An Account of the Indian and Chinese Immigrants in British Guiana

INTRODUCTION
By ANNE-MARIE LEE-LOY, Ryerson University
By 1871, the year that The New Slavery was published, slavery had been abolished in the British West Indian colonies for almost 40 years. During that period, some 90,000 indentured labourers had been introduced to British Guiana as a replacement workforce in the wake of freedom for the Black slaves and as a means of maintaining the hierarchical sociopolitical structures of colonial society. Unsurprisingly, indentured labour, a system that, Joseph Beaumont would memorably describe as “rooted upon slavery, grown in its stale soil” would quickly be accused of “emulating its worst abuses”. Indeed, the earliest attempt to import indentured labour from India to British Guiana ended in scandal and public outcry when antislavery advocates’ accusations that the new labour system was really no different from slavery

appeared to be substantiated by subsequent governmental inquiry and an excessively high mortality rate amongst the migrants. The scathing reports about the so-called “Gladstone Coolies” brought an abrupt end to indentured immigration from India for about six years. By 1844, however, the Colonial Government bowed to the insistent pleas of the planters for a steady supply of controllable workers – the only type of labour that, the plantocracy insisted, would save the declining sugar industry in the West Indies. Indentured immigration from India was soon followed by indentured immigration from China. During the 1800s, attempts were also made to procure indentured immigrants from locations as diverse as Madeira Portugal, Barbados and the United States, but China and India would quickly become the most significant sources of indentured labour for the West Indian colonies and, more particularly, for British Guiana.

Unlike the first attempt to introduce indentured immigrants to British Guiana, the indentured immigration scheme that emerged in the 1840s was established as a state-control-led rather than private enterprise as a means of ensuring that the abuses inherent under slavery would be avoided. State control was exercised over the way in which the recruitment of the labourers was managed, the labour contract, and by a series of ordinances and regulations that set out the obligations and responsibilities of the labourers and their employers to each other. For example, potential labourers were interviewed prior to embarking on the ships for the colony to ensure that they were migrating of their own free will, while labour contracts spelled out that employers were responsible for ensuring adequate housing and hospital accommodations when necessary. It seemed, on the surface, to be an exemplary labour arrangement — one in which the desperately poor had the opportunity to better their situations under fair, even generous working conditions, while planters were assured of the steady body of workers necessary for the intensive labour involved in sugar production. Nevertheless, from the very onset, the protections designed to distinguish indentured labour from slavery were undermined in the actual practice of the system; or as one contemporary observer put it:
“To the superficial observation it would seem, that persons who have been rescued from a state said to be bordering on destitution in their own country, who are provided with free houseroom, regular work and wages when they are in health, and in sickness have the advantages of a hospital, the attendance of a medical man and medicines free of expense, who have moreover a magistrate always at hand to hear their complaints, and a department of officers with the especial duty of securing their good treatment, can have no ground for dissatisfaction. A closer scrutiny, however, would detract much from the apparent value of these advantages, and would show that some of them at least are more nominal than real.”

