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Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean

Auerbach, Sascha

Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean Thumbnail


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Abstract

This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns.

Citation

Auerbach, S. (2022). Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean. English Historical Review, 137(589), 1662-1692. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead002

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 31, 2021
Online Publication Date Apr 13, 2023
Publication Date 2022-12
Deposit Date Feb 2, 2021
Publicly Available Date Apr 14, 2025
Journal English Historical Review
Print ISSN 0013-8266
Electronic ISSN 1477-4534
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 137
Issue 589
Pages 1662-1692
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead002
Keywords History
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5288960
Publisher URL https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/137/589/1662/7117624?login=false

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