Lawfare and Indentured labour

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 “the law” to mystify its purpose. And it is for this reason, in reviewing during the last month the history of indentureship and its abolition 100 years ago, I summarised my thoughts under the caption, “Lawfare and Indentureship”, from which the following is extracted.roar
“Indentured Indian labour” was but one of various guises under which individuals across the globe were conscripted to provide labour in the development of the “capitalist” mode of production that developed as Europe began to exploit the worlds it had “discovered” – and more germanely, conquered – after 1492. The Spanish made a turn from enslaving Amerindians in the New World to the Africans which was 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 fashion from “unfree” to “free labour” in reality the process was quite discontinuous with frequent regressions. The British adapted their Master and Servant laws to initially introduce indentured workers in the farms they established in America (Virginia) and Barbados. The workers were made available by the Enclosure Acts and GameLaws of England etcm 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 seventeenth 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”. Africa was declared terra nullius as late as the 19th century when it was divided between the European nations. Before that they simply established forts from which they bought slaves from local chiefs and kings.
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, that resulted in millions dying in famine and pushed off the land to become the excess labour that could be exported to other parts of the empire as needed. Under the new racism, Indians were also lower intrinsically to whites. Indentured Indian labour was first used within India in the tea plantations of Assam and then to the newly acquired French islands of Reunion and Mauritius.
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 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 to 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 for all the locals.
So I thought it rather ironic I was accused of raising ethnic tensions when I made my presentation at “Garv aur Izzat”, drawn from the above scribblings. We – all Guyanese groups  – were all caught in  the network of exploitation after brought to the New World by the incipient capitalists.