1 - Introduction

Summary

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.