Ben Jacob: What led you to study indentureship in the first place?

Jonathan Connolly: I began thinking about indenture with a broad interest in the history of emancipation, and in particular an interest in the core insight that abolition ended formal slavery without defining freedom. I wanted to think about how the making of an indenture system was bound up with broader questions and conflicts concerning the meaning and purpose of emancipation. Initially, the historical questions that animated my research had to do with political culture and ideology. I wanted to know more about not just what indenture was, but how it was perceived and discussed and debated. And as I began to look at newspapers and other public documents, I was struck by a particular pattern of change, whereby, in an early moment in the 1830s and early 1840s, indenture was widely condemned in Britain and in India as a new form of slavery, and yet moving forward in time to the late 1850s, the public image of indenture had completely transformed such that most observers now celebrated indenture not just as a necessity, but as a legitimate form of free labour. Thus the first seemingly simple question that I tried to answer was, why did indenture become less controversial over time?

The project then broadened in the immense archives of indenture, and it became clear that the kinds of questions I was asking about ideology implied other related questions involving law and social and economic change. In this way, the project developed from a starting point where I was mainly interested in the cultural history of empire and thinking about justifications for nineteenth century imperial expansion, and also became a legal history of indenture as well as an economic history of indenture interested in both local and global forms of economic change and the ways in which the indenture system affects the political economy of emancipation. So these three lines of argument in the book's final form coexist. Broadly speaking they're cultural, legal and economic. The book seeks to explain how shifting conceptions of free labour shaped the ideology and law of indenture, but also how indenture shaped the political economy of emancipation and the meaning of freedom in practise.

BJ: How does the meaning of freedom change over the first decades of indentureship?

JC: First of all, the legal parameters of free labour shifted. One way of tracking that is to look at the length of the standard contract that was signed on arrival. In the beginning, officials in London wouldn’t allow a contract longer than one year to be assigned. They thought that multi-year contracts would infringe on free labour principles. This was based on a relatively universalistic view of Indian and non-European workers: that they would respond rationally to labour incentives the same way European workers would, and that direct legal compulsion was economically  inefficient and morally wrong.

Over time, this conception of the boundaries of free labor was abandoned for a very different view, which emphasised racial and cultural difference, and on that basis argued that a liberal, universalistic theory of rational behaviour didn’t apply in the colonies, and that instead a much longer contract was needed, along with an intensified penal structure to punish those who breached their contracts. So to start, the legal meaning of the indenture relationship and what was accepted as free labour shifted significantly over the period that I look at.

Then there are some other elements that have to do with the forms of economic change that indenture brought about. One early justification for indentured labour was a fear of economic collapse following emancipation, a fear that sugar production would decrease, and that the wealth of the colonies would dissipate. And through large-scale labour migration, that proved not to be the case in the three colonies at the heart of my project: Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad. There, sugar production increased over the course of the 1850s, and came to surpass pre-abolition levels. That economic shift reinforced the ideology of indenture and produced a new view that indenture was a form of free labour that could compete with formal slavery, which of course still existed in other foreign colonies at this time. In other words, economic struggle and change also influenced the shifting meanings of free labour in this context. By the 1860s, indenture was celebrated as a form of anti-slavery, but the language was repurposed in a very different way from in the 1830s.

BJ: Your work sets out to link liberalism, as a universal philosophy of individual rights, with liberal economic policies concerning free trade and free labour, in the context of nineteenth-century imperial expansion. How do you see these different realms as interacting?

JC: There’s a large and very interesting literature on what we might see as the strange coexistence of liberal political philosophy and nineteenth-century imperial expansion. You might think of Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire or Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, a whole variety of writing, often explicitly interested in key political philosophers and how their ideas about freedom either excluded colonial subjects or undergirded forms of inequality in imperial contexts. My book engages with these questions in two different ways. The first has to do with what I said previously about legal ideology and an apparent shift away from a more liberal, universalistic approach to the law of indenture in the 1840s toward a more race-based approach, which argued and justified special kinds of restrictions for non-European workers at the very moment in which those kinds of restrictions – master and servant laws, penal sanctions for employment violations – came under attack in England.

A second way has to do with free trade policy, what we might see as economic liberalism, not just in theory but in action. This is the period in which free trade is put into practice – the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws is of course a key example and milestone. Interestingly, the turn to free trade creates new forms of economic conflict and struggle in the post-slavery empire involving not just indentured workers but freed people, the formerly enslaved, as well. And those conflicts play a large role in the eventual consolidation of the indentured system such that there’s a link, possibly an unexpected link given the ideals of free trade in the domestic context, between free trade at home and new forms of labour coercion abroad.

