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 indenturedlabourers 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 expansion 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 labourers 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 origin. In some areas, such as South Africa, it even could mean anyone of Asian descent.Inthis chapter the wordwill not be used, except in official terminology,because of its associationwith negative and racist stereotypes. The British werethe pioneers in organizingthe nineteenth-century intercontinental 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, indentured, 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 sanction 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 migration to the Americas. Despite the fact that both slavery and indentured labour are forms of unfree labour 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 contracts, 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 authorities, the quality of indenturedlife in general, and labour conditions in particular,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 migration 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 migrants, 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 communities. 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 destinations, including non-British colonies,expanded. Indentured Indian immigration was legalized for Natal and Réunion (1860),the French Caribbean(1865), Suriname (1873), Fiji (1879), and East Africa (1895). The number of intercontinental indentured migrantswas less than 10 percent of the totalnumber of indentured and non-indentured departures from Indian shores. Major Asian destinations such as Ceylon, Burma, and Malaysia attracted millions; annual departures climbedtoover425,000 in the last decades of the century.The seemingly endless supplyofIndian migrants wasthe resultofdemographyand overpopulation, political unrest,economic changes, famine and other naturaldisasters which set millions on the movelooking for workand shelter in the cities, where manywould be lost and thus apotential prey for recruiters. Infrastructuralchanges, includingthe building of railroads,made easierthe movement of people to the cities and also to the depots in the ports. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the exactrea- sons for migration, emigration data suggest that the Indian Rebellion of 1857 caused apeak in overseas departures. It is hard to gaugeindividual motivesfor signingacontract of indenture,but the armyofrecruiters playedacrucial role in this decision. The actual recruiting was done by the so-called arkatia or unlicensedrecruiter,who looked for candidates in busy places likemarkets,railways stations, and temples. The arkatia,who received afee for every recruit,often paintedadeceptive picture, promisingriches and con- cealingthe long voyage across the kala pani (the black water,the crossingofwhich was ataboo in Indian culture) or the penal system. When successful he handed the candidate over to the licensed recruiter,also an Indian, who took care of the admin- istrative process and forwarded the recruit to the ports of Madras or Calcutta.⁴ Like India, China had along tradition of labour migration, which took on new dimensions in the nineteenth century.And as in India demographic, socioeconomic, political,and ecological pressures explainedthe growingwillingness to leave.Final- ly,similarlytoIndia, amajority of the migrants originatedfrom specific sending areas.Historicallythe southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian were the areas of recruitment.Inthe nineteenth century,migrants to SoutheastAsia came from Fujian, while Guangdonese dominated the labour trade to the Western hemisphere.

 Principal destinations of Indian labour in the period 1838–1924 were in rounded figures: Ceylon 2,321,000;Malaya 1,754,000;Burma 1,164,000;Mauritius 455,000;British Guiana 239,000;Natal 153,000;Trinidad 150,000 (144,000 indentured); French Caribbean 79,000;Réunion75,000;Fiji 61,000;East Africa 39,500 (32,000 indentured); Jamaica 38,600 (36,500 indentured); Suriname 34,400;other British Caribbean 11,200.Source:David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Impe- rialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge,1995). map6,p.53. Note that these arefigures for labour migration, not indentured migration. The figures for regional migration to Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya arelikely to be inflatedbythe inclusion of re-migrants (Northrup, Indentured Labor,p.64). 4.4. Indentured Labour 367

