There is a pressing need in indentured labor studies for new approaches to examining and conceptualizing the nature and dynamics of the global migrant labor system that scattered some 2.2 million indentured Asian laborers, two-thirds of whom were Indians, throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world between the 1830s and 1920s. In this revised version of his dissertation, published as part of Cambridge University Press's Global South Asians series, Reshaad Durgahee seeks to demonstrate how historical geography can deepen our understanding of the indentured Indian experience in Mauritius and Fiji between 1871 and 1916. Regrettably, his efforts have resulted in a seriously flawed work that makes only a modest contribution to our understanding of that experience.
Durgahee notes in his introduction that he wants to escape the conceptual and other limitations inherent in the historiographical propensity to examine the Indian indentured experience in various colonies in isolation from one another....
