Fragments of empire

When Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833, sugar planters in the Caribbean found themselves facing the prospect of paying working wages to their former slaves. Cheaper labor existed elsewhere in the empire, however, and plantation owners, along with the home and colonial governments, quickly began importing the first of what would eventually be hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers from India.

In Fragments of Empire, Madhavi Kale draws extensively on the archival materials from this period, reading planters' correspondence, legal documents, newspaper reports, imperial papers, and speeches. She argues that imperial administrators sanctioned and authorized distinctly biased accounts of post-emancipation labor conditions and participated in devaluing and excluding alternative perspectives.

As she does this she highlights the ways in which historians, by relying on these biased sources, have perpetuated the acceptance of a privileged perspective on imperial British history.