Immediatelyafter the banning of the slave tradein1807the Britishshowed in- terest in Chinese workers with their reputation for stamina and endurance. Yet, after the failed experimentinTrinidad in the earlynineteenth century,the next transport of indentured Chinese to overseas European colonies took place onlyin1843when the planters’ demand for labour was stronger thanracial and legal objections as recruitment was technicallyillegal underChinese law. In total, some 2million Chinese traveled beyond Asian shores,but even this estimate represented onlyamodest part of total Chinese migration. In contrast to the Indian labour trade, which was largely directed to other parts of the BritishEmpire, Chinese migrants left for alargernum- ber of countries and colonies with different historical, political,legal, and socioeconomic backgrounds,asfar apart as the Caribbeanand Australia. In 1847, the first Chinese indenturedlabourers arrivedinHavana, and soon after Peruvian entrepreneursfollowed the Cuban example. As elsewhere, coercion, abuse, fraud, and deception about the final destination and the contract wereoftentimes used to luremen to sign up. Spanish and local officials contended that in the late 1850s, 90 percent of the indenturedmigrants boarded ship against their will. Scan- dals about corruption, kidnapping,and otherabusesprompted investigations uncov- ering even more irregularities in la trata amarilla or the yellow trade. Thesubagents, locallydespised as “pig brokers”,wereseen as the major culprits. Chinese contract migrationwas depicted as anew slave trade. Indentured migrationfrom Java started later than in India or China and continued longer.There existed various overlappingsystems of recruitment in Java: by informal indigenous networks,commercial agencies, and by employers. As in India and China, overpopulation served as apush factor in Java. And as in the other sending territories Java had along tradition of labour migration though informal networks.Brokers, who organized pilgrimages to Mecca, alsoemployed professional recruiters to arrangefor Javanese temporary labour migration to plantations in Malaya and BritishNorth Borneo, and later New Caledonia and French Cochin China. After 1900,two commercial firms wereadditional players on the recruitment market.Re- cruitment for Surinametoo was in these commercial hands. In totalalmost32,000 Javanese indentured migrants left for the West in the period 1890 –1932. The flow of migrantstoSurinamewas exceedinglysmall compared to the tobacco and rubber plantations in East Sumatra(Deli): Deli in its economicallymost prosperous years imported annually as manyJavanese indentured immigrants as Surinamedid in a forty-year period. Around 1910 athird system in the recruitment of Javanese labourers came into operation, when employers started organizingtheirown recruitment system in Java. This so-called laukeh (old hand)system, legalized in 1915,focused its activitiesonthe social network of experienced labour migrants with agood track record. Japan and the Pacific Islands wereplaces of origin of smaller numbers of indentured migrants. In Japan, the Meiji government’sopening of the country from 1868 led to an unprecedented international migration of indentured labourers and free migrants. The main destination was Hawai’i, which sawthe arrival between 1868 and 368 Rosemarijn Hoefte

1900 of approximately 65,000 indenturedJapanese. Although the United States had banned indentured contracts in 1885, Japanese immigrants werestillinbondageas they wereindebt,oftenfor brokerageand transport services, to the contracting agencies.When in 1908 the United Statesrestricted Japanese immigration, the flow turned to Peru, which received18,000 Japanese indentured migrants in total. Recruitment in the Pacific Islands was known as “blackbirding”,indicating the use of forceand fraudbyprivate agents. From the 1880s the migration process was monitored by the British administration, which cut out major abuses. The majority of the indentured islanders came from Melanesia.More than 80 percent of the migrants were transported to plantations in Queensland (which alone receivedmore than 60,000), to Fiji, and to the nickel mines in New Caledonia. In Fiji, more than 60,000 Indian indentured migrants, Girmitiyas,wereimported when competition for Melanesians created alabour shortageand droveuprecruitment costs.Inthe end, indentured Indian labourers vastlyoutnumbered the imported Pacific Islanders in Fiji. The emergence of plantations in the western Pacific was fueledbythe crumbling of the cotton production in the U.S. South duringthe Civil Warand the abolition of slavery there. Cotton turned out to be atransitional crop, and was overtaken by sugar and copra.The indentured labour trade was closelylinked to existing trading networks and maritime labour practices.Incontrast to other processes of indenture, the Melanesians did not sign awritten contract; their recruitment was basedon oral agreement.Another difference was that the labour trade in the western Pacific lacked the infrastructure of other sourceareas and depended on beach-based ex- changes between recruiters and potential candidates. Despite the large number of migrants to destinations far outside their region of origin the overwhelming majority of the skilled and unskilled Chinese, Indian, and Javanese migrantsremained in South and Southeast Asia.⁵ Their migration was rel- atively short distance, often precededbyinternal migration to urban areas,causedby the transformation of local and regional economies. Transportation improvements fa- cilitated both types of migration flows.

