“Newly arrived Indian laborers in Port Natal,” n.d. Natal began to import indentured laborers from India in 1860. Photography and numerical registration became integral to a state-operated system of migrant labor that sought to regulate many aspects of laborers' life and work in the name of protecting them from oppressive servitude. Originally published in Meet the Indian in South Africa (Pretoria: State Information Office, 1950); reprinted in Riason Naidoo, The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s (Woodstock, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2008).
It is perhaps unsurprising that the expansion of capitalism and empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasioned renewed interest in labor as a category of human activity.1 In Britain and Western Europe and their empires, in fields ranging from economics to politics to philosophy and the arts, a new attentiveness to and criticism of prevalent modes of labor extraction not only strengthened the anti-slavery movement and grounded observations of the nature of industrial capitalism, but also bolstered analyses of human experience that aspired to the level of general theory.2 These powerful formulations linked labor to human subjectivity as well as to political recognition. Yet the question of how such sweeping theories might actually become globally salient, or whether this was even necessary or desirable, remained largely underdeveloped.3
One historical context in which this question of potential global reach was explored in concrete and pragmatic terms was (and is) the struggle to implement international labor standards and labor rights. The history of this struggle is typically told in terms of the efforts by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European socialists, international trade unionists, and social workers to put such mechanisms in place, culminating in the formation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as part of the League of Nations in 1919.4 While the ILO did emerge immediately and directly from the work done by these various thinkers and activists, many elements of modern attempts to establish international labor rights and protections can be traced through a more entangled past. From the broader perspective of nineteenth-century empire, global capitalism, and anti-slavery agitation, such nascent efforts to regulate the conditions of labor across national boundaries emerged in what was perhaps an unlikely and seemingly marginal context: the official British imperial system of Indian indentured labor. Placing the indenture system within the history of international labor rights illuminates some of the key ideas and forms of governance that undergirded the emergence of transnational human rights concepts and law.5
The system of indentured labor, established to replace slave labor following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, occasioned new ideas, among both supporters and opponents, about what constituted a legitimate and humane labor system and about how to ensure that the humanity of such laborers would be protected. While the system remained exploitative and grounded in both coercion and neglect, political pressure from anti-slavery activists coupled with bureaucratic exigencies led to the institution of a modern (and in some cases pioneering) regulatory regime that rendered the conditions of indentured life and labor subject to a variety of new forms of scrutiny and intervention. Most significantly, these efforts to create a legitimate system ultimately sought to protect the laborers' humanity not only by distinguishing indenture from slavery, but by prompting a framework of laws and regulations that was oriented toward welfare provisioning. Attending to the ways in which diverse officials, observers, and other interested parties understood the dilemmas posed by the indenture system, and how they sought to solve them, draws into focus some of the key early conceptual and administrative frameworks that shaped the emergence of modern international labor regulation.
The Indian indenture system was put into place by the British imperial government at the behest of sugar planters.6 The intention was to provide planters with a regular, assured, and cheap labor force similar to what they had had under slavery, thereby alleviating their need to rely upon, or pay market price for, the labor of their former slaves. During its more than eighty years of operation, the system was responsible for transporting some 1.2 million laborers from India to new and old colonies around the world—including Mauritius, Réunion, Natal, East Africa, British Guiana, Trinidad, Suriname, Jamaica, and Fiji—primarily to labor on sugar plantations, but eventually also for other agricultural and industrial enterprises.7 Wherever the system was instituted, it became integral to a racial segmentation of the labor force and to racialized models of labor organization. Because of its direct connection to slavery abolition, from the moment of its inception the system generated significant anguish and outcry from British anti-slavery forces. By the early twentieth century, it became a major target of elite Indian nationalist criticism as well. As a result, it was finally abolished in 1917 in the context of the economic and political exigencies of the First World War.
For a long time, scholars treated indenture as a unique, singular system, an anomalous halfway house between slavery and free labor. For many of these scholars, as indeed for contemporary nineteenth-century commentators, the primary question was whether the system more closely resembled slavery or free labor.8 More recently, scholars have come to recognize the indenture system as part of a far broader—indeed, expansive—field of master and servant relations that governed a huge portion of labor relations in Britain and the empire from the early modern era.9 Other scholars have also recently linked it to broader transformations in the nature of state sovereignty, particularly in the modern regulation of borders, migration, and the rights of state subjects.10
Building on these recent arguments, the indenture system can be understood as linked to the expansion of modern forms of state power, and especially to the history of international labor law and governance regimes. The system occasioned the extension of the state into diverse aspects of laborers' lives, work, and health, even as this increase in authority took shape through debates about the necessity and propriety of state regulation of economic relations. It generated questions of sovereignty and concerns about the rights and protections of subject peoples, as well as a variety of efforts to work across imperial national boundaries. The indenture system can thus be viewed as integral to the history of international labor regulation in at least three ways: (1) in its emphasis on legal infrastructure and on specific conditions of life and work that would mark a legitimate labor system; (2) in its effort to regulate labor conditions across multiple British colonies and across several imperial national boundaries; and (3) in its new framing of the humanity of the laborer at stake in this system. Ultimately, the inadequacies of welfare provisioning as a means of creating a humane and legitimate system raised a core question: What legal and political rights and remedies would protect the humanity of the laborer?11 Whether within the framework of empire or nation-state, this would remain a lingering problem.
The indenture system emerged through negotiations among multiple parties: planters, planter-dominated colonial assemblies, the Colonial Office, the India Office in London, the Government of India, and the English Parliament, with officials also responding to and occasionally representing external criticism—particularly from the Aborigines' Protection Society (founded in 1837) and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (founded in 1839). Because of these divergent agencies, the system took shape in an uneven and fitful fashion, and in ways that reflected these ongoing countervailing impulses.12 In the early 1830s, with slavery abolition looming on the horizon, planters lobbied for state provisions that would enable them to operate their own system of indenture, but early experiments with a private system produced such a high rate of mortality and evidence of brutalities, and elicited such an outcry from anti-slavery forces within Britain, that the government at first suspended the system in 1839, and then shifted it under government control in 1842; it operated intermittently in the Caribbean until 1851.13 Although planters regularly sought more leeway for private as against government agencies, after 1842 the colonial Government of India largely restricted these efforts, maintaining indenture firmly under state control.14 The first colonies to import indentured laborers under this system were Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad. The system was extended to Natal in 1860 and to Fiji in 1879, as well as to other British, French, and Dutch colonies in this period.
It is important to recognize both the overarching regulatory impulse of the British Government of India in its attempt to create a unified system under colonial state supervision, and the countervailing energies of local governments in the colonies as they sought to redefine or particularize the legal framework as it related to them.15 Differences in the political economies and social structures of the colonies produced divergent policies. For example, Trinidad sought to encourage Indian settlement by offering a land grant in exchange for commuting the right to free return passage, while Natal sought to restrict the possibilities for Indians to remain in the country after the expiration of their indenture. The ordinances passed by local governments at times confirmed the baseline protections demanded by the Government of India, but they also sought to expand the legal authority and discretion of the planters, to limit the protections and contractual rights of indentured immigrants, and to cap the financial liability of the colonies and/or of the planter class therein. Slight changes in these ordinances had significant impacts on the coercive measures that structured the system.16 Moreover, even after the establishment of an overarching regulatory system in the mid-1860s, local colonial legislatures continued to regulate aspects of the system by ordinance, and retained considerable latitude for doing so, although at times these acts drew the scrutiny of the Government of India. Such ordinances, a product of overlapping jurisdictional authority and local initiative, created a patchwork of regulations drawing from multiple sources, including earlier master and servant covenants, apprenticeship codes, anti-slavery criticism, and imperial government stipulations. In turn, these ordinances at times served as models for other colonies seeking to gain access to Indian indentured labor, and the Government of India itself occasionally utilized them as templates for such purposes.17 Overlapping areas of jurisdiction and competing interests among multiple colonial legislatures, the Government of India, the Colonial Office, and the India Office structured the system from the beginning.18 Moreover, uneven flows of information and of legal ideas across the empire, alongside attentiveness to the distinctions in local colonial conditions, facilitated variation in the system on the ground.19
At the same time, the experience of responding to the concrete problems engendered by such a system built up practical knowledge that could be applied to other circumstances. The regular operation of the system produced an edifice of principles and practices that did not merely connect one colony to another, but had potentially trans-imperial—indeed, global—scope. Thus, for example, early questions in the 1850s about how the savings and remittances of indentured laborers in British colonies could be sent back to India generated extensive debate and eventual systems for official transmittal and currency exchange.20 Such systems were a precursor for later efforts at bipartite labor agreements among European countries in the early twentieth century, several of which involved savings bank agreements that enabled workers to transfer deposits from banks in one country to another without charge.21 At a pragmatic and molecular level, the official indenture system occasioned the development of institutions with transnational regulatory aims. These would become an institutional substratum for later-twentieth-century internationalist efforts in this regard.
Whether in British or foreign colonies, the legal position of indentured laborers, as well as of immigrants whose term of indenture had expired, remained complex: structured at once by Government of India regulations and by various colonial ordinances, yet shaped in practice by situations that lent themselves to a high degree of informality, at times backed by legal machinery. These immigrants thus faced a situation in which the law repeatedly made itself visible and yet was marked (even by its own accounting) by absence, failure, and what many even at the time recognized as intrinsic injustice. Although some colonial officials obdurately opposed planter interests and the system as a whole, the repeated use of commissions of inquiry and periodically revised regulations suggests the overarching official commitment to the potential of law to eradicate abuses and make indenture a legitimate system of labor. These colonial officials and state agencies institutionalized mechanisms to respond to humanitarian and abolitionist critics, producing a regulatory regime that purported to govern indenture in minute detail.22 This regulatory approach confounded the efforts of the abolitionist movement by moving in a new direction: emphasizing a baseline of humane treatment that required pragmatic as opposed to heroic intervention. Indeed, by the 1850s, humanitarian criticism ceased to threaten the prohibition of indenture, but instead became integral to the operation of the system itself.
