Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality

Abstract

Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth century appears a further testimonial to European racism, to the arrogance of great power, and to the political influence of the West India planters and their merchant associates. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have characterized the whole process of nineteenth-century indenture as a new system of slavery.' If indentured labor has become, retrospectively, a cause for substantial moral indignation in the twentieth century, it was not lacking weighty moral overtones in the nineteenth. Public schemes for transporting contract workers from Africa and Asia to the free British West Indies were