I’m not really interested in hypocrisy in that sense, but in the coexistence and the connection between these developments, free trade at home and labor coercion in the empire. And I think we continue to live with this connection, where in order to have lower-cost consumer goods in parts of the developed world, there remains extremely low wage, very exploitative forms of labour to produce those goods in other parts of the world. We see the origins of that dynamic in the mid-nineteenth century.

BJ: In your analysis of this key period in the nineteenth century, you draw on both the transformation of metropolitan ideas about freedom and a simultaneous process of economic upheaval in the sugar colonies. How do the material conditions in places like Guyana, Trinidad and Mauritius interact with metropolitan debates concerning emancipation and indenture?

JC: The relationship between ideology in the broad sense and economic interests is of longstanding interest to historians of abolition. The task of relating those two realms of activity without being overly deterministic is one of the great questions and challenges in the history of emancipation. In this case, I think one way of addressing this question involves race and race thinking. As scholars like Catherine Hall and Thomas Holt have argued, there was a hardening of racial attitudes during this period in the middle of the nineteenth century, marked and fueled by violent upheaval, like the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. And in both the public and official debates that I trace in the book, one sees a similar pattern of change.

In examining that pattern of change, I try to do two things which relate to that question about ideology and structure. The first is, without being overly deterministic, to connect that intellectual and cultural history of race thinking to the material history of economic conflict surrounding plantation production after abolition. And a key point that emerges here is that a growing consensus that emancipation had failed economically is a key driver of new support for indenture. And so this is one example where you see a pattern of ideological change grounded in material relations. But the ideological effect of this hardening of racial attitudes also has causative power, at least with regard to indenture. Because as this notion of the failure of emancipation comes to justify indenture, it undergirds a pattern of large-scale state action, which completely remakes the economic structure of the affected colonies.

In other words, the line of causation points in both directions. It’s not simply that economic interests determine how we think. There are elements of that, in this case, in that conflicts over sugar, wages, and, in the broad nineteenth-century sense, “civilization” influenced new ideas about race, labor, and freedom. But those new ideas then structured policy in such a way as to radically change what was happening economically in the colonies.

BJ: Your book looks at three separate British colonies: Mauritius, Trinidad and British Guiana. Why did you choose to focus on these places in particular, and what do we gain from looking at indentureship across different parts of the world?

JC: That’s a great question. To start, of course, they’re important sites for the study of indenture because they were among the largest indenture colonies, as well as the earliest. As a result, many of the arguments I make concerning legal and social conflict and the boundaries of free labour necessarily involve these three colonies where the indenture system took shape during the 1840s and 1850s, amidst tremendous conflict over what was frequently called the “great experiment” of emancipation.

But my decision to focus on these three places also comes from a desire to connect the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean worlds. In that respect, my goal is less often comparison in the sense of how, say, Mauritius differed from Trinidad, and more often to illuminate a set of imperial or trans-colonial connections.

One traditional way of doing colonial history is of course to focus on one colony and its relationship to the metropole. And the archive predisposes you to do that. That's how the Colonial Office records work: they're divided geographically and then organised chronologically. So it was especially fascinating for me as a scholar of indenture to see how often colonies didn't just communicate with London, but also were quite aware of each other.

There are all sorts of examples of this: officials who worked in more than one colony where indenture took place, the fact that local assemblies and councils deliberately borrowed legal texts from other colonies, a general communication among planters regarding sugar and their own theories about labour and economic necessity. And then by the later period, there's even some trans-colonial migration involving onward and return migration, creating further links at a different level. All of this again complicates our sense of how the imperial state worked as well as the socio-legal history of indenture. It's hard to do archivally, but it has some really interesting results and I think is a trend in newer work involving indenture.

BJ: Absolutely. On the topic of that newer body of work, I sometimes feel that there have been two big developments in scholarship on indentureship since the 1990s. The first has explored indentureship as a system, shifting away from an earlier comparative approach towards a more nuanced analysis of indentureship in relation to things like abolitionist debates in the metropole, the financial legacies of compensated emancipation, and colonial strategies of labour reallocation. The second has aimed at excavating experiences of indentureship outside of the official mind by recovering the perspectives of indentured workers themselves. How do you see your work in relation to these two trends?

JC: Firstly, I think something that a lot of newer work on indenture has revealed and that I absolutely agree with is that indentureship should be regarded as a field of study, not a singular subject, not something that's to be exhausted with one book. And I think it makes sense that there's a flourishing of very different kinds of work about indenture, involving different places, time periods, people, and approaches. And I broadly think much of this work is complementary, though of course, there are also disagreements. That said, it's true that one could divide the historiography broadly into two branches, one more focused on imperial power and the structure of the indenture system, and another more focused on various forms of experience, though using that term with its full multi-valence and ambiguity.

