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Continuities in Capitalism: Exploitation of 
Indentured and Migrant Labour 

 
*** 

Kevin De Silva is a third year student at the University of Toronto. He 
is completing his undergraduate degree in Political Science and 
Caribbean Studies, winning in 2010 the United Network of Indo-

Caribbean Toronto Youths (U.N.I.T.Y.) Scholarship. He is a member of 
the Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, and is chief editor of Caribbean 

Quilt. He has also contributed to the Stabroek News in Guyana on 
issues concerning environmental politics and diaspora. 

 
*** 

“Indentureship” is a legal, contractual agreement which defines 
a particular, temporally structured relationship involving capital 
interests and labour. The practical, historical results of such a contract 
required of labour its submission and unwitting acceptance of a 
subaltern state, ensuring the dominance of capital. In short, 
indentureship was a conceived as a legal compulsion demanding 
economic operationalization with punitive measures for those who 
resisted. If one accepts the practical implications of indentureship in 
these terms, one implicitly assumes a moral or normative position, that 
is, one automatically understands such a system to be reprehensible, 
exploitative, and “wrong.” This position however is easy to take: since 
the period of indenture is in the Caribbean over, and since diasporic 
labour populations have been constituted under nation-states as “free-
men” contemporarily, with the benefit of hindsight, a seemingly “clear-
cut issue” becomes fodder for arm-chair criticisms of past practices, 
institutions, and norms. 

Yet the capitalist framework which underpinned this system still 
readily persists with only reticent moral condemnations of it.  
Destroying temporality, that is, viewing indentureship as a past 
phenomenon in its character, destroying regionalism, that is, viewing 
features of indentureship only in the purview of a quintessentially 



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Caribbean experience, and destroying the nation-state as a level of 
analysis (ignoring flows of labour divorced from any meaningful origin 
elsewhere globally) all become central in viewing history as a 
continuing, discursive process, rather than merely a sum total of dead 
events irrelevant to the present age.  

This paper will argue that indentured labour, though non-
existent in the Caribbean today and less apparent in the rest of the 
world, continues structurally in the form of migrant labour. The 
intention of this argument is to re-infuse and expand normative 
considerations beyond any nationalist or cultural limitations. 
Similarities between the two processes seemingly detached from one 
another can be brought to light by analyzing firstly persisting economic 
modalities then secondly persisting social modalities in the cases of the 
Caribbean, India and the United Arab Emirates.  

 
Persisting Economic Modalities: Contrasting Pre & Post Indenture 

India 
 

Basdeo Mangru describes Indian government policy during the 
period of indentured emigration as “largely influenced by the laissez-
faire theory of administration… [with] minimum government 
interference in the pursuit of individual economic interests and few 
restrictions on the movement of goods, labour and capital.”1 The Indian 
government policy today, adapted formally in 1991, is one that stresses 
this continuance of the laissez-faire attitude in neo-liberal terms: freeing 
up markets, the redirection of government expenditure away from 
public services in favour of infrastructure which in turn is meant to 
guide and regularize capital movement, as well as privatization, 
competition and the promotion of foreign direct investment. This 
economic schema, aside from myths which stress the newness and 
uniqueness of it and its “globalization” presently, can be found in its 
earlier incarnations during the 19th century: “Nineteenth century 
globalization involved increasing transfers of commodities, people, 
capital and ideas between and within continents. The most 
straightforward measure of integration is simply the growing volume of 
these international flows.”2 