By the mid-1860s, the Government of India established a more or less standard set of provisions consolidating the framework and specifying the minimum conditions for the operation of the system, laid out in Government of India Act No. XIII of 1864. These provisions would largely remain in force, despite some important occasional revisions, for the duration of the system.23 From the moment of recruitment to residing in depots at ports of embarkation, the sea journey, the engagement to work on a particular plantation, life on the plantations during the terms of indenture, procedures for reindenture, and an individual's decision whether to remain unindentured in the colony or return to India, each element became subject to minute regulation. The provisions touched upon matters such as the number of changes of clothes and the number of blankets to be provided to each person aboard the ship and at the estate, the minimum amount of space required per person aboard the ship and in housing at the estates, the specific quantities of culturally appropriate foods and spices to be allotted per person on the sea voyage, medicines to be kept aboard ship and at each estate, and also wage rates, hours of labor per day and days of labor per week, and provisions for free return passage.24 Act XIII also initiated the development of a more formalized system of “protectors of emigrants” at ports of embarkation and “protectors of immigrants” or an “agent-general of immigrants” in the colonies, charging these officials with regular oversight of these conditions.25
“Indian Coolies at Depot, Trinidad and Tobago.” Colonial Office, ca. 1890. CO 1069/392, pt. 2 (14). Courtesy of The National Archives, UK.
Integral to this regulatory impetus, from the 1860s (and somewhat irregularly before), the system was subject to mandatory forms of statistical and narrative reporting: annual reports included specific data such as the numbers of men and women recruited, their castes, districts of origin, ages, and health, and the plantation where each was indentured; as well as mortality rates at the depot, aboard each ship, and at each plantation, and more general information about plantation conditions.26 Although from the perspective of the planters such state regulation of indenture represented an unwanted and expensive oversight of the “private” relations of labor, this state role in fact entailed a form—albeit incomplete—of institutional capture, in which the state operated in the interests of planters, taking on the role of labor provisioning even as it continually extended its administrative reach. This unique legal and regulatory edifice structured indenture as a “system,” and even the uneven patchwork of borrowing across local ordinances testifies to its shared, systemic quality.
This expansive state role was unique even in relation to other Indian indentured populations in Assam, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya. For example, as Prabhu Mohapatra has shown regarding the treatment of indentured laborers on the tea plantations in Assam, who were often recruited from the same regions of North India, legal provisions for employer “self-help” gave planters extraordinary powers of private arrest and imprisonment, producing a variant of the system with far less direct oversight by the state.27 This kind of state role was also not found anywhere in the context of broader labor relations in India, where the colonial state often confirmed a variety of forms of coerced and bonded labor as “customary,” and likewise never questioned various forms of caste-based coercive labor practices.28 Nonetheless, even in this expansive regulatory system, there was still room for a variety of forms of neglect, allowing violent, oppressive, and exploitative practices to structure the system at least as much as, if not more than, the regulatory framework itself.29
The question of regulation lay at the heart of the system and underscores the complex positioning of indenture in the history of modern capitalism. At issue is not simply the contradiction that supporters of this system often envisioned and lobbied for a limited role for state scrutiny and intervention even as it was precisely such a state role that enabled the system to operate. More importantly, those who criticized what they saw as excessive state involvement did not oppose regulation entirely, but rather identified and sought regulation or “law” in other human “systems”: political economy, society, culture, and civilization. Such observers knitted together a prevailing liberal theory of political economy with emergent sociological and anthropological theory to depict nature, culture, and the economy as operating according to their own internal laws, which needed only to be properly set in motion and allowed to operate unfettered. Moreover, people on all sides of the issue mobilized such ideas about the regulatory nature of societal systems to further quite divergent arguments. The presence or absence of regulation, its origins and impetus, and its effectiveness or ineffectiveness formed the terms of debate about the legitimacy and viability of the indenture system, and diverse supporters and opponents of the system utilized these terms in an utterly labile manner.
Supporters of indenture often characterized it as serving the interests of both Indians and the plantation colonies, with the state merely confirming the laws of political economy. Although the targeting of South Asian labor had initially been largely pragmatic, indenture supporters drew upon this pragmatism as integral to a vision of an international labor market based in the unfettered global movement of people according to supply and demand. In 1875, the Marquess of Salisbury, then secretary of state for India, articulated what would become one of the standard arguments in support of the system: that indenture enabled Indians to move from their overcrowded homeland, where they had poor economic prospects, to other lands of opportunity. As Lord Salisbury explained, “[W]e may also consider, from an Imperial point of view, the great advantage which must result from peopling the warmer British possessions which are rich in natural resources and only want population, by an intelligent and industrious race to whom the climate of these countries is well suited, and to whom the culture of the staples suited to the soil, and the modes of labour and settlement are adapted.”30 In Lord Salisbury's analysis, both the economic law of supply and demand and the auspicious pairing of peoples with the natural environment suggested the mutual benefit of such a system for all parties.31
Such formulations also became intertwined with racial theories of labor. Advocates of the system identified particular cultural traits and physical comportments as characteristic of different racial types, evaluating them comparatively for their laboring potential. This imperial racial savoir faire that undergirded the system similarly involved a naturalized vision of a socio-legal order in which both colonial officials and capitalist planters understood racial cultures as generating their own systems or social orders that operated without the intervention of formal state institutions. This was a form of racial theory that was ultimately most concerned with the cultural traits and laboring styles of racially defined collectivities. Such a perspective emerged out of the history of plantation slavery, but also reflected a global imperial vision in which multiple populations could be assessed side by side for their viability as a docile and effective labor force. For example, the 1871 Commission to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana, headed by William Frere, distinguished the existing African, Indian, and Chinese laboring classes as follows: Africans were driven to labor only by economic want, and “get through [their] work with great speed, and if allowed, with great carelessness.” Indians, in contrast, were described as weaker and less efficient than Africans, as prone to excessive subservience and mendacity, but as driven to labor by “[t]heir love of saving and desire to return to their own country.” The Chinese laborer “possesse[d] greater intelligence” than either of the other groups, and was “very careful and neat in his work” as well as “much more independent than the Coolie,” but “[t]he Chinese as a class [were] inveterate gamblers and opium smokers.”32 Locating this type of analysis within the history of global capitalism underscores how the development of capitalist social relations involved not only the idea of the exchangeability of laborers—an idea of universal humanity grounded in the commoditization of labor—but also a division of labor on the basis of race, with particular groups identified as best suited for particular forms of work. Although the systems of labor on plantations and in industries that employed indentured labor were diverse and varied to some extent by colony, they were shaped by such racial segmentation, with tasks as well as living arrangements typically organized by race or what was often termed “nationality.” In this sense, racial and civilizational arguments did not contradict, but rather complemented, universalizing visions of human labor.
It is tempting to identify these claims that culture and economy involve their own systemic qualities or intrinsic laws as a product of planter interest (and broader liberal ideology) favoring limited state regulation. And it is certainly true that planters were utterly self-serving in their use of these arguments. However, such a conclusion requires significant qualification. First, throughout the nineteenth century, sugar planters largely opposed policies based in free-market ideology, being themselves dependent on a variety of tariffs that protected their sugar against competition from other, cheaper sources (such as Brazil, Cuba, and eventually European beet sugar). Likewise, the entire indenture system was itself a product of state intervention in the interests of the planters, who sought ways to avoid reliance on the local labor of ex-slaves. Moreover, an examination of this expansive legal imagination shows that even critics of the system at times adopted this kind of analysis to characterize the effects of indenture as social dysfunction: as producing a system of social functioning with its own internal logics and “laws,” but one that operated in negative and damaging ways.
By the late nineteenth century, one of the most powerful critiques of the system was centered on the social environment that prevailed on the agricultural and industrial estates. This issue also eventually became a major focus of Indian nationalist critique.33 As early as the 1840s, official reports had begun to express concern about the “sex ratio” of the recruits.34 In early reports, this concern was reflected in mandatory quotas, which shifted somewhat, with the required proportion of women typically between 20 and 33 percent, although this was not strictly adhered to; in 1868 the ratio was fixed at 40 women to 100 men, or less than 29 percent.35 Even this regulation also allowed for a number of “exceptional” situations in which the mandated proportions could be set aside.36 By the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, this uneven ratio of men and women recruits was identified as the cause of rampant sexual immorality and violence, which in the view of contemporary commentators across the political spectrum was an outcome of competition among male laborers for the relatively small numbers of Indian women.37
While scholars have long taken up the question of the condition of women indentured laborers, what has scarcely been considered is the strange way in which the state came to concern itself with the provisioning of sex, and indeed of life itself, within this system.38 As with the provisioning of food, clothes, and shelter, the state sought to ensure an adequate “supply” of women on the estates. Moreover, through the mandatory sex ratios, the state effectively sought to utilize informal means to produce certain kinds of living conditions—domesticating food preparation and household labor, for example, while minimizing the responsibility of the estate management for such tasks. According to this model of the natural operation of heterosexual supply and demand, the problem lay in a skewed ratio that inherently created a “seller's market” that favored women.39 Notably, for some observers, where the natural regulation of supply and demand was thwarted, “culture” appeared to provide its own modes of regulation—that is to say, force or violence—that supplemented nature. In one unusually optimistic characterization, in 1846 the governor of Mauritius attempted to refute allegations of gross immorality among the Indian population by arguing that “where a licentiousness prevails among the sexes, as it assuredly does … it is far from universally degenerating … into a literally promiscuous intercourse; the concubine of the hour, or of the week, or more is respected as the mate of her temporary protector; and where not, sanguinary violence is taken by the party aggrieved.”40 Such a description seemingly identified masculine violence as an effective mode of social regulation operating to curb degeneration into promiscuity.41 Although later commentators almost universally condemned such violence, nonetheless the later colonial characterization of Indian men as culturally prone to violent “jealousy,” and even Indian nationalist characterizations of the moral “degradation” that indenture entailed, worked through a similar logic, according to which normally functional modes of societal regulation became dysfunctional under conditions of extremity or duress.
