A discerning audience member noticed the slip. They’re bright yellow and familiar to those who know The National Archives in London. I had put together some slides to talk about my recent book, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation. We all have our own archiving systems. Mine is fairly analog—a recreation of physical cabinets inside my computer—but the material is thankfully still there. So, without meaning to, I had included an archival image taken with a long-lost camera ten years before the book came out. That’s what she noticed, the date: 2014.
I decided to keep the slide, with the yellow slip and a small portion of my hand. Professional digitization comes with many benefits, but our own photos have an off-kilter presence. They remind us that we were there; that research is an experience. Though accidental, the old slide felt like an invitation: a chance to think back on the lifespan of the project, and to reflect on some pathways where research and teaching in legal history cross.
Worthy of Freedom is a history of Indian indentured labor migration to Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, and British Guiana and Trinidad, in the southern Caribbean, were important sugar-producing colonies—and part of a larger plantation complex that had depended fundamentally on African enslavement. Indenture, meanwhile, was a labor relationship with seventeenth-century precedent. An indenture was a theoretically voluntary agreement binding a worker to labor for a period of years in exchange for transportation to a colony. But unlike labor contracts in contemporary Anglo-American law, indentures were enforceable penally. The typical punishment for breach of contract was imprisonment, and in the post-slavery empire an elaborate body of master-and-servant and vagrancy laws policed both work and mobility.
In the 1830s, before emancipation went into full effect, planters began recruiting indentured workers from British India to work on sugar plantations. The imperial state intervened and, beginning in 1842, created a larger, state-regulated system of labor migration that lasted until the end of the First World War. Over the course of that roughly 80-year period, approximately 1.3 million indentured immigrants arrived in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, South Africa (from 1860) and Fiji (from 1879).
Worthy of Freedom is about the making of this system. It focuses on the category of “free labor:” on a set of conflicts and social and economic dynamics that reshaped the meaning of that category from the 1830s to the late 1870s. Instead of defining “freedom” and asking whether indenture was free, the book explores how the meaning of freedom changed as the indenture system was built. As such, the book seeks to connect the history of indenture to the broader history of emancipation. Indenture caused a public scandal in the 1830s and early 1840s. But by the 1860s it was widely celebrated, as an acceptable form of free labor and as tool of civilization. In tracing this transformation, the book offers insight into the reformulation of racial hierarchies after abolition and shows how the state used indenture to reshape the political economy of emancipation.
The yellow slip takes me back to the archives, to chance meetings and new friendships with others digging through similar materials. British colonial archives are organized geographically and chronologically, not thematically. This structure reinforces a disciplinary tendency to separate regions—such as the Caribbean and Indian Ocean—from one another. For me, it also created a basic archival challenge. One can’t simply request ‘records on indenture’ (or on any other discrete topic, for that matter), not least across multiple colonial spaces. Instead, one has to find relevant material within enormously voluminous series of general correspondence, in Britain and (in my case) Mauritius and Trinidad.
Over time, responding to that challenge brought new themes into the project. Tracing dispersed debates on indenture made me think newly about the structure of imperial bureaucracy. Forms of circulation beyond colony and metropole came to light: across colonies and in triangular patterns with India as its own imperial center. I became interested in the political importance of imagined geographies (like the “sugar colonies”) and in the shifting meaning of key terms (like “coolie”) underlying perceptions of imperial migration.
Searching along these paths also made legal history increasingly central to my methods. One early strategy involved cataloging indenture-related ordinances passed in each of the three colonies. Ordinances were printed and bound in separate volumes, making them relatively easy to find. But after assembling a legislative timeline, I then began to search for a widely dispersed (and much harder to find) body of official correspondence on the nature of free labor. Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad were Crown colonies without elected assemblies. Each time local authorities passed new ordinances, they needed to seek approval from the Colonial Office in London. Local governments thus engaged in lengthy correspondence with the home government, while the Colonial Office engaged in parallel correspondence with officials in India—specifically about the laws of indenture and the appropriate boundaries of free labor. In the book, this material later allowed not only for the reconstruction of statutory development but for extensive analysis of “legal ideology,” the kind of reasoning, legal and otherwise, that motivated conflict and change.
In short, the book became a legal history as my archival methods increasingly revealed the importance of legal sources to understanding both the law and other aspects of indenture. Indeed, I think of the book as a “legal history” in a flexible, dual sense. The book is a “direct” legal history in that it makes arguments about law. It reconstructs the statutory law of indenture, which was by no means static. It argues that in key respects that law became more restrictive over time (even as indenture became less controversial over time). And in explaining why this was the case, the book traces shifts in legal ideology, in notions of race, order, and civilization.
But the book is also an “indirect” legal history in the sense that it uses legal sources to make claims about other aspects of historical development. The project began as a cultural history, with interests in public debate, discursive normalization, and questions of imperial legitimacy.[1] But over time my research expanded, and I developed an equally strong interest in the political economy of indenture and in local and global socio-economic change. This brought me to a perennial question, particularly for historians of abolition, about the relationship between ideology and structure, ideas and economic interests. Increasingly, the legal sources I found pointed in both directions. Law was a primary means by which the state reshaped economic relations. At the same time, legal contestation and debate addressed key questions surrounding race, liberalism, and the ambiguities of emancipation. In the book, then, legal history helps bridge the divide; legal sources allow us to relate ideological and economic change without reducing one realm to another.
My thinking in this regard has developed further through teaching—and in this sense I hope that the book will join in conversation with other works that similarly attempt to chart paths in global and economic history without surrendering the advances and inspirations of the cultural turn. Last year, I taught a graduate seminar on law and empire. While the course was offered in part as an introduction to the various ways in which legal historians work on empire, it also sought to trace methodological development in the field over time.[2] That took us back, all the way to Willard Hurst and the midwestern roots of sociolegal history in the US academy. From there and from other influential attempts to fashion social and anthropological approaches to law, we gradually witnessed an immense geographic expansion. That change, as the students saw, grew out of a similar dual interest among scholars of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This was an interest in law itself alongside a more general turn to legal sources as a means of developing social histories of experience, colonization, migration, and many other subjects. We see this now, at ASLH, the Law and History Review, and other key venues. Legal history has become an expansive field in multiple respects. A ‘global’ field with shared thematic concerns across regional specialties. And a methodologically diverse field, one that draws on and engages with other approaches to history, cultural, social, and economic.
This expansiveness is part of what draws me to history as a discipline, and I’m hardly alone in this respect. Worthy of Freedom pursues more than one approach to historical analysis and reflects on relationships across levels. It is just a book, though I mean that in a positive sense—it makes historically specific arguments about indenture and emancipation. But as it enters into conversation with others, it reinforces my sense that legal history has a role to play in charting new courses across the discipline’s recent “turns”—and in continuing to rethink “global history,” “cultural history,” and other important modes of historical analysis.
[1] This line of analysis, initially published as “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: An Analysis of British Public Debate,” Past & Present, no. 238 (2018), remains central to the book as a whole.
[2] I’m grateful to the 2021 Hurst Institute, led by Lauren Benton and Sarah Barringer Gordon, for influencing my thinking here, and for workshopping several draft chapters of my book.