<p>This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.</p><p>The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.</p><p>Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.</p> / Dissertation

Magister Commercii - MCom / The purpose of this research study is to explore the variables that contribute to improving the process of recruiting and retaining rural doctors within the South African context. The aim is to explore rural doctors’ perceptions of the role which the rural community can and ought to play in respect of the latter process. A basic recognition is that the emphasis on the Mainstream Approach (which elevates health workforce planning and management as well as market-related interventions and solutions) cannot exclusively achieve the desired result of effective and efficient recruitment and retention of rural doctors. The ‘active’ role which communities can and ought to play in the recruitment/ retention process, is an overlooked and neglected aspect within the South African research and healthcare service-delivery context. Even though the notion of collaborative management and governance of human resources within the health sector is generally mandated from a policy and legislative perspective, the practical manifestation and implementation thereof remain limited or at best piece-meal. An alternative governance model with reference to the humanresources- in-health system outlines the Partnership Approach advocating the need for the establishment of practical working relationships, amongst an identified range of multiple-stakeholders. This study examines the notions of ‘passive’ vis-à-vis ‘active’ community participation equated to the Utilitarian and Community Empowerment/ Development Perspectives continuum. The study introduces the ‘Principle of Balancing Model’ as well as the notion of a ‘hybrid perspective’ as key underpinnings of an efficacious rural-doctor recruitment and retention process.