By the late nineteenth century, colonial commentators were questioning the systemic nature of this violence and its potential for regulation, understood as a problem not of effective policing but of social engineering: What ratio of women to men, and hence what overall environment on the estates, would need to exist to curb this social dysfunction and set things on their proper course? Here as elsewhere, law was imagined as operating in a recessed fashion, merely providing the conditions for properly societal forms of regulation.
In the early twentieth century, diverse Indian nationalists and anti-indenture activists began to offer a more sustained critique of this framework of supply and demand, arguing in journal editorials that “the very idea of so many women to so many men is disgusting and bestial,” and “[e]ven if the number of male and female emigrants were equal, the moral evil would not be remedied.”42 Yet their focus was the inadequate state recognition of Hindu and Muslim marriages, which in many colonies were not legitimate unless accompanied by civil registration, as well as the question of whether marriage was even necessary on the estates. They emphasized “the sanctity of conjugal relations” and urged that the moral evil could be rectified only if the women were “the religiously and legally married wives of the men.”43 These nationalist critics thus shared with indenture apologists a view of culture as a regulatory order that creates moral social relations and thereby distinguishes humanity from degradation into animality.44
Regardless of official views on the positive or negative efficacy of culture as a means of social regulation, the system proceeded on the premise that certain baseline formal protections were requisite. This emphasis on state-sponsored protections did not prevent official experimentation and modification of the specific terms of regulations, however. Indeed, such experimentation, motivated both by a desire for economy and by a pragmatic calculus of the relationship between specific provisions and rates of morbidity and mortality, was seen as integral to proper oversight and led to periodic revision of the regulations. For example, to prevent overcrowding during the sea voyage, should the height between decks be a minimum of six feet, or would five and a half feet suffice? Was the ideal provision of water per person five or seven gallons a week? How many ounces daily of rice, wheat, various dals, meats, oils, vegetables, onions, garlic, mustard seed, turmeric, black pepper, chilies, coriander seed, tamarind, salt, sugar, and tobacco did the ships need to provide for the duration of the voyage?45 Or turning to the conditions on the estates, the recommendations of one of the later commissions of inquiry reports, accepted by the government in question (Trinidad), called for each of the immigrants to be weighed every two weeks during their first year on the estates to preserve the health of the laborers and to gauge whether additional food allotments were necessary.46 Here again, these areas of scrutiny in some ways reflected longer histories of state interest and enforcement; for example, the extensive focus on ship conditions and the sea journey reflected longstanding concerns with delegated sovereignty and international law raised by ocean traffic, as Lauren Benton has shown, as well as recent anti-slavery campaigns that had drawn attention to the horrors of the “Middle Passage.” But as in the proposal for biweekly weighing, in some cases they also reflected new sensibilities and initiatives concerning public health and welfare.47 Thus, while the state sought in various ways to distinguish its role from one of patronage, associated at the time both with slavery and with traditional Indian social relations, it adopted the role of the modern pastoral state in certain key ways, concerning itself with diverse aspects of the laborers' life, health, reproduction, morbidity, and mortality.48
Ultimately, these forms of regulation would mark a critical shift: from a focus on the humanity of the laborer, as in the anti-slavery movement, to a focus on the laborer's conditions of life and work. This change was not absolute; indeed, critics of the system rhetorically utilized the language of slavery to condemn the conditions of indentured labor. But the focus on the dichotomy of slavery versus free labor in the literature on indenture has obscured the extent to which the history of indenture altered how labor and freedom were imagined.49 As indenture came to be evaluated through an array of new social science disciplines—population science, public health, sociology, and statistics—the focus of criticism shifted from the problem of the human status of the laborer, as in the anti-slavery movement, to the component parts that constituted humane or inhumane conditions of labor. The indenture system thus underwrote a silent transition from a vision of humanity imagined as a substantive status—in other words, the opposite of slavery—to a humanity that was achieved, or lost, in fragmentary, incremental measures of welfare.50
“Emigrants at Their Meals, Guyana.” Colonial Office, ca. 1870–1900. CO 1069/355 (42). Courtesy of the The National Archives, UK.
This change in thinking paralleled the welfare orientation of metropolitan labor movements, which from the late nineteenth century sought to secure limits on the daily and weekly hours of work, provisions in case of sickness or injury, and the like. Similarly, at the international level, the 1919 Preamble of the International Labour Organization enumerated its most urgent aims as “[t]he regulation of the hours of work, including the establishment of a maximum working day and week, the regulation of the labour supply, the prevention of unemployment, the provision of an adequate living wage, the protection of the worker against sickness, disease and injury arising out of his employment, the protection of children, young persons and women, provision for old age and injury, protection of the workers when employed in countries other than their own … and other measures.”51
The Berne Conventions of 1905 are typically identified as the first substantive success in the efforts at international labor regulation that would eventually culminate in the establishment of the ILO.52 These agreements sought to ban the use of white phosphorus in the match industry (which employed large numbers of women and children) and to prohibit the night work of women on an international scale. They proceeded on two premises: first, they advanced the idea that all nations could agree on the social desirability of protecting vulnerable populations; and second, they developed the logic that efforts to regulate industry in one nation would be effective only if similar provisions were implemented in other nations, so that international competition did not adversely affect the industry in the initial country seeking to regulate it.53 Accordingly, it was precisely the global nature of economic competition that rendered rights at the level of the nation-state insecure and ultimately insufficient, necessitating new, international, and potentially universal protections for labor. The targeting of white phosphorus proved particularly successful because the horrific effects of the poison—the necrosis of the jaw popularly known in Britain as “phossy jaw”—knew no borders, but affected workers in the match industry universally. Similarly, although the early focus on protecting women and children traded on ideas of the exceptional vulnerability of these populations and their unsuitability for industrial labor, it also posited putatively universal bodily categories—of womanhood and childhood—as determinative of particular rights and necessary protections.
Ironically, both these efforts and later initiatives by the ILO and the League of Nations mobilized claims of universal standards of humanity alongside the articulation of necessary exceptions, located in the colonial world.54 By the 1920s, the effort to end night labor for women and children was accompanied by the determination that the differences in climate and bodily habitus, as well as in economic and cultural conditions, that characterized the European colonies and protectorates would necessitate somewhat different labor standards in those places. Likewise, interwar efforts by the League of Nations to abolish international trafficking or “white slavery” of minor girls traded on the notion that significant portions of the colonial world would require a different definition of childhood, due to the earlier “ripening” of the body in the tropical climate.55 These metropolitan efforts to regulate conditions of labor internationally, like the indenture system itself, thus advanced notions of universal humane standards of life and labor while also identifying particular races, cultures, and nationalities as amenable to—if not in need of—other conditions and forms of discipline.56
“Labourers Gathered at the Pay Table, Perseverance Estate, Cedros.” Ca. 1890s. Courtesy of the Rare Photographs Collection, Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
As this differentiation suggests, despite some continuities and commonalities between the imperial regulation of indentured labor and the metropolitan efforts of the trade union and internationalist movements, a few key differences bear notice. The first is the agency of the laborers themselves: in the metropolitan movements, laborers played a central role in these struggles, in contrast to the significance of state direction in the context of indenture. This is not to attribute passivity to the indentured laborers, but rather to note that the regulatory system that structured indenture was not generated through their demands. Nor did it effectively address what appear to have been the major grievances of the laborers: the withholding, underpayment, and nonpayment of wages; extensions of their labor time; and in some places, restrictions on their free movement off the estates.57 When former indentured laborers and elite Indian nationalists eventually rose up against the system in the early twentieth century, it was to secure its abolition entirely, not to improve its contractual terms or its provisions for worker welfare. In this sense, the elaboration of the system within a welfare framework remained largely a product of state agency. Second, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor activists in Britain and internationally did not speak the language of humanity or human rights, but rather of poverty, abuse, justice, social justice, and industrial peace.58 The emergence of a new language among British labor activists and internationalists of labor conditions as a matter of human rights—a change that became explicit in the framing of the International Labour Organization's Constitution in 1944—had been mediated previously by the indenture system, which, precisely because of its connection both to slavery and to capitalist wage labor regimes, yoked the language of humanity to the language of welfare.59 Third, in the metropolitan labor movement, such a welfare orientation had been linked to both radical and liberal efforts to achieve substantive political rights, especially suffrage.60 In contrast, the indenture system exemplifies how the concern with welfare could and in fact did take shape in fundamentally non-democratic contexts as well, serving to replace a political orientation.61 In the indenture system, the idea of provisioning of labor welfare as a matter of humanity was made fully compatible with a form of imperial subjecthood that entailed exclusion from modern citizenship.62
Perhaps nowhere did the question of the efficacy of welfare provisioning in the absence of citizenship emerge more starkly than in the context of foreign imperial colonies seeking access to Indian indentured labor. The context of global imperial rivalry and negotiation that fostered the indenture system also shaped the terms by which the British were willing to make Indian laborers available to other colonial empires. From quite early on, French, Danish, and Dutch colonies (among others) sought access to this source of labor, and British governmental agencies debated whether and how they might be accommodated. The relations with the French were the most developed, and they highlight both the emergent vision and the limits of international monitoring in this era.
