Eddie Bruce-Jones
©2024 Eddie Bruce-Jones
Colonial Indenture
Indenture Post Mortem: Diasporic Afterlives (manuscript in progress)
Death occupies a central place in the archive of indenture. Mortality rates on ships and plantations, inquests commissioned to examine mysterious deaths, significant accidents, mistakes, murders and suicides all comprise the vernacular of indenture’s textual archive. It is a language of governance. It is the grammar of economic accountability and profitability in transport and plantation economies. And it is through this language that the events of the labourers’ lives are staged in the archive. The code is apparent as one opens the ledgers—and it reveals that the most significant measures of the labourers’ lives, in the colonial ledgers, are the ways they died.
Indenture Post Mortem advances a set of theoretical reflections that scholars of indenture should consider when excavating, interpreting, imagining and narrativising historical material on the indenture period, specifically and colonial systems of labour and servitude more broadly. In the process of advancing these theoretical considerations, the book provides a critical historical account of the British colonial system of indentureship that transported South Asians from India to the Caribbean and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on migration between 1845 and 1917 from Calcutta, India to Kingston, Jamaica, the book interrogates, through practice, three principal approaches to engaging with the history of colonial laws and policies on indenture—critical legal history, literary analysis, and critical reflection on colonial frameworks of analysis that remain embedded in contemporary institutions.
Research for this volume included visits to the Jamaican National Archives, the State Archives of West Bengal, the Port Authority of Kolkata, the UK National Archives and the Colonial Legal Archives of the Institute of Advanced Legal Study, University of London. It also involved extensive research of administrative registry records, including those of my own family. This research was supported by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (now: Legal History and Legal Theory) in Frankfurt, within the ‘Common Law Transfers’ research stream.
Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive -
(Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant, 2022-2024)
The creation of an interactive digital space that brings together collections in the United States and United Kingdom to facilitate scholarship on colonialism and indentureship by Eddie Bruce-Jones and Tao Leigh Goffe. The lead UK partner is SOAS, University of London. Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and New York library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, and oral histories.
Related work
Over the last decade, I have been involved in social scientific and archival research on the indentureship period, as well research on the literature of the period. I have also published creative writing on the period in a volume written by descendants of the indentureship period, called We Mark Your Memory, edited by Tina Ramnarine, Maria Kaladeen and David Dabydeen, and in a Special Issue of Gasher Magazine on new writing from the Asian diapora. In 2020, I was appointed the Kleh Visiting Professor in International Law at Boston University, where I delivered the annual lecture entitled “Contractual Intimacies: British Colonial Indenture from Kolkata to Kingston”. I’ve also delivered keynotes on invited lectures on indentureship for Stanford University, the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and for the International Academic Forum (Tokyo).