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Indo-Caribbean migration refers to the process whereby people have migrated from the subcontinent of India to the islands of the Caribbean since the middle of the nineteenth century, forming a large diaspora there in the process. The roots of this migration lie in the system of Indian indentured servitude developed by the British in India from the late 1830s onwards to compensate for the loss of slave labor following the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. These indentured servants were workers who were taken from India and sent to places like Fiji, southern Africa and the Caribbean to work on sugar cane plantations there, often with limited rights and working under conditions akin to chattel slavery. Approximately half a million Indian indentured servants were transported to the Caribbean in this way between the inception of the system in 1838 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Natural growth and continued voluntary migration since have created an Indo-Caribbean diaspora of approximately one and a half million people.[1]
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Indo-Caribbean migration chronology of events
Two major developments in London and in India coalesced from the late 1750s onwards to create the conditions for Indian migration to the Caribbean nearly a century later. Firstly, the Abolitionist movement started to gain traction in Britain as groups like the Quakers became extremely opposed to the mass chattel slavery and trans-Atlantic slave trade that the British were heavily involved in. This would eventually result in the Slave Trade Act of 1807 leading to a virtual ban on future slave trading in the Atlantic as the British Royal Navy was powerful enough to impose such a prohibition by the nineteenth century. Eventually the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 brought the slave trade in the lands of the British Empire to an end. This had major consequences in the British West Indies in particular, where the plantation owners were hugely reliant on slave labor for their extremely valuable sugar-cane production.[2]
Secondly, in India the English East India Company had entered into a period of rapid expansion in the Bengal region in the late 1750s in the midst of the Seven Years' War. By the 1780s and 1790s the company was expanding all over the subcontinent and by the early nineteenth century was the de-facto power across India. The Great Mutiny of 1857 would see the British government impose direct control over what became the British Raj. Long before then an arrangement was in place whereby Indian indentured servants were being transported to the Caribbean. This immediately aroused complaint that it was ‘a new system of slavery’.[3]
Transports from India to the Caribbean began in 1838 as the plantation owners here sought alternative forms of cheap labor to replace their emancipated former slaves. Indentured servitude is a labor arrangement whereby workers are recruited to work for a master for a term of several years, often under very restrictive conditions akin to slavery. Indentured servitude was actually what existed in many parts of the English Thirteen Colonies and Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth century before the full development of chattel slavery. Often what it involved was workers being in bonded labor contracts for terms of years after which they were given their freedom and perhaps a small plot of their own land. As such, the use of indentured Indian servants in the Caribbean was a retrograde development in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Similar practices were seen in places like southern Africa, Fiji and other parts of the British Empire. It would continue until the system of indentured servitude was banned throughout the British Empire in 1917.[4]
Because a very large proportion of the Indian indentured servants who were transported to the Caribbean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were males whose labor was most needed on the sugar-cane plantations, there was a gender imbalance between men and women within this community. This resulted in many of these Indian servants intermarrying or otherwise starting families with native women, often of Carib or Taino heritage. Thus was born a mixed Indo-Caribbean ethnic group.[5]
Extent of Indo-Caribbean migration
It is understood that approximately half a million Indian indentured servants arrived to the Caribbean from India in the three-quarters of a century between the first arrivals in 1838 and the end of the system in 1917.[6] There were some areas of particularly intense settlement. One such was the island archipelago which constitutes the country of Trinidad and Tobago today. Between 1845 and 1917 some 147,000 Indians settled here in a region which was comparatively under-populated when the British acquired it from Spain as part of the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 in the midst of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Other centers of settlement included other parts of the British West Indies such as Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana and smaller islands like Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. From 1860 an arrangement was developed between the British and Dutch and French governments whereby Indian indentured servants would be brought to their colonies in the Caribbean and the Guianas, meaning that Martinique, Guadeloupe, Sint Maarten and Dutch Guiana also became centers of Indo-Caribbean migration.[7]
Demographic impact of Indo-Caribbean migration
The Indo-Caribbean diaspora today is concentrated in particular regions. Nearly half a million, or one-in-three Indo-Caribbean people, live in Trinidad and Tobago, where they make up roughly 40% of the overall population.[8] In Guyana on the northern coast of South America, Indo-Caribbean people make up nearly 300,000 out of a total population on much more than 800,000. Similarly, they make up nearly a quarter of the total population of Suriname, the former Dutch colony adjacent to Guyana. Ancillary migration in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has led to the development of large Indo-Caribbean populations in the United States (230,000), the Netherlands (200,000), Canada (100,000) and the United Kingdom (25,000).[9]
Finally, there are around 150,000 Indo-Caribbean people dispersed around the rest of the Caribbean, with the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe being particular places of habitation with roughly 35,000 people in each, as well as Jamaica (20,000), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (6,000), Barbados (4,000) and Grenada (3,900). Thus, many people in the Caribbean, the Guianas, the US and Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom will be able to trace their ancestry and family history today to Indo-Caribbean migration which took place from the late 1830s onwards as part of the system of indentured servitude.[10]
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References
- ↑ Lomarsh Roopnarine, The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora (Jackson, Mississippi, 2018).
- ↑ https://beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/explore-by-time-period/georgians/1833-abolition-of-slavery-act-and-compensation-claims/
- ↑ https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a-new-system-of-slavery-the-british-west-indies-and-the-origins-of-indian-indenture/
- ↑ Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998).
- ↑ Lomarsh Roopnarine, ‘East Indian Women and Leadership Roles During Indentured Servitude in British Guiana, 1838–1920’, in Journal of International Women’s Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2015), pp. 174–185.
- ↑ https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0210.xml
- ↑ Ralph R. Premdas, ‘Ethnicity and Identity in the Caribbean: Decentering a Myth’, The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Working Paper No. 234 (December, 1996).
- ↑ https://www.everand.com/article/488302458/Trinidad-And-Tobago-Has-Indian-Links
- ↑ Jessica Ramsawak, ‘Twice Migration and Indo-Caribbean American Identity Politics’, in Political Science, Vol. 36 (2020).
- ↑ Ron Ramdin, Arising from Bondage: A History of the Indo-Caribbean People (New York, 2000).