Introduction

The “Indian Ocean World” (IOW) spans a coastline, or littoral scape, from the tip of Southern African to the Persian Gulf, the whole of peninsular Indian subcontinent, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and archipelagic South East Asia up to the Philippines. Historians are yet to decide how far inland this littoral scape extends; as Ashin Das Gupta, one of the founding historians of the Indian Ocean World (IOW) cautioned, “an important task for the historian of the Ocean is to understand the limits of the littoral.”1 While the limits of the hinterland vary widely, suffice it to say, for historians of the IOW, the changing nature of human interactions with the ocean is central to the history of the societies ensconced within its coastline. Over the years, Indian Ocean-centric histories have unveiled the role of commerce in state formation in Asia and Africa, laid bare maritime dimensions of imperial diplomacy and competition, and intimated ecumenical and sectarian religious networks. Most significantly, these works have revealed interconnected social milieus of major and minor political figures, merchants, mercenaries, scholars, religious itinerants, sailors, pirates, and slaves. This chapter summarizes a sliver of these findings in recounting the history of IOW slavery from the vantage point of maritime imperial interactions.

The scholarship on Indian Ocean world slavery reveals linked systems of bondage in Asia and Africa, which European empire-building cemented together. Scholarly interest in Indian Ocean slavery originally stemmed from the findings of Atlantic historians who showed that the extension of European plantation economies in the late eighteenth century had turned the East coast of Africa into a hotbed of slave trading. As scholars probed further, it became clear that European practices of slavery and slave trading in the vast region east of the African continent had older roots, connected to several systems of dependence and servility in Africa and Asia. Thus, in Siam, an important node of slave trading in the Indonesian Archipelago, the social concept of “that” explained a whole range of servitude from debt bondage to male and female slaves who could be bought and sold. Slavery was also second nature to family structures. The origin stories of Thai ruling dynasties, for instance, mention dynastic heads descending from heaven with a full family, including dependents, and slaves. Such practices gave rise to several discrete networks of slave trading in Asia and East Africa. From the sixteenth century, European empire builders tapped into these networks, opened new sources of slave capture, introduced new forms of enslavement, transformed the existing ones and created conjoined webs of slave transfer that spanned the entire Indian Ocean. These imperial webs were often fragile and frequently collapsed as a result of intra-European imperial competition, conflictual relations with various local states, or slave revolts. Yet in its wake, this maritime nexus of slavery created many new relationships, institutions, and identities.

The late eighteenth century saw transitions in the world of Indian Ocean slavery. In increasing numbers, non-European states began employing slave labor to produce commodities for a global market. Apart from the clusters from whence they sourced their slaves, these transitioning slave societies were not in direct relationship with each other. Nonetheless, all these societies shared the pressing need of integrating into a globalizing market economy. Slavery in many of these societies was not a new institution; yet, the old institution adopted several new usages, while retaining some of the old meanings. Hence, in the Arabian Peninsula slavery burgeoned in the late nineteenth century as a form of labor commercially producing dates and pearls at a time when pilgrims to Mecca were buying slaves only to free them as “charitable action” of Islamic piety. At the same time, while non-European states were turning to slave trading, European imperial powers were preaching abolition. In fact, abolition became both the practical and ideological maneuver for ousting political competitors and creating a (primarily British) imperial edifice justified by a civilizing mission and racial superiority. The imperial politics of abolitionism had far-reaching effects on Asian and African polities and social relations. Imperial ambitions also drew the limits to abolition. In places where slavery ended formally, new forms of servility took root. European imperial vigilante abolitionism and subsequent experiments in alternative kinds of forced labor regimes created once again a mesh of an Indian Ocean network.

The essay narrates the evolution of the Indian Ocean network of slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Within this chronological arc, it situates who were enslaved and how they were enslaved, what the labors of slavery were, and how people experienced the end of their enslaved condition. Over the extensive geographical expanse pathways into slavery were many, including warfare, kidnapping, indebtedness, and poverty. Forms of service were also multiple, but predominantly labors involving hard physical exertion, especially from the eighteenth century. Trajectories of freedom involved initiatives of slaves resisting their masters, manumission following the legal conventions of the states and societies where the enslaved found themselves, and European imperial abolitionist interventions. As European imperial projects transpired with their manifold interface with local polities and people, they brought together this vast variety of practices into an oceanic network.

