Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System

Abstract

The origins of the indentured labor system which flourished in the post-emancipation colonial plantation world must be understood in terms of the development of increasingly interconnected free and forced labor trades within and beyond the Indian Ocean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Recent research reveals that this system took shape a quarter of a century earlier than previously believed, that Chinese rather than Indian workers were the initial focus of the interest in using indentured Asian labor and that the British East India Company played a significant and hitherto unappreciated role in this global migrant labor system's early development.