The contract

The contract of indenture,which minimallylisted the name of the labourer,regulated the legal relationship between worker and employer,stipulating anumber of obliga- tions for both parties. Itscontent varied over time, area, and economic branch, but

 Walton Look Lai, “Asian Diasporas and Tropical Migration in the AgeofEmpire: AComparative Overview”,in: Walton LookLai and TanChee-Beng (eds), TheChinese in Latin America and the Car- ibbean (Leiden, 2010), pp. 35 – 63, at 38–39,states that 6.5 million of the 7. 5million Chinese and 5mil- lion of the 6.3million Indian migrants remained in the region. Onlyaminority was actuallyinden- tured. 4.4. Indentured Labour 369

the main clauses concernedthe length of the contract, workingdaysand hours, and wages. The length of contract varied over time and in different areas and correspond- ed to the costs of recruitment and transportation. Employers recouped theirinitial expensesbythe work of the indentured. The higher the costs,the longer the contract would run. Chinese labour for Cuba and Peru was the most expensiveand eight-year contracts werethe standard. Intra-Asian recruitment and transportation costs were the lowest,resulting in contracts of three years or less. Additional stipulations prescribed that the employer had to provide housing and medicalcare at his own expense. The worker could not leave the premises of the enterprise without consent.The coreofthe indenture contractwas the penal clause, which subjected the worker to criminaljurisdiction in case of abreach of contract by refusingwork or other infractions threateninglabour discipline. Actual surveillance of contracts wasinthe hands of civil servants who werethe backboneofthe (colonial) state in boththe sourceand receiving areas.Theycould playanimportant role in supervising and checking the system, but they were not always united in their philosophyand operations. Required to keep the economic mo- tors behind the systems in mind, some officials had greater cultural affinity with the Western employers,while others also tried to maintain acertain degreeofautonomy in relation to the enterprises.Thusbesides official rules and regulations, the size and quality of the controlling bureaucracyand the personal efficacy of civil servants determined the level of inspection and the enforcement of the rules. The policy of these monitoring agencies could also shift over time. Indian immigrantsinnon-British territories had the right to claim the assistance of the British consul. Communicationwith this official should have been free and without restrictions. Indentured labourers could requesthis help to appeal against the decisions of the highest local authorities. The consul could alsoreport on short- comings in the living and workingconditions of Indians under indenture.InSuri- name, planters and colonial officials identifiedthe role of the Britishconsul and the right of appeal as one of the major reasons for the perceivedlack of submissive- ness of the Indian labour forceand areason for promotingimmigration from Java. Indonesianscholars later claimed that some Indians felt superiortoJavanese because of the protectionthey enjoyed of the British consulate. Although the contractstipulated afixed wage, the wages actuallypaidout could lead to conflict as “official” and real wagesoften differed. Accordingto manyarrangements the indentured labourers could be paid on the basis of days or hours worked or the number of tasks completed. Generally, employers preferred to payfor each finished task in order to increase labour productivity.Employers thus defined atask as the work an averagelabourer could perform in one day. The management argued that they wereacting accordingtothe contract.Indentured workers,however,frequentlycomplained thatthe tasks assigned weretoo heavy to finish in one day, particularlywhen weather conditions such as heavy rain made theirwork even harder.Thus employers and indentured labourers, sometimes supported by colonial officials, differed on what aworker could do in one day. The 370 Rosemarijn Hoefte

arbitrary definitions of an “averageworker” and “averageperformance” werethe main elements in wageconflicts.Inpractice wages and thus the capacity of indentured workers to accumulate savingsvaried enormously, depending on their health and stamina, their experience, the type of work they undertook (with overseers, for example, earning more), or opportunities to gain extraincome from other activities. Moreover,toobtain aclear measure of anyearnings, income needed to be compared to the local cost of living.Inmanyinstances,the price of rice was an important indicatorofthe actual standard of living of the labourers. After expiration of their contracts labourers had several options: to sign anew contract, to return home, or to find employment elsewhere. The lastoption could be restricted as formerindentured migrants wereexplicitlyprohibited from working in certain industries to protect the non-immigrant population. Gold mining in Suri- name is but one example. Manycontracts included freereturn passagetoconvince those signingupofthe, at least in theory,finality of the agreement.Manyfactors influenced decisionsabout whether to return or to stay. They included the formation of familyand other relations in the host country,the power of the caste system in the case of Indian migrants, afailureofmeeting savingsgoals, or the irregular sailing of return shipswhich caused time-expired migrants to incur debts. Distance from the homelandcould also playarole in the decision to return. In Cuba and Peru, freereturn was not part of the contractand the high cost of the voyage made it difficult to return. In contrast, the overwhelming majorityofIndian migrantsinthe Mascarene Islands repatriated. In the late nineteenth century,manyCaribbeangovernments offered former indentured workers plots of land to populate the colonyand to further develop smallholding agriculture. Repatriation rates varied through time among ethnic groups and destinations, and accordingtoeconomic opportunities in places of destination and of origin.

