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Little is known about capital punishment in Fiji in the context of indenture. This paper examines cases of condemned Indians who migrated as indentured labourers (girmitiyas). It compiles and analyses statistics and accounts pertaining to crimes of murder and the penalty of execution from 1886 to 1919. When these data are situated within a relevant social, historical, and cultural context, it becomes possible to dispel colonial myths about condemned girmitiyas. My intention is not to condone the act of murder, but to understand how this crime was triggered by interlocking social, cultural, and circumstantial factors. Indian patriarchal ideologies and stereotypes, displacement resulting from the journey across the kala pani (black water), unsatisfactory living conditions, the struggle to maintain a stable family life, exploitation by overseers and sardars, and feuds among Europeans and wealthy Indians are some root causes of homicide and 'wife-murder' during the years of indenture. The article concludes with glimpses of condemned Indian reactions to the sentence of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British attempts to reform or close down the indentured labour system as it applied to Chinese labourers across the British empire were carried out on an ad hoc basis, one colony at a time. In the southwest Pacific islands indentured labour recruitment was retained into the 1930s and beyond. Between 1920 and 1953 thousands of Chinese workers suffered under penal clauses for labour offences and endured harsh conditions on contracts that often extended beyond five years. This article investigates the means by which colonial authorities in Hong Kong and the southwest Pacific were able to maintain the indentured labour system despite the British Colonial Office preference for abolition. It compares government correspondence, labour contracts and ordinances from Nauru under British-Australian mandate, Western Samoa under New Zealand mandate, and the Anglo-French Condominium of New Hebrides (Vanuatu). It demonstrates that Chinese indentured labourers were retained with only minor changes to their contracts, put in place for the most part so that colonial administrators could avoid national and international censure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Chinese perspectives on the indenturing of Chinese labourers during the First World War and Chinese official intervention in the indenture system. In contrast to the Qing government's reluctance to send people overseas, the Republican government formed in Peking in 1912 believed in integration into the international capitalist system, and that indentured Chinese labourers working abroad would benefit the country and its people. The government sought to regulate indentures to prevent the recruitment of labourers by rogue agents and to establish new standards for the indenturing system. To some extent this arrangement reflected the characteristics of a new system under which the labourer was relatively free. The popular press was the main vehicle through which the Chinese reading public constructed their perceptions of the indenture system. The terrible conditions endured by Chinese labourers in Russia was portrayed in newspapers as a consequence of the fraudulent practices of Chinese recruiting agents. Labourers recruited by the British and French were judged to have received better treatment. The perceptions of Chinese labourers and their families varied, but especially after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, their memories of indenture were influenced by anti-colonial and nationalist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the term 'new slavery', short for 'a new form of slavery', as used by Liberal British Parliament members and white South African trade unionists in opposition to the recruitment of Chinese indentured labourers to work in the Transvaal gold mines. The recruitment of Chinese indentured labourers emerged following the South Africa War (1899-1902) in response to African 'native' labourers' refusal to return to the mines. This article explores how the Transvaal's distinct indentured labour system, characterized by coercive features akin to those in the Indian indentured labour system, and further defined by mandatory repatriation, fines for assisting labourers in contract violation and the establishment of a Chinese consulate for fair treatment, set a precedent for global labour programmes. These specific conditions of the Transvaal system influenced the development of subsequent labour initiatives, particularly the Chinese Labour Corps during World War I. The article provides an overview of the overlaps between these programmes and highlights the enduring impact of the Transvaal system on the evolution of global labour practices including modern guest worker programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 1931 report investigating the status of labourers in British colonies, the Colonial Office declared that the system of indenture had been abolished across Malaya. This claim belied the realities of labour practices on the ground. On plantations, mines and in colonial homes, Chinese workers continued to labour under formal indenture and to endure indenture-like practices well into 1930s. This article explores the slow decline of Chinese indenture in Malaya, concentrating on the rubber industry in the Unfederated Malay State of Kelantan during the interwar years. The Chinese migrant workers that were brought to Kelantan in that era