After Slavery: Indentured Labour and Migration in the British Empire, c. 1837-1920 - HIS00180M

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Module summary

Slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1833, leading to a scramble for procuring labour from other quarters of the empire. Between 1837 and 1920, more than a million indentured labourers migrated from India to plantation colonies across the empire, including Jamaica, Guiana, Mauritius, Fiji, and South Africa. This module explores the lives of Indian migrants as they participated in the indenture trade, were bound to the empire’s plantations through indentures (contracts), carved out their own space within the indenture network, and consolidated their identity as migrant subjects of the British Empire. By putting global concerns about slavery and unfree labour on the same plane as local concerns in India, Guiana, Fiji and Mauritius (among others), this module explores a crucial moment in the history of imperial labour through the eyes of its migrants.

This module uses memoirs, interviews, photographs and colonial documents to explore the lived experience of Indian migrants in the empire’s plantations. It asks: Why did Indians migrate for labour? How did indentured Indians interact with Chinese indentured migrants, domestic labourers and penal workers? As they moved to and between colonies, how did migrants develop their own unique diasporic culture and resist the plantation complex? How did race, caste and gender influence life under indenture? And, in the backdrop of the transition from slavery to ‘free’ labour in the empire, how did Indian migrants force a discussion of unfree labour in Britain?

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 2 2024-25

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. A New System of Slavery?
2. Recruiting for Indenture
3. Crossing the ‘Kala Pani’
4. Life on the Plantation
5. Subversion, Agency, and Everyday Resistance
6. Gendered Lives
7. Race, Caste and the Body
8. Archives of Indenture

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Sascha Auerbach, ‘Recent Work on Indenture in the British World’, History Compass 22, no. 2 (2024): 127-97.