Abstract
This chapter covers cross-border labor mobility focusing on indentured servitude system in the post-transatlantic slave-trade, post-African-slavery world economy. Under the revived indentured servitude system, that was geared to exploit huge reservoir of labor from the Asian continent—mainly from India and China—the European colonial powers deployed millions of indentured workers throughout their colonies around the world. Although billed as a voluntary labor system, the indentured servitude of the Asians were barely different from slavery. Often the recruitment processes were riddled with torture and deception, the contracts were hardly voluntary, and the treatment meted out to the indentured servants during the shipments and in the plantations were hardly different from slavery.
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Notes
- 1.
As mentioned earlier, slavery was officially abolished throughout the French Empire in 1794, the British Empire in 1833, the United States in 1865, and Spanish America in 1542. The slave trade was abolished between 1805 and 1807 by both the British and American governments.
- 2.
The Virginia Company—consisting of two joint-stock companies, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth—was chartered by King James I (1566–1625) for establishing settlements on the coast of North America.
- 3.
Other available estimates also provide very similar figures. For example, Goodrich (1932) puts the figure at half the total number of white migrants in the 13 mainland colonies, and Galenson (1981, 17) maintains that the net migration of European whites to the New World in 1650–1780 totaled approximately 600,000, of which about 50–67 percent were indentured servants. Walton (1982) maintains that of the 20,657 indentured contracts signed between 1654 and 1775 alone suggest that the number of white indentured servants migrating to the New World would be 413,140 during this period alone.
- 4.
No accurate estimate of the Indian population in the 1850 s is available. The Cambridge Economic History of India (Volume 2, Table 5.1, p. 466), puts the population of the British Indian subcontinent in 1800 between 157 and 214 million, and between 183 and 247 million in 1850. The subcontinent had its first census in 1867–1871, providing an estimated population of 238 million. For further details see Henry Waterfield (1875), Memorandum on the Census of British India 1871–72, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, p. 5. Available online at http://arrow.latrobe.edu.au/store/3/4/5/5/2/public/pagec981.html?title=1871&action=next&record=3, accessed on Jan 22, 2019.
- 5.
In 1600, the Indian economy was 12 times larger than that of the United Kingdom (based on Maddison 2006, 114–118).
- 6.
Between 1600 and 1947, that is, for about 350 years, the per capita gross domestic product in India remained stagnant, while that of the United Kingdom increased nine-fold—much of the increase attributable to the transfer of resources from India. Repressive revenue measures of the British colonists, coupled with dispossession of land from ordinary people, often resulted in devastating famines. The famines of 1876–1878 and 1899–1900 had such a devastating effect on the Indian population that millions of debt bondage slaves traded survival for servitude (Kara 2012, 26–27).
- 7.
This figure of 30 million does not include cross-border labor migration within British India—there had been significant intra-subcontinent migration, especially to the tea plantations of the Indian state of Assam.
- 8.
The British colonists began exporting Indian indentured labor to the country in 1835 and by 1922 had exported more than 450,000 Indian workers, of which only 160,000 returned home. In 1924 there were 255,000 Indians in Mauritius, of which 23,000 were still indentured servants.
- 9.
Estimates made by Potts (1990, 68) indicate that between 1838 and 1918, a total of 430,000 Indian workers were exported to seven British colonies in the Caribbean.
- 10.
As the tropical climate in the Caribbean islands caused very high death tolls for workers, with many of them unwilling to stay beyond their initial contract period, in 1844, the British colonists legalized emigration to many of the Caribbean islands and offered indentured servants small parcels of land and some cash incentives to stay on the islands. The resulting emigration led to the development of large Indian diaspora in many of these islands.
- 11.
The Malayan archipelago at the same time also served as a source of indentured labor for Dutch settlements in South Africa. Between the early seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, over a period of 150 years, the Malay population was the only Asian element within Dutch settlements in the area (Richardson 1984).
- 12.
