Jonathan Connolly | Worthy of Freedom: On Indenture, Slavery, and Emancipation in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean

Jonathan Connolly's talk will be based on his recent monograph publication, Worthy of Freedom: On Indenture, Slavery, and Emancipation in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Joining him will be Mahishan Gnanaseharan (Stanford PhD student, Department of History) to offer comments.

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Connolly will discuss a history of Indian indentured labor in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Mauritius after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, as well as aspects of a new project on the law of slavery and freedom in Trinidad across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Weaving together arguments concerning political culture, law, and economic conflict and change, his book Worthy of Freedom examines the making of post-slavery indenture in relation to the wider project of emancipation. It shows how debates surrounding indenture intertwined with shifting, contested notions of emancipation; how and why the law of indenture and category of free labor changed over time; and how indenture restructured the political economy of emancipation in a material sense.