Receptioninhost societies

Governments and employers determined the conditionsofthe labour contracts, but the migrants themselvesalso shaped conditions in theirnew,possiblytemporary, homes. Their places of work wereoften spatial and social enclaves. Upon arrival most newcomers wereallocatedtotheir employers, but in some cases, includingCuba and Peru, slavery-style auctions werecommon. The arrivals had to adjust to anew environment includingdifferent diseases, diet,work rhythm, culture, and social stratifi- cation. Needless to say, circumstances varied by territory,time period, and product.In Peru, for example, the mortality rate among Chinese migrants was exceedingly high, but it is unclear whether this was caused by ill treatment and malnutrition or the encounter with adifferent disease environment.The organization of production and the profitability of the enterprise had agreat impact on labour conditions and levels of wellbeing.Acommon denominator was aclearly defined hierarchical 4.4. Indentured Labour 371

organization demanding unconditional discipline and obedience. Moreover,lan- guagedifferences increased the sense of alienation of contract workers from their employers. Yetmanagement cultures could vary by economic sectors or even among employers. Another importantfactorwas the macro-economic climate. Rapid economic expansion might lead to increased workloads and mounting tensions, lower healthstandards,and more crowded housing.Itisamatter of debate whether material conditions such as housing,medicalcare, drinking waterand food provisions improved over time. Finally, factors such as age, experience, social relations,and the physical state of migrantsinfluenced how well and how quickly they might adjust. Specific case studies,whether for particularplaces,ethnic groups,oreconomic sectors,reveal little about individual experiences, through there are some indirect indicators. Frustration about the circumstances in which indenturedlabourers found themselvesmay have prompted avariety of reactions, rangingfrom gambling and drugtaking to suicide or even to rebellion. Heavy workloads and poor wages wereoften the main reasons for discontent.Desertion, thatisleaving the enterprise without consent,was aclear act of dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions relative to opportunities elsewhere. Other obvious forms of protest,certainlytothe outside world, werepersonal at- tacks on supervising staff or mass strikes and rioting.Incase of open defiance, the armyorpolice might be usedtosuppress unrest.Particularly in the late colonial period employers used allegations of anti-colonial agitation as an argument to call in the support of the state to curb unrest on their enterprises,sometimes with perverse consequences for their workers. In Indonesia in the 1920s, the fear of agitation by alleged “outsiders”,such as nationalists and communists,led to ever more regres- sive policies, which did not leadtobetter treatment of the workers. Where resistance was more covert,involving,for example, feigning sickness or not following orders, the penal sanction gave the employers the right to take recalcitrants to court as such breaches of contract weredeemed criminaloffences.Open confrontations mayhavebeen more eye-catching, but the ratesofconvictions mayhavebeen a clearer indication of resentment.Finally, contemporaries had little awareness of cultural strategies of survival, such as escapism, to accommodate to the new life in an unfamiliar setting. Though often from different cultural backgrounds,indentured workers moving overseas tried to form communities within the new and often alien world in which they found themselves. Adaptation and sociocultural identity formation often went hand in hand, but uneven sex ratios, and in particular alow ratio of females, sometimes made it more difficult to (re)build communities and to generate asense of wellbeingand stability.This was especiallysoamong Chinese and Pacific Islanders, making it even harder for them to settle in the host society.The British government ordered thatspecifiedquotas of women needed to be recruited, while Caribbean planters statedthatthey wanted women not for their labour power but to tie the men to the plantations. The status of women within the indenture systems remains, 372 Rosemarijn Hoefte

