Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery

The 18th and 19th centuries were a time where Britain owned and operated colonies throughout the entire world. There was not any given moment in time where the sun did not shine on a portion of British soil from the beaches of the Bohemian sugar islands, to the horn of Africa, to the mountains of the Himalayas. These vast stretches of colonies of course were acquired through the destruction of indigenous people and built tall and glorious on the broken backs of slaves. However when in 1838 the British government outlawed the trade and use of slaves, labor was still needed to operate the many plantations throughout the Britain of the new and old world. So in an effort to preserve their financial interests the British ventured into the lands of Asia, especially India, in search of a new labor force. They lured the unsuspecting peoples of these lands to mass depots where one stamp of their finger to a contract was all that was needed. They were signing their lives over to the British empire. These new indentured laborers were sent to the very posts that the former "freed" slaves were once forced into, to be driven by the same cracker and watched by the same overseer. This secret slave trade of contracted laborers spanned far beyond that of the "freedom" date in 1838. In fact this secret slavery stretched well up until World War I in the early twentieth century. These modern slaves were eventually given French and British citizenship during the 1920's after nearly 100 years of unjust and toilsome labor.