Blackness Across India and Jamaica, 1756–1865

Jamaica and South Asia were linked together by English imperial and commercial projects as early as the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the flow of indentured laborers from the Indian Ocean world to the Caribbean inaugurated a new chapter in a long history of transplanting ideas, seeds, commodities, humans, and visions of empire. While histories of race and racialization have been especially emphasized in scholarship on British imperialism in the Atlantic world, the historiography of South Asia has often only alluded to race while concentrating on the exclusions and hierarchies engendered by caste, community, and religion. This paper examines how British imperial officials deployed the language of blackness across Jamaica and India between the Seven Years War (1756-1763), a conflict that implicated both the so called East and West Indies, and the Rebellions in 1857 and 1865 in India and Jamaica respectively. In Jamaica, the association between enslavement and blackness was cemented through formal legal processes including the promulgation of slave codes in the seventeenth century itself. In South Asia, on the other hand, Britons used the category of “black” and associated terms not only to describe enslaved Africans in Presidency towns such as Madras and Bombay but also to refer to some sections of the local population, especially laborers considered menial. The regular appearance of “black” and more sporadically, the term “negro” in the archives of British governance in South Asia and the Indian Ocean highlights the necessity of thinking comparatively and connectively across two major British colonies that are often divided by the bounds of Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean studies. By considering the uses of the language of blackness, this paper also draws attention to how the categories of “white” as well as “Indian” evolved across hemispheres.