French colonies, especially the Indian Ocean island of Réunion (Bourbon until 1848), had been engaged in some of the earliest experiments with recruiting Indian labor both from the west coast of India and from French settlements in South India and from Madras. Such emigration, at least of British subjects, was suspended by Act XIV of 1839, which prohibited the contracting of Indians for labor to be performed outside of East India Company territories; in practice, all embarkation from the French colony of Pondicherry in South India was halted as a result of this act as well. The provisions allowing the resumption of the system in certain British colonies in 1842 did not alter the terms for foreign territories. Both representatives from the colony and the French government repeatedly sought alteration of these restrictions, and from 1851, the French government engaged in extensive diplomatic negotiations to reopen such immigration. In the meantime, it appears that indentured labor migration had resumed covertly and illegally through recruiters operating in Madras.63 From the beginning, the question of making Indian workers available to French colonies (Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne or French Guiana) turned on the problem of ensuring protection for Indians as British imperial subjects. But it also encompassed debate about the importance of such labor in stemming French planters' continued reliance on the labor of emancipated slaves imported from nearby coastal East Africa (known as the system of râchat), and on the utility of establishing positive law to regulate what had become a clandestine practice.64 Those who supported extending the indenture system to French colonies argued that regulation would offer greater protection to the laborers than the existing prohibitions, which of course did not specify terms and conditions for labor that was being provisioned illegally. Alongside these arguments, the British, for their part, held out to France the prospect of a convention providing access to this labor in order to further their own diplomatic aims.
A convention between the British and the French was passed in 1862, formally granting the French access to Indian labor, and in fact Réunion had already acquired access to this labor by Government of India Act XLVI of 1860. Ironically, while the terms of the convention sought to place the French colonies on the same footing as existing British colonies in the system, in fact it initially led to revisions of the existing regulations governing indenture in those British colonies, as the Government of India responded to complaints from the latter that the convention created privileged conditions for the French.65 Nonetheless, from the beginning, the regulations governing indenture in French colonies were subjected to critical scrutiny. On the one hand, observers, including the British consuls located in these colonies, the Aborigines' Protection Society in London, the India Office in London, and, most self-servingly, the West India Association (an association of British Caribbean planters competing for access to Indian indentured labor), repeatedly narrated the horrific conditions the laborers were subjected to in these colonies, particularly in Réunion as well as in Cayenne, where by 1873 total mortality rates had exceeded 40 percent.66 On the other hand, perhaps the most central and repeated criticism from all quarters concerned the lack of information and the impossibility of transparency in dealing with a foreign colony.67 In the words of Lord Derby in a Foreign Office communication of 1874, “[W]hile British Colonies have been required to furnish regular and exhaustive reports upon the Coolies there, and pressure has frequently been brought to bear to induce the colonial authorities to remedy injustice to the labourer or to carry out some reform in his interest, French colonies are permitted to continue to receive large numbers of British Indian subjects of whose condition and treatment but little is known.”68
The limited availability of information, punctuated by occasional harrowing reports, enabled the system to continue to operate in the French colonies for a long time. In the case of Réunion, while the Government of India and the India Office in London regularly demanded greater access to and oversight of the conditions of the laborers, and a British consul was established in the colony to serve as a de facto protector of immigrants, all sides recognized that the position lacked the authority to oversee or investigate actual conditions on the estates.69 Such scrutiny, as all acknowledged, would necessarily be limited in the context of French imperial sovereignty.70 Nonetheless, even the existing information was largely ignored by British colonial state agencies. Thus, despite repeated reports from the British consul stationed in the colony detailing abuses, as well as appeals by the Aborigines' Protection Society in London and eventually a report by an international British and French commission of inquiry, a decade passed before the India Office in 1879 took the small step of issuing a letter calling for the appointment of a British protector of Indian immigrants, “vested with very much larger powers of control and supervision than the present convention allows to the Consul.” More specifically, the letter detailed, “He should have full power to visit and inspect all estates on which immigrants are employed, to scrutinize all registers” of local officials; and most importantly, “access of the coolie to the British officer must be free and unreserved … [F]or, unless the right of access be distinctly and fully secured to the British officer, and he be made the medium of direct communication between the immigrants and the executive authorities, he can exercise no effective check on the abuses to which the position of the coolie is liable.”71 In other words, even with the inflow of information, the India Office framed the problem as one of adequate “control and supervision” in the context of French imperial sovereignty. By contrast, “direct communication” between the laborer and the British protector would lay the foundation for a non-exploitative system. Thus, the official framework for addressing the conditions in the colony remained a closed circle: both the lack of information and the presence of information led simply to a call for more supervision and more information. Moreover, the official response readily conceded that gaining such access and information (even without authority to act upon it) would be difficult if not impossible in the foreign imperial context.
Yet despite the seemingly exceptional situation of Indian laborers in foreign imperial colonies, similar reports had emerged with great regularity in the context of British colonies as well. In the words of Law Member of the Viceroy's Council in India Sir Courtenay Ilbert in 1883, while the Government of India sought to ensure the proper treatment of such laborers from the moment of their recruitment in India through the sea journey to the colony, “[f]urther than this our law cannot follow him, and after this point we can only provide for his welfare by such influence as we can bring to bear on the Government of the country in which he has established himself.”72 Although ironically Sir Ilbert's comments were an attempt to sidestep longstanding reports of the use of force and fraud in the system of recruitment within India itself, as well as of appalling conditions in the recruitment depots in India and aboard ship, his focus on the treatment of these laborers outside the territorial boundaries of British India showcased how the system as a whole, including in British colonies, was plagued by a broad set of problems of sovereignty, jurisdiction, oversight, and structural inequality.
Ultimately, even the limited reports from the British consuls and international commissions of inquiry revealed such deplorable conditions in the French colonies that Indian immigration was suspended for Cayenne in 1877, Réunion in 1882, and Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1888, although the French government engaged in further diplomatic efforts to reinstate it into the 1890s.73 In effect, and surprisingly, after years of inaction and neglect, the termination of the system came relatively swiftly, at least in comparison with the situation in British colonies. It seems plausible that the limitations on foreign imperial oversight and regulation, coupled with shifting British diplomatic priorities, ultimately facilitated more rapid suspension of Indian indenture in the French colonies. In contrast, in the case of the British colonies, heightened regulatory access coupled with a commitment to British imperial economic interests sustained the continuation of the system.
West Indian planters, in particular, tried to make a case for the hazards of French imperial sovereignty in order to limit the mobility of such laborers across global imperial boundaries. In 1870, an official in the Colonial Office noted that one possible reason for not allowing other imperial states access to Indian laborers was that without adequate oversight, those colonies would gain an unfair competitive advantage in their industry: “If the French are allowed to ill[-]treat their labourers, this may give them an advantage in cheapness of manufacture over our colonists who are not allowed to ill-treat theirs.”74 While that official did not seek to pursue this line of argument, a version of it would in fact form part of the underlying rationale in support of international labor regulation in the early twentieth century, utilized especially in the formation of the ILO: that if only one nation enacted measures to prohibit dangerous, hazardous, or oppressive labor practices, its industry would be unable to compete economically with the industry of other nations that allowed such practices to continue unabated.75 According to this reasoning, international agreements were requisite in order to sustain the overall economic well-being of nations seeking to protect their laborers' lives and livelihoods. Some of the difficulties of monitoring and overseeing such agreements emerged prominently in the history of indenture, however, where British demands for scrutiny and direct access led immediately to arguments—readily articulated by the British themselves—about the narrow room for direct foreign intervention.
While these late-nineteenth-century imperial negotiations and debates framed the problem as a dilemma between respecting the sovereignty of foreign states (with their differential labor standards and labor norms) and intervening to protect the humanity of the laborers, the question of when the humanity of the laborers would override state sovereignty was ultimately, as it still is today, both a matter of political calculation and a product of struggle against bureaucratic neglect.76
The numbers of Indians sent to other European colonies were relatively small—some 155,000 to French colonies, some 35,000 to Dutch Guiana or Suriname, and a smattering to other colonies. Yet the legal framework for such trans-imperial relations produced a number of effects. It spurred official enunciations on all sides of the nature of imperial sovereignty and the limits of British intervention, but it also occasioned the development and implementation of international commissions of inquiry. Moreover, it enabled the British both to critique the conditions of laborers in foreign colonies and to position themselves as setting a global standard for the treatment of those laborers, however fitful and ineffectual that role.77
Ultimately, the very operation of the system highlighted the limitations of imperial subjecthood coupled with welfare provisioning as a framework for safeguarding the humanity of these laborers. As early as 1870, an official in the Colonial Office had noted that any argument based on “humanity” remained outside that department's mandate: “the welfare of an Indian subject in a French colony viewed as a matter of humanity no more concerns the Colonial Office than it concerns the Home Office or the War Office.”78 This rebuke, although merely a recognition of the division of bureaucratic responsibility within the empire, nonetheless pointed to a more foundational issue: that regardless of the putative universality of humanitarian claims, in fact only those governmental agencies tasked with the protection of such persons could effectively pursue one. That is, it was solely the role of British imperial state agencies related to India to represent the needs and interests of Indians.
