The primary source for indentured labour to the colonies was to be found in India, which became a British colony itself. China, Japan, and Africa were also large contributors to the overseas need for labour. Another, though smaller source, was to be found in the Pacific Islands. European nations, too, sent over indentured workers, but the government was often willing to subsidise such migrants, so fewer were forced into indenture for their passage abroad.

 By the mid-nineteenth century, various factors and developments made the indenturing of non-European labour in the Americas and Caribbean a viable possibility. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which brought millions of Africans to the New World in its four hundred-year history, had been largely abolished in European colonies by the middle of the nineteenth century, first by the Danish, and followed sporadically by other European nations. Slave labour had been vital to the production of sugar and the profitability of plantations, and in the first decades after abolition the productivity of the plantations was seriously compromised. Efforts by the British government to compensate planters for the loss of their slaves could satisfy neither the planters’ financial needs nor their need for labour as most freed slaves were unwilling to work in any capacity for their former owners. The wars for independence of many Latin American countries further disrupted the system of slavery, as slaves were often freed to fight and then sought land of their own with which to earn a living.

The labour of slaves, however, may have been productive enough to enhance the rapid economic growth of European nations through the industries of their colonies, although this is still the subject of intense historical debate. The failing production in the colonies as a result of the abolition of slavery caused planters to look to other markets for the inexpensive labour necessary to sustain and develop the economic profits of the plantations, and to establish new areas of development. Although planters originally looked to Europeans to work for them, often seeking to “whiten” their local areas, the low wages and arduous work deterred all but the poorest or most desperate Europeans willing to migrate across the Atlantic, and these migrants only partially relieved the demand for labour. As well, by this time, many of the tasks for which indentured labourers were required had become associated with slavery, so much so that white workers considered the work beneath them. However, the development and growth of European colonies heightened the need for labour as European demand increased for the crops produced in the colonies, and Western nations sought to expand their political and economic influence farther afield using settlers, capital, and new technology. At the forefront of this expansion was Great Britain, who had acquired such colonies as Trinidad from the Spanish in 1797, and British Guiana, which had been annexed from Holland in 1814. As well, European nations began to develop plantations in Southeast Asia, Australia, the Pacific, and South Africa. As well, European powers, and the United States, began looking to Asia in order to expand their influence, opening up trade with countries like India, China, and Japan, either by direct control or by forced negotiation. For example, the British had been colonising and controlling parts of India since the eighteenth century, and the East India Company had begun trading in the area before this date. The expansion of plantations in the latter half of the nineteenth century into previously uncultivated areas, due to ever-increasing European demands for sugar, coffee, tea, and chocolate, ensured a steady demand for new workers. These workers, in turn, were willing to migrate in order to improve their condition, as many areas from which they originated were experiencing increased population growth and impoverishment, as well as the disruption caused by Imperial expansion. For many, an overseas work term could ensure greater economic success than remaining at home. Also, it is important to realise that labour abroad was not always undertaken under contracts of indenture, although the conditions under which migrants often worked were little different or even worse than those under more formal contracts. What is important to remember is that, although there were general trends in the movement of migrants, the choice to migrate was, above all, an individual decision, and each situation compelling individuals to undertake a term of indentured servitude or other form of labour was unique.

Although the vast majority of indentured workers were employed in the Americas and Caribbean, other areas of the globe which were coming under European influence were also desperately in need of inexpensive labour. Thus, indentured workers were sent to almost every corner of the globe, from the South African developments in Natal and the Transvaal to other areas of Asia and even in Europe itself. No matter where these labourers found employment, however, they still had to deal with the realities of low wages, discrimination, and hard work.

India was the source for the greatest number of indentured workers to the New World, and approximately 1.3 million individuals crossed the oceans under contracts of indenture. Various factors pushed Indian migrants into seeking employment under indenture. One factor was a rich Indian history of migration and exploration. From the early middle ages, individuals had been migrating beyond India’s boundaries, extensively exploring and trading in the area of the Indian Ocean, but not settling the areas they visited. By the end of the eighteenth century, Indian traders, labourers, and some Indian slaves were to be found in Southeast Asia, Ceylon, and North and East Africa.

