Colonial political economy

This article examines the position of time-expired labourers within the indenture labour regime, challenging the tendency in existing scholarship to treat them either as indistinguishable from freshly indentured workers or as a simple transition towards free wage labour. Drawing on primary and secondary sources from Assam and overseas colonies, it argues that time-expired labourers constituted a distinct and unstable category whose relative mobility and bargaining power unsettled plantation regimes. The article shows how planters responded through legal extensions of contracts, land policy, indebtedness, surveillance, and recruitment strategies to reassert control. By foregrounding time-expired labourers as historical actors, the article rethinks the dynamics of coercion, autonomy, and control within the indenture system.