Appendix: Proposed Indian Emigration Routes, 1871–1914

Sugar and the Arrival of Indians

This chapter explores the lives of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, as well as time-expired labourers or ‘free’ Indians as they were known in the colony. In this chapter, the term ‘free’ is used when referring to specific citations from archival documents or how these people were referred to by the colonial administration, and ‘time-expired’ is used when discussing this group in my own words. The first ship carrying Indian indentured labourers to Fiji, the Leonidas, arrived in Levuka in 1879 (see Figure 3.1 for a map of Fiji). This was the beginning of Fiji's 37-year Indian indenture era during which over 60,000 labourers arrived in the colony from India. The story of Indian indenture in Fiji is not a straightforward one. Unlike Indian Ocean and Caribbean colonies, Fiji was not a former slave sugar plantation colony. Instead, as small plantations were opened by white Australasian settlers, labour was found through blackbirding, a practice which involved forcibly recruiting (often kidnapping) labourers from neighbouring Pacific islands. Blackbirding was eventually outlawed, with indenture taking its place. In addition to Indian indentured labourers, there were also Fijian and Polynesian indentured labourers.

Fiji. French Guiana. Grenada. Guadeloupe. Guyana. Jamaica. Martinique. Mauritius. Réunion. St. Kitts and Nevis. St. Lucia. St. Vincent and the Grenadines. South Africa. Surinam. Trinidad. US Virgin Islands.

Scattered across three oceans and on verdant continental littorals, to the unknowing these are a seemingly obscure collection of countries and territories. Yet they were once intrinsically connected, bound together by one commodity – sugar. For a period of approximately 90 years during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they shared a common history – the importation and use of Indian indentured labour. In the labour vacuum that resulted from the abolition of slavery, over 1.3 million Indian men, women and children were recruited to work on the sugar plantations of the British, French, Dutch and Danish empires.

These men, women and children travelled across the Indian subcontinent, and then the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to work on the plantations of empire. Their descendants today form integral parts of Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean society. This book is the product of research conducted on two indentured labour importing colonies; Mauritius, which was the first British colony to begin recruiting Indian indentured labourers in 1834 and recruited over 450,000 people in total, and Fiji, which was the last, having recruited its first group of labourers in 1879 and which recruited over 60,000 people. The book examines the experiences of labourers in the two colonies between 1871 and 1916 – a time period that saw the beginning of connections between Mauritius and Fiji. Using two conceptual innovations, the historical geographies of indenture and imperialism are brought out more broadly.

The first concept is that the indenture system created an indentured archipelago encompassing colonies not geographically located together but which had a shared experienced of indenture – a collection of territories scattered confetti-like across the world's tropical sugar-producing belt. The second is subaltern careering, a concept which examines the hitherto unexplored remigration amongst Indian indentured labourers between sugar colonies and the wider colonial world. This phenomenon challenges the spatiality of empire and brings to the fore questions of subaltern agency. Analysing the lived spaces of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius and Fiji and their movements within the indentured archipelago avoids the colonial compartmentalisation of the Indian indenture experience that has characterised much scholarship to date. This radically alters the accepted geography of the Indian indenture system.

The archives offer us glimpses into the lives of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius and Fiji, but there is much more the archives can tell us by contesting the spatiality of indenture and empire. This chapter introduces the concept of trans-colonial mobility. It challenges the notion that inter-colonial networks during the indenture period were reserved for colonial elites and administrative middlemen and that they were the only people to move between sugar colonies. A new subaltern geography is proposed, radically altering the perception of Indian indenture. One crucial aspect has been neglected from historicist literature on Indian indenture: the relationships formed between different colonial spaces. This has been observed by Allen who has written of ‘an attendant failure to view the indentured experience in individual colonies in larger global and comparative contexts’. The indentured archipelago concept allows for a wider geographical reading of Indian indenture, avoiding the compartmentalisation of the indenture experience.