The British government was originally hesitant about allowing indentured Indian labour into their more distant Caribbean colonies, fearing that the practice would degenerate into a new system of slavery. Demands of the planters, however, as well as the belief that colonial subjects had the right to emigrate, even if it was under a system of indenture, served to alter government policy. Initial experiments with one-year terms of indenture were quickly extended and adopted by other European powers anxious to secure inexpensive labour from India. British control of India had itself altered conditions within the country that encouraged emigration, although the effects of British control on the number of migrants remains a contentious issue among historians. Developments such as the construction of railroads within India, however, undoubtedly facilitated the movement of those willing to migrate abroad. The disruption caused by the Indian Rebellion of 1857 also corresponded to an increase in the number of migrants, suggesting that the presence of the British did affect the numbers of Indians who went across the Pacific.

More importantly, other conditions within India, as in many other Asian countries, were changing to make migration more of a necessity than a choice. Altered economic conditions, political upheaval, ecological disasters such as droughts, floods, and famines, and overcrowding were causing increased internal migration as rural peasants sought work in the cities or as seasonal labourers. From 1800 to 1900 the population of India is estimated to have risen from 185 million to 285 million, putting pressure on rural resources and exacerbating conditions of poverty and famine. Famines resulting from crop failure produced large refugee populations, and departures across the Pacific peaked during these times of want. The Protector of Emigrants, writing in 1894, commented that because of the effects of famine, the Calcutta depot was filled with "half-starved adults and emaciated children […] the Calcutta depots eventually became asylums for a large number of people in a more or less anaemic and unhealthy condition." Although many Indian communities were close-knit and, in some cases, migration overseas actually violated certain caste restrictions, many individuals often felt compelled to abandon their homes and families and seek employment in other areas of India or across the ocean in an effort to improve their situations. It is important to note that, although there was a great deal of Indian migration as individuals searched for employment and economic stability, only a small portion of this total migratory population was funnelled into the overseas indentured trade.

Most of the Indians who accepted contracts of indenture were the socially and economically marginal, or those who had previous migratory work experience within India itself. For example, many of the casteless Dhangar people of northeastern India, who had experience working the indigo plantations of Bengal, risked the journey to Mauritius, an island off the coast of Madagascar, in the 1840’s for wages that were three times higher than they would have been at home. Generally, however, recruiters managed to obtain labourers from relatively broad social, religious, and caste backgrounds. In 1880, the Protector of Emigrants, although possibly seeking to justify the position of woman migrants, noted that many of the women seeking overseas employment were those "who [had] already gone astray and [were] therefore most anxious to avoid their homes and to conceal their antecedents, but [were] also at the same time unlikely to be received back into their families."

Those individuals who decided to undertake migration under indenture often had pressure to do so from agents within India. Known as an arkatia, this type of recruiter often received financial incentives to procure as many recruits as possible. These agents would locate likely candidates and, often with lofty promises of prosperity, would hand them over to an official, licensed recruiter who would then determine if the individuals were fit, informed, and willing to perform labour overseas. Fraudulent activities, however, were not generally resorted to, as there could be a financial loss should the fraudulently recruited individual change his or her mind. In spite of efforts to fully inform potential migrant workers, however, the huge numbers of recruits being processed meant that not everyone who boarded ships for abroad knew exactly what they were getting into. For example, one group of individuals destined for Surinam included a “batch of dancing girls and women of a similar description, with their male attendants. These people laughed at the idea of becoming agriculturalists.” In spite of this danger, the India trade, unlike the African or Chinese systems, for example, was designed to ensure the understanding and consent of its participants, and fraudulent behaviour did diminish as the trade progressed. The government of India also responded to reports of abuse involving their treatment in overseas estates. For example, accounts of the harsh conditions suffered by Indians sailing to the Danish colony of Saint Croix were such that the government subsequently refused the colony further labourers after only a single shipment of workers. Although the indentured labour system had ended by 1917, Indian labour continued to be employed overseas in large numbers until the 1930s, responding to labour demands in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Malaysia on the tea, rice, and rubber plantations. During the Depression and post-Depression eras, more Indians returned home than left, and emigration in this form had largely come to an end by 1938.

China provided the second largest population of indentured workers (often referred to as “coolies”) to the Americas and Caribbean, although the means by which labourers were induced to undergo the voyage across the ocean were often markedly different from those of India. The most obvious difference lies in the fact that China was not under direct foreign control, and the many different nationalities of European recruiters for Chinese labour were obliged to restrict their activities to a few coastal regions. Britain, however, had control of Hong Kong, and had opened five other Chinese port cities as a result of the First Opium War (1839-41). As well, the lack of an effective system of regulation because of the division of political authority between the Chinese and British governments, as well as the presence of other Europeans who had been granted special trading concessions, meant that both Western and Chinese recruiters were more at liberty to deceive and coerce potential recruits into signing a contract of indenture.

