Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora.

With

Purba Hossain

Neha Hui

And

Clem Seecharan

Produced by Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst and Co., 2013)

Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2002)

Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (eds.), The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire (Pluto Books, 2021)

Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati, ‘Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers’ (The Economic History Review 75:2, 2022)

Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The political economy of Indian indentured labor in the nineteenth century (Journal of the History of Economic Thought 47:2, 2025)

Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)

Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004)

Brij V. Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations’ (Indian Economic & Social History Review 22:1, 1985)

Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’ (South Asian Studies 33:1, 2017)

Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantation (TSAR, 1993)

Kalathmika Natarajan, Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Oxford University Press, 2026)

Clem Seecharan, 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29 (Macmillan, 1997)

Clem Seecharan, Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture (Peepal Tree Press, 2015)

S. Sen, ‘Indentured labour from India in the age of empire’ (Social Scientist, 44:1/2, 2016)

Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1974)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.