Chapter 1 provides a contextual outline of how colonial mobility and territorial expansion restructured the British Empire after the abolition of slavery. As colonial investment stepped up in pace around the empire from the 1830s, the principles of liberal imperial reform were most strongly expressed in terms of protecting freedom of labour mobility and implementing an integrative vision of an empire peopled with rights-bearing subjects. At the same time, new patterns of labour coercion and settler colonial violence put pressure on imperial and colonial governments to more closely regulate the relationship between British subjects and others. The growing presence of non-European immigrants in the settler colonies, constituting a mixture of British subjects and legal aliens, drew forth mixed views. Whether envisaged as disruptive forces or as assimilable into new economies and formations of settler colonial society, non-European peoples and their capacity for global mobility helped shape debates about the settler colonies’ place within a global empire.