The British Empire was, in many ways, contingent on trade and commerce. British merchants helped expand the empire into newer territories, while planters consolidated imperial hold over these newly acquired territories through settlement and commodity production. They played a particularly important role in procuring, employing and legalising the indenture trade. The continuation of indentureship for about a century, and the resumption of indentured emigration in 1842 after its brief suspension in 1839, was a direct consequence of relentless pressure from merchants and planters. Any understanding of the indenture debates, then, is incomplete without a thorough discussion of merchant and planter arguments in defence of indenture. Although there has been substantive work on the West India lobby and planter arguments in the context of slavery, pro-indenture arguments have remained peripheral to the histories of Indian indenture, and indeed to the histories of the British Empire.1 Most works on indenture debates focus on anti-indenture protest – a narrative that under-represents the voices of merchants and planters who decried prohibition and used their significant political and commercial influence to shape post-slavery labour regulations.

By situating merchant arguments in Calcutta within a global network of pro-indenture letters, petitions, publications and reports, this chapter inserts merchant and planter voices into the narrative. Abolition had created labour crises in plantocracies that ranged from permanent decline of the sugar industry in Jamaica, to decline and slow recovery in British Guiana, to fast and successful recovery in Mauritius. With the increasing strength of anti-slavery and anti-indenture lobbies, planters and merchants not only had to prove the need for an alternative source of labour but also demonstrate that Indian labourers were the most well suited for this post-slavery regime.