The colonies that used Indian indentured labour are well documented, some more so than others. The mobility of labourers from India to these colonies is therefore unquestioned. Labourers travelled from India to the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific Oceans. This much is known, well-written about and illustrates the trans-oceanic mobility of labourers. It is, however, a simplistic, one-dimensional view.

The neglect of geography in the study of Indian indenture, in particular the neglect of onward geographies, has given rise to a lack of attention placed on trans-colonial phenomena which played out across the indentured archipelago and beyond. This can be traced at both the individual and trans-colonial scale. Firstly, the individual level is examined. Between 1876 and 1912, at least 18,000 Indian indentured labourers were re-migrants. Re-migrants were individuals who, having completed one tenure of indenture in a colony, elected to re-migrate either to another or, having returned to India, back to the same one for a new indenture contract. The agency of these labourers and the networks which were co-opted by them is consequently explored. Secondly, the chapter looks at the trans-colonial level, examining innovation in a time of labour shortage and the proposed migration routes which would have taken Indian indentured labourers between and to new colonies.

A geographical analysis of indenture can enable vital new understandings not only of the system but also of the broader imperial geographies of the post-slavery world. Indian indenture was global. It was a trans-oceanic phenomenon drawing actors together from different parts of the globe. These actors were elite, middle class and subaltern. They were male, they were female; adults and children; human and non-human. To appreciate the scale of the system and the connectivity between the colonies which recruited Indian indentured labour, the geographical term archipelago is used. Contextualising the experiences of indenture in Mauritius and Fiji within the indentured archipelago ensures that the connectivity of these colonial spaces which were bound together by the cord of indenture is not severed.

In focusing on Mauritius and Fiji, experiences of indenture within colonialism are brought to light, re-approaching the indentured labourer experience from below. Considering space within the Indian indenture story enables us to draw attention to particular aspects of the system. The indentured experience has so often been viewed in siloed studies of individual colonies even though indenture in one particular colony drew connections with other parts of the indentured archipelago. Given the methodological nationalism of colonial historiography, these connections have remained relatively unexplored. They should no longer remain so.

As this book illustrates, the teasing out of connections and flows between parts of the indentured archipelago, and of networks that emerged across oceanic spaces, relies on the use of multiple archives. This multi-archival approach offers much in terms of scope to comparative studies of indenture but is, of course, restricted by time and resources available to researchers. The written texts, sketches, photographs, maps and diaries enable a story to be told of indentured life. Whilst many historical geographers have focused on the elite and middle class when exploring trans-colonial connections during the indenture era, the subaltern links which were much larger in volume (in terms of numbers of people moving between places) have remained relatively uninterrogated. This book aims to plug this gap by counter-reading the colonial archive to extract the stories of subaltern labourers through, for example, the lenses of health, gender, childhood and mortality.

Metropolitan archival material lends itself to the study of the sort of individuals who have been examined in detail in historical geographical studies of the colonial era – white, middle class or elite men – the colonial official and missionaries who travelled to, and between, the colonies of empire.

Regional Entrepôts

The recruitment of time-expired labourers in Mauritius to travel directly to Natal, as seen in Chapter four, highlights a facet of Indian indenture that has not yet been dealt with in any detail, despite it becoming a constant feature of the system. Certain colonies to which indentured emigration from India was sanctioned appear to have become regional entrepôts. They emerged as potential sites for recruiting labourers for other colonies in the region where emigration from India was either not sanctioned or where additional labour was required on top of that which was arriving from India. This was a way to get around regulations put in place by imperial lawmakers to prevent abuse within the system. Three locales emerged as distinct regional entrepôts. Mauritius for the southwest Indian Ocean, Fiji for the South Pacific and the British, and French West Indies (treated here as one entrepôt) for the Caribbean. They effectively acted as nodal points within the indenture system, much like ports in a trading network. Figure 5.1 highlights the many destinations to which Indian labourers were recruited from the hypothesised regional entrepôts of Mauritius and Fiji. Proposals emerged that would take advantage of these locations that already had a population of indentured immigrant labourers and, crucially, a population of time-expired labourers willing to travel to nearby colonies to re-indenture. Due to this proximity, transporting labourers would be considerably cheaper than importing new labourers from distant India. Labourers from existing colonies would also have the supposed advantage of being experienced in plantation work (though as selected testimonies from the Sanderson Commission show, this was not always desirable).

