Caribbean countries to request reparations for ‘indentured labour’ from former colonial powers

Caribbean nations are set to demand that Britain make reparations for indentured labour in addition to slavery, in a major expansion of the campaign to address colonialism. Countries that have pushed for payments on slavery are now planning to seek reparative justice surrounding the 500,000 indentured workers shipped from India to work on sugar plantations after African slaves were freed. Under the indenture system, workers agreed to work for a set number of years in exchange for a pay-off at the end, such as land or a return passage to their place of origin, but most never returned after being duped into their bonded labour. Exporting indentured labour to the Caribbean was pioneered by Sir John Gladstone, a 19th-century landowner in British Guiana, and father of future prime minister William Gladstone. Guyana, as it has been known since independence in 1966, received the most indentured labourers of any Caribbean colony, and its leaders are in favour of fresh action to secure reparations. President Mohammad Irfaan Ali told The Telegraph:  “All those nations that benefited from abominable systems need to do the morally right thing and to accept their complicity in historical wrongs.” He said leaders are “prepared to examine” the...