Health, Moral Reform, and Coercion in the Indenture System, 1840–1864
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2025
This fourth chapter assesses how indenture grew from its modest beginnings in British Guiana and Mauritius into a global labor system linking the breadth of Britain’s plantation colonies. With the parliamentary critics of slavery and indenture in abeyance and labor organization established as a keystone of colonial and imperial governance in the colonies where it was employed, the overseer-state was free to expand across the empire. It still faced structural, legal, and moral challenges. The most significant obstacle, for the supporters of indenture, was reconciling a system that was exploitative and inherently unfree with the discourses of Liberalism, “free labor,” moral colonization, and just rule. This, in many respects, was the imperial project in microcosm, and the responses of policy, practice, and public discourse adopted to defend indenture developed in tandem with the broader redefinition of the British Empire as a whole.
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