Dear Editor,
In the commentary following the passing of Shridath Ramphal, no one commented that he had been chosen in the 1988 “Genesis of a Nation” commemorations to deliver the lecture on the Indian Guyanese experience. Insisting that he was a “West Indian”, a quarter century later he took excerpts from that speech to make the connection between African slavery and Indian Indentureship in his memoirs, “Glimpses of a Global life”. He emphasized that “the slave was private property and that slavery implied permanence were basic differences – however, much they (slavery and indentureship) tended to be overshadowed by the similarities. (But) It was one experience with differing shades of brutality, differing methods of coercion, but a common experience of human bondage.” It is a point worth remembering as we continue on our fraught journey of nationhood.
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin famously remarked, “there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” A document, he might have added, framed and authorised by the language of “the law” to mystify its nature. It is for this reason slavery and indentureship – and the subjugation of the Amerindians – can also be seen as Europeans waging “lawfare’ against the peoples of Guyana; which suggests a tool for unravelling the lingering effects.
“Indentured labour” was but one of various guises under which individuals were conscripted to provide labour in the development of the “capitalist” mode of production, which developed as exploited the worlds it had “discovered” – and more germanely, conquered – after 1492. The Spanish made a turn from enslaving Amerindians in the New World to Africans via laws already encoded in their medieval Las Siete Partidas. The ideology of racism – that Africans were inalienably less than human – was invented to justify their claim and African exploitation as chattel.
While it is usual to posit that the development of the exploitation of bodies for their labour occurred in a unilinear teleological fashion from “unfree” to “free labour”, in reality the process was quite discontinuous with frequent regressions. The British adapted their Statute of Labourers laws to initially introduce indentured workers in the farms they established in America (Virginia) and Barbados in the early 17th century. The workers were made available by the Enclosure Acts and Game Laws of England etc. which drove them off the “common land”. These White servants would work in the New World farms for four or five years after their passages had been paid by their employers after which they were free to cultivate the plot of land they were given on their own.
But with the introduction of plantations in the late 17th century that demanded greater numbers and rigour than Europe could supply, to cultivate sugar cane and cotton, the British turned to African Slaves. They had to invent slave laws in Barbados that used the Spanish racist ideology to also justify the practice. But even before, they had followed up their “accumulation by dispossession” through developing the modern international law that moved away from the natural law-based “jus gentium”, which accepted equal sovereignty for all countries, to a positivistic law that specified a system of differential sovereignty. The people of the new world were thus dubbed “uncivilised savages” and their land “terra nullius”, or “nobody’s land”.
In India, which the British East India Company conquered between 1657 and 1818, the British passed laws that changed the rules on land taxes, crops that should be cultivated etc. This resulted in millions dying in famine or pushed off the land to become the excess labour that could be exported to other parts of India, such as Assam tea-plantations or its global empire as needed . Under the new racism, Indians were also lower intrinsically to whites.
After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, rather than moving to “free labour” as was promised, they introduced unfree Indentured labour by law. Slaves were made de facto unfree as laws were passed to discourage them from moving off the plantations – such that land must be purchased in 100-acre plots. Similarly, the contracts of the indentureds were structured to keep them bound to their employer so that if they were not in the fields, they had to be either in jail or hospital. Infractions of their contract were subject to criminal penalties and these were applied liberally. It was lawfare against all locals.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
