Worthy of Freedom

A study of Indian indentured labour in Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad that explores the history of indenture's normalisation.

In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalisation of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labour and a means of preserving the promise of abolition.

Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labour and the political economy of emancipation.

Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labour were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of freedom in a post-abolition world.