Colonial Plantations & Indian Indenturers
Revealing Suppressed Realities
An edited volume dismantling the colonial myth of benevolent indenture, revealing how India became the world's largest forced-labour market after slavery's abolition.
Overview
When Britain abolished slavery in 1834, the plantation economies of the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, and Natal faced ruin. Their solution was not to abandon coerced labour but to repackage it. Within years, India had been turned into the world's largest supplier of indentured workers — men and women recruited through deception, false promises, and a legal framework designed to look like voluntary contract while functioning like bondage.
Edited by Prof. Kapil Kumar and Sandili Maharaj-Ramdia, this collection challenges the colonial narrative that presented indenture as benevolent migration. Contributors draw on a range of archival and oral sources to document how recruiters operated through allurement and outright fraud, how the 'agreements' that gave indenture its legal cover were instruments of control rather than consent, and how the plantation system sustained itself through oppressive practices that bore a family resemblance to what it formally replaced. The standard colonial account of labour history is not merely incomplete, the contributors argue — it is a deliberately constructed alibi.
For scholars of empire, diaspora history, and the Indian Ocean world, this volume provides both the counter-evidence and the interpretive framework to understand indenture on its own terms.
The present edited work provides an alternative to the established colonial narrative on Indenture labour history. The contributors have based their arguments on a variety of sources to challenge the so called colonial benevolence The plantation economies, in order to save themselves from ruin after the abolition of slavery re packaged it in a new form - Indenture labour .To procure it India was converted into the biggest market. Oppressive practices, deceit, manipulations, false promises & allurements - the established colonial tools - were opperationalised to facilitate smooth flow of labour under the garb of agreements converting India into the biggest labour recruiting nation.