Although these comments were made specifically with reference to the situation of the indentured labourers once they arrived in British Guiana, the existence of nominal rather than real advantages for the labourers very much characterized all stages of the indenture process. For example, recruitment agents in both India and China, eager to obtain the money that they received per individual recruit, were accused of kidnapping and forcibly containing individuals who were then shipped off to the colonies against their will. In The New Slavery, Beaumont reproduces a dramatic report from the Indian newspaper, The Pioneer, which details how a young woman was tricked with an offer for local work and then trapped in a room with other women to be shipped off as indentured labourers to Jamaica. She was released upon the interference of two English ministers but the event triggered a tightening of the laws regulating recruiters in India. In China, the phrase “the sale of pigs” to describe the process by which indentured labourers were recruited vividly captures the dehumanization and commodification of the individuals who were often violently coerced into embarking on the ships for the colonies. While The Pioneer hinted that sexual slavery of women was a dark underside of the recruitment system by noting somewhat obliquely that “Not the least ugly feature in the system is that it appears that young, good looking women are the class of coolies preferred in ‘Jamaica’”, fears of just such a traffic in women were overtly expressed in China perhaps due to the fact that additional money was paid out to men who brought their wives with them as an incentive for female migration. Indeed, when the suggestion that such money be allocated was first introduced, the Colonial Office was warned that the “wholesale purchase and shipment of prostitutes” would be the end result. Reports such as the Agent General of Immigrants in Trinidad’s 1862 Report, which noted that the Chinese men had “for the most part, repudiated the wives whom they picked up at Hong Kong, more with a view of sharing in or appropriating their advance money” seemed to validate these fears.
The recruitment process was also marred by accusations that the indentured labourers were being enticed by misrepresentations and falsehoods about the type of work, wages, the conditions of labour, and even the length of journey upon which they were about to embark. In the colonies, these issues became part of a wide range of complaints that were levelled against the system that can be summarized under three main points: first, the indentured labourers were unfairly subject to criminal prosecution and severe penal punishment were they to be found to breach the terms of their contracts; second, planters were not upholding their obligations under the indentured labour contracts; and third, those entrusted to enforce the laws concerning indenture were biased on behalf of the planters. Indeed, in British Guiana, the law had become so skewed that immigrants who left their plantations to lay complaints with the Immigrant Agent, the colonial administrator who was charged with advocating on their behalf and supervising the indenture system in general, could be arrested and imprisoned on charges of vagrancy, while labourers who carried a sick worker to the hospital without first gaining the permission of estate management to do so might be charged with “wilful trespass”. It was this imbalance of power between worker and employer, coupled with violent intimidation that was often part of the daily interaction between estate management and workers, that led to accusations that indenture was simply a new slavery. Certainly, Beaumont’s description of the indentured labourer’s condition paints a picture of slavery in practice if not in name:
“Practically an Immigrant is in the hands of the employer to whom he is bound. He cannot leave him; he cannot live without work; he can only get such work and on such terms as the employer chooses to set him; and all these necessities are enforced, not only by the inevitable influence of his isolated and dependent position, but by the terrors of imprisonment and the prospect of losing both labour and wages”.

Some one hundred years later, Cheddi Jagan, the first premier of British Guiana, would make a similar argument when he claimed that the only difference between indentured labour and slavery was that the former substituted “paper chains…for iron chains.”
If indentured labour mimicked slave society in its labour structures and practices, then it should come as no surprise that the new labour system also inherited one of slave society’s deepest fears; namely, the fear of revolution. How do you keep tens of thousands of indentured labourers from rebellion? This was a question that was particularly pertinent in British Guiana, which had received significantly more indentured labourers in the early part of 19th century than either Trinidad or Jamaica. In August 1869, this question became even more pressing when a dispute over wages resulted in a riot and the beating of a deputy manager on Plantation Leonora. Although labour gangs “forsaking work for a long tramp to town” to lodge complaints with the Immigration Agent did not seem to be unusual at this time, the unrest at Leonora was striking for both the sheer numbers involved and for the trickle-down effect it seemed to have. For many members of the plantocracy, the answer to the question of containing such activities on the part of the labourers was simple: increase coercive power to crush the possibility that any revolutionary activity might take hold. Indeed, the immediate response to the unrest at Leonora was to build up the police force and to make an appeal to the Barbadian commander of forces to ready his troops so that they might quickly come to the assistance of the colonialists in British Guiana if the indentured labourers rose up in a true revolution. There was, however, another response to this question of containment; namely, to hold the plantocracy legally accountable to their obligations and responsibilities as provided for by the laws governing indenture. In doing so, it was claimed that “the interests of the whole colony, and especially . . . the public peace” would be secured. In 19th century British Guiana, prominent proponents of this latter position included Immigration Agent, James Crosby, one-time stipendiary magistrate, George William Des Voeux, and the author of The New Slavery, Chief Justice, Joseph Beaumont.
Beaumont’s term as Chief Justice of British Guiana lasted between 1863 and 1868. He arrived in a colony where the local plantocracy, as represented by the Combined Court and the Court of Policy, was engaged in an overt struggle for power over the labour system with the Colonial Office. Of course, this struggle went back to the abolition of slavery in 1833, followed by the early end of the mandatory apprenticeship system, but it also included more recent attempts by the Colonial Office to maintain and enhance its reputation as an
empire that had rid itself of the ugly scourge of slavery – an objective that clashed directly with the plantocracy’s desire to produce the most sugar possible at the least possible cost. This power struggle can be seen in such events as the rejection of the Colonial Office’s request for money to provide salaries for professional stipendiary magistrates, as opposed to magistrates drawn from the plantocracy, and in the Colonial Office’s refusal to allow legislation that appeared to favour the planters. The Colonial Office reserved the right to make governmental appointment of outsiders to the colony in key roles in the application of the law, including the posts of Governor, Immigration Agent and Chief Justice. In fact, Beaumont was appointed to Chief Justice against the wishes of some of British Guiana’s plantocracy who had, through Governor Francis Hincks, put forward their own, planter sympathetic nominee for the position.