however,debatable.Some have argued that women wereatthe bottom of arace- class-genderhierarchy, subjecttodouble exploitation by employers and by men from their own group, while others have pointed to the opportunities for women in asociety with ashortageoffemales. Thearrival andsettlementofdifferent ethnic groups sometimescausedoutbreaks of open racism. Themigrantswereoftenseenasintruders taking jobs,weakening the bargaining position of localworkers,mainly, in theCaribbean, Africanfreedmen, and thus lowering wages. In particular,Chinese were frequently targeted,both during and afterthe indentureperiod, notonlybecause of theirethnicdistinctiveness,culture, andlanguage,but also becauseoftheir perceivedeconomicsuccess.Not surprisingly, in timesofeconomiccrisismigrants were oftenscapegoatsaccused of taking jobs at cutthroatwages andundercuttinglocal entrepreneurs. Ethnic tensions mayeven have harmed developmentinpostcolonialcountries such as Guyana or Fiji,where ri- valrybetween descendantsofindenturedlabourers andother population groups con- tinues to provokediscussionabout social exclusion, which, in turn,isseendeeplyto affect thesocioeconomic,cultural,and politicalfunctioning of thecountry.Outcomes vary,however,for whereastwenty-first centuryMauritius andSurinameprovide examples of non-Asiancountries wherepeopleofAsian descentformtoday themajorityof thepopulation,inother countries, such as Jamaicaorthe French Caribbeanislands, thepresenceofindenturedmigrantshas basically “vanished.”

The end of indenture

Like the abolition of slavery,the end of indenture did not occur simultaneouslyinall receiving countries.Moreover,aswith slavery,the debate surroundingthe end of indenture focused on freedom in general and the concept of free labour in particular. Temporal and geographical factors influenced debates over the meaning of freelabour.What was lauded as freelabour in one place at aparticular time was oftenla- beled as slavery by anyother name at other places at the sameordifferent times. The system’sabuses fueledthe debate. Thiscontroversy is still visible in current publica- tions. Proponents stressedand continue to stress that indentured migrants signed a contractout of their own freewill, while opponents pointed to deceptive recruitment methods, the penal sanction, and the labour and living conditions in new host societies. Sometimes governments acted on critical reports regarding labour conditions and the legal rights of the indentured workers, but calls for reform were often ignored on account of the socially marginal position or the ethnic background of the indentured migrants. Ultimately, politics with acapital Pand new socioeconomic realities made the difference. Hawai’iwas the first major receiving country whereindentured labour was banned when the U.S. anti-Peonage Act(1867) prohibitingthe “voluntary or involuntary servitude” was extended to the newlyannexed islands (1898). Howev- er,itwas in the sending countries wherethe rising nationalist tides signaled the end of the system. China was the first to act when in the 1870sthe country adopted a 4.4. Indentured Labour 373

more assertive policy and first regulated and then suspended the system, even though debt and other forms of involuntary migration to Hawai’i, Natal, and Europe continued to exist. In 1916 the Indian Viceroy,LordHardinge,abolished the indentured trade. In- denture was seen, in Hardinge’swords, as “asystem of forced labour entailing much misery and degradation and differingbut little from aform of slavery.” Conse- quently, he urged “the total abolition of the system of indentured labour” in Fiji, Ja- maica,BritishGuiana, Trinidad, and Suriname.⁶ This volte face by the Britishauthor- ities was prompted by increasing nationalist pressureinIndia. Following Mohandas Gandhi’sprotests in southern Africa over the precarious legal position of Indians there, indentured labour became avehicle for highlighting wider forms of discrimi- nation against Indians by the British. During the Great Warindentured migration was thus abolishedbyLondon in order to save the British Raj. Other developments leadingtothe international abolition of indentured labour weresocioeconomic in nature. The nineteenth century had witnessed twomajor,dis- tinct streams of migration: from Europe to temperate settlements and from Asia to (sub)tropical lands. At certain places these streamsconverged, as for example in Aus- tralia and southern Africa. Where at first the European settlers regarded indentured labour as an asset, soon they considered the growingnumber of non-Europeans as a threat to European rule and jobs. Consequently, by the turn of the twentieth century governments in these settler areas restricted entry of non-Europeans by adopting dis- criminatory legislation and thereby promotingthe interests of people of European descent at the expense of the Asian populations.⁷ In the plantation zones, changingeconomic circumstances sometimes made bound labour unattractive,either because economic downturns and unemployment militatedagainst continuingrecruitment or because in some cases offered wages werehighenough to attract non-indentured workers. In Java, both political and economic factors prompted abolition of the “contractcoolie” system in Indonesia and Suriname in 1931.

