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ABSTRACT
The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments.
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Notes
1 John Wear Burton, The Fiji of Today, London: C. H. Kelly, 1910, p 271.
2 Bruce Knapman, ‘Capitalism's Economic Impact in Colonial Fiji, 1874–1939: Development or Underdevelopment?’, The Journal of Pacific History, 20(2), 1985, pp 66–83, p 70; For key histories of Indian indentured labour in Fiji see Kenneth L Gillion, Fiji's Indian Migrants: A History to the End of Indenture in 1920, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962; Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012.
3 Michael Moynagh, Brown or White? A History of the Fiji Sugar Industry, 1873–1973, Australian National University Pacific Research Monograph No. 5, Canberra, 1981, pp 4, 8–9.
4 Jonathan Connolly, ‘Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838–1860’, Past and Present, 238(1), 2018, pp 85–119.
5 Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured labour in the British Caribbean, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, pp 7–10.
6 Among others: Geoghegan’s Report on Coolie Emigration from India, British Parliamentary Papers 1874, XLVII; Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius, British Parliamentary Papers, 1875, XXXIV.
7 H E Holland, Indentured Labour – is it Slavery, Greymouth, 1920; Debate on Treaties of Peace Amendment Bill, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1920, Vol. 187, p 1220.
8 Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 248–250, 267–268 on arguments for suitability of ‘black’ Africans as slave labour on plantations.
9 P S O'Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White, 1908-1920’, New Zealand Journal of History, 2(1), 1968, pp 41–65, pp 46–48; Jacqueline Leckie, Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians, Auckland: Massey University Press, 2021, pp 31–32.
10 O'Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White’, pp 41, 44-49; Margaret Allen, ‘Shadow Letters and the “Karnana” Letter: Indians Negotiate the White Australia Policy, 1901–21’, Life Writing, 8(2), 2011, pp 187–202; David C Atkinson, ‘The White Australia Policy, the British Empire, and the World’, Britain and the World, 8(2), 2015, pp 204-224, pp 210–211.
11 Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and its Empire, c. 1800-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp 187–188, 194-5; Julia Martínez, ‘Questioning “White Australia”: Unionism and “Coloured” Labour, 1911-37’, Labour History, 76 (May), 1999, pp 1–19.
12 Janet Doust, ‘Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Eastern Australia Race and Empire’, Australian Historical Studies 35(123), 2004, pp 152-166, pp 153–5; Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836-38’, South Asian Studies, 33(1), 2017, pp 23–36, pp 27–30.
13 On union opposition to ‘cheap coloured’ labour see Martínez, ‘Questioning “White Australia”’, p 1.
14 ‘Problems of Fiji’, Otago Witness, 3056, 9 October 1912, p 4.
15 Esme Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness: Race and Disability in Imperial Britain’, Social Identities, 21(1), 2015, pp 22–36, p 33.
16 Piya Chatterjee, ‘“Secure this Excellent Class of Labour”: Gender and Race in Labor Recruitment for British Indian Tea Plantations’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 27(3), pp 43-56, pp 43–44.
17 Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean’, in Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (eds), Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook, Cham: Springer, 2016, pp 379–391, pp 380–381.
18 Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness’, p 33.
19 Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750, A History of Exclusion, Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2005, pp 12–13; David M Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780-1880, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, pp 4–8.
20 Mark Harvey, ‘Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal, 88, 2019, pp 66–88, p 84.
21 Turner and Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution, pp 5-8.
22 Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation, London: Duke University Press, 2001, p 176.
23 Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness’, pp. 24–27, 32.
24 Kennedy and Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery’, p 381.
25 Catherine Kudlick, ‘Disability History: Why we Need another “Other”’, The American Historical Review, 108(3) 2003, pp 763–793.
26 Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The Political Economy of Indian Indentured labour’, University of Reading Economics Discussion Papers, Reading, 2017, pp 1-26, p 9; Purba Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt and Uncertainty”: John Gladstone and the Post-Slavery Framework of Labour in the British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50(1) 2022, pp 52–80, p 62.
27 Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour’, pp 23–36.
28 Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 52–53.
29 Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836. Enclosure No.1 to Gladstone’s letters to Lord Glenelg, February 28, 1838, in Copies of All Orders in Council, or Colonial Ordinances, for the better regulations and enforcement of the relative duties of masters and employers, and articled servants, tradesmen and labourers, in the colonies of British Guiana and Mauritius and of correspondence relating thereof, 2 March 1838, [Hereafter, masters and employers] cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 53–55, p 61.
30 Letter from Gladstone to Hobhouse, February 23, 1837, in Enclosure 1 in No. 5, in masters and employers, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 62–63.
31 Kaushik Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality: Primitivism and Race Classification in the Indentured Labour Market of Colonial India’, in Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash and Susie Tharu (eds), Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp 8–48, pp 18–19.
