Coolies of the Empire

This study has endeavoured to develop an alternative view on the ‘world of girmitiyas’. The Indian peasants who became indentured workers to produce sugarcane and sugar on the capitalist plantations in Indian, Caribbean and Pacific oceans belonged to a rich agricultural and cultural background. The introduction of the indenture system and Indian labour to sugar islands can be best understood in the context of the failure of capitalist sugar production in India as well as promotion of Caribbean sugar in the world economy. India was considered to be a place where plenty of labourers were found, and they could be sent to overseas plantations to produce sugar, as sugarcane cultivation was one of the various agricultural operations.

In Chapter 5, I have pointed out that before the commencement of indentured contract, the prevalent mode of sugar production was dependent on slaves. The Caribbean plantations, owned by the British capitalists who dominated in the British Parliament, were the main sugar suppliers to Britain. These were the places where the consumption of sugar was on the rise. When slavery was outlawed, plantations of the Caribbean were affected severely. Another depressing factor for British planters of the Caribbean was the equalization of duty on West and East Indian sugar. This led to a sharp decline in the production of West Indian sugar during 1830s and 1840s. These circumstances created a high demand of labour for sugarcane cultivation in the former slave-driven colonies. Hence, pressurized by the Caribbean plantation lobbyists in the British Parliament, a new system was announced known as the indenture system.

In his magisterial Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism, Sven Beckert has shown how slavery or slavery-like labour relations meshed in myriad ways, and over several centuries, with the cultivation of cotton fibre over large parts of the world. The noticeable and large exception of course was India, where cotton and other high-value crops were cultivated under conditions of small peasant commodity production. Except for a period of the 1830s and 1840s when, post-emancipation, several prominent British sugar planters organized a short-lived plantation phase, cane was raised in north India predominantly by peasant producers.