Global Capitalism and Cheap Labor: The Case of Indenture

Abstract

The system of indentureship, utilizing mainly Chinese and Indian labor in the post-slavery period, was a continuation of the capitalist desire of sourcing cheap labor under the aegis of the plantation system. That system, originating in Brazil from the sixteenth century, provided a model which was effectively used by the other Western European countries to create a plantation society. This was a rigidly stratified polity using race as a major determinant of one’s place in the pyramid. The model was transferred from Portuguese Brazil under the auspices of Dutch entrepreneurs, to the Caribbean colonies transforming them from poverty into prosperity. Its success in the Caribbean led to its transference to the Indian Ocean by the same European powers which had established parallel patterns of trading in the East, complementing their Western, Atlantic enterprises. In this continuance of labor exploitation, China and India were major sources of “coolie” labor under less brutal conditions than in slavery. For both peoples, however, this bondage was not the end of their world. Most of them survived using new opportunities provided by new situations, discarding some of the old traditions selectively. Both Chinese and Indians came from ancient societies guided by beliefs and traditions sanctified by time. As they adapted to their adopted societies, they used their ancestral moorings as enablers in new homelands in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Through the complex interaction of sugar, slavery-bonded labor, and European capitalism, the international economy was transformed leading to the industrialized world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.