imposed migration throughout the British Empire was unique and has major impacts on contemporary law. I thus give primary attention to the two former British colonies, ‘Burma’ and ‘Malaya’. Though this paper lacks the space to elaborate on patterns within all European colonies, the most important feature of this period is the sheer scale of the colonial migration that happened within the British colonies, which dwarfed that of all others (Goscha, 2012; Christie, 1996). Manby’s (2009) assertion that areas with significant colonial movements tend to have highly contentious citizenship laws is thus examined here. Pre-Colonial Politics and Migration Patterns Three major groups are excluded from citizenship in Southeast Asia on the grounds of indigeneity. Two of these have been resident in the region before European colonialism: non-dominant groups in contemporary ‘border’ regions, and pre-colonial migrant communities. The first major necessary contextualization is the movement of non-dominant groups to highland areas of mainland Southeast Asia, to explain why such groups live predominantly in contemporary borderzones, particularly in Myanmar and Thailand. ‘Mainland’ pre-colonial Southeast Asia, by which I mean contemporary Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, was for most of its history organized in relatively small and fluid units of political order, largely at local levels (Scott, 2009; Leach, 1954). This was effectively a ‘state-less’ and ‘citizen-less’ period, though not ‘ethnic-less’, as groups often selfidentified and were organized by language and other cultural markers, in small polities based primarily on kinship (Scott, 2009). By the late eighteenth century, some of the small-scale state-like structures had formed into three major imperial dynasties in the lowland, rice-producing regions. The three major empires—the Burman (Bamar), Siamese (Thai) and Vietnamese—centralized their core state structures in the highly cultivatable, highly traversable, flat riverlands of contemporary Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam (Scott, 2009). The dominant ethnic group of the empire (the Bamar, Thai and Viet peoples, respectively) was generally positioned in the central lowlands of the controlled areas, securing a core zone of governance. The imperial governments attempted to administer (often for the purposes of enslavement or taxation) a range of people living outside of that core zone, who were usually linguistically and culturally distinct from those core groups, and of whom many fled to and arranged themselves within the mountainous and more forbidding ‘shatter zone’ of highland territories, effectively resisting the power of the empires (Scott, 2009). Other groups similarly took refuge at sea or in wetlands, which posed comparable challenges to imperial governance (Chou, 2003; Sather, 1997). This ‘shatter zone’ of smaller groups in the vast expanses of the Southeast Asian massif (approximately the size of mainland Europe) became a space of state-evasion, as it was harder for the empires to penetrate than the lowland areas (Scott, 2009). The harsh geography of the region made     9