Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920

Kay Saunders, Kay Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351120647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

First published in 1984. Indentured labour migration in the nineteenth century intersects many of the most serious issues of our own time - racism, Third World poverty, and the arrogance of a great world powers. Indenture suggests lack of freedom and the exploitation of people formed into exile or misadventure. Coming as it did after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, in many respects it can be regarded as a replacement of the slave labour system. Indeed, both concerned humanitarians and officials in the nineteenth century, and many historians subsequently have regarded indentured labour merely as 'a new system of slavery'.

Many of the articles in this book address themselves to this assertion, whilst investigating the particular variations inherent in their geographic area. The differing patterns of Indian indenture in the West Indies and British Guiana, coming almost immediately after slavery, forms the first section of this book. Attention is given to the Indians engaged in the sugar industries in Mauritius and Fiji, and the rubber industry in Malaya. The use of Pacific Islanders in the Queensland industry is also examined, particularly in the sugar industry which, by the early twentieth century, contained the unique pattern of white, expensive, unionized labour. Other groups dealt with include the aboriginal workers in Australia and the Chinese workers in the Transvaal.

Overall, this book is comprehensive and far-reaching in its scope and the complex issues which it raises.

Chapter One

THE WEST INDIES AND INDENTURED LABOUR MIGRATION - THE JAMAICAN EXPERIENCE

William A. Green

Jamaica was an important recipient of indentured labour, but unlike British Guiana or Trinidad, it could not claim that indentured labour saved its flagging sugar industry. Although indenture intruded deeply into the political and economic fabric of post-emancipation Jamaican society, neither the historical course nor the demographic character of the island was substantially altered by the introduction of bonded workers. Among the four major British Caribbean colonies Jamaica stands apart.¹ It was the most prominent, most populous, and most troubled of Britain’s West Indian dependencies, and its economic development in the half century following the abolition of slavery was as disappointing as it was different from that of the other leading Caribbean colonies. This chapter will emphasise the distinctive qualities of Jamaica’s involvement with indentured labour as well as the broader ethical issues which that migration implied for the British Empire.

Among the leading British colonies, the distinctiveness of Jamaica is often ignored. Geographically, the island was removed nearly 1, 000 miles from the nearest British plantation colony, a distance that precluded an easy seasonal movement of labour like that which persisted in the Lesser Antilles after emancipation. In contrast to Barbados, a small, low-lying, entirely settled island, Jamaica was large and mountainous and possessed vast tracts of unsettled upland. Although Trinidad has many topographical similarities to Jamaica, it is considerably less mountainous. British Guiana, of course, is continental, and in the nineteenth century its settled areas were entirely within the tidewater belt. Like Barbados, Jamaica enjoyed a long history of British settlement. Trinidad and British Guiana, on the other hand, were acquired by conquest at the turn of the nineteenth century. In Trinidad, most labouring people spoke patois French or Spanish; in Guiana, Dutch influence persisted well into the nineteenth century. Unlike Trinidad or British Guiana (both Crown colonies), Jamaica was a self-governing legislative colony until the crisis of 1865, and its governor exerted less control over local affairs than any other in the West Indies.

Jamaica was the only major Caribbean colony whose sugar exports suffered steady, steep decline in the half-century following emancipation. By World War I, Jamaica was exporting less than one-quarter the amount of sugar it shipped in the final decade of slavery. Over the same period, Trinidad, Barbados and British Guiana substantially increased their output.² During intervening years, the demographic structure of Trinidad and British Guiana changed dramatically by virtue of bonded, particularly East Indian immigration. Barbados received no indentured labour. Jamaica acquired about 50, 000 immigrant workers, but the effect of this labour was limited. In Jamaica, as in Barbados, the flight of workers to other countries caused heavier demographic impact than immigration.

For analytical purposes, the history of indentured labour migration to Jamaica can be divided at the mid-1860s. In the early period, the colony struggled to preserve its plantation structure, experimented with various immigration schemes, then declined precipitously under the pressure of free trade. The later period coincides with the era of Crown colony government when immigration for all recipient colonies was confined very largely to indentured Asians. Though somewhat less than half of Jamaica’s bonded workers arrived before 1865, the island’s experience with immigrant labour in the early period was the most distinctive and the most interesting.