signed contracts for one year with the terms of the contract enforced by colonial administrators. These workers endured poor working conditions and high death rates. Those that sought to escape faced criminal conviction and punishments including fines and incarnation. By showing the continuation of indenture in Kelantan, this article challenges the assumption made by historians that Chinese indenture had ended globally by the early 1920s. It also develops new understandings of the fragmentary and complex process of abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of Chinese indenture in Cuba is very clear when it comes to its periodization, establishing the start date of the trade in 1847 and the end in 1874. This periodization is based upon the arrival of the first and the last ships carrying Chinese indentured labourers. Thus, studies on the so-called 'coolie trade' focus on the period between these dates. What happened after the arrival of the last ship has attracted less attention. The end of the trade, after all, did not coincide with the end of indenture in Cuba, either in legal terms or in practice. By the 1880s there were still Chinese indentured labourers in Cuba who had not finished their contracts. Furthermore, after 1874 there were attempts to restore the trade in Chinese migrants: firstly, in 1877; and later, in 1919. Chinese indenture in Cuba is an excellent case study by which to problematize the meaning of 'abolition' and inquire on the nature of 'indenture'. Using multilingual source material, this article suggests a continuous view of indenture in Cuba beyond the 1874 hallmark, and pinpoints the debt generated at the moment of recruitment to pay for the emigrating costs as the single most important defining mechanism of indenture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to a journal section is presented which discusses reports within the issue on topics related to Chinese indentured labour such as the abolition of the Cuban coolie trade, the political legacy of Chinese indenture in South Africa, and indenture policies in the Netherlands.

This article examines the representation of Asian indentured migrants as 'consumers' in colonial British Guiana and Trinidad. Focusing on the specific case of opium, it explores how attitudes towards the drug fed into broader debates about socio-economic responsibilities of these labouring communities. After first establishing the considerable revenues which colonial authorities derived from the taxation of opium, the article illustrates the growing calls for migrants to 'pay back' to the colonies which had shouldered the cost of their introduction. It also explores how stereotypical representations of Chinese and Indian consumption informed debates about the economic viability of continuing to import various forms of migrant labour. The article argues that migrant consumption mattered, and that understanding why it mattered necessitates a broader understanding of how indentured migration shaped the economic and social histories of various British colonies following emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2022, David Dabydeen and Ben Jacob interviewed South African cricketer Keshav Maharaj. Maharaj – South Africa's most successful spin-bowler since the nation's readmission to international sport in 1991 – is the first descendant of an indentured worker, and only the third Indian South African, to play for South Africa's cricket team. In the conversation, Mahraj reflects on the legacies of indentureship, being part of South Africa's post-apartheid generation, his journey to the top of cricket, and his achievements on the international stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents artwork from the project, 'The botanical afterlife of indenture: Mehndi as imaginative visual archive', which memorializes the legacy of Indian indenture by recording the flora brought by indentured workers as they exist in the midst of contemporary social life and in the region's landscape. In the project, mehndi works as a decolonializing and embodied, post-indenture feminist aesthetic praxis and a method for contributing to a new world visual archive. Indo-Caribbean imaginative visual archives can challenge gendered and racialized exclusions in colonial and creole visual representations, and can instead image indenture and post-indenture histories in ways that are accessible, inclusive, consensual and popular; connecting all in the Caribbean and its diaspora to the afterlife of indenture. The article reflects on the images produced, how they echo biographical and fictional writing, and how they critically engage with the orientalising lens of colonial-era photography. In presenting these original designs of a botanical imaginary, the project aims to transform mehndi in post-indenture sites so that art forms which are both traditional and contemporary can be seen as post-plantation techniques for making memory-work an act of beauty. Inspired by his scholarship and encouragement, the project is dedicated to beloved Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the occasion of the Guyanese-born artist Suchitra Mattai's solo exhibition 'Monster' in London, the Art historian and writer Melissa Baksh interviewed Mattai about her work. This interview took place at Unit London in February 2022 and touched on themes such as the representation of women of the South Asian diaspora and how society 'others' and stigmatizes immigrants and those experiencing mental health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent commemorations