The push for Chinese workers to migrate in the nineteenth century rested on foundations of overseas migration established centuries earlier. In fact some of the earliest efforts at recruiting the Chinese focused on those migrants already located in Southeast Asia. Like India, China was also faced with a nineteenth century boom in population (which had risen from approximately 150 million in 1700 to 430 million in 1850), which caused economic and social conditions to deteriorate. As well, there were further disruptions precipitated as a result of internal conflicts and wars against foreigners, such as the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864. Because of these disruptions, as well as natural disasters such as droughts and floods, many Chinese migrated internally, either to the northern regions of Manchuria or to the coastal cities, which became ports for further migrations across the ocean.

European-organised transport of Chinese migrants did not begin until the 1840s, for a number of reasons. Although the Chinese were seen as hard workers, many Chinese men often planned on returning to China and were, therefore, unwilling to undertake a journey to places where return would be difficult or where pay would be low. As well, there was the fact that emigration was technically illegal under Chinese law. The first transport of Chinese workers came in 1843, when 582 individuals were indentured for work terms in Mauritius. The experiment was a success, and between 1847 and 1852 the trade grew rapidly, largely under two British firms. Because of the illegality of the trade in China, recruiters, or “crimps” often resorted to deception to gain recruits, and would sometimes bring debtors or prisoners of clan wars, and would even resort to kidnapping. European shippers, for their part, had extremely uneven screening procedures and minimal health requirements. The abuses of the system were so bad that they sometimes led to mutinies on board the ships. One Chinese man, who was onboard during one of these mutinies, recounted that after the workers had been “beguiled” onto the ship:

Reforms were implemented to stop the most flagrant abuses of the system, although scandals continued to surface. It took more than twenty years before the Ch’ing court of China became directly involved in the trade and although efforts to regulate the trade continued, the publicity of abuses aided efforts to stop the trade altogether, and the last ships destined for the Americas left China in 1874. In spite of this, Chinese labourers continued to enter into contracts of indenture, and would migrate to the Americas in search of employment without signing such contracts. As well, the use of indentured labour from China was once again allowed by both Europeans and the imperial court in China in 1893, although this time the trade was strictly regulated on both ends to prevent abuses. Chinese labour was not only required in the Americas, but was sought in other, European-controlled areas of the globe. For example, from 1904-07, over 60,000 Chinese labourers were hired to work the gold mines in South Africa. Recruits came from the areas of Northern China, which, because of severe flooding and the unrest of the Boxer Rebellion, contained a large population of refugees. In the last years of World War One, at least 140,000 Chinese contract labourers were employed as far away as Europe, where they worked mainly in support roles such as burying the many dead.

Unlike India and China, Japan had little history of overseas exploration or migration before the period of large-scale indenture, although there was a tradition of young men leaving home in order to seek their fortunes in other areas of Japan. These individuals were known as dekasegi, a term which came to be applied to those travelling overseas for contract labour. In the half century before the First World War there was an increased migration between rural communities and to growing cities, from which overseas labour originated. Also unlike the situation in China, the new reformist Meiji government in Japan imposed strict regulations for the recruitment of its denizens, preventing many of the abuses of the system, which were so prevalent in China.

Japan was forced to end its self-imposed isolation with the 1853 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron. The contact caused rapid social changes and resulted in displaced and impoverished Japanese as Japan began a process of rapid modernisation, especially in the slums of Yokohama, which was the centre for European diplomats and merchants. A fire, which destroyed most of this city in 1866, further disrupted the lives of those living on the margins. Less than two years after the fire the first Japanese contract labourers were on their way to Hawaii for three-year contracts. In the following decade almost 30,000 people emigrated to Hawaii on three year contracts, of which about half decided to remain in Hawaii or travel to the United States after their term ended. By 1907 there were 125,000 more Japanese in Hawaii, and growing communities of Japanese overseas came to be viewed as a source of national power. With the 1908 restriction of Japanese immigration by the United States, Japanese workers began to arrive in South America, where by 1924 there were almost 26,000 in Brazil and 21,000 in Peru. Indentured contracts were made illegal in the United States in 1885, although the status of immigrants still resembled that of the indentured labourer rather than that of the free immigrant.

