The Global Coffee Plantation, Abolition, and the Making of “Free” Labor in British Ceylon, 1837–1880

In this talk Mahishan Gnanaseharan will present a paper that builds upon recent works in the history of the British empire that have converged on the view that free and unfree labor are not fixed categories, but rather the products of evolving social interests. This paper is primarily concerned with the fact that plantation-based commodity production in colonial South Asia emerged during a broader trans-imperial transition from “unfree” slave labor to “free” wage labor. Drawing on planting manuals, prosopographies, Parliamentary debates and reports, missionary records, and newspaper accounts of abolitionists, this paper examines the construction of “free” labor on the coffee plantations of Ceylon through key political, economic, and social developments in Ceylon, Scotland, and London between 1837 and 1880. This paper argues that abolitionists, planters, and missionaries conveyed Caribbean structures of plantation slavery to British Ceylon, where these colonial elites helped to transform “slave” labor into “free” labor.

About the Speaker

Mahishan Gnanaseharan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University. He studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of migrant South Asian laborers across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also a Digital Public Fellow on the editorial team for the Humanities Center's Arcade platform.