3. Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836–1885

1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhavi Kale
Keyword(s):  
Labor Migration ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Indentured Labor

“Oceans without Borders”: Dialectics of Transcolonial Labor Migration from the Indian Ocean World to the Atlantic Ocean World

2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 7-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshina Hurgobin ◽  
Subho Basu
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Global Demand ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
In Trans ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

AbstractBy investigating the hitherto unstudied trans-colonial migration between Mauritius and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, this article complicates liberal Eurocentric perceptions of global labor force formation under the auspices of colonial capital. Indeed, coercion, as depicted in liberal historiography, was a crucial component of indentured migration but indentured workers themselves sometimes availed of the opportunity of the global demand for their labor by engaging in trans-colonial migration. The dialectic of the formation of globalized indentured labor regime was such that while capital sought to confine workers to specific plantations, the very nature of the demand for labor enabled workers to defy the dictates of capital and further enabled them to move from one colony to another in search of better livelihoods and thus made them globally mobile. These migrations did not follow the so-called boundaries between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Rather such migrations reflected workers’ search for jobs through trans-colonial networks within the framework of imperial domination.

The Livret system: the interface of accounting and indentured labor in British Guiana

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 145-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Tyson ◽  
Shanta S.K. Davie
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Sugar Plantations

Between 1838 and 1920, over 200,000 Indians immigrated to British Guiana (BG) as indentured workers on sugar plantations (estates). During this period, different labor types (freedmen, indentured workers, and free immigrants) coexisted on the same BG estates and were paid the same wages for comparable tasks. In 1873, in response to a commission of enquiry to improve the treatment of workers, the BG legislature introduced the Livret system. Livrets were to be kept by each indentured worker and contain the cumulative wages earned during the indenture period. In theory, Livrets would promote greater productivity, help mitigate pay disputes, and enable hard-working immigrants to end their indenture in less than five years. This article describes the Livret system and speculates on the reasons for its introduction and early abandonment. It contributes to the growing body of literature that critically assesses the interface of accounting and labor during the British colonial period.

Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Labor Migration ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
Labor Control ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Labor System ◽  
Worker Resistance

The period between the mid-1830s and early 1920s witnessed the migration of some 3.7 million Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Melanesians, and other peoples throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world to work as laborers under long-term written and short-term oral contacts. Studies of this global labor migration over the last forty years have been heavily influenced by Hugh Tinker’s 1974 argument that the indentured labor system was essentially “a new system of slavery.” There has also been a propensity toward specialized and compartmentalized studies of the indentured experience in various parts of Africa, the Caribbean, the southwestern Indian Ocean, India, Southeast Asia, and Australasia, with a particular emphasis on systems of labor control and worker resistance. Recent scholarship reveals that this labor system began two decades earlier than previously believed, and illustrates the need to explore new topics and issues in more fully developed local, regional, and global contexts.

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