Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia

Gwyn Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135759162
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: History

The abolition of slavery in and around the Western Indian Ocean have been little studied. This collection examines the meaning of slavery and its abolition in relation to specific indigenous societies and to Islam, a religion that embraced the entire region, and draws comparisons between similar developments in the Atlantic system. Case studies include South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Benadir Coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. This volume marks an important new development in the study of slavery and its abolition in general, and an original approach to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia regions.

Introduction: Slavery and other forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World¹
GWYN CAMPBELL

Introduction

This volume is the first of two containing an unparalleled number of specialist studies of slavery and abolition across the Indian Ocean World. As such, they represent an important advance in slavery studies—a field which, except for a handful of pioneering works,² is still largely dominated by the history of the Atlantic slave world. However, as these papers demonstrate, the essential features of the slave-trade and of slavery in the Indian Ocean world contrast sharply with those of the transatlantic slave-trade and plantation slavery in the Americas. This volume examines the meaning of slavery in the Indian Ocean region up to the period of European economic and political predominance in the nineteenth century, while the second volume focuses on the origin and impact and abolitionist impulses in the context of the rise of the international economy and of European colonialism.

The Indian Ocean World

For those who place Europe at the centre of the development of ‘world’ systems of trade and production, the term ‘Indian Ocean world’ is probably either new or associated with Asian cultures which in many conventional Eurocentric histories are portrayed as possessing insuperable social and political obstacles to modernization. From this perspective, economic development, where it occurred in the Asian region, was a result of external, specifically European, forces. However, some scholars have recently argued that Asia, not Europe, forged the first ‘global’ economy, and did so at a considerably earlier date than previously thought.

Adapting Ferdinand Braudel’s concept of a Mediterranean ‘maritime’ economy, K.N.Chaudhuri, and later André Wink, argued that an Asia-Indian Ocean ‘global’ economy emerged alongside Islam from the seventh century, and that Europeans achieved global dominance only in the eighteenth century. Others date the start of the Asia-Indian Ocean global economy to between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Andre Gunder Frank considers that it may well have arisen much earlier, and that European dominance was achieved only in the nineteenth century with industrialization and the emergence of a truly international economy.³ Although these revisionists have largely omitted Africa from their analysis, contributors to these volumes demonstrate that eastern and northeastern Africa, which possessed linkages to the Middle East, South and South-East Asia, and the Far East, formed an integral part of the Asia-Indian Ocean economy.⁴ Therefore, the entire area from the Cape to Cairo to Calcutta to Canton and beyond forms what is here termed the Indian Ocean world (hereafter ‘IOW’).

Slavery: Conventional Definitions

In the Western tradition, slavery is contrasted with freedom: whereas a ‘free’ individual enjoyed basic rights of citizenship, choice of occupation and lifestyle, and security of person and property, the slave was a chattel with hereditary status. The slave owner, who legally could punish, sell or transfer a slave, and separate a slave mother from her children or male companion, controlled the slave’s productive and reproductive capacities. Slaves thus formed a separate economic group, a ‘chattel’ class that possessed no communality of interests with the ‘free’ working class. Some posit that where slave labour predominated, as on slave plantations, the economy was characterized by a ‘slave mode of production’.⁵ Further defining features of plantation slavery in the Americas were violence, employed to enslave and to force the slave to work, and ‘outsider’ status, as slaves were overwhelmingly of foreign origin. They were also physiognomically distinct. In the Americas, where colour was a feature of the slave-free divide, ‘race’ has become a central issue in the historiography of slavery. In addition, slave owners characterized slaves as products of uncivilized communities.⁶

Slavery in the IOW Context

Views of plantation slavery in the Americas have largely formed the context for research into slavery in the ‘non-European’ world. Attention focussed first on western Africa, source of the bulk of the 10 million to 12 million slaves shipped to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Subsequently it expanded to include other African slave sources, African slave exports to the Middle East and European islands in the Indian Ocean, and intra-African slave-trades and systems of slavery. Separate projects have investigated Asian slave systems.⁷

The picture that has emerged from this research is one of complex trans-IOW slave-trades that, unlike the transatlantic system, started well before the Common Era, remained vigorous into the twentieth century, and in some areas are still maintained. Some scholars consider that the slave-trade was greatly stimulated by the rise of Islam, although more important was the demand for menial labour that accompanied the concomitant growth in the IOW global economy—as occurred again with the rapid expansion of the international economy in the nineteenth century.⁸

