Indentured workers

Why did indentured workers come to the

Caribbean (why did indentureship come
about)?
Indentured laborers were bonded laborers under contract to work for
an employer for a specific amount of time, to pay off their passage to a
new country or home. Indentured laborers were brought into the
Caribbean to provide a workforce that would replace the African slaves.
These laborers were Chinese, Africans again, Whites, Portuguese,
Syrians, Lebanese, and East Indians, in chronological order. The Chinese
were the first indentured laborers to come to the Caribbean. They first
came in 1806 because the abolition of the slave trade was nearing
(abolition of the slave trade occurred in 1807) and the planters were
afraid to lose their workforce. Sugar was also on a decline and so, the
Chinese were brought to grow tea as an alternative. The East Indians
were the largest ethnic minority to migrate to Jamaica. They arrived
between 1845 and 1917 in hopes to earn a "fortune" in Jamaica to
return and start a better life back in India.
How is indentureship different from
slavery?
Indentured servitude differed from slavery in that it was a form of debt
bondage, meaning it was an agreed-upon term of unpaid labor that
usually paid off the costs of the servant’s immigration to America.
Indentured servants were not paid wages but they were generally
housed, clothed, and fed.

The rights to the individual’s labor could be bought and sold, but the
servants themselves were not considered property and were free upon
the end of their indenture (usually a period of five to seven years).
Nevertheless, indentured servants, along with normal servants, were
often subject to physical abuse. They had to have their master’s
permission to marry and found that the courts enforced their
agreements if they tried to avoid all or part of their indenture.
Their way of life
The indentured laborers were under contract for 5 to 10 years. They
were promised repatriation but as this was costly, they were permitted
to own land after their term was over, as a persuasive method. They
were entitled to a basic wage, accommodation, and health care, which
were to be provided by the estate owner. Laborers worked on sugar or
cocoa estates for 45 hours per week and 54 hours during the crop
season. Each day, they got 30 minutes for a break and were assigned to
a particular estate. Their wages were supposed to be 30-40¢ per day
but they were really paid 25¢ with deductions for food and sometimes
they weren’t paid.
Employers were required to provide their indentured laborers with
suitable dwellings, in satisfactory condition. The Immigration Ordinance
of 1870 gave the Governor power to make regulations concerning the
immigrants’ barracks to ensure satisfactory sanitation and cleanliness.
Houses were to be properly drained, floored with wood, and white-
washed inside and out. The best barracks had two rooms (for one
family or three single men). One was a living room, part of an enclosed
veranda for cooking, with an earthen fireplace (cholla). The floors were
boarded, the roofs covered with galvanized sheeting from which
rainwater was collected. Other barracks were dilapidated and leaking.
There were usually no latrines.
The individual estate owner was responsible for maintaining the
regulations but often lapsed. Events in 1910 revealed that the
Government had failed to enforce its regulations. The barrack system of
housing on the estates contributed not only to unsanitary conditions
but to social abuses.
Their political system (oppression).
The Caribbean system of indenture relied on the recruitment, often
under pretenses, of dispossessed and marginalized people (mostly
young adult men) from Europe and Asia, and contractually binding
them to a fixed term of work for a single employer in the British, Dutch,
Danish, Spanish and French colonies in exchange for transportation to
(and sometimes from) the colonies, subsistence wages and in some
instances, land. Indenture contracts varied between one and fourteen
years, with possibilities or requirements for re-indenture after the
initial contract. The indentured were shipped to the Caribbean and
confined to a plantation or estate where they lived and worked under
conditions comparable to those for Africans under slavery. They had no
choice in employer, could not change employers or buy themselves out
of, or negotiate their contract, nor could they move freely without the
consent of their employers. Planters in collusion with colonial
governments often managed to maintain them in states of indenture or
dependency through creating economic conditions that demanded or
required re-indenture after the initial contract. The indentured were, in
Guyanese Indian vernacular, ‘bung coolies’—bound to the employer
and the plantation—in a pattern of ‘interlocking incarceration’.7

