Colonialism, Capitalism and the Discourse of Freedom

Summary

In the history and historiography of labour servitude, the ideology of modernity and progress looms large. Thus it was with bitter irony that a British officer described the miserable condition of a labourer in late nineteenth-century colonial India: “Steam, the great civilizer, has not done much for this man, although the railroad runs within a few hundred yards of his door.” The persistence of the miserably poor existence was bad enough, but truly appalling was the fact that the introduction of modern industry had not set the labourer free. The poor labourers, or kamias as they were called locally, had seen modernity whizz past them without carrying them along in its journey to progress and freedom.

The expectation that the abolition of unfreedom, even if it was “a very long time in coming”, was bound to happen with “the advance of modern ideas, open communications and opportunities for industrial labour” was part of an ideology rooted in the post-Enlightenment belief that freedom constituted the natural human condition. This post- Enlightenment discourse enunciated two fundamental propositions. First, that free labour was the natural and the normative form. Thus, even as the Enlightenment philosophes offered a tortuous defence of the enslavement of Africans, they also represented freedom as the essence of humanity and servitude as its negation. Indeed, Adam Smith attacked slavery as a system of restraints that stifled the slaves' pursuit of their self-interests and impeded the development of free labour.