Stop It: Indentureship was not Slavery

May 13, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Nearly a decade ago I went to the Caribbean Studies Association Annual Convention in St. Lucia. My paper was on the subject of violence against indentured women during the 19th and early 20th century. Alissa Trotz was the discussant, and I recall David Hinds being in the audience.
I began the paper by stating that there is a rising Pan-Indianist grand narrative seeking to equate indentureship with slavery. I specifically wrote that this narrative is preoccupied with “the working and living conditions of indentured labourers with considerable effort expended to show how indentureship was actually a form of slavery” (Persaud 2001).
I objected to that discourse then, and I do so again. The matter is simple – indentured servants did not suffer nearly as much as African slaves.
Any such suggestion must be, at best, dismissed as misinformed. As I stated in St. Lucia, the fundamental difference between the servant and the slave was that the servant was never the private property of a master.
The Indian servant had a contract – that is to say, he/she had a legal instrument governing the terms and conditions of employment. The indentured servant was taken to Guyana by contract; the slave was taken there by force. At the end of the contract, the servant did not have to go through four years of apprenticeship as African slaves had to do after hundred of years of coercive exploitation.
I am well aware of the reports filed by people like H.V.P. Bronkhurst and Joseph Beaumont.
These reports did capture the terrible conditions in which indentured servants lived and were by a large accurate. But we must also understand that men like Bronkhurst and Beaumont were activists who wanted to end the indenture system. The reports were constructed to elicit horror in England (See Walter Persaud on this). They did.
What is striking is that so long after the end of the indenture system some writers have not understood the textual strategy of the anti-indenture activists. They take the reports at face value, rather than engage in the deconstruction of those texts. The whole notion that indentureship is similar to slavery was concocted by anti-indenture activists who knew that such an association would resonate among progressives in Britain. We should note that one such activist, Joseph Beaumont published a book called The New Slavery in 1871. Even book titles have their conditions of emergence and this historicity should not be ignored.
Whilst I am at it I may as well address why the indenture system began. Rum shop historiography has it that many people came before and could not do the work. More serious scholarly disquisitions point to labour shortage. Rum shop historiography is nothing other than a form of ethnic nationalism. Cease and desist! The labour shortage thesis has more scholarly traction but its explanatory power withers as you dig down.
Following Rodney, I argue that the real drive behind indentured labour was to dismantle an increasingly well organised African work force. There was absolute shortage of labour. If there was labour shortage sugar production would have suffered even before emancipation. But as I wrote in the St. Lucia paper “sugar production actually increased by 214% between 1812 and 1835.  Eighteen twenty-nine in fact, was one of the most profitable years in the colony, when 109 million pounds of sugar was produced” (Persaud 2001). I also argued then that “while emancipation did, in and of itself lend to labour withdrawal, the equally pressing matter was that a labour market had actually emerged.” The ex-slaves were now in a position to bargain for wages and better working conditions. Task Gangs were formed as a strategy of strengthening the bargaining position of workers. Significantly, the Task Gangs broke the absolute control the planters, managers, and overseers had in controlling every aspect of estate work” (Persaud 2001).
The disruption of plantation hegemony by the emerging African working class (in the technical sense of that term) was of great concern to the planters. Moreover, there had been periodic but intense protests in the years before emancipation. Between August 18th and 23rd 1823 for instance, there was a revolt on the East Coast. Martial Law was declared on August 21st, and it took musket fire and several dead and wounded to beat back the more than 2000 slaves in arms.
Forty-five slaves and a white missionary were sentenced to death for the revolt.
These were the circumstances that led to indentured labourers. Make no mistake about it; the planters wanted to break the back of a rising labour militancy in Guyana. This is why in January 1836 John Gladstone wrote to Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. specifically inquiring about Bound labour. Gillanders replied the order could be met, and that the Indian labourer was akin to a monkey, and has only paltry needs. Mangru’s work on this aspect of the labour migration is excellent.
There is much more to this story, but one thing stands out. By 1888, P.M. Netscher was in a position to write the following – “through the advent of those competing labourers, the people have made themselves completely independent of the caprices and extravagant demands of the creole workmen” (Netscher 1888).  The people as used here referred to the planters and the established classes of colonial society.
The suffering of Indians is not an empirical question. Indians did suffer. The question is -so what? In part you get the answer when the attempt is made to equate suffering in indentureship with suffering in slavery. In this context there is a shift from the empirical documentation of hardship, to an epistemological strategy of ethnic instantiation. Whereas the former is concerned with historical knowledge, the latter is driven by a politicized historical presentism.
The former is productive and should be encouraged; the latter is a dangerous potion that should not be swallowed, even by the descendants of the indentured servants.
Dr. Randy Persaud

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