While most attention goes to the system that followed the abolition of
slavery by the British in 1834, indentureship also occurred both before
and during the period of slavery. Impoverished, destitute, or
imprisoned white European men and women, as well as children, made
up some of the first cohorts of laborers from the late 1620s to early
1700s, the majority of whom were indentured to tobacco and cotton
farms in the Caribbean. Numbers are hard to come by, but estimates
are that before 1660 around 190,000 whites arrived in the English
colonies in the Caribbean, such as Barbados, St. Kitts, and Nevis,
Montserrat, Antigua, and Jamaica, for example, received a large
number of Irish indentures and some Scots, English and Welsh who,
before the late 1640s, are said to have mostly left for the Caribbean
‘willingly’, in search of a better life.
(State the rebellions that influenced the
rebellions in Jamaica).
The Baptist War
The Baptist War, also known as the Sam Sharpe Rebellion, the
Christmas Rebellion, the Christmas Uprising, and the Great Jamaican
Slave Revolt of 1831–32, was an eleven-day rebellion that started on 25
December 1831 and involved up to 60,000 of the 300,000 slaves in the
Colony of Jamaica. The uprising was led by a black Baptist deacon,
Samuel Sharpe, and waged largely by his followers.
Led by 'native' Baptist preacher, Samuel Sharpe, enslaved black workers
demanded more freedom and a working wage of "half the going wage
rate"; they took an oath to stay away from work until their demands
were met by the plantation owners. The enslaved laborers believed
that the work stoppage could achieve their ends alone – a resort to
force was only envisaged if violence was used against them
The rebellion exploded on December 27, when slaves set fire to
Kensington estate, in the hills above Montego Bay. Colonel William
Grignon of the militia was an attorney who ran several estates,
including one at Salt Spring, where a series of incidents in December
were the sparks for the uprising.
The rebellion was however quickly suppressed by British forces. The
reaction of the Jamaican government and reprisals of the plantocracy
was far more brutal. Approximately 500 slaves were killed, with 207
killed outright during the revolt. The Baptist War was one of the largest
slave rebellions in the British West Indies and contributed to Britain’s
decision to start attempting the abolition of slavery in 1833.
Morant Bay Rebellion
During the election of 1864, fewer than 2,000 black Jamaican men were
eligible to vote (no women could vote at the time) out of a total
population of more than 436,000, in which blacks outnumbered whites
by a ratio of 32:1. Before the rebellion, conditions in Jamaica had been
worsening for poor blacks. In 1864 several floods ruined many crops,
whilst 1865 marked the end of a decade in which the island had been
overwhelmed by plagues of cholera and smallpox. A two-year drought
preceding 1865 made economic conditions worse for much of the
population of former slaves and their descendants. Several
bankruptcies were declared in the sugar industry, causing a loss of jobs
and widening the economic void.
This caused Jamaicans, who were led by Paul Bogle, to start a protest
march towards the courthouse in Morant Bay. Most freedmen were
prevented from voting by high poll taxes, and their living conditions had
worsened following crop damage by floods, cholera and smallpox
epidemics, and a long drought. A few days before the march, when
police tried to arrest a man for disrupting a trial, a fight broke out
against them by spectators. Officials then issued a warrant for the
arrest of preacher Bogle, who had called for reforms, and was charged
with inciting to riot.
Governor Edward John Eyre declared martial law in the area, ordering
troops to hunt down the rebels. They killed many innocent black
individuals, including women and children, with an initial death toll of
more than 400. Troops arrested more than 300 persons, including
Bogle. Many of these were also innocent but were quickly tried and
executed under martial law; both men and women were punished by
whipping and long sentences. This was the most severe suppression of
unrest in the history of the British West Indies. The governor had
George William Gordon, a mixed-race representative of the parish in
the House of Assembly, arrested in Kingston and brought back to
Morant Bay, where he tried the politician under martial law. Gordon
was quickly convicted and executed.
The nature of the suppression led to demands in England for an official
inquiry, and a royal commission subsequently took evidence in Jamaica
on the disturbances. Its conclusions were critical of the governor,
Edward John Eyre, and of the severe repression in the wake of the
rebellion. As a result, the governor was dismissed, the political
constitution of the colony was transformed, and its two-hundred-year-
old assembly was abolished.