Classification and the Secrets of Kinship: Migration, Scientific Naturalism, and the Racialization of Blood in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter provides a statistical overview of population mobility in eighteenth-century England and assembles a wide range of cultural material—fiction, legal proceedings, memoir, political writing, and visual culture—to explore how migration was conceptualized. It identifies a pervasive narrative archetype centered on hidden kinship, in which the figure of a stranger emerges from the anonymity of mass life to be revealed as a secret relative. The chapter links this narrative function of kinship to the classificatory tables of scientific naturalism in this century, which redefined knowledge as the process of situating an object of perception within a vast system of unseen relations structuring the known world. Viewing kinship as an epistemological mode illuminates the way narratives imagined social legibility in context of mobility. The chapter begins by juxtaposing early modern depictions of movement by Pieter Bruegel the Elder with William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century engravings to determine how changing demographic data-trends were metabolized into hostile cultural environments surrounding migration. It then analyzes the role of kinship within those environments, examining Nowroji Rastamji’s 1724 suit against the East India Company, Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) and his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers (1751), and Joseph Émïn’s 1792 autobiography. By predicating incorporation on an imaginary system of blood relations, the logic of kinship helped produce the racial consciousness informing the discipline of demography in the early nineteenth century. The chapter teases out the cultural categories for articulating what could not be incorporated into a community of blood and shows how those categories served as the literary focal point for ideologies that formed around efforts to regulate mobility with criminal transportation, vagrancy laws, and workhouses.