Critically, the suggestion of recruiting directly from these regional entrepôts was often to circumnavigate the stringent regulations that had been put in place to safeguard indentured labourers from India by the British and Indian governments. The 1883 India Emigration Act had been enforced to prohibit labourers from India being recruited to work in ‘foreign’ (non-British) colonies, with the exception of Surinam. This was due to the lack of welfare infrastructure such as a protector of immigrants and other indenture-related administration, in light of the abuses which emerged in French colonies, to where Indian indenture was banned as a result.

The Indentured Geography of Mauritius

Mauritius had been the test case for the use of indentured labour during the 1820s and 1830s. By the late 1870s, smaller, but no less significant, numbers of immigrants were arriving in the colony compared to previous decades. Indenture by this point had already been operating in Mauritius for approximately 40 to 50 years. Literature on Indian indenture to Mauritius has therefore concentrated on the first half of the indenture period in the colony (1834 to the 1870s). It is, however, misleading to concentrate only on the earlier period. To do so skews the perception of what life was like for an Indian immigrant in Mauritius, for as the indenture system became more regulated and communication between Mauritius and India (remittances, letters, re-migration) increased in intensity, life for an Indian immigrant in Mauritius in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century was not the same as it was for his or her predecessor in the 1840s. The deadly epidemics on the island during the mid-nineteenth century, including the catastrophic ‘Mauritius Fever’, had resulted in the enforcement of much more stringent regulations regarding sanitation and housing of labourers, which will be explored in this chapter.

The latter half of the indenture period in Mauritius brings to light evidence of individual and group agency, notions of subaltern careering, elite careering, trans-colonial networks, increased regulation and cooperation (but also dispute) with other indenture-importing colonies and the eventual integration of the Indian immigrant population into Mauritian society. The turn of the century was also a pivotal time in the galvanising of an Indo-Mauritian identity. The cyclone of 1892 devastated the colony, killing 1,100 people, wounding 2,000 and leaving 50,000 homeless. Meanwhile, the plague outbreak in the late 1890s and early 1900s tested the rigour of the island's sanitation and health policies.

The upward social mobility of Indian immigrants also became increasingly apparent during this period as morcellement (parcelling out of sugar estate land to Indians) gathered pace. Though Allen states that this process began in the 1860s, it reached its peak post-1880. By the turn of the century, one-third of the land under cane cultivation was in Indo-Mauritian hands as estate owners centralised their landholdings and disposed of marginal land.

Geographically, Kent’s position close to France has always made it a significant point of entry into Britain from all over Europe. Some of the entrants have been ‘aggressive’ invasions, so the fact that Kent’s borders are predominantly coastal has resulted in a wide range of coastal fortifications and defence systems that can still be found in a large number of locations that include Roman fortifications at Hythe, Dover, Richborough and Reculver, the medieval Cinque Port fortifications at Sandwich, Dover, Hythe and New Romney, later added to by Henry VIII in 1539–40 with the forts at Walmer, Deal and Sandown, through the Napoleonic defences to radar stations and anti-aircraft guns set up in anticipation of, and during, World War II. However, not all movement in and out of Kent was unwanted and significant trade routes developed, ensuring Kent became an important maritime county, the detail partly depending on how the physical environment changed over space and time.

Kent has a wide range of coastal environments largely due to a varied geology and its influence on relief, but also because of its geographical location with coastlines facing north and south. While many think of coastal erosion as the largest cause for change over time, in Kent sediment deposition has also been important and both have had, and will have, significant impacts on society and its use of the coast.

Kent’s Coastal Geology

The coastal geology of Kent is relatively simple (Figure 2.1). It is dominated by north-east dipping Cretaceous strata of the North Weald and Palaeogene strata of the southern London Basin. The sub-parallel nature of the strata exposed at the surface and the relatively rapid lithological changes from sands to clays and back again, together with the chalk, has a strong influence on the relief of the coastline.

