Issues within existing scholarship
In this work, slavery and indentured labour are framed along their most basic common denominator in the Mauritian context, namely as sugar-plantation labour systems. In scholarly contributions on indentured labour, references to slavery are abundant.
As a consequence, a level of comparison between the two systems is inevitable. A large part of scholarship falls into one of two “camps”: one maintaining that indentured labour was “better” than slavery, the other that it was merely a “new type” of the same. Scholars who favour the former view tend focus on one particular dimension of those relationships to support their arguÂment that indenture is not to be equalized with the slavery, such as for instance, the question of legal status. The discussion can then be brought to a swift close - for, of course, slaves were nominally chattel while indentured labourers were not. On the other hand, scholars who persist in arguing that indentured labour was a continuation of slavery will go to great lengths to establish the similarities found within the two systems, with instances of duress and deception in recruitment as well as similar living and working conditions commonly cited as examples.To the extent that both these arguments appear equally plausible - that indenÂtured labour was “better” because it did not involve the “ownership” of labour, and that it was “no better” because the conditions of exploitation were largely the same - is to frame the enquiry as a purely ethical or utilitarian one (good/bad, better/worse), which is not particularly enlightening and arguably draws attenÂtion away from the dynamics and contradictions that attended to each system of labour. By looking at these relations as essentially complex legal relationships, this work seeks to examine the distributive consequences of in both systems of labour, uncovering the logics and the mechanics that drove them.
This is not to say that an ethical or evaluative analysis is entirely irrelevant. It tends however to block out more fine-grained analysis if taken as the starting point of the enquiry.While the suggested approach is considered a more useful one, it requires awareness of the drawbacks an emphasis on law may potentially entail. Legality is frequently, at least in common parlance, conflated with legitimacy - a conflation sustained, in large part, in the language of law itself, when it draws upon notions of right or justice. Law and legitimacy, of course, are not covalent concepts, and it is quite feasible to understand that the enslavement of, and trade in, human beings was once upon a time sanctioned by law, whilst holding out the view that such acts were nevertheless reprehensible. Hindsight enables this, as does the idea that our contemporary “moral compass” is more mature, liberal or cosmopolitan than that of our forebears. A certain moral complexity thus attends to any evaluÂative examination of the practice of slavery, but it is one which can be scarcely avoided if only to prevent lapsing into the kind of apologetic or justificatory discourse that might be entailed were the practice to be examined in the light of the moral discourse of its own time. Contextualism, in other words, has its obviÂous limits.
What of the perpetual discussion around the concepts of free and “unfree” labour? Are they of any continued relevance? While the setting of this study is an Indian Ocean island in the 19th century, certain dynamics are being reproduced in the 21st century in places with high migration flows, and most notably so in the Gulf states, as examined in a separate publication.[41] Certainly, contemporary discussions on the working conditions of migrants often are redolent of referÂences to slavery and forced labour, an occurrence which Cathryn Costello states cannot be outright dismissed as simply “political rhetoric”.[42] Rather, she suggests the phenomenon of “vulnerability to forced labour” are persistent characteristics of immigration and labour market regimes.[43]
Emphatically rejecting a simple dichotomy of free and “unfree” labour, CosÂtello asserts that the latter is a political, not a legal concept.
Accordingly, she stipulates that the frequently perceived link between slavery and forced labour as “sub-sets”[44] of unfree labour may be inappropriate, given that the notions of “â€?forced labour,' â€?servitude' and â€?slavery' belong in the legal realm.”[45] In the context of labour migration, Costello sees the process as creating two types of vulnerability in particular. As a costly undertaking, involving significant expendiÂture, migrants may be required to make a considerable investment to support their emigration. Additionally, in the process there are in-built “information asymmetries”, which may be exploited to create dependency as well as a level of uncertainty. According to Costello, “indebtedness, and misinformation about likely life-conditions and earnings can together lead to conditions of vulnerabilÂity to forced labour, in that exit options may be foreclosed.”[46] As will be seen, these two aspects regarding debt and limited knowledge of local conditions were indeed highly relevant to the conditions in which indentured labourers found themselves in Mauritius in the 19th century. What makes a particular system of labour “unfree” is examined in Part II (“Indentured Labour”) of this work, and while it cannot aspire to be a conclusive statement on the matter, it hopes to broaden the frequently theoretical discourse through analysis of concrete legal mechanisms and their effects.1.2.4