Indian Indenture in the Danish West Indies, 1863-1873This 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
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 |
105 | |
109 | |