ABSTRACT The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments.
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