Posts com a Tag ‘Reviews in History (HVH)’

Between 1834 and 1917, some 1.37 million Indian migrants travelled the length and breadth of the British Empire under contracts of indentureship. Chiefly contracted to work on colonial plantations, in the place of formerly enslaved Africans, Indian migrants found themselves in destinations as far flung as Mauritius (off the coast of Africa), Fiji (in the Pacific Ocean), British Guiana (in South America), and Trinidad (in the Caribbean).(1) Despite just how far reaching this migration stream grew to be, few historical works have engaged with its truly global nature, nor indeed of the connections that enabled and perpetuated it. Rather, as Reshaad Durgahee aptly notes, much of the scholarship on Indian indentured labour suffers from a somewhat ironic ‘methodological nationalism’ (p. 233), evident in a persistent tendency to focus on the experiences of indentureship within a specific colony or set of colonies. It is to Durgahee’s credit, then, that The Indentured Archipelago clearly, and convincing, illustrates the importance of considering the global nature of indentureship, offering a timely reconceptualization of both the system, and of the lives of those who lived through it. Leia Mais