‘A Triple Empire…United under One Dominion’: Charles Prinsep's Schemes for Exporting Indian Labour to Australia

Abstract

Charles Prinsep, a prosperous Calcutta lawyer and sometime advocate general of the East India Company, was active amongst a network of British entrepreneurs in India who were enthusiastic about an Indian Ocean sub-empire, the potential of the Australian colonies to become trading partners with India, and their prospects as destinations for British residents to settle after their Indian service. During the 1820s and 1830s, Prinsep embarked on a series of ventures to purchase land, establish shipping links and export indentured Indian labour to Australia. In Australia, agriculturalists and merchants were also interested in the potential of Indian indenture schemes to respond to projected shortages of labour with the demise of convictism in the Eastern Australian colonies. A number of shipments of indentured Indian labourers arrived in Australia during the 1830s. These schemes were opposed by the Colonial Office and by many in Australia, particularly urban dwellers, who feared that such a ‘degradation’ of the labour market would discourage European settlement in the Australian colonies, which they wanted reserved for Europeans, that other great diaspora of the nineteenth century.