Indentured Labour from India in the age of Empire

Unfreedom and the Indenturing of Labour:A Few Conceptual Aspects

We intend to analyse in this paper aspects related to the large-scale movements of indentured labour from colonial India, between the years 1834 to 1920, to plantation islands owned by Britain. Labour deployed as above can be labelled as ‘unfree’, judged by the yardstick of the so-called ‘freedom’ that is supposed to be enjoyed by wage labour under capitalism. Unfreedom, as faced by those indentured labourers, concerns the denial, in terms of the contractual arrangements, of command over their own ‘labour power’. The employers had full control over the labourers employed, and their labour power could be used, exchanged or even sold at will without need for acceptance or consent by the concerned labourers. In effect, thus, labour got ‘alienated to the master’.