Description
Book SynopsisThe early years of the East Indian Indentureship system in the Caribbean saw experiments on coolie laborers under the British Empire. Colonial Trinidad was one of the main sites for this experiment. This book foregrounds one of the earliest cases (1846) of occupational and physical cruelty against East Indian indentured laborers in Trinidad within this very early period of experimentation. It presents and analyzes the full transcripts of an inquiry concerning the ill-treatment of coolie laborers and the severe punishment and death of one laborer, Kunduppa, by a Scottish planter in Trinidad. Drawing on the concepts of discipline, governmentality, and Orientalism, the main argument of the manuscript is that within the early experimental period of Indentureship, the figure of the coolie and disciplinary tactics of bodily torture were instrumental to redrafting and stabilizing the colonial governance of contract labor. It also argues that Crown investigations of coolie abuse and death b
Table of Contents
List of Figures – Acknowledgments – Preface – Cast of Characters – Introduction: The Footprint – Disciplinary Orientalism and Indian Indentureship in the Colonial Caribbean – ‘Coolie’ Genealogy as Colonial Governmentality: An Analysis of ‘Mr. Walkinshaw’s Ill-treatment of Coolies’ – The Transcripts: Trinidad 1846, Volume 4, Mr. Walkinshaw's Ill-treatment of Coolies, Governor Lord Harris, Disp. 75 and 88 – Postscript: ‘Coolie’ Hauntings – Index.