Conclusion

The indentured labour system exhibited temporal, regional, and industrial variations depending,among other things, on the prevailing colonial authority thatmanaged it, production regimes in new host societies, the local labour history,lawsand customs

 Quoted in respectively Northrup, Indentured Labor,pp. 144– 145, and Hugh Tinker, ANew System of Slavery.The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London, 1974), p. 339.  Despiteits WhiteAustralia policy, this country “continued to import indentured Asian labour for the pearl-shell industry until the early1970s.” Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers, ThePearlFrontier. Indonesian Labor and Indigenous EncountersinAustralia’sNorthern Trading Network (Honolulu, 2015), p. 132. 374 Rosemarijn Hoefte

in both sourceand host areas,the strength of the entrepreneurial class, the state of demand for workers in host areas,and supervisory structures. Manykinds of ar- rangementsweresimultaneouslyatwork in both sending and receiving areas. Stud- ies of the different systems in operation reveal acomplex picture with different shades of coercionand freedom and thatborders between forms of labour werefluid. In whatever regime one considers,itwas evidentthat the level of coercion involved was determined from the outset by whether an individual was forced to leave or made his or her owndecision to leave.Ineither case, the role of recruiters was crucial. Those recruiters “fished in two pools.” First,they pursued mobile labourers in search of work and who were willing to consider the opportunities of new life elsewhere. Second, recruiters targeted more sedentary people living in vil- lages. Chicanery could be apart of the process encouragingpeople to leave,and might include providingmisleading information about work and contract conditions as well as final destinations, especiallyifthey involved traveling long overseas dis- tances.The costs of recruitment and transportwereultimatelyreflected in the length of initial contractthat migrants signed. Indentured migrantsfacedonerous conditions on sugarplantations, amajor destination forsuchmigrantsand onewhere employershad oftenpreviouslybeenslave owners andworking conditionshad historically takenaheavytollonthe enslaved.But decadesafter slaveryhad ended, workingconditionsfor indenturedlabourers in new andexpanding economic enclaves were arduoustoo.Afteraninitialperiodoftrial and errorinthe firsthalfofthe nineteenth century, theindenturedlaboursystemreached both itshistoricpeaknumerically andits greatest diversityinthe thirdquarter of the nineteenth century. Thereafter,the number of indenturedmigrantsslowlydeclined, notablyinthe wake of theformalabolition of thesysteminChina andIndia,but it stillsurvivedwellinto thetwentieth century. Itsfinal collapse came in the1930s with repeal of thepenal clause in theDutch East Indies in 1931,and itssubsequent ending in Suriname,the last refuge of indenturedlabourinthe Americas. Thecategorization of therevived system of indenture hasbeendebated since itsearly-nineteenth-centurybeginnings. It washailedasfreelabourbased on volun- tarily signed contracts, butthe fact that in many places it wasadirectsuccessor to slavery, with thementallegacy of that system as well as thematerial remnants such as slavebarracks, made it suspectthen andnow.Aswithslavery,racismwas acorner- stoneofthe indenturedmigration system,eventhoughits depthvariedacrosscolonial settings anddependedonglobaland localeconomicconditions influencing howem- ployers, civilservantsand otherpopulationgroupstreated “foreign” labourers. Despite these continuums indenturedlabour was not an intermediatephase in ateleological development from slavery to freelabour.Indentured labour existed in places without ahistory of slavery and in othersettingswhereenslaved, free, and indenturedlabourers worked sidebyside. The waythe system was implemented showed clear variations in time and locality,calling for anuanced approach to indenturedmigration and labour. 4.4. Indentured Labour 375