This chapter argues that from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, there existed a strong relationship between the institutions and practices of debt and labour in Britain and those in the colonial world. Thus, one cannot fully understand the origin and evolution of indentured labour in the Indian Ocean without taking into consideration the notions about labour, and labour practices, in Europe.

Conventionally, historians have interpreted the phenomenon of indentured labour in two main ways. The first interpretation, advanced by colonial elites in the nineteenth century and later renewed in ‘subaltern studies’, is that the indentured contract was a ‘legal fiction’, and that those indentured experienced conditions of forced labour or even slavery. This approach essentially negates the historical significance of the abolition of slavery and underestimates the efforts of indentured immigrants to fight for their own rights. Also, legal scholars have demonstrated that indentureship was initially viewed as an expression of free will in contract, and can only be considered as an involuntary contract that reflected forced labour in the second half of the nineteenth century. This in turn reflects recent debates in the history of emigration that also stress the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.