in 2018 and 2023, of the 70th and 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, have prompted a deeper engagement with the history of postwar migration from the Caribbean to the 'motherland'. As public awareness of the economic contribution the Windrush Generation (1948-1971) made to Britain grows, there is also an increasing curiosity in the artistic output of this community and their descendants. However, when museums and cultural institutions choose to engage with the history of the Windrush Generation and its influence, such representations focus on Black Britain and a celebration of the African-Caribbean presence; little or no acknowledgment is given to the community of Indian-Caribbean heritage, who also formed part of the Windrush Generation. Frequently for example, art exhibitions, book lists and musical celebrations ignore the IndianCaribbean presence with the UK's Guardian newspaper recently publishing an article entitled 'Windrush at 75: books that shaped the black British experience' (author's italics).In this article I seek to analyze the literary contribution made by writers of IndianCaribbean heritage, who were part of the Windrush Generation. From Sam Selvon, the author of the classic Windrush novel The Lonely Londoners to lesser-known writers such as Lakshmi Persaud and Elly Niland, I argue that Indian-Caribbean writers have complicated the binaries of the current Windrush narrative and have perhaps been afforded less consideration as a result. My aim in this article is to offer a preliminary analysis of the literary odyssey of Indian-Caribbean writers during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This photo essay chronicles the life of my grandfather, C. Rajah, who travelled from India to British Malaya in or around 1920. He eventually made his home in a rubber estate in the north of the Malay peninsula called Foothills Estate, Kulim. There, he grew his family and built a life that was, by all accounts, a good one. The story I tell is based on tales I heard about him and Foothills Estate, documents in my possession and some items I inherited. It is an attempt to counter the stereotype in modern Malaysia that those who come from the estates are to be regarded as 'uncultured, illiterate and poor'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Priyageetha Dia is a Singapore-based transdisciplinary artist whose work brings together South-East Asian plantation histories, postcolonial memory, migration politics, and extractivism as it relates to both labour and data. The conversation focuses on submerged and speculative archives of indentureship in Dia's work. Dia describes how specific strategies, such as layering archival images, embodying diasporic Tamil ritual, as well as incorporating CGI and 3D animation in her moving image installations create a counter archive of the histories and afterlives of indentureship in present-day Malaysia and Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia recruited tens of thousands of local military labourers in the New Guinea Campaign (1942–5) of the Pacific War. This article suggests that widespread Australian military incorporation of local people in the war effort rendered Papuan and New Guinean women vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation by the Japanese military. These abuses were sometimes facilitated by men organized in Australia's labour indenturing scheme, both before and during the war. The article describes this historical connection in order to shed new light on the 'comfort women' system from an allied perspective. Its conclusions extend a trajectory of research forged by the late Hank Nelson in his groundbreaking 2008 article published in the Journal of Pacific History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to "make live" the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Rodney noted that colonial racist constructions of Africans depended on Africans oppressing each other more than it depended on Africans oppressing Indians or vice versa. 'No ordinary Afro-Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can afford to be misled by the myth of race', he stated, 'time and time again, it has been our undoing.' This paper affirms Rodney's position, and challenges Caribbean historiographies that produce a notion of Indo-Caribbeanness that is incompatible with Blackness. It argues compatibility can be achieved through the arts, namely poetics, because the arts reposition indentureship identities as more than labour-based and subvert memorial practices that create a static historiography that cannot progress beyond affect. Focused on the 2015 film, Bazodee, the paper outlines the history of the system of indenture as it relates to slavery to show how the conceptualisation of the figure of the 'coolie' highlights the identity's impossibility. Through Bazodee, it shows how the theoretical implications of the impossible coolie apply to life after indenture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I work as a Probation Officer; I have been doing this job for almost 15 years. I work primarily with men and have worked in major cities in England. I am a minority in England, both ethnically and religiously. I am a woman, and my family are migrants from Africa, and their grandparents were indentured labour from India. In all the ways I am different, I also often share histories of migration, of minority experience and of being an outsider with many of those I work with. This is the conversation I have with myself most mornings: Can you consider yourself an activist? I ask myself. Can you call yourself an activist, an anti-racist whilst working within this criminal justice system? Can you continue in this work and not betray yourself, your Muslim-ness, your brown-ness, your working class-ness, your immigrant-ness? