In 1829, George Saintsbury published a pamphlet entitled East India Slavery, in which he provided a shocking expose of ‘unfree labour’ in British India, declaring, ‘throughout India slavery prevails; India is therefore a slave territory, as Jamaica is a slave colony’. His ‘humanitarian’ efforts to awaken public sympathy for the sufferings of poor East Indian slaves met with a hostile response in the pages of the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, however, for Saintsbury was not a campaigning philanthropist, missionary or abolitionist, but an active member of the West Indian Association. His expose of Indian labour conditions was not designed to further the cause of universal ‘anti-slavery’ but rather to undermine emerging attempts on the part of abolitionists and East India commercial interests to position India as a ‘free-labour’ alternative to the West Indian slave system. To this end he used recently published East India Company records to demonstrate the existence of slavery in India and highlight the fortunate position of the ‘pampered Negro slave’ compared with that of the average poverty-stricken East Indian peasant. Given Saintsbury's obvious agenda, it is perhaps not surprising that the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter did not immediately rally to the cause of East Indian slaves, but rather attacked Saintsbury for ‘wilful and deliberate misrepresentation’ of the facts. On this occasion, as on others when the idea of ‘unfree’ labour in India intersected with abolitionist discourses, their treatment of the issue was ambivalent. Unable to deny the existence of slavery in India altogether, yet unwilling to incorporate it into their campaign, they primarily sought to marginalise and excuse those forms of bondage found in India as mild, primarily domestic and, most importantly, in no way connected to the production of the ‘free-grown’ East India sugar that they championed as part of their campaign.

The previous chapter discussed how metaphors of slavery, bondage and oppression functioned within popular evangelical depictions of Indian society and religion, and helped both to normalise colonial control and to justify Christian proselytisation. This chapter goes on to look at how ideas about ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour in the subcontinent intersected with and informed metropolitan debates about how to exploit India's potential for colonial commodity production.