Paper short abstract:

This paper looks the continuum of coercion between slavery and indentureship in plantations of British Guiana by looking at the relationship between the plantations’ history of slave coercion during slavery and indentured labour mortality after emancipation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the role of coercion in plantation economy in determining indentured labour mortality. The plantation could have an impact on the workers mortality in two ways- 1) through infrastructure availability: the living conditions in the barrack could affect the exposure of the workers to new diseases. Equally, availability of medical facilities in the plantation could ensure treatment and avoid death of workers inflicted with such diseases, 2) through work practices and abuses: plantation workers were required to work long hours under difficult conditions in unfamiliar work environments. The plantations which were accustomed to labour practices and profit margins associated with slavery may continue use coercive methods to extract labour to ensure the marginal productivity greater than fixed wages. Equally however, abusive practices would have reputational costs. Thus plantations could adjust their extractive methods to reduce long term reputational costs.

We use archival sources to create a data set to analyse the relationship between the plantation economy and indentured labour migration in British Guiana. We use information on indentured workers, including their mortality using ship data digitised from The Walter Rodney National Archives in Georgetown Guyana holds ship registers which digitised for the project. We have matched our indentured worker database with a database of plantation characteristics that we will built using archival resources including estate details made available by UCL (available here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/) as well as data on slave punishment by estate from slave records in National Archives.