Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes

It is perhaps unsurprising that the expansion of capitalism and empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasioned renewed interest in labor as a category of human activity.1 In Britain and Western Europe and their empires, in fields ranging from economics to politics to philosophy and the arts, a new attentiveness to and criticism of prevalent modes of labor extraction not only strengthened the anti-slavery movement and grounded observations of the nature of industrial capitalism, but also bolstered analyses of human experience that aspired to the level of general theory.2 These powerful formulations linked labor to human subjectivity as well as to political recognition. Yet the question of how such sweeping theories might actually become globally salient, or whether this was even necessary or desirable, remained largely underdeveloped.3 One historical context in which this question of potential global reach was explored in concrete and pragmatic terms was (and is) the struggle to implement international labor standards and labor rights. The history of this struggle is typically told in terms of the efforts by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European socialists, international trade unionists, and social workers to put such mechanisms in place, culminating in the formation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as part of the League of Nations in 1919.4 While the ILO did emerge immediately and directly from the work done by these various thinkers and activists, many elements of modern attempts to establish international labor rights and protections can be traced through a more entangled past. From the broader perspective of nineteenth-century empire, global capitalism, and anti-slavery agitation, such nascent efforts to regulate the conditions of labor across national boundaries emerged in what was perhaps an unlikely and seemingly marginal context: the official British imperial system of Indian indentured labor. Placing the indenture system within the history of international labor rights illuminates some of the key ideas and forms of governance that undergirded the emergence of transnational human rights concepts and law.5