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4.4. Indentured Labour¹

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4.4. Indentured Labour¹ Rosemarijn Hoefte 4.4. IndenturedLabour¹ Introduction In legal terms,indenturedlabour describes “acontract committing one party to make aseriesofpayments to or on behalf of the other – settlement of transport debt,sub- sistenceoverthe (negotiable) contract term, and final payment in kind or,less usu- ally, cash at the conclusion of the term. In exchangethe payeeagrees to be complete- ly at the disposal of the payor, or the payor’sassigns,for performance of work, for the term agreed.”² The system of indenture curtailed the freedom and mobilityofthe workers,who could not easilydisengagefrom the contract when criminal laws rein- forced it.Refusal or inability to work, misbehaviour,orother transgressions of disci- plinary codes werepunishable breaches of contract. In those cases the indentured workers weresubjecttofines, hard labour,orincarceration. Indentured labour was widespread in (pre)colonial Asia. Indentured labour also existed as ‘White Servitude’ in seventeenth and eighteenth-centuryBritishand French America,wheredebt servants, political and religious dissenters, petty crimi- nals etc. wereput to work.³ With the expansion of the sugar plantations, enslaved Africans became the preferred labour force. In the nineteenth centurythe expanding global sugar market and ashortageofcheap, servile labour revivedthe system. The abolition of the slave trade and slavery and the subsequent actions by the imperial powers,particularlyGreat Britain, had enormous worldwide consequences. The “new” indenturedsystem relocated millions of Asians to work under contracton sugarplantations in the Caribbean, Peru, Hawai’i, Réunion, and Mauritius. Asian in- denturedlabourers werealso oftenused in the exploitation of natural resourcesorin other jobs demanding hard physical labour in new economic activities. Examples of such activities were the exploitation of guano in Peru and rubber production in SoutheastAsia, underlining the point that Asian indentured labour was also used in Asia itself. In fact,the overwhelming majorityofAsian indentured migrants did not travel outside South and SoutheastAsia.Increasing colonial intervention and ex- pansion transformed regional economies,pushing people out,but also creating new Western enclaves of labour intensive production. The present entry is largely based on alongerarticle: Rosemarijn Hoefte, “Indentured Labor”,pub- lished in Keith Bradley,PaulCartledge,David Eltis, and Stanley Engerman (eds), CambridgeHistory of WorldSlavery,Volume IV (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). ©Cam- bridge University Press, reproduced with permission. Christopher Tomlins, “ReconsideringIndentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600 –1775”, Labor History,42, 1(2001), pp. 5–43,at6–7. David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America. An Economic Analysis (Cambridge,1981). DOI 10.1515/9783110424584-019 364 Rosemarijn Hoefte Indenture is one of manyforms of bound labour,includingdebt bondage, con- vict labour,orcorvée labour.These formsoflabour mobilization merit separate cov- erage. HereIwill onlyuse the term indenturedlabour and not contract labour as this term maybeconfused with other forms of labour contracts. The indentured la- bourers wereoften called “coolies.” The origin of the word “coolie” is unclear; it might be from the Hindi and Telugu kūlī’ meaning “daylabourer”,and is probably associated with the Urdu word ḳulī’ or “slave.” In the nineteenth century it became acommon European termtocharacterize an unskilled physical labourer of Asian ori- gin. In some areas, such as South Africa, it even could mean anyone of Asian de- scent.Inthis chapter the wordwill not be used, except in official terminology,be- cause of its associationwith negative and racist stereotypes. The British werethe pioneers in organizingthe nineteenth-century interconti- nental system of indenture. Afterpressurizingother European nations to follow their lead in banning the slave trade, in 1806 the Britishwerethe first to ship 200 indentured Chinese to Trinidad for afive-year period of what they euphemistically called “industrial residence”.The system really took off in the 1830s, when slavery and apprenticeship came to an end in the BritishEmpire, and the Britishtransported thousands of Indian indentured workers to their colonies in Asia and the Caribbean. Planters argued thatonlymassive,regular imports of malleable labour could save their enterprises.Indian indentured migration thus was closelytied to the expansion of the tropical regionsand the abolition of slavery in the Empire. However,itismisleading to regard indenturedservitude as an intermediate stage in alinear process from slavery to free labour.Although indenture often came