From the turn of the twentieth century, elite Indian nationalists as well as non-elite activists began to interrogate the very premises of this claim. What kind of human life did imperial subjecthood enable and protect for these laborers? To what extent could the bureaucratic efficacy of empire secure their humanity?79 While Gandhi was the most well-known critic, other major figures within India also became outspoken activists against the indenture system, including elite nationalists from a variety of political perspectives: Indian National Congress moderate Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Hindu nationalist Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, as well as Indian Member of the British Parliament Sir Mancherjee Bhownugree and Gandhi's close English associate, the Anglican priest Charles Freer Andrews.80 By the second decade of the twentieth century, the issue began to generate broader agitation at both the elite and popular levels. Activists formed anti-indenture associations in Calcutta, in Madras, and in the North Indian city of Allahabad. These organizations held public meetings, published pamphlets, and circulated anti-indenture songs in the countryside to warn potential recruits.81 As one Hindi pamphlet signed by “Satyadeva” of Allahabad warned in 1914, “Save yourself from the Depot Wallas. Be careful!!! Be careful!!! Be careful!!! It is not a service [i.e., job] but pure deception. Don't get enmeshed in their meshes, you will repent. They take you over seas!!! … They are not Colonies but Jails.”82
Despite divergences in the tenor of some of their concerns—for example, Malaviya underscored the lack of provisions for preserving caste and religion, while Gandhi and Gokhale emphasized the system's foundation in fraud and coercion, and its treatment of all Indians (even elites) as “coolies” throughout the empire—anti-indenture activists shared a focus on the elements that revealed the system's racial character, pointing to the way it rendered Indians a class of persons fit only to serve, in Gandhi's biblical language, as the empire's “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”83 As Gokhale noted, the system was “degrading to Indians from a nationalist point of view … Wherever the system exists, Indians are known as coolies, no matter what their position may be,” and “India is currently the only country supplying indentured labour—why should India be marked out for this degradation?”84
The terms of these critiques focused on two issues that had long been part of official and unofficial criticism of the system: first, the nature of the labor contract, which subjected laborers to penal sanctions for refusal to work—a form of contract that by the early twentieth century white laborers in the colonies were not subject to; and second, the lack of protection for and the sanctioned immorality of Indian women, which was characterized as brutalizing the laborers—both men and women—and undermining their civilization and civility.85 Such analyses of indenture's racial underpinnings enabled these nationalists to articulate larger issues that the system raised. Thus Gokhale pointedly questioned: “First, what is the treatment of us, Indians, in this Empire? Secondly, what is the extent of the responsibility which lies with the Imperial Government to ensure to us just and humane and gradually even equal treatment in this Empire? And, thirdly, how far are the self-governing members of this Empire [such as South Africa] bound by its cardinal principles?”86 Although such critical comments relied upon imperial ideologies of justice and universality in a variety of ways, they nonetheless effectively countered the logic of imperial humanitarianism with the bitter reality that Indians' claims to humanity, and even their claims as imperial subjects, in effect held precious little purchase. On the contrary, it was precisely Indians' status as imperial subjects that rendered them vulnerable to the violations of their humanity that indenture entailed. Ultimately, these nationalists suggested, their humanity could be protected only within the framework of some form of citizenship, whether inside or outside the empire.
The historiography on indenture has focused on the role of these nationalists in securing the abolition of the system in 1917, and historians must reckon with the widespread commitment and political force that the anti-indenture movement generated in the second decade of the twentieth century, before the emergence of a mass-based nationalism under Gandhi's leadership in 1920.87 Yet while elite nationalists deplored the exploitation and oppression of Indian laborers abroad, their criticism of the system nonetheless focused on the fact that it created a global image of Indians as “coolies.”88 Likewise, their early-twentieth-century demands for imperial citizenship (representative government within the empire) did not seek to emancipate labor in India or elsewhere in any straightforward sense.89 Far from envisioning radical change in Indian social relations more broadly, to a considerable extent they held out Indian village life as a positive counterexample and model of ethical social life.90 These politics thus did not seek to transform the social relations undergirding manual labor in toto, nor were they concerned with the forms of life, labor, and sociality that would enable the laborer to come into her own. In this sense, the question of what legal edifice or form of citizenship could sustain the humanity of the laborer as a laborer remained unanswered.91 Only in the aftermath of the First World War and the abolition of the indenture system would these questions come haltingly and unevenly to the Indian political fore. In many ways, they remain unanswered to this day.
Advocates of the indenture system sought to utilize global differentials in conditions of life and labor to undercut the bargaining power of an existing local labor force, and they advanced racialized theories that identified particular races and racial traits as suited to particular forms of labor. In this sense, the system emerged from an impetus that was quite different from the vision that drove early-twentieth-century European efforts to create an international regime of labor rights, which led to the establishment of the International Labour Organization in 1919.
Nonetheless, the indenture system constitutes an important strand in a genealogy of international rights regimes in at least three respects: first, in the way that it involved the creation of and reliance on an expansive, regulatory, pastoral state; second, in the way that it came to involve international and trans-imperial efforts at regulation; and finally, in the way that it refashioned the question of the humanity of the laborer, locating such humanity in universally elevating or degrading conditions of work and life, which could be subject to law and regulation. Such humanity the system proposed to protect by means of law, and on the basis of Britain's responsibility for its Indian imperial subjects. Placing indenture in the history of international labor regulation highlights the areas of perhaps unwitting overlap between activists' efforts to secure worker welfare in Europe and the quite differently inspired efforts of the British imperial state to secure a docile, effective, and uncontroversial labor force through a similar welfare orientation.
The official British indenture system has long been treated as signaling the incompleteness of the transition to free labor or the limitations and inadequacies of state protections. Yet perhaps more importantly, it represents the emergence of efforts to envision and regulate labor on a global and transnational scale. The indenture system fostered an interplay of different modern ways of theorizing human regulation—including a view of culture, race, and civilization as non-state modes of governance, and a view of violence as both a form of cultural regulation and a measure of dysfunction that necessitated further state intervention. Alongside these ideas, because of its official status, the indenture system concatenated broader debates about the power of the state to regulate “private” relations of labor and the authority of empires and nation-states to oversee labor conditions across imperial-national boundaries. At the same time, the system was shaped by the (at times willful) limits of state capacity: the vicissitudes of overlapping jurisdictions, delegated legal authority, and imperial neglect. This braiding together of various imaginings of state and non-state law with expansive forms of state power, on the one hand, and with unresolved questions of sovereignty and jurisdiction, on the other, represented not an exceptional outcome of this singular system, but rather what would become integral to broad mid-twentieth-century struggles around internationalism, human rights, and the welfare state. Attending to the innovations of the system, as well as the ways it drew from earlier precedents, highlights the role of empire and imperial law in the history of international labor regulation. It also points to the transformations that occurred during this period in international legal imaginations of humanity.
For their generous responses and incisive comments, I would like to thank Rohit De, Kusha Haraksingh, Belinda Kong, Thomas Metcalf, Prabhu Mohapatra, Radhika Mongia, Jeffrey Selinger, Vyjayanthi Selinger, Mrinalini Sinha, and Hilary Thompson, as well as the six anonymous readers for the AHR. I am especially indebted to Riyad Koya for sharing his immense knowledge of the indenture system, and for his careful reading and productive critique. Audiences at Cornell University, the Law and Society Association, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, and Bowdoin College offered valuable questions and feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Jane Lyle edited the article with great skill and care, and provided exceptional assistance throughout the production process. Research for this article was supported by a Bowdoin College Kenan Fellowship.
1See the diverse explorations of facets of this phenomenon in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958); Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn., 2005); and Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1993).
2Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, 2009); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008).
3For some recent explorations of this issue, see Kevin Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery, c. 1885–1956,” in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (New York, 2007), 80–102; Talbot Imlay, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (October 2013): 1105–1132; Daniel Roger Maul, “The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour from 1919 to the Present,” Labor History 48, no. 4 (November 2007): 477–500; Maul, “‘Help Them Move the ILO Way’: The International Labor Organization and the Modernization Discourse in the Era of Decolonization and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (June 2009): 387–404.
4Antony Alcock, History of the International Labor Organization (New York, 1971); Conley Hall Dillon, International Labor Conventions: Their Interpretation and Revision (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942); John W. Follows, Antecedents of the International Labour Organization (Oxford, 1951); International Labour Office (League of Nations), The International Labour Organisation: The First Decade (London, 1931); Boutelle Ellsworth Lowe, The International Protection of Labor: International Labor Organization, History and Law, new ed., revised and enlarged (New York, 1935); David A. Morse, The Origin and Evolution of the I.L.O. and Its Role in the World Community (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969); Gerry Rodgers, Eddy Lee, Lee Swepston, and Jasmien Van Daele, The International Labour Organization and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009); James T. Shotwell, ed., The Origins of the International Labor Organization, 2 vols. (New York, 1934).
5This essay can also be read as part of a broader scholarly interest in the imperial and conservative origins of human rights. See, for example, Samuel Moyn, “The First Historian of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 58–79; Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery.” See also Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd, enlarged ed. (New York, 1958), 267–302; Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379–398; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J., 2009); Eric D. Weiss, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1313–1343. My argument diverges particularly from Moyn's exclusively European optic.
