Mishal Khan, PhD.
I am a historical sociologist working at the intersections of labor, race, capitalism, and technology. My historical work examines labor management practices under the British empire after the abolition of slavery – with colonial India as my primary case study. This historical lens shapes my contemporary work on wide range of issues from labor rights across global supply chains to the role of technology in producing new forms of labor subordination across the global economy.I am currently a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center where I engage in research and policy work on technology and its impact on work in the US. I have a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and have held several postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
BOOK PROJECT
Empire of Innovation: Rethinking Slavery, Capital, and Freedom in British India and Beyond
I am currently working on my book manuscript Empire of Innovation: Rethinking Slavery, Capital, and Freedom in British India and Beyond. In this work I examine how the British empire legitimized its reliance on a variety of coercive labor practices in the post-abolition colonial economy. I situate this question in an imperial context where slavery and unfree labor was seen not only as immoral but also as inefficient according to capitalist ideologies that valorized free wage labor as superior to unfree labor.Drawing on materials from archives in Sindh, London, and Geneva, this book demonstrates how the colonial regime developed a set of what I call “innovations” to manage this contradiction. I define these innovations as cultural stories that were perfected over time in the colony and were then enshrined in global labor governance regimes at the International Labor Organization and League of Nations in the interwar years. Embedded in this work is a critique of contemporary global labor governance regimes that narrowly define freedom as contractual consent – obscuring the powerful work that race plays both in shaping the global economy as well as determining when consent is manufactured, ignored, or imagined.
Source: Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean. A record of naval experiences [With plates and a map.] British Library Archives.
PUBLICATIONS
Race, Capitalism, and Empire
Articles and Book Chapters
Khan, Mishal. “Abolition as a Racial Project: Erasures and Racializations on the Borders of British India.” Political Power and Social Theory 38 (2021): 77-104. (Full PDF)
Khan, Mishal. “The Indebted Among the “Free”: Producing Indian Labor through the Layers of Racial Capitalism.” In Histories of Racial Capitalism, edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin LeRoy. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). (Full PDF)
Khan, Mishal, “After the Railways Are Built: Makrani Labor and Illegible Claims to Land and Belonging in Sindh.” Journal of Sindh Studies, 3, no.1 (February 2023): 1-27. (Full PDF)
Khan, Mishal. Review of “Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies.” By Anna Suranyi. American Historical Review 127, no.3 (September 2022): 1567-1568. (Available here)
Other Work
Khan, Mishal. “Foreword.” Translation from Sindhi to Urdu of Ghulami Ain Azadi (From Slavery to Freedom) by Muhammad Siddiq Mussafir. (Karachi: Kitaab Publishers, 2021).
Khan, Mishal. “Can you ‘see’ slavery? Black Skins, Brown Skins, and the Price of In/visibility in Colonial India.” OpenDemocracy, Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, November 11, 2019. (Available here)
Khan, Mishal. “’Slaves” and ‘Bondsmen’ after Abolition.” Collective for Social Science Research Blog, July, 2018. (Available here)
Labor and Technology
Mishal Khan, Annette Bernhardt, and Laura Pathak, “The Current Landscape of Tech and Work Policy: A Guide to Key Concepts,” UC Berkeley Labor Center, November 2024. (Available here)
Mishal Khan, “The Recent CFPB Guidance on Worker Surveillance.” UC Berkeley Labor Center, December 2024. (Available here)
Mishal Khan. At Work and Under Watch: Surveillance and Suffering at Amazon and Walmart Warehouses. Oxfam US. April 2024. (Available here)
Fairwork US Report, "Fairwork US Ratings 2023: A Crisis of Safety and Fair Work in a Racialised Platform Economy", Fairwork US, August 9th 2023.
Jill Habig, Veena Dubal, and Mishal Khan, "Unrigging the Gig Economy", Stanford Social Innovation Review, September 27th 2023. (Available here)
Labor in the Global Economy
Articles and Book Chapters
Baber, Zahra R. and Mishal Khan. “The Paradox of Technical Education and the Pakistani Migrant in the Gulf.” In The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education, edited by Karine Walther and Oliver Charbonneau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Forthcoming 2026.
Khan, Mishal. “Imperial Anti-Trafficking: Producing Racialized Knowledge Regimes over the Longue Durée.” In White Supremacy, Racism, and the Coloniality of Anti- Trafficking, edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih. (Routledge, 2022).
Khan, Mishal. Review of “Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance is Failing and what we can do about it.” By Genevieve LeBaron. American Journal of Sociology 126, no. 3 (November 2020): 739-41. (Available here)
Other Work
Khan, Mishal, “Is the Great Resignation a Global Opportunity or a Siren Song?” Chicago Tribune, October 25th 2021. (Available here)
World Business Report Segment on the Great Resignation. BBC World Radio. December 3rd 2021. (Listen here)
Behind the “Great Resignation” Television Segment, WTTW Chicago Live, November 15th 2021. (Listen here)
Segment on the Great Resignation, WCPT 820 Radio Segment. Joan Esposito Live. December 2nd 2021. (Listen here)