Voices From Calcutta - Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition

Between 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured labourers migrated from India to sugar plantation colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Voices from Calcutta shows how spokesmen from Calcutta - the capital of British India - disrupted this trade and influenced the lives of these migrants. It follows Calcuttans in their journey of debating, investigating and defending indenture, unfolding a complex web of letters, petitions, interviews and investigative-reports. As the indenture debates influenced lived experience on ships and plantations, and shaped the negotiation of subjecthood and labour rights for the empire's peripatetic labourers, they became a means by which elite Calcuttans negotiated their own position within the empire. This book locates in Calcutta voices of protest that fundamentally defined the contours of post-slavery labouring across the British Empire. Instead of simply emanating from Britain, to be dutifully followed in the colonies, labour legislation was informed by voices from those very colonies.

List of contents

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Glossary; Introduction; 1. Calcutta and Indenture; 2. Debating Indenture; 3. Investigating Indenture; 4. In Defence of Indenture; 5. Race in the Making of Indentured Labourers; 6. Subjects, Citizens, Spokesmen; Conclusion: City, Spaces, Encounters; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

Purba Hossain is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. She is the author of Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. She is a historian of colonial India with an interest in how Indians negotiated life under colonial rule and contributed to imperial processes.

Product details

• Authors: Purba Hossain, Purba (University of York) Hossain
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2025
• EAN: 9781009573009
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0957300-9
• No. of pages: 266
• Series: Global South Asians
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social & cultural history, India, Social groups, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Kolkata, Colonialism & imperialism, Migration, immigration & emigration, Social and cultural history, Migration, immigration and emigration, Colonialism and imperialism, HISTORY / Asia / South / General, Social groups, communities and identities