This essay introduces the Special Theme on regulation and domestic service in colonial societies. It provides a brief overview of the key themes of domestic service and regulation in the history of colonial states, and reflects upon the ways in which the colonial past is deployed in contemporary calls for the regulation of domestic work by the state, to secure the rights and protections of present-day workers as modern, free subjects. We note that, while much more work needs to done on this subject, current scholarship suggests that the status of the domestic worker and the extent of regulation in colonial contexts was historically unclear and often ambivalent. The three articles that constitute the Special Theme are then discussed in turn, to highlight the important insights, both empirical and theoretical, they offer to our deeper understanding of this complex history.

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.

Chinese men working as servants in colonial Singapore were a largely unregulated group of workers and, as a result, few traces of their lives have been preserved in the colonial archive. Rare cases in which Chinese domestic workers were accused of murder compelled the colonial state to directly intervene in their lives. This article explores the experiences of Chinese migrant men who worked as domestic servants in Singapore by analysing three murders that occurred between the 1910s and the 1930s. Details of the crimes and the arrests, along with the processes of conviction and sentencing, were reported in detail in the local newspapers. In addition, testimonies of the accused and of witnesses were preserved in Coroner's Court records. This rich criminal archive is used to shed light upon aspects of domestic servants’ lives that would otherwise remain obscure.

A crucial aspect of the regulation of domestic service is the regulation of people's status. Because of its emphasis on freedom and equality, the French Revolution is particularly interesting. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” These principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (26 August 1789) did not seem to leave room for slavery and master/servant hierarchies. Yet, their impact on slaves and servants was ambivalent, as I shall show by focusing on France and its Caribbean colonies. Dependency, race, and gender are crucial in my analysis. After sketching the features of servants, serfs, slaves, and indentured servants at the end of the Ancien Régime, I will analyse how the Revolution affected them, focusing on serfs and servants in metropolitan France, on black colonial slaves, and on female slaves and servants. While I investigate the “French imperial nation-State”, I will also provide some comparison with the American case. The Revolution led to a feminization of dependence both in metropolitan France and in the French Caribbean, making dependence more gendered. It abolished serfdom and slavery, and enfranchised male domestiques. Thus, on the one hand, it was really revolutionary; on the other, colonial slavery was first replaced by bonded labour and then reintroduced. Male domestiques were enfranchised briefly and only on paper; they would be enfranchised when slavery in the French colonies was abolished (1848). Women were excluded: mistresses and maids had to wait until 1944 to become full citizens. This makes it impossible to establish clear-cut distinctions between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, and in part challenges the difference between metropole and colonies.