The employment of Africans by Europeans in their colonial holdings was more directly related to the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of all slaves. Since Europeans did not believe that rescued Africans could safely be returned to their homes or fend for themselves in the colonies, they were often persuaded or coerced into the European labour system. In many respects this system was initially little different from the slave trade, with long terms of apprenticeship, but by the 1830’s liberated slaves from Sierra Leone were supported by the government for six months and given tools and land, and missionaries gave religious “support”. In 1840 restrictions on the recruitment of liberated Africans were lifted by the British, but initial attempts at recruiting Africans from Sierra Leone were largely unsuccessful as there was little impetus compelling individuals to venture abroad. The British government stepped in to regulate the system in 1843, without much change. Those Africans who may have benefited from the system were hampered by fears of re-enslavement and harsh treatment. Even Africans from neighbouring regions of the country, such as the Kru people from present-day Liberia, resisted long-term work contracts, refused to bring their wives with them, and disliked the low wages offered for plantation work in the Caribbean. Recruiting Africans from other areas of the continent was equally unsuccessful, largely because there were no pressing factors pushing Africans from their homeland. Land was in abundant supply, resulting in an absence of an African labour market from which to draw. As well, the means for quick and easy transportation were lacking in Africa, which limited individuals’ mobility, even if they had been willing to travel. Using recaptured slaves from other vessels and persuading them through isolation and promises to enter work terms in the British colonies was a finite venture insofar as the traffic in slaves was illegal and was rapidly coming to a halt.

The French (and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch) attempted to gain workers for their colonies by looking to enslaved Africans within Africa itself, purchasing slaves’ freedom and then binding them to fourteen-year contracts of labour. In 1854, these Africans began to be transported across the Atlantic to work six-year terms in French Caribbean colonies. During the eight years in which the system functioned, it is estimated that approximately 20,400 Africans were sent to the French colonies, both as the product of this system of “ransoming” and as voluntary contract labourers. Portuguese colonists in Angola, forced to end slavery in 1858, began apprenticing Africans to their former masters in a system almost identical to that of slavery itself, and which lasted until 1875. After this time, any African not already working for the Portuguese in Angola could be forced to sign a five-year labour contract for very low wages. Captives taken in the Portuguese “pacification” of the hinterlands of the colony provided more forced contracts of labour. Between 1876 and 1915, approximately 97,000 contract labourers were shipped to the Portuguese overseas colonies of São Tomé and Principe. Although these workers’ contracts provided for free passage home, only a handful ever managed to return, suggesting that the system was little different from slavery.

It has been estimated that only about ten per cent of all Africans who entered into contracts of indenture did so voluntarily. In general, the system of recruiting free African labour to fill the gap left by slaves was generally unsuccessful and failed to satisfy the demand of the colonial planters, largely because, although there was the pull resulting from the demand of planters, there were no corresponding factors pushing Africans into seeing voluntary indenture as a viable means of employment, unless they were coerced into signing contracts.

Although whaling vessels had sometimes taken on extra hands from the islands in the Pacific Ocean, it was not until the early 1860’s that islanders began to be recruited on a larger scale to work on plantations. Early efforts to recruit labourers from Easter Island, Polynesia, and Micronesia for Peru and Hawaii proved too expensive in terms of money and lives for it to be a viable contributor to the labour market. However, 90,000 individuals from the southwest Pacific basin were recruited to the British colonies of Queensland and Fiji, and approximately 16,000 Pacific islanders went to German Samoa, French Polynesia, and New Caledonia. Like the trade with China, there was initially much deception and kidnapping of workers by private recruiters; however greater demand initiated British involvement and regulation, which made the trade more like that in India. Unlike India, however, recruiters had to sail, not to one port, but to dozens of harbours before obtaining enough workers for one cargo. The reasons prompting the islanders themselves to enter into indentured contracts are difficult to ascertain, as there appears to have been little to push them into seeking employment overseas. Trade goods brought by returning migrants may have enticed some into travelling abroad, while the sense that labour abroad was an adventure or rite of passage may have influenced others. However, the reasons were much more complex, and there were undoubtedly cultural and economic factors prompting the movement away from home and family.