Emancipation in the British Empire in 1833-38 created a demand for plantation labour that was met by indenture: five-year contracts, called girmit by the labourers from the English word agreement, under which Indian workers were shipped to Mauritius from 1834 and then to the Caribbean, Natal, Fiji, East Africa and Malaya. The Striking Women project records recruitment concentrated in rural north India and the south, frequently by deception about destination and wages among people who could not read the contracts; voyages of ten to twenty weeks with mortality among Caribbean-bound migrants of around 17 per cent in the early decades; and annual mortality on the plantations of around 12 per cent. Labourers were subject to criminal sanctions for breach of contract, restricted movement under pass systems, and sex ratios heavily skewed towards men. Resistance took the form of petitions, desertion, sabotage and strikes, and the system - after a campaign in which Gandhi's South African career began - was formally abolished in 1917. The descendants of the girmitiyas form the Indian populations of Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname and South Africa.
British colonial authorities and plantation interests recruited indentured labourers in India for sugar and other plantation colonies after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire
The 1881 census of India, the first reasonably complete decennial enumeration, recorded about 253.9 million people across British India and the princely states. Emigration registers kept at Calcutta, Madras and later Bombay are the source for the roughly 1.3 million indentured emigrants shipped to Mauritius, the Caribbean, Natal, Fiji and elsewhere between 1834 and the early twentieth century.
No aggregate death toll has been compiled, but the rates are documented: the Striking Women project records mortality of about 17 per cent on early Caribbean-bound voyages, from cholera, dysentery and other shipboard disease, and annual mortality of around 12 per cent on the plantations themselves. Applied across a migration of well over a million people those rates imply very large numbers of deaths, but the rates varied enormously by colony, decade and estate, and colonial immigration returns are not consistent enough to support a total.
The Striking Women project documents recruitment by deception, criminal penalties and corporal punishment for breach of contract, long hours and low wages, and restrictions on movement, drawing on emigration records, colonial inquiries and the testimony of former indentured workers.
India, Mauritius, Guyana, Fiji, South Africa