The Unfinished Business of Britain’s Colonial Empire
After Slavery came Indenture
London Letter
By Shyam Bhatia
As Commonwealth heads ruminate over their recently concluded summit in Antigua and Barbuda, one of the most uncomfortable questions confronting the organisation remains unresolved: how should Britain acknowledge the human cost of the empire from which so much of its wealth was derived?
The Caribbean has long demanded that Britain accept responsibility for the transatlantic slave trade, including through a formal apology and reparatory justice. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has expressed his “sorrow and regret” for the suffering inflicted on millions of enslaved Africans and said he is open to listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state.
In an article published ahead of the Commonwealth summit, Burnham proposed structured dialogue with affected countries and campaign groups. But he ruled out direct financial reparations, suggesting instead that Britain work with wealthy nations and investors to ease the debt burdens of poorer Commonwealth countries.
“Listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state will form an important part of this process, and I am open to them,” he wrote.
It is a significant acknowledgement. But for countries such as Mauritius, the debate raises a further question. What happened after slavery was abolished? And should the history of indentured labour, which brought hundreds of thousands of Indians to Mauritius and other parts of the empire, form an equally important part of the Commonwealth’s reckoning with its past?
Mauritius occupies a particularly important place in that history.
Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the plantation economy faced a serious labour shortage. Formerly enslaved people were no longer willing to submit to the conditions under which plantation owners had previously exploited them. The British colonial authorities and plantation interests turned increasingly to India for a new source of labour.
The “Great Experiment”
On November 2, 1834, the ship Atlas arrived in Mauritius carrying the first officially recognised group of 36 Indian indentured labourers. It marked the beginning of what the British government described as a “Great Experiment”: replacing slave labour with workers recruited under fixed-term contracts.
The experiment would have consequences far beyond Mauritius.
Between 1834 and 1920, more than 462,000 migrants, predominantly from India, passed through the immigration depot at Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis. Many were sent to work on the island’s sugar plantations; others were transferred to Reunion, Australia, southern and eastern Africa and the Caribbean.
The system eventually spread across the colonial world, with more than two million indentured workers transported under arrangements involving British, French and Dutch colonial powers.
The distinction between slavery and indenture must be recognised. An indentured worker was not legally owned as a slave and was supposed to have a contract specifying the period and conditions of employment. But the existence of a contract did not necessarily mean freedom in any meaningful sense.
Recruitment could be deceptive, conditions on plantations were frequently harsh, and workers faced restrictions on their movement, inadequate accommodation, poor wages and corporal punishment. The power imbalance between plantation owners and labourers was enormous. The earliest abuses in Mauritius were sufficiently serious for Indian emigration to the island to be suspended between 1839 and 1842.
The system was therefore not simply a benign alternative to slavery. It was a new form of colonial labour organisation designed to preserve the profitability of plantation agriculture after emancipation.
Aapravasi Ghat, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stands as a powerful reminder of this history. Its significance is not confined to Mauritius. It represents the beginning of a global migration that transformed societies across the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
For Mauritians, the story is also deeply personal. The descendants of indentured labourers became an integral part of the island’s population, culture, politics and national identity. The hardships endured by their ancestors, their struggle to establish communities and preserve their traditions, and their contribution to the making of modern Mauritius are central to the country’s history.
It is striking that the debate over reparations has so far been framed predominantly around slavery. The suffering of enslaved Africans deserves recognition and justice. But the historical experience of indentured labourers should not be relegated to a footnote. The two systems were different, but both were integral to the functioning and enrichment of the colonial plantation economy.
Nor was the exploitation of colonial subjects confined to the labour system. My own research into the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942, including interviews with families in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, has uncovered episodes that rarely feature in conventional accounts of British rule in India.
The “tolerated brothels” and colonial violence
One concerns the continued existence of racially segregated military brothels, known as chaklas, serving British troops during the Second World War.
The history of these establishments stretches back into the nineteenth century. British military cantonments maintained brothels to provide sexual services for soldiers while attempting to regulate prostitution and control venereal disease.
An official inquiry commissioned by the Secretary of State for India in 1893 recorded methods used to procure women. Historian Sameera Chauhan, writing in ‘Gender & History’ in July 2026, describes instructions requiring regimental police officials, accompanied by policemen, to enter villages and find between twelve and fifteen girls aged fourteen and upwards. They were told to select the “best-looking”. The girls were then issued tickets and placed with the keeper or matron of a brothel.
