Regional Entrepôts

The recruitment of time-expired labourers in Mauritius to travel directly to Natal, as seen in Chapter four, highlights a facet of Indian indenture that has not yet been dealt with in any detail, despite it becoming a constant feature of the system. Certain colonies to which indentured emigration from India was sanctioned appear to have become regional entrepôts. They emerged as potential sites for recruiting labourers for other colonies in the region where emigration from India was either not sanctioned or where additional labour was required on top of that which was arriving from India. This was a way to get around regulations put in place by imperial lawmakers to prevent abuse within the system. Three locales emerged as distinct regional entrepôts. Mauritius for the southwest Indian Ocean, Fiji for the South Pacific and the British, and French West Indies (treated here as one entrepôt) for the Caribbean. They effectively acted as nodal points within the indenture system, much like ports in a trading network. Figure 5.1 highlights the many destinations to which Indian labourers were recruited from the hypothesised regional entrepôts of Mauritius and Fiji. Proposals emerged that would take advantage of these locations that already had a population of indentured immigrant labourers and, crucially, a population of time-expired labourers willing to travel to nearby colonies to re-indenture. Due to this proximity, transporting labourers would be considerably cheaper than importing new labourers from distant India. Labourers from existing colonies would also have the supposed advantage of being experienced in plantation work (though as selected testimonies from the Sanderson Commission show, this was not always desirable).

Critically, the suggestion of recruiting directly from these regional entrepôts was often to circumnavigate the stringent regulations that had been put in place to safeguard indentured labourers from India by the British and Indian governments. The 1883 India Emigration Act had been enforced to prohibit labourers from India being recruited to work in ‘foreign’ (non-British) colonies, with the exception of Surinam. This was due to the lack of welfare infrastructure such as a protector of immigrants and other indenture-related administration, in light of the abuses which emerged in French colonies, to where Indian indenture was banned as a result.