Sowing the seeds of exploitation: colonial statecraft and racial capitalism at Britain’s agricultural border

Abstract

The reproduction of the global agri-food system is, at a systemic level, conditional on the exploitation of migrant labour, raising the question of how exploitation became the default mechanism through which states regulate the sector. This paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a critical policy analysis of the UK Seasonal Visa Scheme. The paper examines the governmentality of the border by identifying four colonial technologies that enable and sustain this exploitation: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights. I argue that whilst borders are reconfigured to facilitate capital accumulation, the origins of the visa regime are rooted in colonial statecraft designed to control and discipline subjects. Recentring the productive power of exploitative border regimes as artefacts of colonial governance, I show how the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on colonial statecraft, and that it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. Whilst racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, it is state-constructed border regimes – and the technologies of racialised extraction – that explains how .