Metropolitan policies and colonial practices at the boys' reformatory in British Guiana.

Abstract

In 1860 the colonial government of Natal, on the southeastern coast of South Africa, secured permission to import Indian labourers under bonds of indenture. In so doing they were following in the footsteps of Mauritius and the colonies of the West Indies. For these colonies the recruitment of Indians had provided an alternative source of labour to that of slaves, who, after emancipation in 1833, disdained, whenever they could, the back-breaking work of cutting cane. A booming sugar market in Britain, with the fact that cane was well suited to the semi-tropical coast of Natal, annexed in 1843, offered some prospect of a remunerative crop to that colony's fledgling white settler community. Natal had never possessed a slave economy. Confronted by the powerful Zulu state, and with ample thinly populated tribal land available in the interior, the colonists had no hope of coercing the resident African population to submit to the discipline of plantation labour. So, enviously eyeing their neighbours in Mauritius, they campaigned for the right to import Indian labour until finally their entreaties met with success. The prospect of prosperity at last lay before this impoverished British colony, annexed with no visible objective other than to keep it out of the hands of the Boers.