Kevin De Silva – CONTINUITIES IN CAPITALISM: EXPLOITATION OF INDENTURED &  
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India itself has historically been home to what is termed 
“surplus labour” (that is, a large swath of the population which, because 
of the inability of the land to accommodate more people”3) requires 
their literal outflow in the form of migration and economic 
operationalization. The latter point refers to the lack of an ability to 
compete agriculturally within the nexus of capitalist accumulation 
against capital-intensive foreign goods (such as British textile outputs in 
the 19th century). Hence, a once agrarian population is pressured onto 
the labour market to satisfy the demands of industrial production 
elsewhere off of the hinterland. Although indebtedness was prevalent 
during the time of indentureship with “the ownership of…land passed 
to money-lenders; and as the traditional cultivators lost their land, the 
number of landless peasants increased,”4 contemporary India also 
suffers the ills of indebtedness as a tool of economic, and in turn, social 
control. Migrant labour may at a glance seem to imply a type of 
“freeness” due to its spatial dimension; however “neo-bondage” 
compels workers into an equally subaltern state as the historicized 
indentured worker since they are not in a position to bargain in favour 
of what they deem reasonable payment for their work.  

Neo-bondage specifically refers to the practice of a jobber 
“tying in prospective labourers through loans/ advances given during 
the lean season before the start of the seasonal employment relation.”5 
This effectively means that throughout the actual period of work, 
labourers are paid a minimal amount with the promise of the full 
amount to be doled out at the end of the campaign. Here, an obvious 
problem can be anticipated: that is in practice, labourers often do not 
receive accurate payment for their productive output, specifically 
through employers consciously manipulating the numbers to be paid to 
workers. Moreover this veiled practice leads to another problem - since 
only a minimum amount is paid during the period of seasonal 
employment, indebtedness may, and often does accrue without the 
labourers knowledge, forcing him or her to stay on even longer in order 
to simply pay off their debt.6

Walter Look Lai notes a central push factor for migratory 
indentureship from 1860 to 1879 was geographic as well as 
environmental, that is, “intense famine caused by crop failures or the 

 



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ravages of nature (drought or floods)”.7 These events seem, wrongly of 
course, relegated to the historical sphere, yet noting the continuing 
harshness of the Indian landscape becomes imperative to understand the 
phenomenon of migrant labour today. Look Lai in the historical record 
notes famines in regions such as Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, places 
which contemporarily are persisting sites for mass droughts, occurring 
as often as once every five years.8  

The ILO points out that since agriculture is largely dependent on 
“precipitation and distribution of rainfall” recurrence of drought 
“reduces the purchasing power of [a] large segment of the population;”9 
again leading to the need for migration. Related to the reality of famine 
here is of course impoverishment, and the pre-indenture period was 
unfortunately not the only time in which poverty in India was rampant. 
It has been calculated as recently as 2004 that 27.4% of India (more 
than a quarter of India’s population) is under the poverty line.10   

The central argument favouring categorizing indentured labour 
as a uniquely exploitative phenomenon is its legal implications. On the 
one hand, the institutionalization of ‘unfreedom’ in the form of a 
contractual obligation became socially normalized for labourers, in 
other words, coercion or exploitation did not seem at the time 
necessarily evident or apparent. Since the relationship was in its scope 
theoretically an agreement between two “equal” parties, an 
interpretation of “unfreedom” might have been felt, but not clearly 
discerned or understood by those involved. Nevertheless a 
contemporary interpretation of such a practice adamantly posits not 
only exploitation, but a relationship in many ways reminiscent in 
character to that of slavery. In order to expand this normative position it 
becomes necessary to situate terms such as freedom and unfreedom 
differently, outside of legal parameters exclusively. Neo-bondage, 
although not in any way related to the law, can be interpreted as a 
means of ensuring a cycle of subordination within a new framework, 
namely the market-system. This is not to say that during the indentured 
period the market did not exist, but it was coupled by many forms of 
pre-capitalist behaviour; the use of corporal punishment to discipline 
the workforce is but one example. 