These governmental appointments were made to ensure the independent administration of justice thereby protecting the indentured labourers; but it is just such a lack of independence that Beaumont decries in The New Slavery. Specifically, Beaumont points out that although “the judges as well as the magistrates hold their offices at the pleasure of the Sovereign,… practically that pleasure is administered by or under the influence of the twin Colonial influences: and no one can hope to maintain his independence or his office against the will of these associated powers”. He further goes on to suggest that to try to retain such independence when to do so was contrary to the interests of the planters meant emulating “a martyr’s vocation or possess[ing] a martyr’s spirit”. Beaumont, the son of
Wesleyan minister whom Beaumont described as “a vigorous opponent of slavery in all its forms”, must have possessed some measure of the martyr’s spirit; for as Chief Justice, he openly and regularly opposed the decisions of stipendiary magistrates when he believed that they were biased in favour of the planters. Unsurprisingly, Beaumont quickly fell afoul of those in power, including Governor Hincks who had aligned himself with the plantocracy. Tensions between the two men would finally reach the point where Hincks would attempt to remove Beaumont from office on grounds that included having “caused public scandals and made the colony more difficult to govern”. Although the Colonial Office would force Hincks to reinstate Beaumont, Beaumont continued to rankle the powers in the colony. Barely a year later, when similar complaints were once again raised, the Colonial Office would find that despite the fact that Beaumont had not committed judicial misconduct, his “want of judicial temper” and his tendency to “embarrass the Executive Government rather than to promote the ends of justice” warranted removing him from office.
If the plantocracy had hoped that by getting rid of Beaumont they would silence criticism about the treatment of the indentured labourers in the colony and thereby limit the interference of the Colonial Office in such matters, they were soon to find otherwise. On Christmas day, 1869, George William Des Voeux, a former stipendiary magistrate of British Guiana who was serving as Administrator of St. Lucia, penned a letter to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Granville, to warn that the “ill feelings” of the indentured population “will were long, unless checked by remedial measures, result in far more serious calamities” than the frightening riot that had occurred at Leonora earlier that year. In response, Granville ordered a Royal Commission to investigate the conditions of the indentured immigrants in the colony. The Commissioners, Sir George Young, Mr. Charles Mitchell and Mr. W.E. Frere, began their investigation in the summer of 1870 and tabled their report in Parliament in June the following year. Beaumont, who was at that time located in England, very much wanted to participate in the inquiry, but was unable to do so due to the cost of the journey. He therefore attempted to provide his evidence as three statutory declarations to the Commission, but, as Beaumont notes, the Commissioners felt precluded from receiving them. Beaumont was, however, undeterred and publicly aired his observations, memories and concerns drawn from his experiences in British Guiana in The New Slavery.

(By JOSEPH BEAUMONT, ESQ.)