32 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 17–19, 23.
33 Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination’, pp 23–36.
34 Deposition of John Mackay, in the Report of the Committee on Transportation, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, XXII, p 191, cited in Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 17.
35 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 17.
36 Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, p 61.
37 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 12–13.
38 Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26, 2016, pp 103-123; Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, p 62.
39 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 9.
40 Deposition of J R Mayo, in the Report of the Committee on Transportation, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, XXII, p 175, cited in Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 19.
41 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 19.
42 Crispin Bates, ‘Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora’, South Asian Studies, 33(1), 2017, pp 7–22, pp 8–9.
43 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 20–21; Sen Sunanda Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India in the Age of Empire’, Social Scientist 44(1/2), 2016, pp 35–74, pp 45–47.
44 The Economist, Saturday, March 2, 1861, 019(914), p 227; The Economist, Saturday, July 16, 1859, 017(827), p 785 cited in Hui and Kambhampati, ‘The Political Economy of Indian Indentured labour’, p 11.
45 Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India’, pp 53–54; Andrea Wright, ‘From Slaves to Contract Workers: Genealogies of Consent and Security in Indian Labor Migration’, Journal of World History, 32(1) 2021, pp 29–43, p 34.
46 Thomas R Metcalf, ‘“Hard hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”: Recruiting ‘Coolies’ for Natal, 1860–1911’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30(3), 2002, pp 1–26, pp 4–10.
47 Brij V Lal, ‘Indenture: Experiment and Experience’, in Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (eds), Routledge Handbook of the South Asia Diaspora, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, pp 79–95p 83; Brij V Lal, Chalo Jahaji:on a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, ANU E Press, 2012, pp 106–7.
48 Chatterjee, ‘“Secure this Excellent Class of Labour”’, pp 43–44; S S Sumesh and Nitish Gogoi, ‘A Journey Beyond Colonial History: Coolies in the making of an “Adivasi Identity” in Assam’, Labor History, 62(2), 2021, pp 134–147, pp 135–7; Lal, ‘Indenture: Experiment and Experience’, p 79.
49 Metcalf, ‘“Hard hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, p 24 note 6.
50 Mitchell to Subagents, 3 Nov 1896, and to B.K. Gupta, 6 Nov 1896, Indian Immigration [II] Letter Books, II B/1/22, Kwa-Zulu Natal Archives, Pietermaritz, cited in Metcalf, ‘“Hard Hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, p 10.
51 Philippa Levine, ‘“A Multitude of Unchaste Women:” Prostitution in the British Empire’, Journal of Women's History, 15(4), 2004, pp 159–163, pp 161–2.
52 Cristina Visperas, ‘The Able-Bodied Slave’, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 13(1), 2019, pp 93–110, pp 93–94.
53 I M Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific: The West Indian System in Fiji’, Pacific Historical Review, 25(4), 1956, pp 369–88, p 382.
54 Madhwi, ‘Recruiting Indentured Labour for Overseas Colonies, circa 1834–1910’, Social Scientist, 43(9/10), 2015, pp. 53–68, pp. 56-58; Madhwi, ‘“Able”, “Dis-abled” and “Invalid” Labourers: Disability and Indenture in Mauritius and Natal, c. 1840–1910’, in Esme Cleall (ed), Global Histories of Disability, 1700-2015: Power, Place and People, New York: Routledge, 2022, pp 44–55, pp 41–42; Metcalf, ‘“Hard Hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, pp 10–11.
55 Isabella Ville, ‘From Inaptitude for Work to Trial of the Self: The Vicissitudes of Meanings of Disability’, ALTER European Journal of Disability Research 4, 2010, pp 59-71, pp 60–62.
56 Jane Buckingham, ‘Disability, Leprosy, and Plantation Health among Indian Indentured Labourers in Fiji, 1879–1911’, in Henk Menke, Jane Buckingham, Farzana Gounder, Ashutosh Kumar and Maurits S Hassankhan (eds), Social Aspects of Health, Medicine and Disease in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Era, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021, pp 199–221.
57 Madhwi, ‘“Able”, “Dis-abled” and “Invalid” Labourers’, p 49.
58 Margaret Mishra, ‘Undoing the “Madwoman”: A Minor History of Uselessness, Dementia and Indenture in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 19(6), 2018, pp 178–195, p 186.
59 Regulation 50 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 112, Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates, June 1910, 3, 5192 of Cd. (Great Britain. Parliament), [Hereafter Sanderson Commission] p 65.
60 Buckingham, ‘Disability, Leprosy, and Plantation Health’, pp 199–221.
61 Regulation 51 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 112, Sanderson Commission, p 65.
62 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 268.