Transportation of Indian labor to the Dutch colony of Surinam began in 1873 with an agreement under which the Dutch transferred some of their old West African ports to the British in exchange for the British withdrawing its claim over Sumatra. The first ship carrying Indian indentured laborers arrived in Surinam in June 1873, followed by six further ships. In 1862, British colonists also allowed the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to Danish colonies.
- 13.
As mentioned earlier, of more than 450,000 Indian indentured laborers exported to Mauritius, only 160,000 returned home.
- 14.
Most of them remained in Fiji after completing their indentures. In 1891, of the 7988 Indians in Fiji, 3567 were free, and in 1941, of 44,220 Indians, 11,392 were free. For further details see Lal (1984).
- 15.
Many western writers suggest that lots of Indians, due to pervasive poverty and age-old caste discrimination, looked at indentured servitude as a great opportunity to attain an unsavory personal liberty regardless of its potential downsides (Quirk 2011, 123); the British might have struggled to understand India, but they clearly understood that large numbers of Indians were desperate to leave their homeland to work on the vague promise of a subsistence wage abroad (Wright 2017, 84; Turley 1991, 188). All such observations clearly lack appreciation of the fact that although the caste system was of India’s own making, large-scale poverty of the majority of Indians was largely a consequence of British exploitation, which resulted in successive famines and the deindustrialization of India. Even Marx (1973, 157) observed that India was “forced to send to England each year free of charge (what) comes to more than India’s 60 million agricultural and industrial workers’ total income!” and that “England receives it without giving anything in return.” Also, it is a fact that England was not only the largest slave trader, but also the largest trader of indentured servants in world history.
- 16.
During the ‘Gold Rush’ that lasted for about 20 years, so many Chinese were imported that shipping Chinese workers to the United States was more profitable than shipping commodities. For example, in 1853, a ship carrying 450 tons of commodities to the United States from China cost $5000, on top of $10,000 for repair, while a ship carrying 500 indentured workers yielded $37,000 in fares alone (Barth 1964, 111).
- 17.
A typical passage of 100 Indian indentured workers to the Americas cost planters £1600 (£16 per head) and a return passage of 15 percent cost £195 (£13 per head)—a total of £1795. A typical passage of 100 Chinese indentured servants cost £2500 (£25 per head) and a return passage of 80 percent cost £1200 (at £15 per head)—a total of £3700 (Campbell 1923, 142).
- 18.
Discussed in further detail in Chapter 9.
- 19.
Studies suggest that Chinese indentured servants had problems in South Africa too. In the first half of 1906 alone, 8,000 of them, from a total of 50,000, were convicted of various offenses, such as assault, desertion, forgery, rape, and robbery (Tinker 1993, 182).
- 20.
Queensland also enslaved its domestic aborigines, treating them violently to the point of extermination—in 1892 settlers’ cattle were herded by native women as no aborigine men were left alive (Saunders 1984, 195).
- 21.
Northrup (1995) however suggests that just about two million indentured servants were transported around the world—around 800,000 to various colonies in the Caribbean basin, and around 450,000 to the British West Indies.
- 22.
Numerous studies have pointed out that there were few tangible differences between slave labor and post-slavery indentured labor—indentured workers were subject to the same work regimes, same physical spaces, same punishments and sanctions for absences or underperformance that had previously characterized slavery. Had slavery not been abolished, it is entirely possible that many employers would have preferred slavery over indentured servitude (Qurik 2011, 132–133). Indentured servants were treated just as chattel slaves—they were stripped naked on the block for ease of inspection; if they became disabled they were discarded; like chattel slaves, they could be whipped for not meeting quotas; and their marriages were not acknowledged. For further details see Tomlins (2006), Tinker (1974, 1993), Turley (1991), Grubb (2011), and Northrup (1995).
- 23.
One of the descendants of indentured Japanese laborers, Alberto Fujimori, became president of Peru (1990–2000). At the time of writing this chapter, a descendant of Indian indentured servants, Kamala Harris, is a leading democratic contender for the US presidential election in 2020.
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Dowlah, C. (2020). Indentured Servitude: The Saga of the Indians and the Chinese. In: Cross-Border Labor Mobility . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_6
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