The Indentured Archipelago

This monograph attempts to offer new perspectives on the shared experience of indenture by looking at two colonies, Mauritius and Fiji, in between 1871 and 1916. It introduces the concept of subaltern careering, which essentially studies the re-migration of Indian indentured labourers between sugar colonies and the world beyond. The author demonstrates how a geographical analysis of indenture brings vital new understandings of the system itself, but also of the broader imperial geographies of the post-slavery world. Indian indenture was global. It was a trans-oceanic phenomenon drawing actors together from different parts of the globe. These actors were elite, middle-class and subaltern. They were male, they were female; European and non-European; adults and children; human and non-human. To appreciate the scale of the system and the connectivity between the colonies which recruited Indian indentured labour, the term archipelago is used. Contextualising the experiences of indenture in Mauritius and Fijiwithin an indentured archipelago ensures that the connectivity of these colonial spaces which were bound together by the cord of indenture is not severed--