Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

Gwyn Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319700274
• eBook ISBN: 9783319700281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Monsoon rains, winds, and currents have shaped patterns of production and exchange in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) for centuries. Consequently, as this volume demonstrates, the environment has also played a central role in determining the region's systems of bondage and human trafficking. Contributors trace intricate links between environmental forces, human suffering, and political conditions, examining how they have driven people into servile labour and shaped the IOW economy. They illuminate the complexities of IOW bondage with case studies, drawn chiefly from the mid-eighteenth century, on Sudan, Cape Colony, Réunion, China, and beyond, where chattel slavery (as seen in the Atlantic world) represented only one extreme of a wide spectrum of systems of unfree labour. The array of factors examined here, including climate change, environmental disaster, disease, and market forces, are central to IOW history—and to modern-day forms of human bondage.

© The Author(s) 2018

G. Campbell (ed.)Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean WorldPalgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70028-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

Gwyn Campbell¹

(1)

McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in facilitating the research for, and writing of, this volume.

End Abstract

The Context

The contributors to this volume examine the relationship between bondage and the environment in the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Although the term “Indian Ocean world” is becoming more widely used by scholars, it is sometimes used erroneously, so it is important to first define its usage here. The IOW refers to a vast macro-region, running from Africa (roughly east of a Cape to Cairo line) to the Far East . The rationale for considering this vast area as a “world” is the historical influence upon it of the monsoon system and related environmental factors. The monsoon system governs all IOW maritime spheres in the northern hemisphere and to about 12° south of the equator and much of their continental hinterlands. In the boreal summer, as the Asian continent warms, hot air rises and through a process of convection sucks in moist air from the seas to the south, creating the south-west monsoon . In winter , the reverse process occurs, creating the south-east monsoon . Historical patterns of production and exchange have been heavily influenced, and to some degree still are, by the monsoons and associated systems of winds and currents that govern much of the region. Agricultural production , in which the vast bulk of the population was engaged , was largely shaped by the monsoon rains . The south-west monsoons bring rains that create the wet-crop (chiefly rice ) cultivation zone of the littoral regions of the IOW , beyond which lie first the dry-crop (wheat , barley) cultivation zone, and beyond that generally arid pastoral regions. At the same time, the biannual changeover in monsoon winds and currents created the possibility for regular direct trans-oceanic exchange . Moreover, to the south of the monsoon system, south-east trade winds feed into the monsoon system. This permitted the development by the BCE/CE changeover of an IOW “global” economy —a sophisticated, regular system of long-distance exchange of commodities, peoples, ideas, and technologies across and beyond the IOW , albeit with considerable fluctuations, that has continued to the present day.¹

It is also necessary to explain why the term “bondage” is used in the title of this volume. Systems of unfree labour existed throughout the IOW but varied greatly according to time and place. The term “bondage” is used here in preference to “ slavery ” because of the close association of the latter term to systems of servile labour in the ancient Mediterranean and early modern Atlantic worlds where “slavery ” had a clear meaning. It there referred to an institution in which slaves formed a high proportion (20 per cent or more) of the total population , slave labour constituted the base of the economy , and slavery pervaded societal culture . Moreover, in such slave societies the term “slave” was also clear. It referred essentially to a chattel , owned by a master, which could be bought and sold like other commodities.

Such slave societies, defined by Moses Finley , were, according to Keith Hopkins , limited to only five locations in history: classical Athens , Roman Italy , and, in the age of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil , the Caribbean , and the American South.² According to such definitions, there existed few slave societies in the IOW outside plantation economies such as nineteenth-century Zanzibar and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Réunion. Moreover, the identification of a slave as “chattel ” in the terms defined by Finley and Hopkins , and followed by most historians of slavery in the Atlantic world, is a complex issue in non-European contexts. Chattel slaves could be found in European enclaves , notably the Mascarene Islands . However, chattel slavery represented one extreme of a wide spectrum of systems of unfree labour in the IOW , including slaves who occasionally, as in some agrestic societies in India , could be sold only with the land they lived on, and sometimes, as in the case of concubines in Muslim societies who had borne their master a child , could not be sold. In contrast to the Atlantic system, black Africans formed a minority of slaves in the IOW , constituting a majority only in Africa and, at certain periods, in other lands littoral to the western Indian Ocean. Slaves in the IOW comprised people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In addition, the majority of those enslaved and trafficked were women and children, not men as in the transatlantic trade. Most of those subject to IOW bondage systems were accorded rights; some rose to positions of influence and wealth superior to that of nominally free peasants , a few became sovereigns and founded dynasties.³

A significant traffic in human beings had developed by at least 2000 BCE in the IOW. This trade experienced three major periods of demand-led expansion corresponding to sustained bursts of IOW -wide economic growth: from about 300 BCE to 300 CE, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries CE, and again from around...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World
• 2. Abolition in the Midst of Turmoil: The Case of the Tang Emperor Wu Zong (814–846 CE)
• 3. Environment and Enslavement in Highland Madagascar, 1500–1750: The Case for the Swahili Slave Export Trade Reassessed
• 4. Volcanoes, Refugees, and Raiders: The 1765 Macaturin Eruption and the Rise of the Iranun
• 5. The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony
• 6. A Local View on Global Climate and Migration Patterns: The Impact of Cyclones and Drought on the Routier Family and Their Slaves in Île Bourbon (Réunion), 1770–1820
• 7. The Impact of Cyclones on Nineteenth-Century Réunion
• 8. Egypt’s Slaving Frontier: Environment, Enslavement, Social Transformations, and the Local Use of Slaves in the Sudan, 1780–1880
• 9. Environmental Knowledge and Resistance by Slave Transporters in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean
• 10. Environmental Disaster in Eastern Bengal: Colonial Capitalism and Rural Labour Force Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 11. Famine and Slavery in Africa’s Red Sea World, 1887–1914
• Back Matter