How did indenture turn from being an object of scandal after slavery to being a consolidated policy of economic improvement and “freedom?” Charting the changing debates, political economy, and ideological transformations of “free labor” between the 1830s and 1870s, Jonathan Connolly’s Worthy of Freedom narrates how the contested meanings, laws, and practices of indenture, a state-managed system of labor migration, transformed emancipation in the modern British empire. No longer seen in opposition to the coercion and discipline of labor, the cause of “freedom” and antislavery was subsequently yoked onto an intraimperial regime of controlled movement and racialized regulation that remade plantation economies and their societies. In a far-reaching analysis focused on the Crown Colonies of Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad, Connolly demonstrates how legal developments in these colonies, in conjunction with the bust and boom of their sugar plantations, set precedents that eventually normalized indenture as “free labor” across the empire. If, following Marx’s critique of the commodity form, we need to unravel the illusions of liberal political economy, Worthy of Freedom sets out a historically grounded, systematic model for doing so – one worthy of emulation, particularly for scholars focused on race, migration, transnational and global legal orders, and political economy.
The import of Connolly’s insightful historical analysis of indenture extends, in our view, beyond the burgeoning field of imperial legal history. In his structured narrative, the making and meanings of indenture unfold through the book’s fine-grained tracking of the statutory forms and conceptual underpinnings of this policy together with the practices that extended, or limited, the colonial state’s reach. Worthy of Freedom is a critical account of the historical transformations of “free labor,” as told along the dimensions of consciousness, legal forms and ideologies, and practice. Law, as Connolly shows, enabled the naturalization of economic interests and power.
Along these threads, Connolly’s book articulates three arguments (5–6). One, the dramatic shift of public debates on indenture in the empire between the 1830s–1840s and the 1850s–1860s – from indenture as the scandalous return of slavery to a means of moral and economic progress – was founded upon emergent discourses that remapped the empire in the language of liberal political economy and social evolution. Two, the laws and regulations of indenture, as increasingly underwritten by essentialized notions of racial character, fostered ever more coercive and expansive controls over labor in the colonies, redefining the category of “free labor” within British legal ideology and “moralizing” the interests of planters through an apparently neutral “language of order” (101). Finally, the processes and practices through which indenture took form were also rooted in the local, everyday struggles between workers, planters, and officials in the paradigmatic indenture-receiving colonies of Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad. Bringing into view the significance of law in action, it was the specific social and material conditions of these colonies that shaped how indenture spread and consolidated across the empire in “a movement from crisis to confidence” (6).
Adding to the innovative body of legal-historical scholarship that has carefully traced the myriad connections that crisscross and constitute empires and their colonies (32), the book’s pointed methodological approach opens up a “layered view of imperial praxis” that was tied to the simultaneously “centralized and decentralized” structure of colonial lawmaking (8, 34). The history of indenture cannot be told only from its development within debates between metropole and colony or through inter-colonial comparison: it calls for the skillful traversal of interconnected sites and connections across the empire and over time – a challenge Connolly more than meets.
Worthy of Freedom tells the story of indenture, and its normalization, in four parts: the first two chapters narrate the beginnings of indenture in the wake of emancipation, detailing the contests over this controversial policy and its emergent regulatory framework. Chapter Three marks a turning point as the adoption of free-trade policy and the removal of protective tariffs on sugar in 1846 altered the debates over indenture as the declining price of sugar threatened the viability of the plantation system. The Colonial Office, while seeking to maintain “liberal free-labor principles” (68), thus authorized coercive legal measures to limit labor costs.
Chapters Four and Five speak to the consolidation and rationalization of indenture, as liberal political economy mixed with discourses of the civilizing mission and demographic theory in justifying state-managed labor migration. Surveying these discourses in public and official debates, these chapters capture how essentialist forms of “race-thinking” found grounds in struggles – ideological and practical – over the control of labor in the colonies (97). The resulting policy changes affected non-indentured populations, as shown in a close examination of the 1867 pass laws in Mauritius, which required them to carry documents that indicated their identity and completion of indenture. Indenture thus became a form of “race-based social control” unbound by the terms of contract (136). The book closes with Chapter Six and an Epilogue that, respectively, narrates the maintenance and elaboration of labor discipline under indenture despite royal inquiries into the mistreatment of workers, and explains the end of indenture in the face of cane sugar’s decline and the rise of anticolonial nationalism.
Writing as historical sociologists of race and law, we are struck by two generative points of convergence between Worthy of Freedom and our fields of research. First, the book’s discussion of the “deeply hierarchical global sociology” that shaped the recasting of indenture as “a means of emancipatory advancement” over the 1840s raises questions about the emergent notions of global hierarchy between societies (94). What drove the articulation of such an ossified view of global difference at this juncture – a far cry from the universalistic premises that underwrote the early official arguments for indenture in the empire (27)? The same might be said of the “comparative sociology” and demographic theories that sought to explain the varying fortunes of the post-emancipation colonies (95). Were the debates over the organization of “free trade” and “free labor” critical staging grounds for the expression, reiteration, and consolidation of circulating ideas of race and social difference? Extending Connolly’s evocative conclusion on the “historically unfixed” meanings of “freedom” after emancipation (177), might we understand this concept, like the “rule of law” and its racialized legalities (Lee Reference Lee2024), as a modern myth that produces difference?
Second, the book extends a strand of legal-historical scholarship on the transplantation or translation of legal forms across jurisdictions, highlighting the power of statutory precedent in producing a form of legitimacy “internal” to law itself (110). Connolly’s intervention warrants emphasis: “Precedent made indenture appear normal and unchanging,” since indenture ordinances, once formulated in British Guiana, Mauritius, or Trinidad, circulated as models across the empire (111). Here, we ask: what about exceptions, or variations, to this pattern? Indeed, the liberalization of indenture law in these colonies provided a model to Australian landowners lobbying for an easing of restrictions (Cullen Reference Cullen2012). Yet with regard to Australia, imperial and local authorities remained, for the most part, opposed to the practice, as was the case for the other “white dominions” of New Zealand and (to a lesser extent) Canada. Rather than rehabilitating indentured servitude as free labor in Australia, the liberal critiques of the 1830s and 1840s were refashioned as arguments against nonwhite immigration in all its forms, prefiguring the development of the White Australia Policy. Such uneven movements of law, as scholarship that builds on Connolly’s Worthy of Freedom might elaborate, point to how struggles over the regulation of labor mediated a complex imperial geography of race and freedom.
