Jonathan Connolly's "Worthy of Freedom"

Jonathan Connolly is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation, and reported the following:

Worthy of Freedom is about a system of indentured labor migration created shortly after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. From the early 1840s to the end of the First World War, this system brought more than a million Indian workers to sugar-producing colonies across the empire. As such, it played a crucial role in shaping the “history of emancipation”—a complex history of conflict and change—and the meaning of “freedom” after slavery.

Opening the book to page 99 parachutes the reader into a set of arguments about the discursive normalization of indenture during the 1850s. Earlier chapters explain that indenture caused a public scandal when planters began recruiting (and policing) migrant workers fifteen years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of abolition. At that point, many British observers denounced indenture as a covert revival of slavery. But this changed over time, alongside broader conceptions of free labor and emancipation. Chapter 4 explains how and why. The chapter argues that new forms of social-scientific analysis reshaped debate on indenture, displacing older antislavery critiques. Drawing on wide-ranging scholarship on nineteenth-century race thinking, it then shows that hardening attitudes toward race, linked to a growing consensus that emancipation had “failed” economically, served to legitimize the penal structures surrounding indenture. Finally, it explains that an important economic shift—increases in sugar production and profit following large-scale labor migration—consolidated public support for indenture as the 1850s wore on. Page 99 introduces this third strand of argument:

The prospect of economic failure had been a catalyst for indenture from the beginning. But starting in the mid-1850s, a new economic story—a story of growth rather than decline—altered the material basis of support for indenture. By the end of the decade, nearly 370,000 Indian workers had arrived in the colonies. In Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad, the impact was transformative. Against the “failure” of emancipation, indenture soon stood for economic success.

So, does this encapsulate something important about the book as a whole? Yes! It brings us to the heart of one of the book’s core subjects, which is how indenture gained legitimacy as “free labor” and how perceptions of the system related to wider conflicts over the meaning of emancipation. Page 99 also hints at the book’s general interest in relating ideas and political culture to economic change. But because change over time is so important to the book, skipping to page 99 also leaves a lot out. One’s sense of what’s shifting in chapter 4 depends on earlier material. When one reads the Times of London celebrate indenture on page 98, the impact of such language is amplified having read the same newspaper stridently condemn indenture nearly two decades earlier on page 21. The book’s core arguments concerning ideology, law, and state power all move forward chronologically. It’s of course easy for me to say this, but to appreciate the book’s arc of historical change, it’s best to start at the beginning.

Learn more about Worthy of Freedom at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue