“Liberty in Calcutta, no Liberty in Demerara!”: Abolitionists and Indian Indenture in British Guiana, 1838-1845.

Abstract

After the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833, colonial sugar planters looked to Asia for a new labor source. In 1837, close to 400 “hill coolie” men sailed from Calcutta to British Guiana, becoming the first Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean colony. Although scholarship on Indian indenture has expanded in the last few decades, little work has been done to understand abolitionist discourse on this subject, especially regarding the earliest years of indenture when it was not yet a systematized form of labor in the Caribbean. This paper traces how abolitionist discourse responded to this introduction of a new labor source in British Guiana in 1837. 

Through analyzing the issues of the fortnightly newspaper, The British Emancipator, printed in London by the Central Negro Emancipation Committee, it argues that while British abolitionists produced an image of the “hill coolies” as victims of coercion, they also portrayed them as sexually corrupt beings needing to be contained – namely through the maintenance of legitimate conjugal relationships that had been ruptured through the bringing of a predominantly male labor force. From these ideas sprang a convergence of abolitionist interests with those of colonial officials and sugar planters, allowing for the reform and further legitimization of the Indian indenture system by 1845, when a larger proportion of Indian women were brought to Caribbean sugar plantations.