on the heels of abolition and apprenticeship,and thus at various times throughout the world, it did not always follow slavery.Cuba is an example of amixed labour system whereChinese indenturedlabourers wereimported before the abolition of slavery, while Hawai’iusedcontracted indenturedlabourers without ever resortingtoslave labour.Nor did indentured labour preclude the hiring of free labour.Thus free, in- dentured, and slave labour could exist side by side in the sameeconomic setting. As was the case with slavery,abolition of indenture took place at different times. The Chinese indenturedtrade was banned as earlyas1874. In India indenture was abolished in 1917, while in Indonesia or the Netherlands East Indiesthe penal sanc- tion was repealed in 1931, thereby also affectinglabour relations with Javanese in- denturedmigrantsinthe Dutch CaribbeancolonyofSuriname. That last mentioned indentured labour influx from Indonesia is frequentlyforgotten, encouragingthe mistaken assumption thatIndian abolition entailed the end of Asian indentured mi- gration to the Americas. Despite the fact that both slavery and indentured labour are forms of unfree la- bour and are often associated with back-breakingwork on plantations, it is question- able whether the equation between the twoiscorrect.The main differencesare that indentured labourers did not become the legal property of their employers (who were often their owner in the case of slavery) and thattherewas atime limit to the con- tracts, which also prescribed the rights and duties of labourers and employers, albeit 4.4. Indentured Labour 365 in Western terms. Indenture wasacompulsory labour system, which was safeguard- ed by so-called penal sanctions,which made neglect of duty or refusal to work a criminaloffense.Importantly, the enforcement of contracts, their supervision by au- thorities, the quality of indenturedlife in general, and labour conditions in particu- lar,varied across time and space. Origins,destinations, and recruitment The nineteenth century sawaglobal movement of commodities and people, and of the capital required to accomplishthis.The growingdemandfor labour in mineral, industrial, infrastructural, and urban projects and on plantations could onlybemet since an increasingnumber of individuals werepushed to migrate because of hard- ship in their homeland and werepulled by the lureofopportunities in places of which they had previouslyprobablynever heard. The new indentured labour migra- tion was aproduct of changingsocioeconomic and political realities in the countries of origin, the extant patterns of (bound) labour migration, and the imperial nexus providingthe legal and logistical basis (includingrecruitment and transport) for this type of migration. In short, old and new factors fused in this process, and the mix varied in the different areas of the migrants’ origin. The largest supplier was India, where Great Britainoversawthe recruitment, transport,and overseas labour conditions of more than1.3 millionindentured mi- grants, 900,000 of whom weretransported to British colonies in Asia and the Carib- bean. Imperial regulation and control checkedthe number of abuses, without being able totallytoeliminate foul play. Indian indentured migrationwas directlytied to expansion of capitalist enclaves in the Britishorbit in the nineteenth century.Indian indentured migration was not anew phenomenon in the nineteenth century as trad- ers and labourers had previouslytraveled to other parts of Asia or East Africa. The new migrants, however,nolonger came from coastal areas but from inland commun- ities. Recruiting effortstook off when planters from the island of Mauritius(which was British from 1810) turned to Indian labour after the abolition of slavery in 1834.With- in five years, more than25,000 Indians had been transported to Mauritius. Local planters wereconfident thattheir business would boom with these migrant labourers who were considered cheaper,moreproductive,and easier to control than the former slaves. But compulsion of labour trumped all otherfactors in the choice of workers. The optimism of the Mascarene planters inspired Caribbean planters to recruitIndian labour too. The first group of Indian workers leaving for the Caribbeanwas not made to sign acontract before departure, or even on arrival, but soon contracts signed in advance werelegalized in all colonies.The terms of indenture also changed: in 1849 Mauritius made the minimum length of the labour contract three years; the Caribbean followed this policy.When some colonies provided afreereturn passageafter completinga 366 Rosemarijn Hoefte minimum of five years under contract,the five-year contractbecame standard in the Caribbeanin1862. As soon as the system wasfirmlyinplace, the number of desti- nations, including non-British colonies,expanded.
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