Abstract
After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the nineteenth century, a new indentured labor regime arose in which tens of thousands of East Indians were ultimately transported to the British Caribbean colonies to serve as agricultural laborers. Many scholars in recent decades have analyzed this indentured labor system, which lasted from approximately 1838 to 1920, primarily in terms of its social and economic characteristics and the agency of its participants. This thesis adopts a fresh methodological approach by investigating British perceptions of these individuals in the island of Trinidad, as expressed in newspapers, travel narratives, speeches, and government correspondence, in order to better understand how East Indians figured in colonial Trinidadian society. In so doing it argues that while British perceptions maintained a certain degree of continuity throughout these decades, their emphases and governing anxieties also evolved in conjunction with socioeconomic, political, and ideological developments not only in the colony and the metropole, but indeed throughout the empire. As such this work strongly argues for the relevance of global contextual factors and the fruitful possibilities of discourse analysis in the field of imperial history.