indentured labor

indentured labor, a form of contract labor in which laborers enter into an official agreement with their employer certifying that they will work for the employer either for a fixed length of time or until a debt has been paid. The debt is usually understood to include the costs that the employer charges the worker for transport from their home location as well as for housing and food. It may also include costs associated with the apprenticeship or other training that is, ostensibly, provided by the employer. Often, indentured workers make agreements unwillingly or unknowingly and are exploited by their employers. Historically, indentured labor was sometimes imposed on criminals who agreed to servitude in exchange for a commutation of their sentence.

Indentured labor is today associated with the era of European colonization, beginning about 1500 and extending into the 20th century, though forms of indentured labor still exist. Its conditions were often severe enough to resemble slavery, even if local laws may have differentiated between slavery and indentured labor. The boundaries between indentured labor, debt slavery, peonage, and other forms of forced labor can be difficult to discern, and, in terms of the workers’ lived experience, these differences were frequently meaningless.

Indentured labor before European colonization

The history of indentured labor reaches back to ancient times, when people typically became indentured servants after borrowing money and agreeing to pay off the debt over a specified term.

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In central India, land grant records dating from the Gupta period (4th to 6th century ce) show that lower-class people had to supply labor, as a form of service, to their king, though whether their labor was mandatory is subject to debate. Such labor was usually provided by blacksmiths, barbers, potters, carpenters, and others in lieu of taxes payable to the king (or, in some cases, to the grantees of the land). Lower-class workers were also often subject to bonded labor during the 8th to 13th century, typically because of a failure to pay a debt, rent, or taxes. Such bondage often continued across several generations.

Indentured labor in the North America

Indentured labor was first used in North America to attract workers to the new English colonies after the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Many skilled and unskilled laborers, as well as some petty criminals, worked four to six years for colonial settlers in exchange for passage to the New World, along with room and board, all paid for by the settlers. The laborers were not enslaved, and some laws were in place to protect their rights. But the work conditions were harsh, and workers’ contracts were usually extended for such infractions as breaking laws, running away, or becoming pregnant. Those who survived their tenure received their freedom, allowing them to pursue their own goals in the new colonies.

The first Black Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 and were initially treated as indentured laborers with the same rights as white people. But the passage of laws that treated Black people as property, rather than as people—which happened in Massachusetts in 1641, when its legislature legalized slavery, and happened in other American colonies across subsequent decades, when their laws also recognized slavery—stripped away whatever relative freedom Black laborers had experienced until then.

As demand for labor grew, so did the need for indentured workers. But landowners, reluctant to deal with freed laborers and their demands for land and other rights, switched to using enslaved people as a more profitable alternative. This preference continued in the colonies and then the United States until the abolition of slavery in 1865.

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During the 1860s the United States saw an uptick in indentured labor when such companies as the Central Pacific Railroad began signing mostly Chinese (and a few Irish) laborers to multiyear contracts to build railways in exchange for housing and wages so low as to be unlivable. The now pejorative term used to refer to the workers from Asia was coolie, which several sources say may be derived from the Tamil for “wages.” American labor leaders opposed companies’ use of these workers, arguing that they displaced local workers and reduced their wages. In 1862 U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed a bill banning transportation of “coolies” in ships owned by American citizens. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 prohibited Chinese workers from entering the United States. But exploitation of laborers from China and elsewhere in Asia to work on American projects continued. In 1906 Pres. Theodore Roosevelt approved their use to build the Panama Canal, and in 1920 Pres. Warren G. Harding allowed Chinese laborers to work on sugar plantations in Hawaii.

Indentured labor was also prevalent among white and Black farmers in the South after the American Civil War. Many of these farmers rented small plots of land from large landowners in exchange for paying the landowners a share of the farmers’ crops (a practice called sharecropping). Supplies—including seeds, tools, clothing, and food—were provided by the landowners, and charges for those supplies were taken out of the sharecroppers’ payment. In years of bad harvests, this arrangement put sharecroppers in debt, which they were legally forced to pay by working on the landowners’ property. Effectively, this put them in a state of slavery. Contract conditions were stringent and punitive, and Black sharecroppers had little recourse to the law in the Jim Crow South. Such debt-related labor became widespread during Reconstruction and persisted through the Great Depression.

Indentured labor in the rest of the world

After the global slave trade was outlawed and slavery was abolished in most of the world during the 19th century, the system of indentured labor again surged as a source of cheap labor outside North America and particularly throughout the British Empire. Many contract laborers were shipped from China and India to newer colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Most of these laborers were unskilled and worked for very low wages. They ostensibly entered into agreements voluntarily, but kidnapping, coercion, and fraud were common. Conditions on transport ships and in the colonies were harsh, with high mortality rates, but the promise of a return to the home country, along with a lump sum payment at the end of the contract period, was sufficient incentive for many laborers. In fact, when their contract ended, some workers took a foreman’s job at a plantation instead of going back home.

The Indian subcontinent was a source of workers for South Africa, which saw a large influx of indentured labor starting in 1860. While Mahatma Gandhi was living in South Africa, he led his first large-scale nonviolent campaign, from 1906 to 1913, which fought for the rights of this Indian community in South Africa. South Africa also brought in tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers in the early 20th century, in response to a labor shortage and to Black workers’ resistance to pay cuts. The Chinese workers mostly returned home, but their exploitation as an alternate source of labor played a key role in enabling the white government to out-negotiate Black workers.

Mauritius saw over half a million laborers arrive from the Indian subcontinent to work on sugar plantations; Indo-Mauritians today make up a majority of the country’s population. Fiji, Grenada, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, and Guyana also have significant populations of Indian descent owing to the Indian indenture system, which was organized by British colonial administrators during the 1830s and ended in 1917.