“Oceans without Borders”: Dialectics of Transcolonial Labor Migration from the Indian Ocean World to the Atlantic Ocean World (original) (raw)
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Indian migration during indentured servitude in British Guiana and Trinidad, 1850–1920
Labor History, 2011
The following article analyzes the under-researched theme of Indian migration during indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad. It is understood that Indians were brought to the Caribbean under a series of restrictive colonial policies that stymied free movement. However, it is argued that some Indians resisted these very colonial regulations and exercised their individual right to migrate and subsequently dictate their own lives. Some independently took illegal action to acquire freedom while others waited until their contracts expired to migrate. While the number of those who migrated was consistently smaller than those who remained on the plantations, migration was a permanent feature of the plantation system that lasted as long as indenture itself. Indian migration during indenture can be conceptualized into three overlapping historical phases: (1) desertion from the plantations; (2) migration from the plantations to settlements (rural) to urban areas; and (3) intra-regional migration from one Caribbean island to the other.
In the period 1845 to 1917, approximately 147,590 Indians emigrated to Trinidad as indentured labourers from India to work mainly but not solely on the island's sugar cane plantations. Almost 75 per cent remained as permanent settlers on the island. Through a micro-study of indentureship within the wider framework of imperialism, this paper examines various aspects of British imperial policies with respect to the Indian indentureship system in Trinidad. It looks at the impact of imperialism/colonialism on labour policies and emigration in India; examines the manner, and extent to which, British imperialism/colonialism influenced migration from specific areas in India; and it shows how imperialist policies regulated the labourers in the colony and influenced labour relations.
Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries
International Review of Social History, 2019
Colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.
Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean
History Compass, 2006
The Indian Ocean, a relatively neglected and unexplored theatre of the slave trade, has only belatedly drawn the attention of historians, for so long preoccupied with its Atlantic counterpart. Recent studies have emphasized the African dimension of the trade to the almost complete exclusion of Asian sources of supply and have therefore done little to probe the diverse and unique features of slavery in the region. In particular, the presence and role of Indian slaves has hitherto been given scant attention, despite its significance in the colonial history of the region. The present paper provides an overview of the literature on the slave trade in Indians, and suggests a number of avenues for further research, in particular in developing linkages between the various strands of migration of Indian slaves, convicts, and indentured labourers throughout the Indian Ocean littoral.
South Asian History and Culture, 2018
This paper article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and transshipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the 18th and 19th centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, theis article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts of resistance of individuals 'of Ceylon'. The experience of Ceylonese or individuals described as 'of Ceylon' not only gives insights into the various forms of mobility that shaped the making of societies in the Indian Ocean world, it also helps us capture the remarkable capacity of some of these involuntary migrants to forge fragile communities, preserve practices of meaning and resist the predations of slave owners. The snapshots we offer of people 'of Ceylon' can refine our understanding of the way imperial designs affected the lives of dominated people across territories in the Indian Ocean. They also make more explicit the link between the global and the local and how larger processes such as slavery are broken down and lived at the local level.
Merchant capital and labor migration in the colonial Indian Ocean world
Historia crítica, 2023
Objective/Context: Historians have long acknowledged the importance of merchant diasporas and trade networks in Indian Ocean history but paid little attention to merchant capital's role in transoceanic labor migration in and beyond this part of the globe. Research on slave trading in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries highlights the need to pay closer attention to the complexities of economic life in this oceanic world. Methodology. This article surveys relevant historiography and draws on archival research in the India Office Records in London and the Mauritius National Archives in Coromandel. Originality. This article illustrates some of the ways in which Asian and European merchant capital shaped colonial social and economic life. Conclusions. A deeper understanding of the social, economic, and political complexities inherent in Indian Ocean history is contingent upon situating the specialized case studies that characterize this field of study in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts.