more nuanced depictions of legal subjectivities in settler colonial spaces. In particular, the category of an “exogenous other,” articulated by Veracini, 4 sheds important light on the history of Indians in South Africa as inhabiting not only a narrowly defined history of “Indians,” outside of India, but within a broader category of “Asiatic,” which exceeds and outlasts only “Indian” communitarian concerns. I argue below that within the settler colonial space of southern Africa, Indian South African legal history shows the broader changes from a focus on race and culture in India to that of regulating mobility and travel between interstitial spaces at the edges of empire. Additionally, Indians by the era of regulation of mobility in the late nineteenth century still were categorized by imperial sovereigns as “Asiatic,” in line with global discussions of racial exclusion but continuing earlier categorizations begun in earlier periods. Asians in Southern Africa Asians hold a long history in the southern African region. Between 1665 and 1794, over 140 Dutch ships departing from Bengal arrived in the Cape. Slaves from throughout the Dutch imperium were traded and worked in the Cape during this time and though precise numbers are not available, contemporary scholars state that a majority of the Dutch slaves in Cape were originally taken from