The Politics of Colonial Lists: Conspiracies, Deportations, and Knowledge in 1790s Pondicherry

In February 1799, the British East India Company rounded up French civilians in Pondicherry and put them on a ship loaded with prisoners of war. The ship continued its journey to Portsmouth in England, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. Handwritten lists were the main tool used to select these deportees. If analyzed superficially, colonial lists can seem to depoliticize the violence of deportation by presenting it as the answer to technical problems. Instead, this article approaches the list as a media technology employed by colonial and military officials, and thereby highlights its iterative rather than fixed nature. The lists were unstable and based on contingent and constantly evolving information that bureaucrats and army officers on the ground inherited from previous colonial regimes, as well as from local populations. The act of listing encapsulates a tension between the agents who identified, categorized, selected, and trapped people on paper, and the tactics of these people, who sometimes found creative ways to jam this process. As illustrated by the breakup of “mixed race” families, these paper documents also reveal the conflicts and contradictions that ran within the imperial state between the twin imperatives of maintaining both security and humanitarian principles.