It remains a moot point whether bonded labour migration to Jamaica was necessary. Whether it was successful is also a matter of perspective, but at best its success was marginal. Why then was it undertaken? To answer this question one ought not to focus exclusively on a single colony, its condition, or the demands of its planter class. Bonded labour migration became an imperial issue of some magnitude, and any meaningful assessment of immigration to the sugar colonies must examine the question in an imperial context. If indentured labour migration has become, retrospectively, a cause for substantial moral indignation in the twentieth century, it was not lacking in weighty moral overtones in the nineteenth. Clearly, our low tolerance for the concept of indentured labour is not founded upon superior morality but on the altered form of our social goals. Schemes for transporting large numbers of African or Asian indentured workers to Jamaica were adopted by the imperial government with reluctance, with anxiety concerning the ethical rectitude of the process, and at very considerable cost. Such projects were instituted only because the practical and moral liabilities of bonded labour migration appeared less worrisome than the burdens to be borne if no such migration was undertaken.

From the beginning of Apprenticeship,³ Jamaica’s planters anticipated serious, if not destructive, labour shortages upon the advent of full freedom. There was abundant vacant land in the island to which the liberated population might repair to pursue peasant farming. In fact, Jamaica’s ex-slaves were already proto-peasants: not only had they sustained most of their own food needs by cultivating provisions on estate backlands, they had maintained a vigorous local marketing system for the exchange of surpluses. Apprentices clearly preferred the cultivation of food crops to the more demanding and more demeaning production of export staples, and there was little doubt in the minds of planters that large numbers of women and children would withdraw from staple agriculture when full freedom arrived. Only by the enactment and systematic enforcement of rigorous labour and vagrancy laws did the planters hope to stem the expected flight of freedpersons from estate labour. And only by the systematic introduction of immigrant workers did they conceive it possible to generate sufficient competition for wages to preserve regular and disciplined labour at acceptable cost. The planters came to these conclusions without the philosophical aid of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, though his theories on colonial settlement, at the height of their popularity in the 1830s, dovetailed precisely with the logic of the Jamaicans.

To the planters’ dismay, Wakefield’s views were no match for the power of British humanitarianism in the formulation and conduct of West India policy. Having created one of the most successful political pressure groups in parliamentary history, British abolitionists brought an end to colonial slavery, then broadened their perspective to include protection of aborigines living in remote areas of the imperial frontier. Their principal focus of attention remained the British Caribbean where scores of anti-slavery activists monitored the conduct of Apprenticeship, incessantly bombarding the Colonial Office with criticism, advice, information, and misinformation. The continuing power of the abolitionist lobby can best be measured by its ability, through carefully orchestrated political agitation, to force the premature termination of Apprenticeship in 1838.

Though profoundly irritated by the verbal excesses of anti-slavery spokesmen. Colonial Office authorities shared many of their fundamental biases. They considered colonial legislatures highly suspect; those bodies had to be watched, constrained, and censured if the liberties accorded the Negro population by the Emancipation Act were to be guaranteed. The commanding figure at the Colonial Office in the late ‘thirties was its permanent undersecretary, James Stephen, son of a leading abolitionist, brother of another, and husband of Catherine Venn whose father had been Rector of Clapham in the heyday of the Clapham Sect.⁴ Wise, diligent, and humane, Stephen quietly dominated Lord Glenelg, the sluggish Secretary of State, 1835 to 1839. Henry Taylor, chief clerk in the West India Department, though more pragmatic than Stephen, was equally suspicious of the planters and strongly disposed toward the assertion of imperial authority in colonial government as a means of ensuring the civil rights of the freed population.

The imperial government was caught off guard by the abolition of Apprenticeship two years ahead of schedule. The legal machinery required to sustain a free society in the British Caribbean was not in place, and the Colonial Office was compelled, in haste, to create a series of model codes on various aspects of colonial governance which it insisted that West Indian legislatures emulate in the preparation of local law. In critical areas of labour law - particularly in the formulation of masters and servants and vagrancy laws by which planters hoped to deter the withdrawal of freedpersons from estates - the Colonial Office demanded more lenient terms than those applying in the statutes of the Mother Country.⁵ In matters affecting immigration, imperial policy dampened the prospects of the planters. Colonists were forbidden to establish labour contracts with immigrants outside the colonies, and contracts adopted within the sugar colonies were limited to a single year. The planters were outraged. Not only had they been deprived, without compensation, of two years of coerced labour, they were prevented from using colonial law either to bind freemen and women to the plantations or to attract significant quantities of immigrant labour from abroad.

