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 bangles. 

“Worldly Afterlives” uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire. Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy — in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas — Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present.