The oldest strata seen at the coast is the Cretaceous Weald Clay, exposed at Hythe and visible further west as an ancient degraded cliff line behind Romney Marsh, although the western end of this cliff line is formed of older Hastings Beds. As the coastline is followed east and north marine erosion exposes the full sequence of the Upper Cretaceous strata, the most prominent of which is the Chalk of the truncated North Downs which form the ‘classic’ White Cliffs of Dover from Folkestone to just north of Kingsdown.

What connections can there be between bombs and roses, mines and hampers full of asparagus, between beautifying a grubby convent and extolling the Zeebrugge Raid? The answer is that Helen Beale, a thirty-two-year-old Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) officer in Dover, revealed how these elements counter-intuitively co-existed in World War I Kent. There was heroic male masculinity in dangerous naval operations at sea alongside what might be called ‘traditional femininity’, women who were never too ‘sailorised’ but worked as administrators in backroom offices, and sometimes revealed subjective feelings and domestic preoccupations.

This chapter discusses Beale’s version of naval Dover from February to May 1918 when she established the WRNS there, including founding the hostel that was members’ home from home. Her own (unpublished) words are used wherever possible, contextualised by primary and secondary material about the WRNS and naval history. In those fine spring days of the last year of the war she established a template for the Dover WRNS in the period that followed, even after the war’s end.

Beale was the youngest daughter of a non-conformist family with seven children. Her father, James, was a solicitor who had grown wealthy from negotiating railway contracts, especially the Midland Railway’s St Pancras route. In the 1890s the family moved from London to their new Arts and Crafts house, Standen, in East Grinstead (now owned by the National Trust). As women of their class did, before the war Helen joined the local branch of the Red Cross as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nursing assistant and later nursed in Étaples and London.

Looking for something with more scope, in January 1918 this well-travelled VAD switched to the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The WRNS had just been formed after much early resistance to women’s incursion. In December 1914 Vice Admiral David Beatty had expressed a typical view: he had ‘never heard such nonsense’ as the rumour of a possible women’s branch of naval services. He opined that there was plenty of work for women which men could not do. If women were married it was ‘enough to look after their homes and children’.

Kent has been on the front line for defence and offensive operations for over two thousand years. It is the obvious coast for both an offensive springboard into Europe and an invasion of England, with the rich countryside and national magazines able to support an invading army marching on London. If the great fortress at Dover was an obvious focal point for national defence, the other ports of the Kentish coast were equally important and exposed to invaders from the Scheldt Estuary.

The threat to national security in the age of sail peaked between 1793 and 1815 as Revolutionary and Napoleonic France occupied and incorporated the Low Countries, the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) and Holland, exploiting their naval facilities and infrastructure to prepare for an invasion of south-eastern England and the total destruction of the British state. Between 1803 and 1805 Napoleon assembled a hundred thousand strong Grand Army around Boulogne, relying on shipping from the Scheldt, based at the Dutch port of Vlissingen (Flushing) for larger transports. In response Britain blockaded the hostile coast, using a fleet based at the Nore, Deal and Dover. On shore new fixed defences including Martello towers were built, to delay the invaders and to support a communications infrastructure to signal for support. A large garrison of regular troops, backed by local militia and volunteer units, would engage any French troops that reached the shore. The scale of the shore defences was such that Napoleon would need a very large army to achieve his ambition, one that could not slip across the English Channel without being detected, and destroyed, by the Royal Navy.

The strength of the navy, based at Kentish dockyards and anchorages, meant that Napoleon never made the attempt, although, in truth, his invasion had been a bluff. The army at Boulogne was used to conquer Austria and Prussia, not Britain. Napoleon had hoped the threat of invasion alone would be enough to bring the British to terms. Instead it galvanised national resistance, sharply increasing voluntary soldiering, and enabling the government to increase the tax burden to fund a powerful fiscal military state.