The Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916

Abstract

There is a pressing need in indentured labor studies for new approaches to examining and conceptualizing the nature and dynamics of the global migrant labor system that scattered some 2.2 million indentured Asian laborers, two-thirds of whom were Indians, throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world between the 1830s and 1920s. In this revised version of his dissertation, published as part of Cambridge University Press's Global South Asians series, Reshaad Durgahee seeks to demonstrate how historical geography can deepen our understanding of the indentured Indian experience in Mauritius and Fiji between 1871 and 1916. Regrettably, his efforts have resulted in a seriously flawed work that makes only a modest contribution to our understanding of that experience.Durgahee notes in his introduction that he wants to escape the conceptual and other limitations inherent in the historiographical propensity to examine the Indian indentured experience in various colonies in isolation from one another. To this end, he argues that the concepts of “the indentured archipelago” and “subaltern careering” allow us to develop a fuller understanding of the historical geographies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century indenture and imperialism. His second and third chapters seek to explore indentured spaces in, respectively, Mauritius and Fiji, while a fourth chapter focuses on the concept of subaltern careering. Chapter 5 examines the development of new indentured migration routes within and beyond the colonial plantation world, a process that he asserts involved the emergence of Mauritius, Fiji, and the British and French West Indies as regional immigration entrepôts. A brief conclusion summarizes the arguments that he advances in preceding chapters.While Durgahee can be commended for wanting to escape from what I have characterized on previous occasions as the “tyranny of the particular” in indentured labor studies—that is, an unwillingness to situate the case studies that characterize this field of study in more fully developed local, regional, and pan-regional contexts—his efforts to do so are less than compelling for various reasons, beginning with his failure to develop a convincing argument about the heuristic value of the notion that an “indentured archipelago” existed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he notes that the colonies in this archipelago did not develop in isolation from one another and calls for the comparative study of the indentured experience in this archipelago, he elects to examine Mauritian and Fijian developments side by side, in parallel, rather than comparatively. In so doing, he largely ignores Mauritian social and economic history before 1871, a thorough knowledge of which is central to understanding indentured life not only on the island but also elsewhere in the colonial plantation world. As a human geographer interested in how space shapes people's lives, he pays surprisingly little attention to changing patterns of spatiality on the ground in both these colonies. There is likewise little sense of change through time in a work of historical geography, much less of the dynamics of these changes, such as the Mauritian sugar industry's dependence on domestically generated capital at a time when the dramatic expansion of beet sugar production transformed the global sugar market. Durgahee's treatment of worker agency is simplistic and fails to consider, for example, the role that changing patterns of illegal absence, desertion, and vagrancy played in shaping indentured life, a serious omission since these manifestations of worker agency have been the subject of a substantial body of scholarship. While his interest in subaltern imperial careering provides welcome new insight into the complexities of indentured Indian immigration, his claims about its historical significance are undermined by the fact that the eighteen thousand individuals in question accounted for less than 2.3 percent of the eight hundred thousand indentured Indians who reached European colonies between 1870 and 1920.The promise inherent in a historical geographical approach to understanding the indentured Indian experience is compromised by Durgahee's failure to engage in the kind of rigorous analysis that this topic requires, a failure made manifest in a surfeit of descriptive narrative prose that also highlights his failure to demonstrate a solid command of important relevant scholarship on indenture in Mauritius and Fiji and the wider colonial plantation world (e.g., David Northrup's Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922). Stylistically, this book contains too many instances of the kind of redundancy that makes it read like a dissertation. The usefulness of the book's maps is limited because of their small size, while most of the illustrations are difficult, if not impossible, to see clearly because they are so dark. Such conceptual, evidentiary, and presentational problems are not what one normally expects to find in a Cambridge University Press publication.