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The Indian indenture system was a system of indentured servitude, by which more than 1.6 million workers [1] from British India were transported to labour in European colonies, as a substitute for slave labour, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century.
Indentured servitude of Irish and other European peoples occurred in seventeenth-century Barbados, and was fundamentally different from enslavement: an enslaved African's body was owned, as were the bodies of their children, while the labour of indentured servants was under contractual ownership of another person.
Still, demand for indentured labor remained relatively low until the adoption of staple crops, such as sugarcane in the West Indies or tobacco in the American South. [37] With economies largely based on these crops, the West Indies and American South would see the vast majority of indentured labour. [38]
Half of an indenture document of 1723 showing the randomly cut edge at the top. An indenture is a legal contract that reflects an agreement between two parties. Although the term is most familiarly used to refer to a labor contract between an employer and a laborer with an indentured servant status, historically indentures were used for a variety of contracts, including transfers and rents of ...
The Inland Emigration Act of 1859 was a pivotal piece of legislation enacted by the British colonial government in India to regulate the internal migration of laborers to the tea plantations of Assam and other regions.
Indentured Chinese servants also laboured in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in the country. Two scholars of Chinese labour in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Pérez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba [58] and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. [58]
The pool of labour proved to be so large that, for the next 67 years, indentured contracts were limited to only one year. This sugar revolution led to an increase in volume production, making Mauritius the most important sugar-producing British colony, its sugar export accounting for 7.4 percent of the world's total production by the 1850s.
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families. [note 1]