'With Eyes of Wonder': Colonial Writing on Indentured Indians in British Guiana, 1838-1917

In the aftermath of slavery, the system of indenture (1838-1917) brought approximately half a million Indians to the Caribbean. The majority of this group settled in either British Guiana (now Guyana) or Trinidad. This monograph demonstrates that in British Guiana, the indenture scheme was habitually unstable owing not just to the actions of indentured Indians on sugar estates, but also the intervention of white colonists, including missionaries, magistrates and politicians whose written interventions helped to destabilise the system. By engaging with a wide variety of texts, this monograph challenges the binaries of `coloniser' and `colonised' by showing that during indenture, the line between the two was sometimes blurred. Further, this book engages with a wide variety of characters and texts to demonstrate that textual `creolisation' occurred in the way in which colonists became influenced by the emerging culture of colonial Guyana.