The origins of Indian indentured migration to the Caribbean revealed the outsized ambition of the imperial state’s commitment to a more ‘useful’ empire. It was prepared to ship Indian labourers literally halfway round the world in pursuit of that ambition – by the hundreds of thousands over the eighty-year history of Indian indentured migration. This social-engineering scheme was highly improvisatory, in ways that were sometimes deadly to its poor subjects. If there had been enough ‘liberated’ African migrants to restore the threatened sugar monoculture of the British West Indies, Indians would never have been recruited. For bureaucrats and planters alike had concluded that the results of the initial 1840s experiment with Indian indentured labour had been, at best, mixed with respect to sugar production, and deadly to a great many of the migrants.