In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname (review)

In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname. By Rosemarijn Hoefte. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xii, 275 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

As African slavery was brought to an end in the nineteenth century, tropical plantations came to depend heavily upon indentured laborers. Over two million were recruited worldwide mostly from Asia, of whom 800,000 went to various colonies in the Caribbean basin. Of these, the 34,000 South Asians and 33,000 Javanese who went to Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) between 1873 and 1939 are the subject of Rosemarijn Hoefte's critical examination. Although the author is aware of the larger context of this labor movement, her study is narrowly focused on Suriname and generally eschews comparative issues.

The strength of the book is its detailed coverage of this relatively small colony's experience with indentured labor, based upon extensive Dutch and British official records, several missionary and company records, and secondary sources. Hoefte makes particular use of the plantation records of Marienburg, the largest plantation in the colony and one of the world's largest sugar mills. The discovery and inclusion of 18 photographs, mostly of laborers and mostly from the early twentieth century, add a dimension generally lacking in other case studies of indentured labor. The book gives a clear overview of the political economy of the Dutch West Indies, describing Suriname's economic problems (falling sugar prices), plantation modernization (railroads, electricity, vacuum pans, steam boilers), and the debates over labor recruitment. Hoefte crafts solid chapters on the working life, health, culture, and demographic impact of the immigrants recruited from British India from 1873 to 1916 and from the Dutch East Indies from 1890 to 1939 (mostly after Indian migration ended).

Like other researchers on indentured labor, Hoefte is often frustrated by the lack of solid information on the motives and perceptions of the laborers, but she makes little effort to explore the ambiguities and contradictions in indentured labor as a way of resolving or testing historiographical debates about the degree of exploitation and liberation in the indentured labor experience. Instead, when faced with inadequate documentation, she simply imposes monolithic interpretations that consistently stress exploitation. She asserts that recruitment in India was "largely" due to the immigrants' misunderstanding of what they were signing and the recruiters' misrepresentation of the colonial situation (p. 34), when this is more likely a minority position. Hoefte grudgingly concludes that both males and females "may have gained some freedom by emigrating to Suriname" (p. 112), but presents only arguments that seek to minimize that gain. On the basis of very meager evidence, Hoefte concludes that the decision of the majority of the immigrants to settle permanently in Suriname, even though they were entitled to free passage home, "seems to have been based on negative rather than positive considerations" (p. 63); however, comparisons with other indentured and free immigrants groups might have suggested a more complex line of interpretation. The fact that some Indians returned home rich is dismissed with the statement that "The majority of these migrants in all likelihood made their money as traders, businessmen, and ushers, not as contract laborers" (p. 66), again with little evidence to back it up. Words such as "probably," "likely," "may," "presumably," and "undeniably" are used with distressing frequency to mask the complexity of the subject. In short, despite this volume's important contributions to the understanding of plantation labor in Suriname, its contribution to the larger debates about indentured labor is meager.

David Northrup
Boston College

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