Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract called an " indenture ", may be entered voluntarily for a prepaid lump sum , as payment for some good or service (e.g. travel), purported eventual compensation, or debt repayment.
Labourers were signed up for five years and were provided with a return passage at the end of this term, but were to be subject to Dutch law. The first ship carrying Indian indentured labourers arrived in Suriname in June 1873 followed by six more ships during the same year.
The labor-intensive cash crop of tobacco was farmed in the American South by indentured laborers in the 17th and 18th centuries. [49] Indentured servitude was not the same as the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were taught, but similarities do exist between the two, since both require a set period of work.
The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport, and on construction sites. [79]
The vast majority of indentured labourers in Guyana came from North India, most notably the Bhojpur and Awadh regions in the Hindi Belt of the present-day states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. A significant minority also came from Southern India. [1] Among the immigrants, there were also labourers from other parts of South Asia.
The contracts of the indentured labourers, which they called girmit (agreements), required them to work in Fiji for a period of five years. Living conditions on the sugar cane plantations, on which most of the girmityas (indentured labourers) worked, had poor standards which resembled that of slavery. Hovels known as "coolie lines" dotted the ...
The word girmit represented an Indian pronunciation of the English word "agreement" - from the indenture "agreement" of the British Government with labourers from the Indian subcontinent. [1] The agreements specified the workers' length of stay in foreign parts and the conditions attached to their return to the British Raj . [ 2 ]
Half of an indenture document of 1723 showing the randomly cut edge at the top. An indenture is a legal contract that reflects an agreement between two parties. Although the term is most familiarly used to refer to a labor contract between an employer and a laborer with an indentured servant status, historically indentures were used for a variety of contracts, including transfers and rents of ...