Space of Mediation: Labour Migration, Intermediaries and the State in Indonesia and China since the Nineteenth Century

It is increasingly recognized that a focus on how migration is mediated by non-migrants can provide a critical lens for examining the relationship between migration and broader social change. This article develops this approach further by examining the mediation process historically and comparatively. We compare the evolution of the complex relations among multiple actors that shape mobilities through what we call the “space of mediation”, using the case of low-skilled international labour outmigration from Indonesia and China since the nineteenth century. In both countries, the space of mediation before the mid-twentieth century was large, quasi-autonomous, and poorly regulated. The space was brought under the control of centralized state in the second half of the twentieth century, and then bifurcated into state-managed labour exports and undocumented outmigration. On entering the twenty-first century, the space of mediation has become both privatized and professionalized, and more expansive, integrated and regulated.‪