IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cge/wacage/177.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Unfree Labour: Did Indenture Reduce Labour Supply to Tea Plantations in Assam?

Author

Listed:
  • Gupta, Bishnupriya

    (University of Warwick)

  • Swamy, Anand

    (Williams College)

Abstract

Migration to tea plantations in Assam in the 19th century used indentured contracts. These contracts differed by conditions of harshness. Migration under the Special Act gained notoriety by giving tea planter the right of private arrest. Using a new set of migration by types of contract, the paper assesses if harsh terms of indenture discouraged labour flows. We find that regions using the harsh contract saw lower response to rise in the price of tea. Disaggregating by types of recruiter, we find that the response to market recruitment was high in all regions, but response to recruitment using community networks is statistically insignificant, suggesting that informational asymmetries may be an explanation for continuing migration despite concerns raised by the nationalist movement, social reformers and policy makers.

Suggested Citation

  • Gupta, Bishnupriya & Swamy, Anand, 2013. "Unfree Labour: Did Indenture Reduce Labour Supply to Tea Plantations in Assam?," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 177, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:177
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/177-2013_gupta.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Suresh Naidu & Noam Yuchtman, 2011. "Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor Market in 19th Century Industrial Britain," NBER Working Papers 17051, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Galenson, David W., 1984. "The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 44(1), pages 1-26, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Madhura Rao & Nadia Bernaz, 2020. "Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights in Assam Tea Plantations: A Business and Human Rights Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-22, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gillian Hamilton, 1999. "The Decline of Apprenticeship in North America: Evidence from Montreal," Working Papers hamiltng-99-01, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    2. Grubb, Farley, 2000. "The Statutory Regulation of Colonial Servitude: An Incomplete-Contract Approach," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 42-75, January.
    3. Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, 2015. "The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(1), pages 3-28, Winter.
    4. Bastian, Jacob E. & Black, Dan A., 2024. "Relaxing financial constraints with tax credits and migrating out of rural and distressed America," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 234(C).
    5. Eric Edmonds, 2007. "Institutional Influences on Human Capital Accumulation: Micro Evidence from Children Vulnerable to Bondage," Working Papers id:1109, eSocialSciences.
    6. Suresh Naidu & Yaw Nyarko & Shing-Yi Wang, 2016. "Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 124(6), pages 1735-1792.
    7. Sukkoo Kim, 2007. "Immigration, Industrial Revolution and Urban Growth in the United States, 1820-1920: Factor Endowments, Technology and Geography," NBER Working Papers 12900, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Luis Felipe Zegarra, 2020. "Living Costs and Real Wages in Nineteenth Century Lima: Levels and International Comparisons," Australian Economic History Review, Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 60(2), pages 186-219, July.
    9. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/4vc7skecu3q7u7s984ph8b1c5 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Suresh Naidu & Yaw Nyarko & Shing-Yi Wang, 2014. "Worker Mobility in a Global Labor Market: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates," NBER Working Papers 20388, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Dan A. Black & Lars Skipper & Jeffrey A. Smith & Jeffrey Andrew Smith, 2023. "Firm Training," CESifo Working Paper Series 10268, CESifo.
    12. David J. Miller & Zoltan J. Acs, 2017. "The campus as entrepreneurial ecosystem: the University of Chicago," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 49(1), pages 75-95, June.
    13. Guido Friebel & Sergei Guriev, 2006. "Smuggling Humans: A Theory of Debt-financed Migration," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 4(6), pages 1085-1111, December.
    14. Djajić, Slobodan & Vinogradova, Alexandra, 2013. "Undocumented migrants in debt," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 15-24.
    15. Galor, Oded & Munshi, Kaivan & Wilson, Nicolas, 2013. "Inclusive Institutions and Long-Run Misallocation," MPRA Paper 51643, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Ran Abramitzky & Leah Boustan, 2017. "Immigration in American Economic History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 55(4), pages 1311-1345, December.
    17. Rosenbloom, Joshua L., 2018. "The Colonial American Economy," ISU General Staff Papers 201802270800001039, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    18. Nunn, Nathan & Trefler, Daniel, 2014. "Domestic Institutions as a Source of Comparative Advantage," Handbook of International Economics, in: Gopinath, G. & Helpman, . & Rogoff, K. (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 0, pages 263-315, Elsevier.
    19. Aguirre, Alvaro, 2019. "Rebellions, Technical Change, and the Early Development of Political Institutions in Latin America," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 65-89.
    20. Jenny Bourne, 2022. "Double take: Abolition and the size of transferred property rights," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 103(7), pages 1706-1718, December.
    21. Nikolova, Elena & Nikolova, Milena, 2017. "Suffrage, labour markets and coalitions in colonial Virginia," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 108-122.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Jadhuram; Tea Plantations; Assam; migrant workers;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:177. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jane Snape (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.