63 Anthony Cole, ‘Accidental Deaths on Fiji Plantations, 1879-1916’, in Brij V Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, pp 324–336, p 326, Table 1 ‘Number of Deaths of Indentured Immigrants and Their Children by Type of Accident, 1879–1916’.
64 Cole, ‘Accidental Deaths’, pp 330–333.
65 ‘Report by J McNeill and Chimman Lal 1915 to the Government of India on the Conditions of Indian Indentured Labour in Four British Colonies (including Fiji), and Dutch Guiana’, [London, 1915] Fiji Section, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, N305, Box file F40, Folder 1, Document 8, [Hereafter McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji].
66 Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific’, p 384, note 63.
67 Eugene J D’Souza, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 61(2), 2000–2001, pp 1071–1080, p 1075; Fiona Paisley, ‘Sexuality, Nationalism, and “Race”: Humanitarian Debate about Indian Indenture in Fiji, 1910–18’, Labour History, 113, 2017, pp 183–207.
68 Umesh Sharma and Helen Irvine, ‘The social consequences of control: Accounting for Indentured Labour in Fiji 1879-1920’, Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, 13(2), 2016, pp 130-158, pp 130–132.
69 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 66.
70 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 248.
71 Holland, Indentured Labour, p 7
72 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, pp 248–249.
73 Arnab Dey, ‘Diseased Plantations: Law and the Political Economy of Health in Assam, 1860-1920’, Modern Asian Studies 52 (2), 2018, pp 645–682, p 469; Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, pp 10, 120–124.
74 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, pp 248-249.
75 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 3, 107 and 112, Sanderson Commission, p 64; McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 252.
76 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 117, Sanderson Commission, 1910, p 65.
77 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 252.
78 Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific’, pp 377–378.
79 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 270.
80 Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Indian and Pacific Islander Migrants in Fiji: A Comparative Analysis’, Journal of Pacific Studies 1, 1986, pp 59–86, p 66; Robert Nicole, Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, pp 199–200.
81 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, c.1840-1900, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012, p 119.
82 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 259; Vijay Naidu, The Violence of Indenture, Lautoka, 2004, 47–82.
83 Fiji Royal Gazette, 1908 A/R 1908 cited in Naidu, Violence of Indenture, p 66; Lal, ‘Murmurs of Dissent: Non-Resistance on Fiji Plantations’, The Hawaiian Journal of History, 20, 1986, pp 188-214, p 202.
84 Naidu, Violence of Indenture, pp 66–70.
85 Lal, ‘Murmurs of Dissent’, p 203.
86 Moynagh, Brown or White? pp 50, 52.
87 Holland, Indentured Labour, pp 7–8.
88 Burton, The Fiji of Today, pp 285–287.
89 Burton, The Fiji of Today, pp 292–293.
90 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 290.
91 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 291.
92 ‘Problems of Fiji’, Otago Witness, 3056, 9 October 1912, p 1009.
93 Naidu, The Violence of Indenture, pp 70-80; Brij V Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture: Fragmentation and Reconstitution in the Indian Diaspora’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 5(2), 1996, pp 167–188, p 172.
94 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses, pp 119–122.
95 Margaret Mishra, ‘“Your woman is a Very Bad Woman”: Revisiting Female Deviance in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of International Women's Studies 17(4), 2016, pp 67-78; John D. Kelly, ‘“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex, and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 19(3-4), 1992, pp 246–267; Brij V Lal, ‘Veil of dishonour: Sexual jealousy and suicide on Fiji plantations’, The Journal of Pacific History 20(3), 1985, pp 135-155; Brij V Lal, ‘Kunti’s cry: Indentured women on Fiji plantations’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 22(1), 1985, pp 55–71, pp 58–59, 98.
96 D’Souza, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji’, p 1075; C F Andrews and W W Pearson, Report on indentured labour in Fiji: an independent enquiry, Calcutta, 1916.
97 ‘Report of Mr. Andrews' speech to the Planters' Association Executive Committee’, Fiji, Dec. 7th, 1915, National Library of Australia, p 4.
98 Brij V Lal, ‘Kunti’s cry: Indentured women on Fiji plantations’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 22(1), 1985, 55–71; Rajsekhar Basu, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Responses in India to the Cause of Emigrant Women, Fiji 1913–16’, Studies in People's History 7(2), 2020, pp 180–191; Karen A. Ray, ‘Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the “Ladies”: Women's Labour and the Abolition of Indentured Emigration from India’, Labour Capital and Society, 29(1&2), 1996, pp 126–152, pp 139–152.
99 Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India’, p 54.
100 Kennedy and Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery’, p 381.
101 Nicole, Disturbing History, pp 199–213.
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Jane Buckingham
Jane Buckingham is a historian of India and the Pacific with a particular interest in histories of disability, health and labour migration.