Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Studies in Comparative World History) by David Northrup

by David Northrup

From 1834-1922, two million Asians, Africans, and South Pacific Islanders signed long-term labor contracts in return for free passage and modest wages. This is the first survey of the global flow of indentured migrants that developed to replace freed slaves on sugar plantations in the British colonies.

Paperback

First published June 30, 1995

About the author

David Northrup is serious about world travel and world history. So far, his rambles have taken him to 49 US states and as many foreign countries. Early studies and research in France were followed by teaching and research in rural Nigeria. The latter experience led him to earn a doctorate in African history from UCLA. While teaching African and world history at Tuskegee Institute and Boston College, he published important books and articles in African, Atlantic, and world history. He also served as president of the World History Assn. Since retirement from teaching in 2012, he had published two books, How English Became the Global Language and a third edition of Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850. Two early books that had gone out of print, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism and Beyond the Bend in the River, are now available for free in electronic formats.

Reviews

[unperspicacious · Rating 3 out of 5]

Textbook-like and probably meant for lower-level undergraduates...but the writing is very clear and makes some of the historiographical debates regarding migratory indentured labour easy to pick up (there are probably other debates being left out, but I am unsure of the relative importance of these).

There are some interesting statistics on indentured migrant flows in the appendices, broken down into decadal increments and disaggregated by country/sub-region of origins and destination colony. The figures show without a doubt that Malaya, Burma and Ceylon took the lion's share of the global indentured labour inflows during this period - millions, as opposed to mere thousands elsewhere (pp. 53, 61). Because of the editorial decision to restrict book's scope to intercontinental migration, there is disappointingly little on these key colonies. They fall into the grey area of regional migratory circuits, as they were neither part of a different continent (Africa, the West Indies, the neo-Europes) nor enmeshed within of the territorial bounds of the Chinese land empire or, as in the case of Ceylon and Malaya, the British Raj's (especially after 1867 for the latter).

The book also suggests, if not shows, that during the period covered, indentured labour from China and India went to just about every geographical region within the ambit of the British empire - except West Africa.