Historicising ‘asylum’ and responsibility

Abstract

Territorial rule ‘begins’ with an assertion of who deserves protection and who does not. The question of responsibility and its limits is integral to the making and maintenance of a nation state. But a modern refugee rights regime externalises the question of asylum. Asylum claims are made by strangers dealt with by bureaucracies. How has this come to pass? How has responsibility become thought in terms of the territorial state and the society and order it begets? In this article, I try to make the case through a historical example that asylum is not external to the constitution of the nation state, rather territorial rule begins by figuring out who to protect and who not to. At the core of these ideas about protection and responsibility is a notion of political subjectivity, which is graduated, hierarchical and centred on the state. The privileging of an ahistorical idea of how political subjectivity has been so limited has contributed to the externalisation of asylum, where the troubling questions of to whom we are responsible and whom not barely figure because asylum claims become the subject of a technicalised procedure. In this article, I focus on the British colonial authority's encounter with native slaves seeking asylum in Perak.

Keywords::

• asylum
• political agency
• subjectivity
• territory

Notes

^1. Perhaps because these were young women, and perhaps because Birch sometimes described them as attractive, rumours abounded that there were other reasons for his interest in ending slavery. None of these rumours have been properly investigated. Swettenham (1900) severely dismisses them as spurious. Jessy (1964) hints but does no more.