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Convicts and coolies : rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century

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Anderson, Clare, 1969-. (2009) Convicts and coolies : rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century. Slavery and Abolition, Vol.30 (No.1). pp. 93-109. ISSN 0144-039X

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440390802673856

Abstract

This article seeks to shift the frame of analysis within which discussions of Indian indentured migration take place. It argues that colonial discourses and practices of indenture are best understood not with regard to the common historiographical framework of whether it was 'a new system of slavery', but in the context of colonial innovations in incarceration and confinement. The article shows how Indian experiences of and knowledge about transportation overseas to penal settlements informed in important ways both their own understandings and representations of migration and the colonial practices associated with the recruitment of indentured labour. In detailing the connections between two supposedly different labour regimes, it thus brings a further layer of complexity to debates around their supposed distinctions.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DS Asia H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Indentured servants -- India, Penal colonies, Imperialism
Journal or Publication Title:	Slavery and Abolition
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	0144-039X
Date:	March 2009
Volume:	Vol.30
Number:	No.1
Page Range:	pp. 93-109
Identification Number:	10.1080/01440390802673856
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access
Funder:	National Maritime Museum (Great Britain)
References:	Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture: experiences of Indian migrants in the British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (eds), India in the Caribbean (London: Hansib, 1987); Kay Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Verene A. Shepherd, Maharani’s Misery: narratives of a passage from India to the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: the export of Indian labour overseas 1830-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/463