Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia

Bonds of Resistance

Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, Michael Salman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136795664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2004. This book - previously published as a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition - provides pioneering studies on the nature and structure of resistance to forms of bondage in Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

A Serious and Alarming Daily Evil: Marronage¹ and Its Legacy in Mauritius and the Colonial Plantation World

Richard B. Allen

In August 1838, chief of police John Finniss advised the governor of Mauritius on the need to increase the size of the colony’s police force. Besides noting an absence of officers in the island’s rural districts and a general increase in crime, Finniss observed that government expenditure on the chasseurs de police had declined dramatically. While he appreciated that the impending emancipation of the colony’s ‘apprentices’² seemingly obviated the need for a force to hunt runaway former slaves, the police chief argued that the chasseurs were still needed to pursue the fugitive workers who continued to commit ‘all kinds of depradations’ on local estates, depradations that had ‘become a Serious and alarming evil daily increasing since the introduction of Indian labourers’.³

Finniss’s comments come as no surprise given the depth of the Mauritian experience with slavery. Slaves first reached the island shortly after its occupation by the Dutch in 1638, and marronage became part of colonial life no later than mid-1642 when 52 of 105 bondmen landed on the island earlier that year fled into its heavily wooded interior shortly after their arrival.⁴ Runaway slaves likewise quickly became a fact of life for the settlers who occupied Mauritius following its colonization in 1721 by the French Compagnie des Indes.⁵ An average of four to five per cent of the island’s slave population marooned each year during the last third of the eighteenth century; during the early 1820s this rate climbed to 11–13 per cent.⁶ The abolition of slavery in 1835 did not end this problem. An average of 7.7 per cent of the colony’s apprentices were apprehended for desertion each year between 1835 and 1837, a figure that may represent only half of all such illegal absences.⁷

Under such circumstances, Finniss’s desire to maintain an adequate police force as the demise of the apprenticeship system approached was not unexpected. However, if many of the police chief’s comments on this subject are rather pro forma, his argument to preserve the chasseurs is an arresting one precisely because he consciously posits a connection between the old problem of fugitive slaves and the new one of controlling the thousands of indentured Indian workers who now laboured in the colony’s cane fields. As the police chief knew only too well, many of these Indian ‘servants’ had followed in the footsteps of the island’s slaves and deserted their ‘masters’. Problematic reports indicate that at least 2.4 per cent of these new servants did so during 1838 and 1839.⁸

This absenteeism soon climbed to impressive levels. Colonial officials estimated that six per cent of 35,000 Indian estate workers had deserted their employers during 1845, while another 11 per cent were temporarily absent without leave. The following year, 7.7 per cent of 33,651 estate workers were described as deserters while an additional 6.2 per cent were described as having been absent from work for less than two weeks.⁹ The passage of time did nothing to ameliorate this problem. In 1855, the colony’s acting governor castigated Indian vagrancy as ‘an evil … fraught with moral and social mischief’ and noted that Government’s ‘most strenuous efforts’ were directed to the ‘removal of this monster evil’.¹⁰ Thousands continued to be charged with desertion, illegal absence and vagrancy each year during the 1850s and 1860s as the colonial government employed measures similar to those used against maroon slaves to suppress illegal absence by Indian workers.¹¹ The royal commissioners who investigated the condition of Indian immigrants in 1872 appreciated the similarities between the pre- and post-emancipation systems of labour control on the island. William E. Frere and Victor A. Williamson noted that the ‘traditions of slavery’ still prevailed in the colony, and reported that the police still conducted periodic ‘maroon hunts’ under the authority of ordinances modelled on the old fugitive slave laws.¹²

Labour Resistance in Colonial Plantation Historiography

Labour control and resistance figure prominently in reconstructions of ‘master – servant’ relations in the colonial plantation world. Studies have demonstrated that many slaves sought to regain their freedom or at least limit the demands made upon their persons and lives and employed various strategies and stratagems to do so. One of the more common of these ‘weapons of the weak’¹³ was to maroon, or run away from their masters. The scale of this activity has led some historians to argue that marronage was the most common form of slave resistance. Although such assertions cannot be verified, the archival record leaves little doubt that marronage was the most consistently public manifestation of slave resistance.

