Indian Indenture in the Danish West Indies, 1863-1873

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Springer, Aug 24, 2016 - History - 111 pages

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Denmark’s solitary experiment with Indian indentured labor on St. Croix during the second half of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on the recruitment, transportation, plantation labor, re-indenture, repatriation, remittances and abolition of Indian indentured experience on the island. In doing so, Roopnarine has produced a compelling narrative on Indian indenture. The laborers challenged and responded accordingly to their daily indentured existence using their cultural strengths to cohere and co-exist in a planter-dominated environment. Laborers had to create opportunities for themselves using their homeland customs without losing the focus that someday they would return home. Indentured Indians understood that the plantation system would not be flexible to them but rather they had to be flexible to plantation system. Roopnarine’s concise analysis has moved Indian indenture from the margin to mainstream not only in the historiography of the Danish West Indies, but also in the wider Caribbean where Indians were indentured.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
PostEmancipation St Croix 18491878
15
Recruitment and Distribution of Indentured Indians
24
Typology of Indentured Indians and Their Plantation Experience
35
ReIndenture Repatriation and Remittances
47
Indian Indenture in British Guiana 18381843 and Danish St Croix 18631868
58
Views and Voices of Indenture
71
Conclusion
79
Appendix 1
85
Appendix 2
97
References
105
Index
109
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About the author (2016)

Lomarsh Roopnarine is Professor of Caribbean and Latin American History at Jackson State University, USA. He received his PhD in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University at Albany, USA and taught at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix. He has published over three dozen articles in Caribbean history, society and environmental policy. He is currently writing a manuscript on Caribbean Indian Migration and Identity.

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