Indian Indentured Labour
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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation owners turned to Indian indentured labour, taking more than a million people to colonies from Guyana to Mauritius to the Caribbean and beyond.
How did the end of slavery in 1833 lead planters to recruit Indian indentured labour?
Critics, Gandhi amongst them later on, said this was little more than slavery in disguise and argued for abolition, which happened, but not until 1917, and there could be deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. But since many, especially from disadvantaged castes, chose to stay rather than return to India when their contracts expired, then questions about the experience of different peoples in different colonies became more nuanced. Well, with me to discuss this period of Indian indentured labour are Purba Hussain, lecturer in modern history at the University of York, Neha Hui, Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Reading. And Clem Seacheran, Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan University.
And Clem, it's to you I turn to first. In 1833, give us a sense of how entwined slavery, sugar and the British Empire were.
Well, there was a very long history of that. And some scholars have referred to it as the sugar slave plantation complex. Certainly in the Caribbean, the sugar industry with slave labor was the dominant factor in the economic development of the Caribbean islands. So it was crucial. In fact, when you think of sugar, Sugar. In the Caribbean, you think of sugar and slavery. And very often the expression bitter sugar crops up because I think it summarizes the experience under slavery as well as... To an extent, certainly in the early stages of indentureship, which came after the enslavement of Africans.
So what happened to the former enslaved people? What did they do?
It varied, Misha. In some islands... Like Antigua, for instance, where the possibility of acquiring land was virtually impossible. So very difficult indeed. You didn't even have the so-called apprenticeship system, which existed on other islands or in other colonies in the Caribbean. because the planters knew that the freed people, the former slaves, the former enslaved, had very few options, very few alternatives, so that their labour was still accessible to the planters. But in places like Trinidad and British Guyana and Suriname in the southern Caribbean, there was a considerable amount of unoccupied land, land that did not belong to the plantations or land that was not used by the plantations.
And in those places, the freed people had options to acquire land. as it did in British Guyana, as well as in Trinidad. And it was to those places where people had options and therefore were inclined to leave the plantations after emancipation. It is to those places where that vacuum was left. where Indian indentured laborers, in fact, other forms of indentured laborers, including Madeira and Portuguese indentured labor and Chinese indentured labor.
So tell us a little bit about the compensation. Who was compensated for the abolition of slavery?
But certainly not the enslaved or the freed people. The compensation, ironically, was referred to those who owned the enslaved Africans.
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