The IOW slave-trade was multidirectional and changed over time. East African slaves were exported in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to other regions of Africa, such as Ethiopia and Egypt, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and to a lesser degree to the Far East. From the mid-eighteenth century, export markets in Africa expanded and considerable numbers of East Africans were shipped to Zanzibar, Pemba, Somalia, Madagascar, the Mascarenes, and some to Cape Town. They were also exported to Portuguese enclaves in India and the Americas. Malagasy slaves were sent in small quantities to Muslim markets, and to European settlements in the Americas, the Cape and Batavia and from the mid-eighteenth century in considerable numbers to Reunion and Mauritius. Indian slaves were shipped to Indonesia, Mauritius, Cape Town and the Middle East. However, most slaves to the Middle East initially originated from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Africa. These were joined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by slaves from the Makran coast of Iran, some from Western India and a few from Indonesia and China.⁹ Indonesians were despatched mainly to markets across South-East Asia and to Cape Town, while Indochinese and Korean slaves were exported to China, and, in the nineteenth century, Chinese slaves were sent to Singapore and San Francisco. In all of these trades, sources, markets, routes, and slave functions varied considerably.¹⁰

It is currently impossible to estimate with any precision the number of slaves traded in the IOW given the duration of the slave-trade there, the limited nature of extant records, and the fact that, in contrast to the Atlantic system, IOW slaves rarely constituted a specialist cargo. However, slaves certainly comprised between 20 and 30 per cent of the population of many IOW societies, rising to 50 per cent and over in parts of Africa and in Indonesian ports.¹¹ The slave-trade in the IOW involved overland and maritime routes. It started at least 4000 years ago, experienced a number of periods of growth, as in the last centuries BCE and first centuries CE, and during the eras of commercial expansion that accompanied the expansion of Islam in the late first millennium and the international economy in the nineteenth century.¹²

In the nineteenth century, as the IOW slave-trade peaked, it came under increasing international scrutiny, which induced slavers to adopt indirect routes and pass slaves off as non-slave porters, sailors, domestics, and even as children or other kin.¹³ Unlike the transatlantic slaving system, which was dominated by European finance, ships and personnel, indigenous agents, coastal Chinese, Bugis and ‘Malays’ in the eastern sector, and coastal Arabs and Indians, notably Gujeratis, in the western sector, largely funded and ran the multiple IOW maritime slave-trades.¹⁴ Moreover, it is possible that the greatest IOW slave traffic was overland, notably within Africa, Hindu India and the Confucian Far East.¹⁵

Overall, it is clear that the structure of slaving and slavery in the IOW differed considerably from that of the Atlantic world. The contrast becomes even starker when the validity of conventional characteristics of Atlantic world slavery is tested in the IOW historical context.

Chattel

On the Atlantic world plantations, a slave was defined in terms of the market as a chattel. Some scholars argue that a slave in the IOW similarly constituted a ‘person-as-property’, who could be freely bought, sold and transferred.¹⁶ It is in the IOW that the world’s first known legal documents referring to the sale of slaves have been discovered—the Ur-Nammu tablets (c.2300 BCE) of Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq.¹⁷ A lively traffic in ‘people-as-property’ has persisted ever since in the IOW where an individual or group could ‘own’ slaves; corporate slave property appears to have been widespread in ancient India and remained common in Africa into the nineteenth century.¹⁸

Nevertheless, there is no consensus as to the meaning of slavery in the IOW. Critical here is the issue of language. For instance, in nineteenth-century Somalia different terms employed to denote slaves included Jareer, Bantu, Mji...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour In the Indian Ocean World
• Slavery: A Question of Definition
• A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave-Trade, c.1730–1830
• The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration In the Indian Ocean During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery Among Bonded Africans In the Indian Ocean World, c.1750–1962
• Violent Capture of People for Exchange On Karen-Tai Borders In the 1830s
• Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth In Indonesia, 1600–1910
• Forced Labour Mobilization In Java During the Second World War
• The Structure of Slavery In the Sulu Zone In the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Slavery and Colonial Representations In Indochina from the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
• Slaves and Forms of Slavery In Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries)
• Nobi: A Korean System of Slavery
• A Theme In Variations: A Historical Schema of Slaving In the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions
• Notes On Contributors