Kevin De Silva – CONTINUITIES IN CAPITALISM: EXPLOITATION OF INDENTURED &  
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 By stringently regulating the pay cycle of employees, as well as 
manipulating the sum total of money owed to the worker and coercing 
them into longer work cycles, neo-bondage in the form of indebtedness 
can be seen as promoting a type of “unfreedom” even when such a 
relationship is neither legally impelled nor implied. In other words, the 
market as well as the underground economy (which is merely a 
reflection of the former’s existence) is its own enforcing mechanism 
demanding strict labour control and subordination. Weber’s analysis of 
capitalism as an “iron cage” is part of this reading surely, but in a more 
concrete sense labour movement itself is determined not so much by the 
law as it is by the demands of capitalist production, demands which in a 
very real sense enforce subservient social roles to those apart of its 
lowest rung. 

 
Persisting Social Maladies: Comparing the Historical Caribbean to 

the Modern UAE 
 

Plantation society can be described not only capitalist but also as 
a “total institution”.11 This categorization takes the plantation as a space 
of seemingly effective hegemony in the form of hierarchical and 
authoritarian structures that over-arch and over-lap, subordinating 
docile bodies to its rule. In the case of the indentureship period, it in 
many ways was a continuation of the period of slavery in a new 
disguise, with the same economic imperatives at the base of the system. 
Haraksingh for example states “the assumptions and premises of 
slavery continued to inform management attitudes.”12

Take a large factory in 

 Look Lai 
recounts the description of a British writer, Edward Jenkins:  

 
Manchester, or Birmingham, or Belfast, build a 

wall around it, shut in it's people from all intercourse, save at rare intervals, with 
the outside world, keep them in absolute heathen ignorance, and get all the work 
you can out of them, treat them not unkindly, leave their social habits and 
relations to themselves, as matters not concerning you who make money from 
their labor, and you would have constituted a little community resembling to no 
small degree, a sugar estate village in British Guiana13 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana


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60 
 

The freedom of movement, something which may be over-
looked and understated, was for the indentured worker severely limited 
as s/he was expected to stay on the estate at all times. The consequences 
of disobeying this rule were “floggings and beatings” as well as 
“arbitrary fines and court sanctioned imprisonment.”14 The limiting of 
space and saturation of the labourer with ceaseless work, hardship, and 
suffering must have created a culture somewhat adapted to severity. 
Nevertheless, the restriction of space also entailed the institutionalizing 
of a perpetual psychological torture for individuals who certainly must 
have had a yearning for their freedom. 

According to Haraksingh, the driver also played a central role in 
the domination of the indentured worker, but not exclusively by 
physical means. The driver was able to command production because of 
his close ties to the “manager’s ear” forcing Indians to act compliantly, 
and also because of his ability to dole out tasks with varying degrees of 
difficulty, in turn “enhancing their earnings.”15 Look Lai notes that 
subjugation was further enhanced by the low wages Indian workers 
received (“in 1871…about 40% of male indentureds did not earn as 
much as $1.20 a week”).16 This fact though seemingly detached from 
political/social control, was, in my view intimately tied to it. That is, 
maintaining low wages forced Indians to continue their servitude and 
labour for subsistence, with death following by both starvation and 
poverty if they did not accede to the dominating planter class.  

Beating so-called “difficult” labourers, disallowing or 
preventing access to legal means of compensation, dwellings which 
were cramped and putrid, a lack of proper nutrition and sustenance as 
well as the continuation of poverty generally were all inherent features 
of indentured life in the 19th

The UAE, now one of the most developed countries in the world 
according to the HDI (Human Development Index), has risen as a world 
leader in finance as well as “development” for three primary reasons: 
oil, construction, and migrant labour. The government, pragmatically 
realizing that oil, because of its finitude needs to be instrumentally used 
as a means to an end in order to avoid a potential boom-bust cycle, has 

 century. With such a brutal historic record 
taken into account, it becomes instructive to contrast these realities with 
the contemporary case of migrant work in the United Arab Emirates.  



