A study of Indian indentured labor in Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad that explores the history of indenture’s normalization.
 
In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation.
 
Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world.

Jonathan Connolly is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Introduction
1. The Scandal of Indenture and the Making of State Regulation, 1834–1845
2. Free Labor Contested: Indenture and the Limits of Freedom, 1838–1849
3. Indenture and Free Trade, 1846–1853
4. Consolidating Indenture, 1848–1862
5. Vagrancy, Free Labor, and State Power, 1859–1871
6. Scandal Revived? Royal Commissions of Inquiry and the Persistence of Labor Control, 1869–1878
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index