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Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation

Online ISBN:
9780226833637
Print ISBN:
9780226833620
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation

Jonathan Connolly
Jonathan Connolly

Assistant Professor of History

University of Illinois at Chicago
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
7 June 2024
Online ISBN:
9780226833637
Print ISBN:
9780226833620
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Worthy of Freedom is a history of Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean (British Guiana and Trinidad) and Indian Ocean (Mauritius) after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. The book argues that shifting conceptions of free labor underwrote increasingly restrictive terms of indenture, and that indenture in turn reshaped the political economy of emancipation. The book is in part a cultural history of imperial power that seeks to explain how and why post-slavery indenture became less controversial over time. In this regard, the book argues that new forms of social-scientific thinking centered on race and political economy transformed the public image of indenture from a thinly veiled reincarnation of slavery into a legitimate form of free labor. The book is also a legal history that reconstructs the statutory law of indenture and a series of official debates surrounding the legal category of free labor, making claims about imperial legal ideology in the process. Finally, the book is an economic history that explains the material consolidation of the indenture system, how indenture was used to bolster sugar production, and how state subsidies, law, and large-scale migration restructured economic possibilities for both indentured workers and the formerly enslaved. These three strands of argument are intertwined. As a result, the book reflects consciously on historical relationships between ideology and structure and offers a detailed excavation of shifting conceptions of race and colonial labor in relation to both imperial policy and economic struggle and change.

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