Voices from Calcutta
Voices from Calcutta
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USDBetween 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured labourers migrated from India to sugar plantation colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Voices from Calcutta shows how spokesmen from Calcutta – the capital of British India – disrupted this trade and influenced the lives of these migrants. It follows Calcuttans in their journey of debating, investigating and defending indenture, unfolding a complex web of letters, petitions, interviews and investigative-reports. As the indenture debates influenced lived experience on ships and plantations, and shaped the negotiation of subjecthood and labour rights for the empire's peripatetic labourers, they became a means by which elite Calcuttans negotiated their own position within the empire. This book locates in Calcutta voices of protest that fundamentally defined the contours of post-slavery labouring across the British Empire. Instead of simply emanating from Britain, to be dutifully followed in the colonies, labour legislation was informed by voices from those very colonies.
- A comprehensive account of Calcutta's role in the Indian indenture trade
- Focuses on plantation labour, migration, and empire
- Uses under-utilised archival records and unused interviews of early indentured migrants
Product details
August 2025Hardback
9781009573009
190 pages
228 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from August 2025
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1. Calcutta and Indenture
- 2. Debating Indenture
- 3. Investigating Indenture
- 4. In Defence of Indenture
- 5. Race in the Making of Indentured Labourers
- 6. Subjects, Citizens, Spokesmen
- Conclusion: City, Spaces, Encounters
- Bibliography
- Index.