Throughout the Glenelg years, the Colonial Office carefully delimited the regions from which labour migrants could be conveyed to the free West Indies. The Mixed Commission Courts at Havana and Rio were considered acceptable sources of immigrant labour, but neither generated a significant flow of free workers. Beginning in 1835, Jamaica provided a public bounty from colonial government funds to be paid on immigrants introduced to the colony from Europe and North America. Both sources were acceptable to the Colonial Office since people from these areas were deemed fully capable of caring for themselves. Europeans, it was thought, would thrive in Jamaica’s higher elevations, raising food for the colony’s lowland markets. Their presence might discourage freedmen and women from settling in highland regions, and their products would help feed free workers who remained on the estates.⁶ Though about 2, 400 Europeans entered the island by 1840,⁷ they were unwilling to remain in the highlands; they were not, as a rule, suited to agricultural labour; and they died in large numbers. A few returned home; others fled the colony for the United States. In North America, free coloured people of prime working age - presumed to number around 35, 000 - were vigorously recruited by agents from Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana. Some Americans ventured to the Caribbean, but few stayed. Trained to the trades and domestic service, they found the rigours of cane culture entirely unsupportable. By mid-1840, colonial recruitment in the United States ceased.

Throughout the Apprenticeship, West Indians had petitioned the Colonial Office for permission to introduce immigrant labour from West Africa. The Colonial Office firmly rejected all such proposals. A government which had long struggled to destroy the Atlantic slave trade could not, at least at that point, countenance the prospect of British ships conveying African labour across the ‘Middle Passage’ to British tropical plantations. Such action would evoke cries of hypocrisy from continentals, while providing unscrupulous governments a precedent for legalising the slave trade under the guise of ‘emigration’. Britain’s first priority was the establishment of meaningful freedom for the emancipated population. Authorities at Downing Street were concerned that free labour might not sustain the plantation economy at its former level, but they discounted the darkest predictions of the planters. Moreover, not until the first harvest had been taken by emancipists would reliable evidence be forthcoming on the prospects of the free labour economy.

By 1840, preliminary evidence was in hand: it pointed to serious trouble in the sugar colonies. The grim forebodings of the planters were coming to pass. Women and children had begun their exodus from field work; men were working irregularly, often negligently; and thousands of ex-slaves were taking up residence on vacant backlands. Angry complaints from missionaries that Jamaican planters had created their own problems, forcing freedmen to vacate estate villages by their unreasonable demands over rents and wages, seemed almost irrelevant. In Trinidad and British Guiana, other colonies with extensive back-lands, the flight from estate villages was occurring at about the same pace despite the willingness of planters to provide free housing, high wages, and numerous allowances. Sugar exports fell roughly a third in the first three years of freedom while the price of the product rose by the same margin. In 1840 Lord John Russell, the new Colonial Secretary, calculated that per capita consumption of sugar in the United Kingdom was 25 per cent below what it had been in the final years of slavery.⁸

During the next three years, the imperial g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The West Indies And Indentured Labour Migration - The Jamaican Experience
• 2. The Impact Of Indentured Immigration on the Political Economy of British Guiana
• 3. Indentured Labour in Trinidad 1880-1917
• 4. From Slavery to Indenture: Forced Labour in the Political Economy of Mauritius 1834-1867
• 5. Labouring Men and Nothing More: Some Problems of Indian Indenture in Fiji
• 6. South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840-1920: Asylum Stability and Involution
• 7. ‘Kings’ in Brass Crescents. Defining Aboriginal Labour Patterns in Colonial Queensland
• 8. The Workers’ Paradox: Indentured Labour in the Queensland Sugar Industry to 1920
• 9. Chinese Indentured Labour in the Transvaal Gold Mining Industry, 1904-1910
• Index