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Indian indentured labour migration followed slavery in providing cheap labour to British plantation colonies. To make this migration characteristically distinct from slavery, the workers were offered a subsidized trip back at the end of the indenture period. However, despite this guaranteed and subsidized return passage, only about a third of the workers returned to India. In this article, we consider the role of caste in the decision to return home using data from ship registers for more than 16 000 Indian indentured workers in British Guiana between 1872 and 1911. Our results indicate that individuals from very low castes were significantly less likely to return home in comparison to other caste groups. We argue that this was because while caste hierarchy played a very significant role in every aspect of the workers' lives back in India, their lives in the plantation economies did not allow the reproduction of caste hierarchies. Low caste workers who stayed on in British Guiana were therefore able to escape the unfreedom of caste. This trend is not robust for other caste groups. While the association of higher caste groups and return is positive and significant, the significance disappears when we include economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1975 the historian K.L. Gillion diminished his reputation among scholars in Fiji with a harsh review of Hugh Tinker's A New System of Slavery. The ensuing controversy was unusual in that neither of the principals participated. Instead, local scholars entered the fray, overwhelmingly in support of Tinker, and this despite Tinker and Gillion being in agreement that indenture was an oppressive labour system. Fuelling the controversy were the passions of personality politics and a sometimes careless reading of Gillion's work, but the major element was confirmation bias – that is to say, the participants were responding not so much to argument or evidence but to the political and intellectual climate of time and place. For these reasons it is worth anatomising this usually-configured controversy as well as going beyond the local Fiji scene and tracing the wider historiographic afterlife of Tinker and Gillion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports on the afterlife of indentureship published within the issue, including a shift in Indo-Caribbean people about the heritage of indentureship, an afterlife of slavery visible in police brutality and the role of women in post-indenture sugar estates.

The article focuses on primer on indenture, paying special attention to the relationship between enslaved African labor and indenture, as well as the important role played by inquiry commissions. It mentions letters exchanged between colonial officials to show that the imperial bureaucracy was producing important legislative changes late in the arc of indenture. It also mentions nineteenth-century indenture and the colony of Fiji.

This article examines narratives of identity and belonging among descendants of white German indentured labourers in Jamaica and the local community in which they live. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews the research shows the ways in which members of the community in the village of Seaford Town make sense of and articulate elements of their German cultural heritage. This paper argues that while ideas about whiteness suffuse many of the identity-narratives, whiteness can variously be muted or amplified as a marker of identity. Similarly, notions of German-ness are not consistently articulated as embodied cultural forms. Here, culture is not conceptualized as static or embodied, but can be claimed and shared. In sum, the paper speaks to the ways in which whiteness read through a historical lens becomes remade in a contemporary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the "White Witch of Rose Hall" plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders' cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women's continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Stephanie Camp wrote of the "rival" geography that enslaved people created on slave labor plantations, few studies outside the field of architectural history have used the built environment as a source to understand the lives of enslaved people and the mindsets of enslavers in the United States. This article takes adolescent outbuildings in Louisiana (garçonnières) as a starting point to understand how white parents taught and reinforced ideas of dominance over both the environment and enslaved people and simultaneously rooted young white sons to a slave labor plantation "home." Using architectural evidence, alongside testimony left behind by both enslavers and the enslaved, this article argues that by moving young male enslavers out of the main plantation house and into a separate building, white enslaving parents created a "risk space" for sexual violence within the sexualized geography of the slave labor plantation. The garçonnière, with its privacy and age-and gender-specificity, constituted just one space of increased risk for enslaved women on Louisiana slave labor plantations from a violence that was manipulated within the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of indentured migration to seventeenth-century