Freedom & Indenture
I am starting a few books that tackle the question of freedom in the modern era. The first up is Jonathan Connolly’s Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation. It enters into a longstanding debate over post-emancipation indentured labor in the British Caribbean. Whereas some historians have long contended that indenture was slavery in all but name and others see it as a variation of contract labor, Connolly is invested in a different question. He is asking why indenture was normalized, and why certain kinds of violence inherent to indenture did not spark outrage or scandle, but were seen as legitimate exercises of power. His answer unfolds across several axes, which are spelled out clearly in his introduction. The one that interests me most are about ideology, and how he treats indenture as an ideology. Seen in this light, shifting understandings of race are critical to the story. By displacing the primacy of economic interests in the debate, he explains how indenture shifted as a system of labor in the late-1840s when he sees a turn away from liberalism in colonial office thinking.
There are a few things to appreciate about this project, most notably its geographic frame and chronological focus. Rather than the book focusing on the period after the 1850s, Connolly is interested in the early scandal around indenture, and its relatively rapid resolution. Moreover, he spans the Caribbean and Indian Ocean world, allowing us to track the questions of race, labor, and empire across region and colony. A key hinge point then is the tendency to “moralize” labor and migration. In the context of hardening racial difference, and acute economic demands, indenture systems that had once caused debate got repackaged as “promoting general social order, rather than elite interest” (91).
By adding indenture to the “problem of freedom” paradigm that Thomas C. Holt elucidated decades ago, Worth of Freedom will speak to scholars of slavery and emancipation, and offer frameworks and insights we can take into our own work.
