The History of Indentured Servants

Two million people. Transported across the world. Told it was a choice.

When Britain abolished slavery in 1834, it faced a crisis it had no intention of solving fairly. The plantation colonies needed labour. India had millions of desperate, impoverished people - made desperate, in large part, by British colonial policy itself. The solution was the indentured system: contracts signed before magistrates, in languages workers couldn't read, binding them to sugar plantations in Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Mauritius, and South Africa for five years that often became a lifetime.

History of Indentured Servants: The Empire's Invisible Chains tells the full story of one of the most consequential and least-known migrations in modern history - from the recruiters who prowled the villages of Bihar and Madras, to the ships that crossed three oceans, to the communities that were built, against all odds, in places their founders never chose.

This is narrative history at its most human. It follows the workers who resisted and the system that punished them for it. It examines the promises the Empire made and the mechanisms it built to break them. It traces the diaspora that indenture created - the Indo-Fijian, Indo-Caribbean, and Indo-Mauritian communities that still carry the weight of that history today - and follows the long shadow of the system all the way to the Windrush generation, to the streets of South London, and to the unresolved question of what Britain owes the people its empire scattered across the world.

Written by the great-great-grandson of a girmitya - an indentured worker - this book is both rigorous history and deeply personal testimony. It is the story of people whose names were replaced by contract numbers, whose journeys were not recorded as they were lived, and whose descendants are still, in various corners of the world, working out what it means to carry a history that was never properly told.

The accounting is long overdue. This book begins it.

Part of The History of... series.