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invested instead in longer-term mass construction projects. Already 
many of these spectacular sites have garnered attention on the world 
stage: its man-made islands The Palm Jumeirah, its indoor ski resorts, 
the Burj Dubai, now the tallest man-made structure in the world, as well 
as a whole host of other hotels, skyscrapers and tourist attractions such 
as its own, unique version of Disneyworld and even Louvre museum.  
 Yet, as is often the case with postcard imagery, the shining, 
glittering exterior of any metropolis or nation-state superpower hides 
it’s structurally related, opposite actuality, its grimy, sordid underbelly. 
During the indentured period, it was reported that when the reality of 
the confined journey was realized by those boarding the ship, many 
desperately committed suicide by jumping into the Hughli River.17 
Such circumstances are unfortunately not relegated to history’s dust-
bin. The BBC in 2005 reported the case of Arumugam Venkatesan, a 
migrant worker who hung “himself from the ceiling fan in his room in 
his labour camp” due to inhuman living conditions.18 One can imagine 
many more cases that are unreported, a testament to labour camps with 
“85 men in a nine-roomed house…bedrooms sleep[ing] eight, 
sometimes 12 people…bathrooms…squeezed into cupboards and 
shared by 25 men.19 The horror however is intensified in that these 
labour camps are often nowhere near the locations in which actual work 
takes place, but are instead situated in the desert sand, where the “wind 
fills the air with sand and dust that choke the lungs and sting the 
eyes.”20

A strong parallel between the historical plantation and the 
contemporary case of the UAE is the stifling of resistance and the 
disallowance of labour unions. According to Human Rights Watch 
migrant workers “comprise nearly 90 percent of the workforce in the 
private sector…and are denied basic rights such as freedom of 
association and the right to collective bargaining.”

 

21 This inconceivable 
dismissal reveals the true concern of the Emeriti government: to create a 
society mirroring a combination of Las Vegas and Singapore, a site of 
concentrated capital physically embodied in a completely bourgeois 
class. Here the goal is the capitalist utopia, the dominating and 
hegemonic ideological and economic concern of the neoliberal era. 
Human Rights Watch highlights elsewhere “unlawful recruiting fees, 



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broken promises of wages, and a sponsorship system that gives an 
employer virtually complete power over his workers.”22 Again, 
although no formal legal provisions are utilized to ensure subservience, 
these “extra-legal” means do entail severe exploitation. Nor is there a 
need for an enforcement mechanism of subjugation when one must 
cope already with “sweltering humidity…well above 32 degrees 
Centigrade [perpetuating]…heat related illnesses”, and employers 
“failing to pay for electricity, garbage and sewage collection in labour 
camps” as well as threatening deportation for striking.23 Though courts 
have formally called for the implementation of certain labour standards 
to be followed by employers, their refusals to acquiesce with such 
declarations are themselves commonplace practices in the United Arab 
Emirates. 
 

In his book, In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj 

Conclusions 

Žižek argues 
that the present neoliberal period is giving rise to a “growing 
apartheid,” a widening separation between labour and its connection 
to a nation-state which would ensure at least an elementary level of 
legal protection against outside abuse. Slavery as well as 
indenturship are in my view early forerunners of such a thesis. The 
modern phenomenon of the export-process zone, or “fenced-in 
factories” outside any clear political jurisdiction are signifiers of 
transportable, interchangeable, and heavily guarded islands of free-
floating capital. They impose, symbolically and literally, a type of 
purgatory onto a labouring citizenry that possess political rights only in 
an illusory sense, since they are, after all, owned and controlled by 
foreign agents, and not meaningfully connected to and protected by the 
polity they were born into. Žižek notes: “Since, sometime very soon, 
the urban population of the earth will outnumber the majority of the 
rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority 
of the urban population, we are no way dealing with a marginal 
phenomenon.”24 Some questions emerge: Is such a pattern sustainable?  
What will happen to migrant labourers in countries such as the United 
Arab Emirates after the “boom of building” subsides? Can we not view 



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slavery/indentureship and migrant labour as related institutionally, as 
“historical bookends” within the same overall capitalist schema? In 
order to even attempt to answer these questions fully one must, to re-
state, destroy temporality. One should not read history as detached or 
distant, meaningless and dead. One should instead trace its continuities, 
its changes and the cloaks its “movers” have adapted in charting a 
specific course. If indentured labour can be read as a cloaked “slavery,” 
then, as this paper has argued, migrant labour certainly can be read as a 
continuation of indentureship. 