The 1899 investigation The Queen’s Daughters in India, by Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katharine C. Bushnell, also recorded accounts of girls being brought into such establishments, including children.
The official position was challenged in the House of Commons in October 1918. Colonel Wedgwood asked whether tolerated brothels for the British Army continued in India and Burma. The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, denied that the law permitted “tolerated brothels”.
But the absence of official recognition did not necessarily mean the disappearance of the practice. Interviews with families in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar suggest that chaklas continued to operate during the Second World War, raising troubling questions about the treatment of Indian women under the racial hierarchy of the Raj.
Another account of colonial repression comes from a British official himself.
Robert Howard Niblett, a British magistrate, recorded the events surrounding the ‘Quit India’ uprising in his diary, later published as The Congress Rebellion in Azamgarh, August–September 1942.
In a chapter entitled “The Retribution”, Niblett describes eighteen men found near a railway line towards Pipridh. He writes that there was “nothing incriminating about them”. Two were aged fifty and sixty; another was a boy of sixteen.
The unnamed magistrate sentenced the men to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and thirty strokes of the cane. The boy received two years’ imprisonment and fifteen strokes. Niblett records that the magistrate “proceeded immediately to inflict the sentence of whipping in the marketplace”.
The Sessions Judge subsequently acquitted all the accused and, Niblett adds, “quite rightly, commented strongly” on the magistrate’s conduct.
Niblett also records a military expedition which visited sixteen villages and set fire to 34 houses. The small village of Qutabpur suffered particularly badly, with ten houses destroyed.
His diary is valuable because it records not simply generalised colonial repression but particular incidents, villages, punishments and casualties. It also reveals that some British officials themselves recognised the brutality of the administration they served.
The research forms part of my investigation into colonial violence in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, entitled Maut Ki Sarak — Road of Death. It draws on archival material, contemporary accounts and interviews with families whose memories have preserved incidents largely absent from official histories.
Ownership of cultural property and human remains
There is another dimension to the question of colonial accountability: the ownership of cultural property and even human remains.
The British Museum continues to hold 121 sculptures from the great Buddhist stupa at Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh, brought to London in 1880 following colonial-era excavations and removals. The history of these sculptures, and the circumstances in which they were dispersed, raise questions about who has the right to determine the fate of India’s cultural inheritance.
The Museum’s own inventory of human remains, published in August 2010, lists fragments of human bone and teeth from several Indian locations. It also records an object from Yungya in Assam explicitly described as a “trophy skull”.
These are not merely questions of museum administration. They concern the dignity of communities, the treatment of ancestors and the right of countries to reclaim or determine the future of objects and remains taken during colonial rule.
For Mauritius, the wider debate has a particular resonance. Aapravasi Ghat represents a history that is simultaneously Mauritian, Indian and international. The descendants of those who arrived under indenture have helped shape a modern multicultural society. Their history deserves to be recognised not simply as an episode of migration but as part of the larger story of imperial exploitation.
This does not mean equating indenture with slavery or suggesting that all colonial experiences were identical. It means recognising that the abolition of one system did not bring an end to the economic structures and racial hierarchies that sustained the empire.
The Commonwealth was built in part on the aftermath of these systems. Its present-day members include countries whose wealth, populations and social structures were profoundly shaped by slavery, indenture and colonial rule.
Apologies for slavery and indentured servitude
Burnham has indicated that Britain is prepared to listen to Caribbean demands for a formal apology for slavery. That willingness should extend to a wider examination of the empire’s legacy, including the experience of Indian indentured workers and the countries in which they settled.
An apology alone cannot settle these questions. Nor can a programme of debt restructuring substitute for historical accountability. Recognition, access to archives, restitution of cultural property, the return of human remains where appropriate, and meaningful engagement with affected communities all deserve consideration.
For Mauritius, the story began with the arrival of ships carrying men and women from India in search of work, many of whom had little idea of what awaited them. Their descendants have built a society in which that migration is now central to national identity.
The Commonwealth cannot rewrite its history. But it can decide whether to confront it honestly.
The families who remember the journey to Mauritius, the communities whose ancestors endured plantation labour, and the countries still seeking the return of their cultural inheritance are all part of that history.
The question is whether Britain, and the Commonwealth it once dominated, are finally prepared to listen.
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 6 November 2026
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