Abstract
AbstractOne year after the first importation of coolie labourers from India to Trinidad in 1845 there were numerous reports of physical, occupational, and psychic abuse perpetrated by planters and estate managers against indentured labourers. This paper presents a genealogical footprint of the tormented existence of these labourers under a system of quasi‐slavery paradoxically at a moment when British colonial governance aimed to reinvent itself via the indentureship scheme, as humanitarian, benevolent and indispensable to the improvement of Indian subjects. Based on the court testimonies of a case concerning planter brutality against coolie, the paper foregrounds a legal‐administrative recalculation and redistribution of the semiotics of disciplinary power in an effort to consolidate the sovereignty of the liberal colonial state.
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