Jonathan Connolly. 2024. Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 272 pp.
In this outstanding study, Jonathan Connolly, an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, examines how Indian indentured labour migration became ‘normalized’ after the abolition of slavery in the British empire. He does so through a case study of Trinidad, British Guiana and Mauritius from 1834 to 1878. While many studies have examined indenture in relation to slavery, either showing how it resembled slavery or arguing that indenture was a voluntary process, Connolly concentrates on the relationship between the emancipation of slaves and indentured labour, with a particular focus on how the colonial state used indenture to reshape the meaning of post-slavery free labour, and how the meaning of freedom and free labour changed from the 1830s to the 1850s.
There was a public scandal when indenture was initiated in the 1830s. Colonial secretary Lord Russell refused to allow indentured labour migration to British Guyana in 1840 for fear that it may ‘lead to a dreadful loss of life on the one hand or, on the other, to a new system of slavery’ (p. 2) Two decades later, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who succeeded Russell as colonial secretary, described indenture as morally just in a speech in Parliament. He argued that indenture was not a new system of slavery but a way to preserve the ‘sublime experiment of Negro emancipation’ (p. 2).
Why did Russell and Bulwer-Lytton see indenture so differently two decades apart? Why did indenture become less controversial in the 1850s than had been the case in the 1830s, and how did British officials come to see indenture as free labour during the 1850s? What changes were there in indenture and what prompted this change in the attitudes of officials?
Connolly responds to these questions through a study of Imperial ideology, law, state power, and economic change. The book comprises an Introduction and Epilogue and six chapters, divided as follows: The Scandal of Indenture and the Making of State Regulation, 1834–1845; Free Labor Contested: Indenture and the Limits of Freedom, 1838–1849; Indenture and Free Trade, 1846–1853; Consolidating Indenture, 1848–1862; Vagrancy, Free Labor, and State Power, 1859–1871; and Scandal Revived? Royal Commissions of Inquiry and the Persistence of Labor Control, 1869–1878. The study is structured chronologically, though there is some thematic and chronological overlap. Connolly’s key arguments are intertwined in each chapter. Three of these constitute the primary themes of the study.
The first is the public debate on indenture in Britain and, to a lesser extent, in India. Connolly examines newspapers, anti-slavery publications, official reports of inquiry, and parliamentary debates to explain how indenture came to be seen by the British as a legitimate form of free labour in the 1850s despite public criticism during the 1830s and 1840s. Two ideas, ‘financial ruin and antislavery – served as justifications not just for indenture, but also for state financial assistance to subsidize the cost of migration’ (p. 66). Connolly argues that new forms of scientific thinking about race, the idea that ‘non-European workers were incapable of productive social and economic development without regulation’ (p. 13), and economic ideas associated with a liberal political economy (‘free trade at home depended on labor coercion abroad’, p. 14) changed the debate on indenture. There was a consensus in Britain that emancipation had failed and that indenture was necessary for the survival of the colonies. This marked the ‘normalization’ of indenture in public discourse, with the decline of anti-slavery in Britain associated with free trade and race.
With regard to law and legal ideology, Connolly argues that various ordinances shaped the legal meaning of indenture and this changed over time. In view of these changes, it is more appropriate to speak of indentures rather than indenture. The length of the contract, for example, became longer, and the legal penalties for breach of contract were intensified. These legal changes removed the (theoretical) voluntariness of indenture. While indenture did not approximate slavery in an absolute sense, changing notions of race and personhood reshaped the category of free labour. These ideas influenced the ideological presuppositions of officials who regulated the system. As discussed in Chapter Five, the state-regulated workers and the overall system rigorously through ever more restrictive laws. Examples of regulation include making workers carry passes and the use of photography in policing indenture from the early 1870s, four decades before photographs were used in European passports (p. 136).
A third argument made by Connolly is that the Imperial state used indenture to reshape the political economy of emancipation as a whole. As discussed in chapters two and three, the state provided subsidies for indentured migration to reduce the cost of labour for individual planters and individual colonial governments. A system of debt financing was established to subsidize large-scale migration. Colonies like Guyana accrued debt guaranteed by colonial revenue and sometimes the British Treasury to finance indentured labour migration. The British state had paid an indemnity of £20 million to slaveholders across the empire as compensation for the abolition of slavery (p. 66). State subsidies for indenture were an additional form of compensation demanded by planters. It helped to shape and limit the socio-economic possibilities of emancipation for both the formerly enslaved and indentured migrants.
Connolly emphasizes the relationship between ideas (ideology) and economics (material change). He argues that indenture was essential to sustain plantation production, while perceptions of economic need led to changes in indenture policy. Ideological conceptions of non-European labour (ideas about race) justified patterns of state action that determined economic activity. Many anthropologists and historians of science have argued that a biological conception of race displaced the biblical theory of monogenesis, which posited a common origin for mankind (p. 97). Connolly argues that the new racist forms of race thinking influenced public thinking and gave legitimacy to state-sponsored labour migration.
Emancipation, Connolly shows, ended formal slavery without defining freedom in any specific sense. It was a contested process rather than a triumphal event. The debate on indenture was linked to unresolved questions about the meaning and purpose of emancipation. Connolly shows in this excellent study that by the 1850s, ‘indenture gained legitimacy. Once a scandal, it became normal, acceptable, useful. Britons celebrated indenture as a civilizing project, as a means of development, and as free labor’ (p. 176). As chapter six shows, the official inquiries of indenture in the 1870s in response to complaints, ‘ultimately reinforced the indenture system’ (p. 169).
This is an excellent study that connects the study of indentureship to the study of emancipation and the history of emancipation as a field. It is a welcome addition as it goes against the tendency to locate studies of Indian indenture in the field of Indian diaspora studies, and the indentured as essentially free peoples, and place indenture within the context of work about slave emancipation in the British context and bonded labour more generally.