Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract

In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal architecture of labor, and the discourses through which the imperial racial capitalist system was legitimated and contested. In the decades that followed, labor became incorporated into market institutions that continued into the post-colonial era. Yet, today, almost two hundred years later, slavery's spectral presence continues to inhabit international labor policy. I argue that the reference to slavery was incorporated into discourses of protection and free contract in ways that sought to sanitize and rationalize regimes of indenture and wage labor in the Indian Ocean world. Thus, paradoxically, slavery is often invoked in ways that are disconnected from its own material history. This essay seeks to trace the persistence of that double move of invocation and disconnection as itself symptomatic of the past in the present. In the context of the nineteenth century labor regime transitions, we might describe imperialism, humanitarianism, and capitalism as having a Weberian relationship of “elective affinities.” Slavery's haunting of the political and normative imagination of alternative labor systems encapsulated those affinities by fusing the denunciation of slavery with the promise of protection and profit, redeeming humanitarian imperialism and commodified labor.