Fellows Lecture: Jonathan Connolly, History “Indenture as Free Labor: Migration and Freedom in the Era of Emancipation”
March 2, 2023
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W Harrison Street, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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Fellows Lecture: Jonathan Connolly,
History “Indenture as Free Labor: Migration and Freedom in the Era of Emancipation”
Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, imperial officials created a transcontinental system of indentured labor migration to bring new workers to sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds. In this lecture, Connolly offers an analysis of the ideological and discursive structures that underlay the laws of indenture in this context. In so doing, he advances three arguments. First, notions of fixed racial difference displaced an early universalism in imperial accounts of post-slavery free labor around the middle of the nineteenth century, with important implications for the legal structure of indenture. Second, imperial legal ideology consistently reframed particular economic interests within the plantation system in an ostensibly neutral language of social order, which served to justify the use of law and state power in economic restructuring. Third, over time and at a trans-regional scale, legal borrowing and a specifically legal logic of precedent and fairness quieted formerly explosive debates over the social consequences of labor control, which helped ‘normalize’ key aspects of indenture’s legal structure.
JONATHAN CONNOLLY is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UIC. A historian of the British Empire, Connolly’s research involves the history of emancipation, imperial political and legal culture, and the category of free labor in Britain, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. He is currently writing a book about Indian indentured labor migration and the meaning of emancipation. Titled Worthy of Freedom, the book is under contract for publication with the University of Chicago Press.
Date posted
Sep 2, 2022
Date updated
Feb 2, 2023