Indentured Indian workers and the politics of race, caste, and sanitation at sea and in colonial South Africa, c.1860–1911

In the mid-nineteenth century, the British Empire was facing a sanitation crisis. Epidemics transported through faster steamships imperilled the imperial economy, threatened labour productivity, and restricted the oceanic mobility of its subjects. However, finding a cheap sanitary workforce that could remove disease-carrying night soil (a euphemism for human excreta) on ships and in colonies was challenging. Several colonies were experiencing labour shortages, and the British officials considered poor white European seamen to be racially too superior, and West African sailors to be too indolent to perform sanitary duties on ships. Through the case study of Natal, a British colony in South Africa, this article shows how, given changing racial sensibilities and labour shortages, officials turned to lower-caste indentured Indian labourers to meet the needs for sanitation at sea and in colonies. While the history of how Indian indentured labour filled the labour gap in sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery in 1833 is well known, the centrality of lower-caste indentured Indian labourers in the sanitation infrastructure that made British imperial expansion possible remains largely undocumented. Contrary to dominant historical viewpoints, which suggest that indentured labour flattened caste-based occupational structures, this history of sanitation reveals a deeper entanglement between caste and indentured labour.