Neha Hui

speaker

93 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 May

Neha Hui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Indian Indentured Labour · 21 May 2026 podcast

That act would remove the preferential treatment that British Caribbean sugar had in Great Britain, and they would face competition from slave-produced sugar from Brazil and Cuba.

The kind of argument that people like Gladstone was making was they were concerned that these newly freed former slaves...

would have increased bargaining power.

And then they were also concerned, as Clem mentioned, because there was abundance of fertile land, these workers would be contained with bounties of nature, was the term that was used.

So he argued for a flow of workers from India.

So liberal thinkers of that time saw Indian indentured labour as an uneasy compromise between slavery and free labour.

So say, for example, the Indian indentured workers did have sort of macro freedom to travel from one part of British colony India to other parts.

However, of course, mobility was restricted within the plantation.

There were other things that made indentured workers superior.

Say, for example, a right to passage back home.

Recruitment was at least theoretically free and people were signing a contract to get into the system.

Of course, there was a lot of evidence of abuse and coercion there.

Indentured workers were paid a wage.

It was less than free wage, but they were paid a wage.

So it was a bit of a compromise.

The political economists of that time were uneasy about this, but they didn't explicitly talk about indentured labour.

Adam Smith, who, of course, predated indentured labour, was unambiguously opposed to unfreedom.

So in his work, Theory of Moral Sentiment, he calls states that had slavery the vilest of all states.

And then in Wealth of Nation, he said that unfree labor was inefficient because workers just did not have the incentive to work more.

J.S.

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