Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.

Previous scholarship on the end of indenture in the British Empire has asserted that a revived and reinvigorated humanitarian movement coincided with a series of public scandals over indenture and the increasingly vehement objections of the Indian and Chinese governments. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the model of the overseer-state prompts a very different perspective on the “second abolition.” This chapter argues that the expansion of the indenture system created the blueprint for its own undoing. It did so in three primary ways. First, it tied labor relations, labor immigration, and the moral and physical well-being of the indentured workforce indelibly to state agents and institutions of governance. Second, it entangled the operation of this labor governance in disparate regions of the empire, ensuring that issues arising in one region reverberated politically and economically throughout the system. And third, its own processes of recordkeeping, adjudication, inquiry, and oversight provided a channel along which the suffering and discontent of those under its yoke could be communicated to both the public and the highest levels of government.

This fourth chapter assesses how indenture grew from its modest beginnings in British Guiana and Mauritius into a global labor system linking the breadth of Britain’s plantation colonies. With the parliamentary critics of slavery and indenture in abeyance and labor organization established as a keystone of colonial and imperial governance in the colonies where it was employed, the overseer-state was free to expand across the empire. It still faced structural, legal, and moral challenges. The most significant obstacle, for the supporters of indenture, was reconciling a system that was exploitative and inherently unfree with the discourses of Liberalism, “free labor,” moral colonization, and just rule. This, in many respects, was the imperial project in microcosm, and the responses of policy, practice, and public discourse adopted to defend indenture developed in tandem with the broader redefinition of the British Empire as a whole.

Chapter 3 argues that during the crucial transition from slavery to apprenticeship and thence to indenture and “free labor” in the 1830s, the state’s oversight of colonial labor systems became one of the most prominent and powerful aspects of colonial governance. The chapter first assesses the central role of the post-emancipation state in colonial labor management in Jamaica, Britain’s most populous, politically prominent, and wealthy colony in the Americas. It then explores the first attempts to introduce Indian indentured labor in British Guiana and Mauritius, examining the motivations for the adaptation of this centuries-old labor system to a nineteenth-century context. In the Indian Ocean World, the state apparatus of ameliorated slavery was merged with the preexisting models of coerced labor that had been employed in southern India and Ceylon, and with established practices of penal transportation. This initial attempt to expand the indenture system from its modest origins, mired in mismanagement and public scandal, was a failure.

This second chapter examines how the employment of local official and judicial venues became a common practice as enslaved African-Caribbeans sought to engage the new rights and resources provided to them. They faced an uphill battle, since the discourse of racial inferiority was programmed into the system. Nonetheless, their actions forced all of those involved to wrestle with the role of the state in regulating slavery, the balance between public order and individual rights, the use of coercion and violence within the new regulatory framework of ameliorated slavery, and competing concepts of morality and justice. These interactions shaped the character of the overseer-state in a multitude of ways, from altering the approaches of local officials to different aspects of plantation life to serving as leverage for antislavery activists in Parliament, and even to prompting internal conflicts over how justice was defined and to what extent, if at all, enslaved Africans were entitled to it.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

This chapter reorients readings of Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s (semi)autobiographies as narratives of disability. I underscore the inextricable links between girlhood, labor, and disability began in their self-authored texts, alongside Jean Fagan Yellin’s publication of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and other documents which detail the life of Harriet Wilson. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Theorizations of slavery in the Indian Ocean world often draw upon analyses of enslavement in the anglophone Black Atlantic world, productively highlighting continuities between systems of unfree labor migration across oceans. This chapter, however, focuses mainly on how enslavement in the Indian Ocean diverged from Atlantic models, and the implications this has had for the literatures of slavery. If the anglophone Black Atlantic can be considered a sphere of autobiographical speech and legal silence, the Indian Ocean world of enslavement is one of autobiographical silence, but legal speech. The rich heteroglossia of Indian Ocean legal records stands in contrast to portrayals of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade as a process of silencing and erasure. The existence of these legal records affects the representation of the enslaved in later, fictional narratives of slavery, which share an interest in voice, testimony, and the law. After a brief summary of the historical contexts of slavery in the Indian Ocean world, this chapter examines depictions of enslaved voices in legal archives and fictional works. The final section turns to literatures of indenture, a more recent form of coerced labor migration, to suggest why we should not consider indenture as simply a continuation of slavery.

