Colonial labor systems recruited Indian prisoners and persisted into the modern era.

Evidence

The use of restricted environments to recruit laborers and stop desertion evolved into the employment of prisoners from Indian jails, who were o√ered remission from their sentences in exchange for labor. Creating an Indian administration in occupied Iraq meant acquiring colonial knowledge, and developing the Indian colony there included introducing colonial legal codes and revenue surveys established by the British, as well as an initially Indian-led police force and government bureaucracy. The experiment in Mesopotamia lasted five years, allowing the British to turn India into a sub-center of the empire while also looking to other colonies, such as those in East Africa, for potential bureaucratic and legal structures to take to the new colony in Iraq. Indian soldiers and laborers were never to be permanent inhabitants of the new Iraq; they were used as a workforce to secure the gains of the British Empire (Metcalf 2007). However, this brief colonial encounter established a relationship to Indian laborers that persisted into the twenty-first century. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 70

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that this 1917-22 Iraqi encounter set a labor relationship ‘that persisted into the 21st century’ — what exact continuities does Rana trace? Worth chasing the payload chapters.