Xenophobia and Labor Migration in a Global Perspective: The Case of Colonial Burma, 1820–1940

Abstract This Burmese–Indian case study breaks new ground in global labor history on the question of why and how people turn against immigrant workers. The widespread riots against Indians in the 1930s were far from unique and, beyond their idiosyncratic South Asian and colonial context, bear a number of interesting similarities with clashes between workers worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of dismissing mob violence in Asia and Africa as communal or tribal, the Burma case study shows that such Orientalist interpretations hide fundamental mechanisms that explain why and how violent collective conflicts between workers are rooted in attributed group characteristics. As in Europe and the Americas, in other parts of the world the rise of the nation state mobilized nativist sentiments.