Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838–1860*

Abstract

This article reinterprets the political and cultural underpinnings of post-slavery indentured labour migration in the British empire. Focusing on the early period of emancipation, it explains how and why indenture transformed in public debates from an unnatural scandal into a legitimate form of free labor. It argues that new modes of social-scientific analysis associated with race and liberal political economy drove this process of normalization. Connecting ideological with material change, it also argues that debate on indenture was fundamentally linked to broader unresolved questions about the meaning and purpose of emancipation. In this context, it shows that a growing consensus that emancipation had ‘failed’ reshaped debate on indenture even as increasing sugar production in parts of the empire bolstered support for labour migration. The article concludes by showing how supporters of indenture appropriated antislavery language to their own ends, paving the way for significant expansions of the indenture system during the early 1860s without public debate or controversy.