English America relies heavily on a single body of sources known as the London record, a collection of contracts and registrations of servants who emigrated from the capital between 1683 and 1686. Of the original 1,000 contracts, 189 have long been considered to be missing. This article uses methods from the study of paperwork and print culture to demonstrate that Huntington Library item HM 1365 is one of those missing contracts. Read as a part of its parent collection, this indenture is evidence of how the writing and archiving of late seventeenth-century transatlantic service contracts functioned to constrain would-be servants' choices and protections during recruitment and servitude, while legitimizing new and exploitative practices in colonial labor relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the controversy that surrounded the employment of Chinese-indentured labourers on the rubber estates of British North Borneo during the 1920s and 1930s. Using North Borneo as a case study, the article seeks to challenge the assertion made by historians that Chinese indenture had been abolished by the 1920s. I argue that Chinese-indentured workers made up a significant component of the workforce until the 1940s. My study of British North Borneo is part of a project that seeks to historicise the abolition of Chinese indenture across the Asia-Pacific region. While there is a wealth of rich work on the emergence of Chinese-indentured labour in the nineteenth century, analysis of the processes by which it was abolished have been neglected. The case of North Borneo brings to light the role of British and American activists in the anti-indenture movement and the resistance work of the Chinese labourers themselves. The article contests the assumption that the end of indenture was straightforward, highlighting the fractured and fragmentary process of abolition. It suggests the need to reconsider existing timelines associated with indenture globally which indicate that this form of labour recruitment was all but over by the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the theme of "abolition" as its point of departure, this collection of essays builds on the significant growth in scholarship on unfree labour in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds during the past two decades. The essays revisit some of the persistent problems posed by the traditional comparative literature on slavery and indentured labour and identify new and exciting areas for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase "chattel slavery" evokes a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade as people with African heritage were stolen, forced to labour under abhorrent conditions, and were powerless to prevent their children being sold away generation after generation. However, slaves were not the only people held in a chattel status through the course of American history. Both Indentured Servants and Convicts were held as chattel, albeit a temporary form. This essay suggests that historians of both slavery and unfree labour need to untangle the word chattel from the word slave – for a person who is chattel is not always a slave (and a slave is not always chattel). I argue that terminology is crucial, and that analysis of the semantics of the word chattel shows how current word usage does not match with actual word meaning, which has repercussions in the current political climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of the essay is the emergence in the eighteenth century of discourses of abolition in the context of bonded labour and the trade in slaves from India. It relates this to the development in forms of unfree labour from slavery to indenture, and to the travels of abolitionism from the Indian Ocean world into that of the Atlantic. The study examines multinational dimensions of this early history of abolition and discusses more particularly how missionary enterprises based in Danish colonies in India contributed to the development of ideas of education, enlightenment, and natural rights that fed into emerging discourses of abolitionism. Further, the essay links eighteenth-century debates around abolition to discourses of protection and humanitarianism that became prominent in the last half of the nineteenth century in the context of imperialist competition and campaigns against the illegal slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prisoners of war formed a legally distinct category amongst the many thousands of people forcibly employed in England and the English American colonies in the mid‐seventeenth century, but they have yet to be studied as such. Focusing on 1648 to 1655, this article explains how a succession of English governments sent their war captives into servitude with private masters despite the prohibition of hard labour for Christian prisoners in the customary laws of war. They instead operated under the logic of the English poor law, in which the indigent could meaningfully consent to serve a master even while under duress. The case of Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war in the Bedford Level fen drainage project shows how the Council of State and the drainage company board members conceptualized common prisoners as willing workmen. Prisoners, ambassadors, and a variety of English observers instead thought that war captives should not have to work for their subsistence or their captors' profit. Nevertheless, common prisoners continued to labour under the aegis of free contracts into the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]