6A variety of dates can be associated with both the beginning and the end of the system. The import of Indians on five-year indenture contracts began in Mauritius in 1834, following earlier efforts by the French in Réunion starting in 1830. The initial outline for such a scheme was legalized in Government of India Acts XV and XXXII of 1837, coming into force in 1838. Emigration to the West Indies was sanctioned in limited terms as an experiment in 1838 for John Gladstone's estates in British Guiana. The system was terminated in 1839 following investigations that revealed horrific labor practices and high rates of mortality. It was reinstated in 1842 (in British Guiana in 1845), and thereafter operated intermittently until the 1850s. Similarly, although the system was officially suspended in 1917 in the context of the First World War, those who were serving indentures at that time were required to complete their terms of service, thereby extending the system into the early 1920s. British Government of India legislation passed in 1922 (Emigration Act VII) sought to fully suppress this form of labor migration. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London, 1974).
7The numbers of Indians who served indentures as part of this system pale in comparison both to those who served forms of indenture outside this system, particularly in Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, and Assam, and to various informal patterns of labor migration within India. According to Adam M. McKeown, between 1850 and 1950, more than 29 million Indians went to Southeast Asia, lands around the Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific. Of these, nearly 4 million went to Malaya, more than 8 million to Ceylon, more than 15 million to Burma, and about a million to Africa, other parts of Southeast Asia, and islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. McKeown states that only 8 percent of the overseas Indian migrants during the century from 1850 to 1950 were part of the official system. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008), 48. The system has since its inception generated disproportionate attention, however, largely because of its direct connection to slavery abolition, and perhaps in a subsidiary way, as a result of the unparalleled archival record that the system produced, precisely because of its uncomfortable connection to slavery.
8The vast scholarship on indenture, much of which operates within the binary of slavery versus freedom, includes Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore, 1993); K. O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875–1917 (London, 1994); Basdeo Mangru, Benevolent Neutrality: Indian Government Policy and Labour Migration to British Guiana, 1854–1884 (London, 1987); Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism; Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920 (London, 1984); Tinker, A New System of Slavery. For some attempts to move beyond this framework, see Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi, 1995); Kale, Fragments of Empire. See also Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990), which critiques the binary between slavery and freedom in the Indian context.
9Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991); Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 39–53; Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, eds., Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).
10McKeown, Melancholy Order; Radhika V. Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form of Equivalence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 2 (April 2007): 384–411; Mongia, “Impartial Regimes of Truth: Indentured Indian Labour and the Status of the Inquiry,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (September 2004): 749–768; Mongia, “Contracting Freedom: The Politico-Economic Subject of Liberalism,” paper presented at the roundtable “Liberalism, Empire, and the Formation of the Political Subject,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., January 5, 2008.
11For one set of reflections on this issue, see Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (London, 2008).
12These continual processes of often agonistic negotiation pervade the imperial archive on the system. Kale's Fragments of Empire is particularly strong in highlighting the terms of debate that structured the establishment of the system. See also Tinker, A New System of Slavery.
13See Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 63–83; Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 52–58.
14For examples of efforts by planters in British Guiana to reestablish private indentures and private shipping of laborers, see British Library, India Office Records [hereafter IOR] L/PJ/1/85 (1857) and L/PJ/1/86 (1857); and British National Archives [hereafter BNA] CO 111/498 (1897).
15Although individual officials took quite divergent positions, and some opposed the system entirely, the government in general moved strongly in the direction of attempting to safeguard its Indian subjects through restrictions on recruitment, regulatory mechanisms, and provisions for safety and welfare.
16This point is also made by Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, “Introduction,” in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1–58; and by Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “Assam and the West Indies, 1860–1920: Immobilizing Plantation Labor,” ibid., 455–480; Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century.
17See, for example, the explicit use of the Trinidad regulation as a model for other British colonies seeking access to indentured Indian labor, such as St. Lucia. Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, Parliamentary Papers [hereafter PP] 314 (1874), 20–22. See also the use of the labor code of Martinique as the basis for the labor code to apply to other French colonies importing Indian labor in Convention between Her Majesty and the Emperor of the French, Relative to the Emigration of Laborers from India to the French Colonies, Article XXIII, PP 2887 (1861).
18For a discussion of partial, competing, limited, and overlapping sovereignties in the early modern era, see Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010). This jurisdictional complexity, a product in part of the initiatives of local legislatures, not only produced systemic areas of state scrutiny, but also created spaces of legal obscurity, delegated authority, and evasion. This is the subject of important scholarship underway by Riyad Koya. I am grateful to him for highlighting the centrality of these issues to my argument.
19Similarly, in significant ways the system took shape through improvisation and experimentation. Initially, planters did not target South Asia alone as a potential source for laborers: there were efforts in the early years to draw laborers from around the Caribbean, from Portuguese Madeira, from West Africa, and from China, as well as from British India. China did become a source for thousands of laborers, and the British avidly negotiated with the Chinese government for decades to attempt to secure greater access to Chinese labor, but the Chinese government strongly resisted these efforts and ultimately prohibited this form of labor migration, albeit ineffectively, from 1874. It was in this context of the difficulty of procuring such a labor force that the system came to focus almost exclusively on British India, where British imperial control facilitated access to this potential resource. For efforts to negotiate with the Chinese government, see, for example, BNA CO 318/218 (1858). As both McKeown and Mongia have noted, for much of the nineteenth century, states were primarily concerned with their power to regulate exit rather than entry of population. McKeown, Melancholy Order; Radhika V. Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” Public Culture 11, no. 3 (1999): 527–555.
20See, for example, IOR L/PJ/1/85 (1856) and L/PJ/1/87 (1858).
21Lowe, The International Protection of Labor, xxxv.
22McKeown, Melancholy Order; Mongia, “Impartial Regimes of Truth.”
23Important changes in the system occurred through legislative acts in the individual colonies and by the Government of India during the entire period when the system was in force. Nonetheless, the basic framework of the system, including protective measures for laborers as well as fixed wage rates and penal sanctions, remained consistent principles. For India following Act XIII of 1864, see Indian Emigration Acts of 1883, 1890, 1897, and 1902. For the West Indies, see Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 62–70; for Mauritius, see Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, 194–217.
24These details filled the annual reports of the officially appointed protector of immigrants. They also formed the subject of the regular commissions of inquiry. For additional discussion and elaboration of these requirements, see IOR L/PJ/1/84 (1852–1856) and IOR L/PJ/1/84 (1856). They are also detailed in Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India. For an important examination linking elements in the indenture system to contemporary innovations in other disciplinary regimes, particularly jails and the system of convict transportation, see Clare Anderson, “Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (March 2009): 93–109.
25The position of “protector” had existed previously, but had been combined with other roles in port regulation. The 1864 act created positions exclusively devoted to this role. These provisions emerged out of jurisdictional competition between colonial agencies: between the Colonial Office and the India Office, and between the Government of India and the colonies. They also explicitly articulated the protective role of the British crown in relation to its Indian subjects. See, for example, IOR L/PJ/1/87 (1858).
26The protectors of emigrants in India and the protectors of immigrants (or the immigration agent-general) in the colonies were required to gather these (and more) statistics for compilation in annual or semi-annual reports submitted to the India Office and to the Colonial Office. The evidence these records produced of appalling conditions, forms of brutality, and high rates of mortality led to both quotidian adjustments and extraordinary commissions of inquiry, which themselves produced ever more regulations. Mongia, “Impartial Regimes of Truth”; McKeown, Melancholy Order. Major commissions included Coolie Export Enquiry (Dickens) Committee Report (1838–1840), PP 45 (1841) [also available at IOR V/26/820 files 1–3]; Correspondence Relative to the Condition of Hill Coolies and of Other Laborers, Who Have Been Introduced into British Guiana, PP 463 (1839); Correspondence Respecting the Employment of Indian Labourers in the Mauritius, and of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Present Condition of Those Already Located in That Colony, PP 58 and PP 331 (1840); Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana (Frere Commission), PP C. 393, C. 393-I, C. 393-II (1871); Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India; Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius (Frere and Williamson Commission), PP C. 1115, C. 1115-I (1875) ; George A. Grierson, Report on Emigration from the Bengal Presidency (Calcutta, 1883); D. W. D. Comins, Note on Emigration from East India to Surinam or Dutch Guiana (Calcutta, 1892); Comins, Note on Emigration from India to Trinidad (Calcutta, 1893); Comins, Note on Emigration from India to British Guiana (Calcutta, 1894); Commission Reporting on Restrictions or Disabilities of British Indian Subjects in British Colonies or Dependencies, PP 383 (1900); Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates (Sanderson Commission), PP Cd. 5192, Cd. 5193, Cd. 5194 (1910); Report on the Condition of Indian Immigrants in the Four British Colonies (Trinidad, British Guiana or Demerara, Jamaica and Fiji), and in the Dutch Colony of Surinam or Dutch Guiana (McNeill-Chimman Lal Commission), PP Cd. 7744, Cd. 7745 (1913); Report of the Indian Enquiry Commission (Solomon Commission), PP Cd. 7265 (1914). C. F. Andrews and W. W. Pearson, Report on Indentured Labour in Fiji: An Independent Enquiry (Allahabad, 1916), can be read as a political response to the recent Sanderson and McNeill-Chimman Lal Commission reports, seeking to provide a degree of scrutiny and critique that was lacking in the official reports.
27Mohapatra, “Assam and the West Indies”; Rana P. Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “‘Tea and Money versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,” in E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein, and Tom Brass, eds., Plantations, Proletarians, and Peasants in Colonial Asia (London, 1992), 142–172; Rana P. Behal, “Coolie Drivers or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System,” The Politics of Work, Family and Community in India, Special Issue, Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (2010): 29–51. For the issue of law, delegated authority, and violence, see also Benton, A Search for Sovereignty; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2010).