These studies have also revealed the extent to which the measures taken to maintain order in slave regimes were shaped by fear of maroon activity. Slave owners, especially in the Americas, did not have to look far for evidence of what might happen if fugitive slaves were not controlled; maroon communities that threatened the local socio-economic order had existed in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico and Surinam.¹⁴ Students of plantation societies have long acknowledged that such fears help to explain why fugitive slaves were often punished harshly.¹⁵ The violence directed against maroons has been viewed in turn as a manifestation of colonial paranoia and racism, a major element of class exploitation, or evidence that coercion was the cement that held these societies together.¹⁶

While there is a substantial literature on fugitive slaves, and maroon communities in particular, historians have paid less attention to labour control and resistance in the post-emancipation colonial world, at least until relatively recently.¹⁷ Histories of Mauritius, for example, usually do little more than discuss labour relations after 1835 in the same terms used by nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry which summarized local desertion and vagrancy ordinances, described governmental responses to illegal absence and vagrancy, and recounted the details of indentured workers’ living and working conditions.¹⁸ Much of the work on social control elsewhere in the post-1834 colonial plantation world is similarly preoccupied with narrative recitatives of the legal and quasi-legal dimensions of the indentured experience¹⁹ in which these workers are frequently characterized as victims of the ‘new system of slavery’ that first arose in post-emancipation Mauritius.²⁰

Although this scholarship has shed substantial light on labour control and resistance in colonial plantation systems before and after emancipation, a striking feature of this historiography is a widespread failure to address issues central to a fuller understanding of how order was maintained in these societies and the impact desertion, illegal absence and vagrancy had on colonial life. Basic questions about the act of desertion itself often remain unasked: How many slaves/indentured workers deserted each year? What percentage of the slave or indentured population engaged in such acts? How long did desertions last and under what circumstances did they come to an end? What were the demographic and occupational characteristics of these deserters? We have long appreciated that assessing the impact of slave trading requires some sense of the number of people who were swept up in this commerce. The same holds true for discussions of labour control and resistance.

A second source of concern is the rather ahistorical quality of earlier work on social control in the colonial plantation world.²¹ Once again, basic questions remain unasked and unanswered: To what extent and in what ways did desertion and illegal absence change over time? Why did it do so (or why not)? Coming to terms with these questions requires not only counting the workers who deserted each year, but also being sensitive to changes in the ideology of desertion.²² Others have reminded us that plantation labour relations were inherently complex and that social control in such systems entailed the use of persuasion and accommodation as well as coercion.²³ There is no reason to assume that the ways in which slaves, indentured labourers and colonial whites conceptualized and approached illegal absence and desertion were any less multifaceted or malleable over time.

Several other analytical deficiencies are additional sources of concern. Much earlier work on labour resistance has been rightly characterized as largely descriptive and lacking in analytical content,²⁴ and the same holds true for some of the most recent scholarship on fugitive slaves.²⁵ Attempts to analyse local systems of labour control and resistance tend in turn to examine these activities within limited socio-economic and political contexts. Studies of maroonage frequently make little reference, for instance, to the sizable free populations of colour that existed in many colonies by the early nineteenth century, much less to their economic resources or their attitudes toward and relationships with local slaves. Work on peasant protest in southern Asia underscores the importance of analysing desertion within ‘whole’ contexts.²⁶ Lastly, this reluctance to adopt a more holistic perspective is often matched by an unwillingness to compare local developments with similar phenomena elsewhere.²⁷ The value of such comparative exercises should be self-evident; how else can we fully understand a particular case study unless we assess the extent to which and the reasons why systems of labour control and resistance differed from one plantation society to the next, and between different parts of the colonial world?

Our ability to address these issues depends, of course, in part on the content of the archival record. The dearth of reliable statistical data on fugitive slaves in the antebellum American South is perhaps the best-known example of the evidentiary barriers that can impede attempts to probe the nature and dynamics of desertion and illegal absence. The difficulties posed by such archival lacunae can be lessened, however, if we are willing to strip away the blinders of geographical parochialism and take note of comparable developments elsewhere. The Mauritian case study affords an opportunity to address some of these issues and problems and, in so doing, to suggest new perspectives on labour control and resistance elsewhere in the colonial plantation world.

Desertion and Illegal Absence in Mauritius

Mauritian colonists complained regularly about runaway slaves, and they would do no less about Indian deserters and vagrants after 1834. Fugitive slaves inspired the same anxiety, fear and revulsion on the island that they elicited elsewhere because of their ability to threaten life, limb and property. During the mid-eighteenth century local fugitives reportedly coupled murder, arson and kidnapping with their usual plundering and destruction of crops, livestock and buildings,²⁸ and they continued to do no less decades later.²⁹ The fear of maroons was magnified by other socio-cultural concerns. Slaves outnumbered local whites by four to one by the 1740s, and during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the island housed an average of eight slaves for each of its white inhabitants. Equally important in colonists’ eyes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Slavery, Forced Labour and Resistance in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
• Articles
• Index