 
 
 

NOTES 
                                                             
1 Mangru, Basdeo. "Indian Government policy towards indentured labour 
migration to the sugar colonies." Benevolent Neutrality: Indian government policy 
and labour migration to British Guiana, 1854-1884. London: Hansib Pub Ltd, 
1987. 162. 

2 Guillaume Daudin, Matthias Morys and Kevin H. O’Rourke. 
"GLOBALIZATION, 1870-1914." University of Oxford Department of 
Economics Discussion Paper Series (2008): pp. 2. 

3 Bisnauth, Dale. "Chapter Three: Crossing the Kala Pani." Settlement of Indians 
in Guyana, 1890-1930 . Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2001. pp. 38. 

4 Ibid. pp. 39.  

5 Lerche, Jens. "A Global Alliance against Forced Labour? Unfree Labour, Neo-
Liberal Globalization and the International Labour Organization." Journal of 
Agrarian Change, Vol. 7 No. 4 (October 2007): pp. 439. 

6 Ibid.  
 
7 Look-Lai, Walter. "Chapter 2: Push Factors and Migration Trends in India and 
China." Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the 
British West Indies, 1838-1918. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. pp. 
25-26. 



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64 
 

                                                                                                                                                  
8 Salve, Dr. W.N. Labour Rights and Labour Standards for Migrant Labour in 
India. 
<http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/condtrav/pdf/rdwpaper22a.pdf>. pp. 
7. 
9 Ibid. 
10 Patnaik, Utsa. "POVERTY AND NEO-LIBERALISM IN INDIA." Centre for 
Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2006): pp. 17. 

11 Beckford, George. "Plantation society: Toward a general theory of Caribbean 
society." Savacou (1976): pp. 8. 

12 Haraksingh, Kusha. "Control and Resistance among Indian Workers." 
Dabydeen, David. India in the Caribbean. Hansib/University of W Blication, 
1987. pp. 67. 
13 Look-Lai, Walter. "Chapter 5: Life and Labour on the Plantations: The 
Indians." Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the 
British West Indies, 1838-1918. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. pp. 
121. 

14 Ibid. 

15 Haraksingh, Kusha. "Control and Resistance among Indian Workers." 
Dabydeen, David. India in the Caribbean. Hansib/University of W Blication, 
1987. pp. 69. 

16 Look-Lai, Walter. "Chapter 5: Life and Labour on the Plantations: The 
Indians." Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the 
British West Indies, 1838-1918. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. pp. 
132. 

17 INDO CARIBBEAN: News Views and Information. INDIAN ARRIVAL IN 
THE CARIBBEAN. May 2003. <http://www.hansib-books.com/root/icn3.pdf> 
18 BBC NEWS | SOUTH ASIA. Migrants' woes in Dubai worker camps . 10 
February 2005. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4249223.stm>. 

19 Ibid. 



Kevin De Silva – CONTINUITIES IN CAPITALISM: EXPLOITATION OF INDENTURED &  
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20 World Socialist Website. The plight of the UAE’s migrant workers: the flipside 
of a booming economy. 9 November 2007. 
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/duba-n09.shtml>. 
21 Human Rights Watch. "UAE: Address Abuse of Migrant Workers." 28 March 
2006.  
<http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/03/28/uae-address-abuse-migrant-workers>. 
 
22 —.  UAE: Exploited Workers Building ‘Island of Happiness’. 2009 May 2009. 
<http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/05/18/uae-exploited-workers-building-island-
happiness>. 
 
23 World Socialist Website. The plight of the UAE’s migrant workers: the flipside 
of a booming economy. 9 November 2007. 
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/duba-n09.shtml>. 
 
24 Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. New York, London: Verso , 2008. pp. 
424. 

 


