Scholarship on Indian indenture has seen several historiographical turns over the years – from the overarching migration histories of the 1950s and the administrative histories of the 1960s and 1970s to the colony-focused histories that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. The end of the century saw an increasing focus on migrants’ experience of recruitment, passage and plantation, and the publication of Hugh Tinker's A New System of Slavery encouraged reflection on the vestiges of slavery while also prompting works that emphasised the autonomous agency of labourers in shaping their own economic futures.1 The last two decades have seen an exciting shift in the field, as scholars are rejecting plantation colonies as the natural boundaries for framing indenture research and moving outside the ‘indenture bubble’ to draw links with other labour systems and wider imperial processes. Historians are increasingly framing indenture within the overseas movements of convicts, labourers, lascars and servants, interrogating the implications of indenture research on understandings of colonial power and labour rights, and exploring the interplay of race and the body in the Indian indenture trade.2 Increasingly, works have foregrounded connections between plantation colonies and explored spaces beyond the sugar colonies.3 Yet others have flipped the narrative of indentured migrants as producers to explore their role as consumers, discussing how sale, taxation and consumption (of opium and cannabis, for instance) were ways of maintaining control over indentured Indians.4 Indeed, the future of indenture research seems to be moving towards bringing indenture out of the slavery–indenture dichotomy and out of siloed colony-focused studies.