Compare and contrast slavery and the indentureship system.

Slavery and indentureship did not develop under the same historical conditions. Slavery and

the Atlantic Slave Trade are both legitimately considered crimes against humanity.

Indentureship as a kind of servitude is not a novel concept. As A.E. Smith noted in Colonists

in Bondage, "indentureship was the most convenient arrangement next to slavery."

Indentureship was the new face of slavery. The claim that indentureship was a kind of slavery

does not imply that it was exactly like slavery; the scope and size of slavery exclude any such

comparison. It suggests that indentureship had some characteristics of slavery and produced

many of the same emotional responses in indentured servants as slavery did in slaves.

According to Tinker, indentureship "integrated many of the oppressive aspects of the slave

system and produced in Indians, many of the responses of the African brothers in bondage."

Frank Birbalsingh contends in Indo-Caribbean Resistance that the "conditions under which

indentured Indian immigrants survived implied that they were slaves in every other respect

other than a name. When indentured workers first arrived in the colonies, they lived in the

homes that the freed slaves had left empty and did the same jobs, he wrote. The expectation

was for lifelong experiences as a slave under one of its various forms on the plantations. It

was thought that the indentureship system was a "new form of slavery." Indians were treated

as mere bodies by the British, particularly as laboring bodies. The requirements were callous

palms and hard hands, exactly like with the Africans who came before them. Indentured

laborers were subjected to harsh punishment penalties and strenuous labor laws, which

reduced them to the status of controlled objects, as Benedict noted in Indians in a Plural

Society: Report on Mauritius Floggings, penalties, incarcerations, and cruel treatment were

frequently used as punishment for offenses like "wilful indolence," "feigned illness," and

"impertinence."
However, it must be emphasized that there are important differences between indentureship

and slavery. Another distinction that must be emphasized is the destruction of the all-

important social and cultural fabric that is so important in family and community, as

Williams elaborated on some of these differences: "the taking the children from their mother's

arms at birth; selling individuals as slaves; the eradication and deprival of their cultural and

religious roots; mind condition measures." It would be ludicrous to compare indentureship to

slavery, but it would also be unfair to ignore the similarities that do exist.

Green, W. A. (1983). Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality. Journal

of British Studies, 22(2), 98–121. http://www.jstor.org/stable/175675

Hilary McD. Beckles. (1997). Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean Modernity. Callaloo, 20(4),
777–789. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299407