So where do I fit into these if there are these two branches? On the one hand, a lot of my work deals with that first branch, but it differs from the older debates in that my persistent focus is on the relationship between indenture and emancipation as opposed to the relationship between indenture and slavery. And by that, I mean rather than taking slavery and freedom as metrics and attempting to determine whether indenture was free or unfree in an absolute sense, the goal in this book is to treat freedom as a socially constructed category with a history, and to explain how indenture in both theory and practise altered and shaped the meaning of freedom during the nineteenth century. So I think that's how I relate to that first body of literature, moving away from one of the core debates going back to Hugh Tinker's work about slavery and freedom.

With regard to the second body of literature, I think there may be two areas of overlap, one substantive, one more conceptual. On the substantive side, the analysis I offer relating to the law of indenture attends to both theory and practise, including many of the ways in which indentured workers evaded, responded to, and were affected by law. And that, of course, means variation and change over time. And so those lines of argument may speak to some of the work about resistance in the broad sense, and also to forms of social history that are of key interest to many working in this realm. Second, and this may be more conceptual, I think there is a growing interest in inter-imperial and trans-colonial relationships, some of which we've already discussed. That's an interest I share and explore. And again, I think it’s a theme that calls for both imperial and social history at the same time.

I do think it's most productive not to think of these bodies of work as necessarily being opposed to each other, but rather, in the spirit of acknowledging that indenture is a field and not a subject, to see how there's more interdependency than it might seem when we do our historiographical categorising. To tell a social history involving individualized experiences of indenture, for example, one does need a sense of the structure of state power, and of economic context. I think legal sources can be particularly useful in this sense, and not just for legal historians, because legal sources face both ways in a sense. Legal sources can give you some purchase on excavating metropolitan ideologies, but they also can help you draw conclusions about how the state was affecting material life, everyday life. And in some cases they shine light on the ways in which individuals interacted with and reacted to state power.

BJ: What do you see as the significance of indentureship in today’s world?

JC: In terms of legacies for today, this is a realm where I hope that the book can be part of some broader conversations. Like most works of history, it doesn't make policy recommendations for the present, but I think it's potentially relevant in two ways. One is, of course, the fact that indenture-like forms have persisted and continue to be used in the contemporary world, often still involving South Asian labour migration. So there's potentially a much longer-term history to write and explore through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century in which we could continue to attend to both the economic contexts in which indentured labour migration takes place and the ways in which it's either justified or hidden from view.

And that brings me to the second way I think the book may speak to contemporary concerns, and that is in its interest in what I've called discursive normalisation, and the extent to which it's a book about how something that was at one point conceived of as being unjust came later to be redefined as being just and normal. I think that trajectory, unfortunately, is very topical. It’s something we continue to live with. If by contrast, histories of humanitarian action and thought tend to emphasise the progressive realisation of some form of injustice, the trajectory in this book is the opposite. It's about the redefinition, the legitimization, and the disappearance of a former controversy in the context of a growing world economy that we still inhabit. In that sense, I think the book has a political resonance in terms of how we think about distance and responsibility. And I would love to be in conversation with others thinking about that in the contemporary world.

BJ: At the moment, we’re seeing a growing interest in the long history of emancipation – both academically, and around renewed calls for reparations in post-slavery societies. How do you see your work, which deals with the entanglement of emancipation and indentureship, in relation to this moment?

JC: I hope that the book can be useful to that broader conversation. I would start by saying that there are a few concrete ways that it might be. One goes back to the way that the Legacies of British Slavery project at UCL did so much to create new attention and conversation around legacies of slavery and emancipation, and specifically around financial legacies. That was inspiring to me as I began the research for this book. And partly as a result, I developed a line of argument related to the subsidies for indenture whereby the colonial and imperial state helped pay for migration, allowing for it to take place on a larger scale than it would have otherwise, and the way in which a seemingly arcane financial history was important to a broader restructuring of economic possibilities following abolition. So there are ways in which I hope the book will speak to that literature and the conversation that has spawned.

Then more broadly, as I said, one of the key goals is to connect the study of indenture to the broader history of emancipation. And as you know, sometimes these histories are dealt with separately. Yet I think indenture could and should be part of the longer-term histories that, for example, Kris Manjapra and others have begun to develop, about multiple moments of emancipation and their collective legacies for how we think about the Caribbean and the wider post-imperial world now.

BJ: I suppose there's also a value in simply telling these stories together, given the ways in which the histories of indenture and emancipation have been drawn into a racialised politics in a number of post-plantation societies. When they’re so often told as two separate stories, even the simple act of narrating them as part of a shared history holds a lot of weight.

JC: I'm glad you mentioned that – I think that's right, and perhaps another reason that uniting the two realms is important, beyond scholarly conventions. It brings me back to the hopeful thought that this book, in addition to offering a set of historical arguments about the making of the indenture system, may take part in a set of broader conversations about the history of emancipation and its long-term legacies, and even about the kinds of memory politics that affect how we look back.