ABSTRACT
A second characteristic of this historiographical tradition is a propensity to draw a sharp dividing line between the pre-and postemancipation eras despite acceptance by many indentured labour historians of Hugh Tinker’s argument (1974) that the years aer 1834 witnessed the creation and institutionalization of a ‘new system of slavery’ in the colonial plantation world that replicated many features of the slave systems it replaced. Studies of British colonies in the Caribbean usually end with the abolition of slavery in 1834 or occasionally with the termination of the ‘apprenticeship’ system in 1838, while studies of post-emancipation labour systems in these colonies pay little attention to the slave regimes that preceded them (e.g., Look Lai, 1993; Laurence, 1994; Hoee, 1998). Discussions
about conceptualizing and interpreting the indentured experience also reect this tendency to view the colonial plantation world in terms of sharply demarcated pre-and post-1834 eras (e.g., Newbury, 1975; Marks and Richardson, 1984; Van Den Boogaart and Emmer, 1986; Munro, 1993, 1995; Shepherd, 2002). e consequences of this chronological apartheid include an implicit, if not explicit, tendency to regard the modern indentured system as a distinctive phenomenon unto itself, a perspective reinforced by the propensity to examine indentured workers’ lives within tightly circumscribed social, economic, cultural, and political contexts.