This Chapter examines the duties of indenture trustees appointed under bond indentures. Although their post-default duties generally are subject to a prudent-person standard, indenture trustees have relatively little legal guidance concerning pre-default duties. The rise of activist investors, however, is making it increasingly critical to identify and understand how to perform those duties. This Chapter seeks to provide that understanding.

Departing from the ‘culturalist’ orientation of most recent studies of the Indian diaspora, I choose a ‘labourist’ approach that privileges the labour market in India and globally as the main explanatory mechanism of human circulations both from and towards India. I cover the emigration of indentured labour to the sugar-producing colonies of the British Empire, as do most narratives of Indian migrations, but I give as much attention to other forms of circulation such as the slave trade, the export of convict labour, and kangani and maistry migrations to Ceylon, Burma and Malaya. I illustrate a trend of ‘globalisation’ of Indian labour migrations beyond the limits of the British Empire, and also pay attention to migrations into India of Europeans, Middle Easterners, Chinese and others. I cover often overlooked post-indenture labour migrations, as well as the circulation of commercial personnel through extended merchant networks. Finally, I look at the new mass migrations towards First World and Gulf countries. The migration of highly educated professionals is an entirely new phenomenon, with repercussions in India at the economic and political levels.

Waves of early twentieth-century Asian migration to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean migration to and from Panama bankrolled the education of a new black and brown middle class. This essay argues that we can hold more of the Caribbean literary tradition within a single frame if we reconfigure the archive so as to highlight the moments when the educational advances the concurrent migrations facilitated allowed both African and Asian Caribbean communities to exert greater control over the terms of their representation. It advances three approaches to rethinking Caribbean literary history. The first examines how early twentieth-century Caribbean fiction represents both groups’ changing attitudes towards money and modern subjectivity. The second considers how migrants’ counterintuitive investments in imperial expansion complicate the political stakes in Caribbean nationalist narratives. The third juxtaposes literary and non-literary forms of cultural production in Jamaica and Panama to demonstrate how, in privileging written texts, we obscure the contributions marginalized groups make to what we think of as national cultures.

The standard association of kala pani (black waters) passage with annihilation has supported the long-held view that, throughout the indenture system in the Caribbean, South Asian migrant labourers focused their cultural energies on returning to the ancestral motherland once their contracts ended. This conclusion falls short of explaining instances of reinvention and resistance seen from the earliest years of the system in the mid-eighteenth century, which demonstrate the indenture’s compulsion to grapple with the birth of a new consciousness in which atavistic connotations of identity are deterritorialized and shifted beyond their meaning in Bharat-mata, as the motherland was then known. Early writings by Munshi Rahman Khan (Dutch Suriname), Lal Bihari Sharma (Guyana), and Joseph Ruhomon (Guyana) examine indenture from the perspective of the migrants and challenge traditional representations of this labour group as largely passive, illiterate, and wretched under the colonial pejorative ‘coolie’. Their works underscore the profound importance cultural reinvention played for the migrants in their determination of belonging and becoming in the Caribbean.

The essays in this volume assess the field of early Caribbean literary studies at a moment when it is undergoing important transitions. Our contributors study genres of writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; genres of fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved and the working classes, especially women. Contributors focus on the multilingual, multi-imperial, and regional literatures of the Caribbean, in keeping with the comparative emphasis in contemporary literary studies. Our contributors infer the cultural presence of non-elite groups within the texts of the dominant classes: can the worlds made by enslaved and indentured people be reconstructed by reading texts that enslavers created? Our contributors move back and forth between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that exceed traditional notions of literary influence. The analysis of Caribbean literature before 1920 is a vital exercise in understanding our present moment.

This chapter examines the many contexts influencing US responses to global slavery, including the British anti-slavery colonial model, attempts to forge the US imperial destiny in the Pacific and Africa, and a global labour market, which blurred the distinctions between free and forced movement of workers.