28Neeladri Bhattacharya, “Remaking Custom: The Discourse and Practice of Colonial Codification,” in R. Champakalakshmi and S. Gopal, eds., Tradition, Dissent, Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar (Delhi, 1996), 20–54; Prakash, Bonded Histories.
29I am indebted to Riyad Koya for underscoring the importance of this point for my argument.
30Secretary of State Lord Salisbury, quoted in Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies (Sanderson Commission), 7. Salisbury had supported active government encouragement of the system; this was rejected in favor of maintaining the status quo of “benevolent neutrality,” which nonetheless involved a government-facilitated system. See Mangru, Benevolent Neutrality.
31For another example of a vision of the system as a symbiosis of interests and of the proper yoking of people to environment, see the opinion of Lord Sanderson in Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies (Sanderson Commission), 21–22.
32Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana (Frere Commission), 90–91. This description also included the Portuguese, but with a much-curtailed cultural evaluation: “Being as a class industrious and frugal, some of them have amassed large fortunes in the colony. Besides shopkeeping, many of them have taken to wood-cutting, at which they excel.” Ibid., 89. For another example of such comparative racial typologies of labor culture, see H. V. P. Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guyana and Its Labouring Population (London, 1883), 99, 140–149. Bronkhurst also quotes a letter to the government by Immigration Agent-General J. G. Daly on the cultural characteristics of emigrants from Madras versus Calcutta.
33For examples of Indian nationalist critique, see Madan Mohan Malaviya, Speeches and Writings of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (Madras, 1919), 341–344; M. K. Gandhi, “Speech on Indentured Indian Labour at Bombay,” October 28, 1915, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter CWMG], electronic book (New Delhi, 1999), 98 vols., 15: 55–58, here 56–57, http://www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm; “Significance of Fiji Struggle,” Navajivan, July 9, 1919, ibid., 18: 361–362. Indian nationalist critiques drew heavily from Andrews and Pearson's 1916 Report on Indentured Labour in Fiji, which emphasized this issue at length. For scholarly analysis of this nationalist discourse, see Tejaswini Niranjana, “‘Left to the Imagination’: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 223–243; John D. Kelley, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago, 1991).
34For early discussions of this issue, see, for example, Mr. Secretary Gladstone to Governor Sir W. M. Gomm, February 26, 1846, “Transmitting Copies of Correspondence between the Colonial Department and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, on the Subject of Certain Alleged Immoral Practices among the Coolie Immigrants,” in Labour (Colonies) (West India and Mauritius), Immigration of Labourers into the West Indian Colonies and the Mauritius, State of the Labouring Population, etc., PP 325 (1847), 161–200, including the claim by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that most of the women brought to Mauritius in the years 1843–1844 were prostitutes (164), and a claim by one magistrate that the women in the colony were “of a low and abandoned description” (174). The depiction of women recruits' lowly or degraded status pervades the archive, despite occasional official refutation of this colonial common sense. Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 130 offers an example of this, with Tinker adopting this colonial perspective, despite his critiques of the system. For a similar example of straightforward adoption of the colonial analysis, see Basdeo Mangru, “The Sex-Ratio Disparity and Its Consequences under the Indenture in British Guiana,” in David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., India in the Caribbean (London, 1987), 211–230. See discussion and critique in Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, 2–3, 88–98; Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “‘Restoring the Family’: Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860–1920,” Studies in History 11, no. 2 (1995): 227–260. For another relatively early official discussion of the sex ratio, and particularly of its connection to the non-recognition of Hindu and Muslim marriage in the colonies, see the debates in the early 1850s concerning conditions in Mauritius among Colonial Secretary J. W. Higginson, Protector of Immigrants in Mauritius T. J. Hugon, and Procurer and Advocate General P. Depinay, IOR L/PJ/1/84 (1853). See also Edward Jenkins, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (New York, 1871), 203–214; and Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana (Frere Commission), C. 393, 40, and C. 393-II, 98.
35Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 89–90.
36See discussion in Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, 35, 51–52.
37Prabhu Mohapatra argues that starting in the late nineteenth century, official policy shifted from a focus on the sex ratio per se to a focus on “restoring the family” via marriage laws. Nonetheless, the concern with the sex ratio hardly disappeared. Mohapatra, “‘Restoring the Family.’” Mongia also examines Gandhi's focus on marriage laws during his South African Satyagrahas in Radhika Mongia, “Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satyagraha in South Africa,” Gender & History 18, no. 1 (April 2006): 130–149.
38In addition to the citations above, see the now-classic arguments regarding gender and indentured labor in P. C. Emmer, “The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British India to Surinam, 1873–1916,” in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916 (London, 1985), 245–266; Rhoda Reddock, “Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 43 (October 26, 1985): WS79–WS87; Ravindra K. Jain, “Freedom Denied? Indian Women and Indentureship,” Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 7 (February 15, 1986): 316; Brij V. Lal, “Kunti's Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 22, no. 1 (March 1985): 55–71.
39Mohapatra, “‘Restoring the Family,’” 236, makes a similar point, recognizing the model of supply and demand at work in this discourse, but does not link it to broader conceptualizations of nature and markets.
40Despatch of Governor Sir W. M. Gomm to Mr. Secretary Gladstone, September 5, 1846, Labour (Colonies) (West India and Mauritius), 172.
41The form of culturalist analysis that this exemplified also imagined the Indian population as forming a closed social sphere—with little to no social or sexual exchange across the lines of race. Many colonial as well as more recent sociological studies also emphasized Indians' resistance to mixing with other communities, an idea that became prominent in scholarly studies of “cultural persistence” in the 1960s and early 1970s, exemplified by Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence (New York, 1961).
42“The Urgent Need for Immediate Abolition of Indentured Labour,” Modern Review 21, no. 2 (February 1917): 250; “The Viceroy on Indentured Labour,” Modern Review 21, no. 3 (March 1917): 349–350.
43“The Viceroy on Indentured Labour.”
44Ironically, however, alongside this treatment of culture or society as a regulatory system that minimized the need for state law, both critics of indenture and diverse colonial officials identified Indians as a culturally burdened population, requiring both exceptional forms of coercion and exceptional forms of state protection. Indeed, from the process of recruitment to the modes of labor discipline on the plantations, the system was widely understood to operate problematically through the inescapable mediation of culture as a form of social domination: Indian sardars or “jobbers,” who served as recruiting agents, as well as sardars or drivers on the estates, who maintained workplace discipline, remained essential to the operation of the entire system, but their very integration into local lifeways, which facilitated labor recruitment and discipline, also enabled them to exploit the vulnerabilities and existing unfreedoms of potential recruits through various forms of force, fraud, exploitation, and deceit. This is also noted by Mohapatra in “Assam and the West Indies,” 462, although he does not explore the point further. See also McKeown, Melancholy Order, 75–76; Samita Sen, “Commercial Recruiting and Informal Intermediation: Debate over the Sardari System in Assam Tea Plantations, 1860–1900,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2010): 3–28, especially 22–27. Sunil Amrith has argued that the countervailing state emphasis on the laborer's agency as a contracting subject served as a way of shifting responsibility for the brutal conditions from the state (or the employer) to the laborer himself, since he had agreed to these conditions. Amrith, “Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870–1941,” Past and Present 208 (August 2010): 231–261.
45Revisions to requirements were often worked out in response to mass epidemics or widespread mortality aboard ship or at the estates. The inquiries that followed such events invariably proposed alterations to specific conditions or practices, at times comparing faulty to model conditions. Some of this experimentation is detailed in Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India.
46Report on the Condition of Indian Immigrants in the Four British Colonies (McNeill-Chimman Lal Commission), Cd. 7744,15.
47Benton, A Search for Sovereignty.
48Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Essays in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 87–104.
49As McKeown argues regarding the broader history of modern Asian labor migration and the emergence of regulatory regimes focused on sovereignty and national borders, freedom, particularly for anti-slavery activists and government officials concerned with the well-being of laborers and the morality of the system, would in fact be guaranteed through an entire scaffolding of regulations, itself subject to further incremental enhancements, that would protect the laborer from brutality and oppression. McKeown, Melancholy Order.
50This shift did not characterize the position of Indian nationalists, who sought the abolition of the system largely on the grounds of the substantive position it placed Indians in. Likewise, in highlighting this shift among metropolitan observers, I do not intend to suggest an abandonment of interest in forms of bodily servitude. The attention directed at sexual trafficking since the interwar era represents a key example of the fascination with acute forms of bodily coercion, especially where these were seen as fundamentally and permanently changing the character of persons, e.g., from virgin to prostitute. Barbara Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years: The League of Nations' Combat of Traffic in Women and Children,” in Grant, Levine, and Trentmann, Beyond Sovereignty, 54–79; Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis, 2009).
51International Labour Office, The International Labour Organisation, 29.
52See, for example, Lowe, The International Protection of Labor.
53Follows, Antecedents of the International Labour Organization; Alcock, History of the International Labor Organization, 5 (Alcock adopts Follows's argument on this); Markku Ruotsila, “‘The Great Charter for the Liberty of the Workingman’: Labour, Liberals and the Creation of the ILO,” Labour History Review 67, no. 1 (April 2002): 29–47. Follows and others attribute this insight originally to the 1788 writings of Jacques Necker, former finance minister under Louis XVI and former syndic of the French East India Company.
