Summary: This article aims to refocus the analysis framework in which Indian labour in the form of contract servitude has been considered — supplied from India colonial to cane plantations in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Fiji Islands, among others. Although contract servitude is usually treated in isolation or is considered as a ‘new slavery system’ (Tinker, 1974), this article takes the interventions of Lisa Lowe (2015) and Clare Anderson (2009) to assert that contract servitude as a ‘colonial innovation’ (Anderson, 2009) should be seen in close connection with transatlantic slave trafficking and colonial criminal settlements, and the ways such connected systems allow for a change and transformation of the British empire between the 18th and 19th centuries. In accordance with the budgets of this edition, this article uses Exit West’s imaginative space of Mohsin Hamid (2017) and Sea of Poppies of Amitav Ghosh (2008) to argue that the system of contract easement and the current border industrial complex offer us specific similarities allowing for a productive comparison. Ghosh’s representation of contract servitude, I maintain, upholds the central contradiction of liberalism of the mid-19th century, which liberal colonial narratives imagine as a successful overcoming of slavery through freedom in the form of extended free trade, even though they directly demand and obscure colonial violence and deny the same freedoms to certain racialised bodies, such as bonded workers. Similarly, Hamid’s novelty allows a relief to the current manifest tension between the neoliberal fantasy of the flow of goods, labour and capital without borders and regulations, and the recent border fortification, a dissonance that repeats the dysonances of liberalism. In an effort to unite a boundary of historical moments that expose the faulty lines of the liberal and capitalist fantasies of freedom, I compare the contractual servitude of the border industrial complex in order to demonstrate in the end how the fortification of borders is not in fact opposed, but promotes neoliberal wishes of open borders.