Django posted:Will have to look more in to that theory.
I am aware in the early 1900's Jamaica,s population was around 1,000,000.
Jamaica was seen as a major source of labor by US interests who were involved in Latin America. It was an extremely over populated island with a labor force very willing to migrate. Once they migrated they suffered abuse from both their US employers and the local Latin authorities. They would have much preferred working in another British colony as the devil you know is better than the one that you don't.
It is also a fallacy that Guyana can support a huge population. The interior soils are useless for farming and the sugar industry wanted to have control over the use of arable lands on the coast. How many Indian immigrants moved to the interior at the time? And this despite the active gold, balata and timber industries that existed at the time. Almost none so this would have been just more people crowding the coast and exacerbating the already high unemployment levels which existed at the time.
This action was political and based on ethnic competition. The fact that the Indian gov't (which didn't even care about the poor of India itself) felt compelled to shut down indenture meant that the reality was that there was much abuse. The BGEIA was trying to sell a bill of goods to India to entice their cooperation and they didn't buy into it.