On the river Ganges in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), there is a small ghat (pier) bearing the name of a faraway South American country – the Surinam Ghat. Seemingly out of place in a port city about 15,000 kilometres away from Surinam, it is named after the Surinam Depot, which used to accommodate Indian labourers migrating to the erstwhile Dutch colony as plantation workers. In fact, for a large part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the port side of Calcutta was dotted with buildings like the Trinidad Depot, Mauritius Depot, British Guiana Depot and Surinam Depot – physical remnants of an 80-year-long trade in Indian labourers. The abolition of slavery in 1833 had prompted the Indian indenture trade, whereby Indian labourers migrated to European plantation colonies to work in the production of sugar. Despite being a key port in the global indenture trade and a site for debating the terms of indenture, Calcutta has remained entirely unexplored in scholarship. This book sets out to insert the British Indian capital of Calcutta into the history of indenture, offering a history of Calcuttans shaping colonial labour on a global stage. Instead of focusing on plantation colonies that labourers migrated to, it refocuses indenture literature on a port city that they embarked from.

Bringing sugar to the metropolitan plate has a long and complicated history, featuring overseas plantation colonies, absentee planters, lucrative commodity trade, labour migration across continents, slavery and various forms of unfree labour. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the empire straddled several plantation colonies.