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Kalyani Ramnath, Reshaad Durgahee. The Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 545–547, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae520
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Reshaad Durgahee’s book The Indentured Archipelago is an excellent and superbly researched addition to the global historical scholarship on indenture. Indenture is most often studied in the context of the rapidly expanding British Empire in the nineteenth century. Initial scholarly conversations about indenture focused on whether indenture was a “new system of slavery.” In this book, the conversation is reframed from the perspective of historical geography, attending to questions of spatiality, mobility, and agency. Introducing the idea of “subaltern careering,” Durgahee traces how indentured laborers and colonial administrators moved between Britain and its colonies, and also between colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. These are “remigrants” whose lives and careers the book maps. They were indentured laborers who chose to re-indenture themselves to go to a different colony, and those who were “term-expired” and were entitled to return to India or receive a piece of land in the colony. The result is a sweeping account of what Durgahee terms “the wider geographies of Indian indenture.” It successfully reveals both the real and imagined extent of the indenture experiment in the long nineteenth century.