54Maul, “The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour”; Maul, “‘Help Them Move the ILO Way.’” See also Kevin Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York, 2005); Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery”; Frank Trentmann, “After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930,” in Grant, Levine, and Trentmann, Beyond Sovereignty, 34–53.
55Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years”; Ashwini Tambe, “Climate, Race Science and the Age of Consent in the League of Nations,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 2 (March 2011): 109–130.
56This differentiation persisted into the postcolonial era, with leaders of these new nation-states at times insisting on the necessity of different standards (or the same standards that had prevailed in industrializing Europe of the early nineteenth century) in postcolonial contexts. Maul, “The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour”; Maul, “‘Help Them Move the ILO Way.’”
57For examples of indentured laborers' resistance, see the discussions in Kusha Haraksingh, “The Worker and the Wage in a Plantation Economy: Trinidad in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Mary Turner, ed., From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 224–238; Haraksingh, “Control and Resistance among Overseas Indian Workers: A Study of Labor on the Sugar Plantations of Trinidad, 1875–1917,” in Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles, eds., Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 207–215; Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “The Hosay Massacre of 1884: Class and Community among Indian Immigrant Labourers in Trinidad,” in Arvind N. Das and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Work and Social Change in Asia: Essays in Honor of Jan Breman (New Delhi, 2003), 187–230; Kelvin Singh, Bloodstained Tombs: The Muharram Massacre, 1884 (Basingstoke, 1988). See also Gandhi's discussion of the resistance of indentured laborers during the third Satyagraha campaign he led in South Africa, in M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, trans. Valji Govindji Desai (Ahmedabad, 1928), chaps. 41–50.
58E. H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (London, 1981), especially chaps. 8 and 9; J. T. Ward and W. Hamish Fraser, Workers and Employers: Documents on Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London, 1980), especially chaps. 4–7.
59Maul, “The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour,” 483–484. See also Victor-Yves Ghebali, The International Labour Organisation: A Case Study on the Evolution of U.N. Specialised Agencies (Dordrecht, 1989).
60Christopher Frank, “Britain: The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill,” in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 402–421; Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 13; Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, chap. 6.
61See Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery.”
62Indeed, particularly in white settler colonies, indenture as a form of labor became integral to racist arguments against the possibility of citizenship. McKeown, Melancholy Order.
63Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, 18–19, 23.
64Slavery was abolished in the French Empire in 1848. The French minister argued that without the provision of Indian labor, it would be difficult to stem planters' reliance on the system of râchat, which the British viewed as an extension of the slave trade. Ibid., 30; also Convention between Her Majesty and the Emperor of the French Relative to the Emigration of Labourers from India to the Colony of Réunion, Signed at Paris, July 25, 1860, PP 2763 (1860), and Convention between Her Majesty and the Emperor of the French, Relative to the Emigration of Laborers from India to the French Colonies, PP 2887 (1861)
65Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, 35.
66See discussion in ibid., 48, 57–58. Also IOR L/PJ/2/145, files 19/89 and 19/90 (1874); and IOR L/PJ/2/143, file 19/82 (1874).
67See, for example, discussions in IOR L/PJ/2/77, files 8/93 and 8/97 (1874); L/PJ/2/145, files 19/89 and 19/90 (1874) and 19/91 (1875); L/PJ/3/1116, file 118 (1879); L/PJ/6/29, files 1, 2, and 11 (1881); L/PJ/6/230, file 1199 (1888); L/PJ/6/326, file 1315 (1892).
68IOR L/PJ/2/77, file 8/93 (1874). See also L/PJ/3/1115, file 37 (1874).
69For discussion of the British consul as a quasi-protector, the limits of such a role, and the possibility of regulatory oversight via an international commission of inquiry in Réunion, see IOR L/PJ/2/77, files 8/93 and 8/97 (1874). An international British and French commission was eventually appointed. See Joint Report to the International Commissioners of Inquiry in Réunion (Miot and Goldsmid Commission), 1877–1878, IOR V/26/820 file 4 (1878).
70IOR L/PJ/2/77, file 8/93 (1874); L/PJ/3/1116, file 118 (1879). See also the discussion of oversight in the French Convention in Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, 31–34, especially the bottom of 33.
71IOR L/PJ/3/1116 file 118 (1879). Also Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India, 48, 57–58.
72Courtenay P. Ilbert, “Speech on Presenting the Report of the Select Committee on the Indian Emigration Bill of 1883,” cited in Malaviya, Speeches and Writings of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, 325.
73IOR L/PJ/6/29, file 1 (1881); L/PJ/6/230, file 1199 (1888); L/PJ/6/326, file 1315 (1892).
74This may well have been T. W. C. Murdoch, as his signature appears on the final letter, but this cannot be confirmed with certainty. BNA CO 318/259 (1870), 3–5, especially 5v.
75International Labour Office, The International Labour Organisation, 23, 30–31.
76For a recent discussion of the limits and contestations of this framework raised by socialists in colonized countries during the era of decolonization and the early Cold War, see Talbot Imlay, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (October 2013): 1105–1132.
77See, for example, IOR L/PJ/1/84 (1853–1855); L/PJ/6/29, file 1 (1881); L/PJ/6/60, file 13 (1882); L/PJ/6/341, files 426 and 427 (1893); and also the two conventions between the British and French regarding emigration of Indian laborers to Réunion: Convention between Her Majesty and the Emperor of the French, Relative to the Emigration of Labourers from India to the Colony of Réunion, PP 2763 (1860); and Convention between Her Majesty and the Emperor of the French, Relative to the Emigration of Laborers from India to the French Colonies, PP 2887 (1861). In the case of Dutch Suriname, governmental inquiries into the condition of laborers in the West Indies included the colony with some regularity; see Comins, Note on Emigration from East India to Dutch Guiana, and Report on the Condition of Indian Immigrants in the Four British Colonies (McNeill-Chimman Lal Report). For discussion of imperial anti-slavery, see Grant, A Civilized Savagery; Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery.”
78BNA CO 318/259 (1870), 5v.
79The Modern Review regularly featured articles and editorials critiquing the system between 1913 and 1917.
80Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 288–366. Gokhale famously moved a resolution calling for the abolition of the system in the Indian Legislative Council on March 4, 1912. (This followed his earlier resolution of 1910, calling for abolition of recruitment for Natal, which was accepted by the government.) Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 2nd ed. (Madras, 1916), 616–643. Malaviya moved a similar resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council on March 20, 1916. Malaviya, Speeches and Writings of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, 323–347. Gandhi, in addition to regular journalistic writings on the subject, also discussed it at length in Satyagraha in South Africa, chaps. 3–4, 39–50.
81BNA CO 323/646 (1914), 100–107. I am indebted to Mrinalini Sinha for highlighting the non-elite voices within this movement, including that of former indentured laborer, writer, and activist Totaram Sanadhya, whose Hindi book Mere Fiji Dwip me Ikkis Varsh played a critical role in the eventual abolition of the system in 1917. Sinha is currently engaged in important research on Sanadhya and the anti-indenture movement more broadly. Sinha, “The Politics of the Impossible: The Abolition Movement in Twentieth Century India,” paper presented at “Political Imaginaries: Rethinking India's Twentieth Century—A Conference in Honor of 50 Years of the American Institute of Indian Studies, New Delhi, January 10, 2014.
82BNA CO 323/646 (1914), 100–107, here 107. This pamphlet appears only in English translation in the records. See also the discussion of the resonance between indenture and convict transportation for Indian villagers in Anderson, “Convicts and Coolies.”
83Malaviya, Speeches and Writings of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, 330, 331. “Hewers of wood and drawers of water” was a phrase that Gandhi used often. See, for example, his circular letter “The Position of Indians in Natal,” March 27, 1897, CWMG, 2: 124.
84Gokhale, “Indentured Labour,” March 4, 1912, in Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 616–643, here 628, 634.
85This is the focus of Niranjana, “‘Left to the Imagination,’” and of Kelly, A Politics of Virtue.
86Gokhale, “Indentured Labour for Natal,” February 25, 1910, in Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 604–615, here 615.
87This subject is part of Mrinalini Sinha's current research.
88Notably, Gandhi's early campaigns within India focused to a considerable extent on questions of labor brutality or economic exploitation, but solely as those questions concerned the relationship between Indians and Britons or Indians and the British government. His increasing concern with the treatment of Untouchables, a subject of great personal anguish to him since his days in South Africa, and his controversial views of caste as a social division of labor can be understood in this context as an effort to address the larger social issue in India. Yet Gandhi's emphasis was not so much on changing labor conditions or eradicating degrading conditions of work, but rather on transforming the social significance of these forms of labor from denigration to noble service.
89While Gandhi notably argued for the elevating nature of all forms of manual labor, his model of citizenship explicitly sought to obviate the modern state and its legal edifice in the pursuit of truth. Absent from this model, as both communist and Untouchable critics at the time argued forcefully, was any real recourse for actual laborers in the face of oppression and exploitation by owners who felt no compunction about their labor practices.
90See, for example, Andrews and Pearson, Report on Indentured Labour in Fiji; Malaviya, Speeches and Writings of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, 330–331, 342–343. Gandhi's extolling of Indian village life is renowned. Liberal moderate nationalist Gokhale was perhaps something of an exception to this, seeking to enlist educated elite Indian men as “Servants of India,” dedicated to the good of the country, who would live a life of poverty and pursue economic and educational uplift in the villages. Nonetheless his model was very much one of liberal social reform and elite uplift of women and lower castes.
91Gandhi's efforts to transform Indian production and consumption via khadi, or homespun cloth, represented one attempt at a revolutionary vision, albeit one that ultimately proved quite marginal.
