Debt, Bondage and Indentured Labor in Land and Maritime Empires

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This chapter seeks to provide a comprehensive view of forms of indentured migrations which goes beyond conventional approaches limiting this phenomenon to post-slavery era, essentially in the Atlantic and debating whether it was free or unfree labor. Instead, it is argued that this form of extreme dependence related to migration developed on both sides of Eurasia (in Central Asia, Russia and China and in Western Empires) since the seventeenth century onwards. This global phenomenon expressed the persistent overlapping between labor and debt across the centuries and the continents. The global diffusion of indentured migrations will be also related to Empire building. Eurasian land empires will be contrasted to European maritime empires, in terms of forms of labor dependence and migrants' inclusion/exclusion. Historiography Indentured migration is usually understood as a temporary solution between slavery and free wage labor market, a kind of adjustment estate owners, producers and merchants needed to resettle labor and product markets. As such, indentured migration is usually encapsulated into a period running from the 1830s through the early twentieth century and WWI. 1 From this standpoint, indentured contracts and indentured immigrants are relevant focuses to discuss the tensions between free wage labor and slavery and the role of both in global capitalism. 2 Debates mostly focused on whether indentured migrants were disguised slaves or not. According to a first approach, the indentured contract resembled forced labour and slavery and contracts were said to express a "legal fiction". This interpretation was advanced by