Empires and the Consolidation of Pan-Indian Ocean Slaving Networks

Several localized clusters of slave trading had emerged in different parts of the Indian Ocean world by the early years of the sixteenth century. Of these, perhaps the most extensive was the network of trade in African slaves in the Arabian sea. Information on this and other networks in this early period is often sketchy and historians have relied heavily on European sources, especially Portuguese archives, to reconstruct these circuits. The island of Madagascar, Cape Delgado, the Swahili coast and the Horn of Africa became a source of slaves for primarily Arab, Swahili, and Comorian merchants. Most of these merchants were followers of some form of Islam. In the Horn region, they colluded with the Christian Ethiopian kingdom transacting with non-Christian/non-Islamic pagans belonging to small polities such as Damot, Kambata, and Hidaya. Most ended up in the markets of Hejaz, Yemen, and Hadramawt, places ensconced in trade relations with the Persian Gulf and the west coast of the Indian subcontinent. The Indian ties with the East African slave trade are evident in the cotton fabric from India that Ethiopian royalty received in exchange for slaves while various Indian political elites received a small but steady supply of slaves from the Horn (Habshi) or the Swahili coast (zanji). A second maritime network of slave trading emerged in the Indonesian archipelago, centering Malacca in the Malay peninsula and Makassar in South Sulawesi. Malay, Makassarese, and Bugis traders redistributed human cargo from the eastern islands from Java, Buton, Sulu, Mindanao, northeast Borneo, Timor, Manggarai, Tanimbar, Solor, and Alor into the important city-states and polities in the western archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia in Malacca, Brunei, Pasai, Banjarmasin, Jambi, Johor, and Siam. This archipelagic trading nexus did not overlap with the Western Indian Ocean slave trade.

These slaves performed a variety of services, occupying a range of positions within the hierarchies of the societies where they were enslaved. East African slaves reaching India were often military slaves. The condition of slavery imparted to these men kinlessness, a much sought-after attribute amongst the political elites of various sultanates in the Indian subcontinent, who were so often distrustful of their own kin. Many of these slaves could expect emancipation and possibilities of social mobility within their lifetime. The life and career of the Habashi, Chapu, renamed Ambar, the slave of the peshva of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate, is instructive. Following his manumission after his master’s death in 1575, Ambar rose to the position of “Malik” or leader of a small contingent of troops. The next few years saw Malik Ambar’s ascent as the kingmaker of the Nizam Shahi sultanate and an undaunted adversary of the northern Mughal state. The Mughals resented the “crafty Ambar” for foiling their imperial ambitions of southward expansion even while their court chroniclers could not help but observe “in warfare, in command, in sound judgement, in administration, he [Ambar] had no rival or equal.”2 One group of military Habashi slaves had even captured the seat of Bengal sultanate for a period in the late fifteenth century. Despite the enormous power of these military slaves, generations of Persian court chroniclers have shown that as deracinated people they found status commensurate with their power difficult to achieve. More humble slaves labored for their masters in agricultural, domestic or urban, mercantile settings. In Makassar and Aceh, slaves tilled rice fields, while in Sumatra (Pasai and Jambi) they worked the pepper groves alongside independent peasants. In port cities such as Malacca merchant proprietorship of slaves was ubiquitous. The Portuguese general and conqueror of Malacca, Afonso de Albuquerque, received a list of three thousand slaves belonging to Malacca merchants soon after the conquest. A large number of these slaves were domestics, enslaved women figuring prominently within merchant households. Amongst male slaves, many worked as crew on merchant vessels. Some even worked as agents of the merchants, a practice commonly observed amongst Muslim and Jewish merchants in the Western Indian Ocean from at least the tenth century. Some even rose to the position of business partners of their masters. For these slaves, Indian Ocean crossings were multiple going beyond the middle passage of bondage.

The Portuguese crown and traders forged for the first time a pan-Indian Ocean slave trading network. They brought East African slaves from Mozambique into their settlements as far away as Malacca. Goa, the capital of Estado da India, an impressive city in the sixteenth century became the primary destination for slaves not only from east Africa but also from different parts of India, particularly Bengal in eastern India. Though formally part of the Estado’s territorial jurisdiction, Bengal was a weak link in the empire, settled primarily by semi-independent Portuguese casado merchants, the chief supplier of slaves to Goa. An estimate from 1635 mentions 800 settlers in Goa, each possessing at least two slaves. The church establishments in Goa were major slaveholders. As a Jesuit visitor from 1576 noted, all Jesuit residences owned slaves and he wistfully wished that the Jesuits would free them all.3 Not all slaves brought from Eastern Africa remained in Portuguese territories in Western India as they were sold to the neighboring sultanates where there was always a demand for military slaves. Within the Portuguese empire too African slaves, from time to time, found places in the military. However, unlike the Habashis, these were not elite military slaves and were only given arms when the Portuguese army was hard-pressed. As auxiliary troops, they were mobilized between settlements whenever the need arose. The majority of slaves in Goa did menial work that the Goan aristocracy and skilled workers, who were organized in guilds, refused to do. Amongst the slave population in Goa, ones with Asian origins were particularly confined to these jobs. As slave traders, the Portuguese merchants connected the Indian Ocean world to the Spanish empire. The “Chino” slaves of Spanish America had their origins in places dotting the Indian and Indonesian littoral and were sold in the slave marts of Manila. Portuguese Malacca emerged as the transshipment point of this long-distance slave trade. This massive network crystallized during the years of the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns (1580–1640).

If the Portuguese had created a slave trading network spanning the breadth of the Indian Ocean, the Dutch East India company (VOC) diversified the use of slave labor in the making of their colonial enterprise in Asia. Between 1618 and 1622, the VOC under the commandership of Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered Jayakarta, on the island of Java, as well as the nutmeg-growing island of Banda. The VOC thereby established a firm foothold in Asia out of what once was a precarious presence in a fort on the island of Amboina. The conquest of the islands was violent; the VOC wiped out indigenous people to create a blank slate upon which the plantations of Banda islands and the city of Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC, were built. While Batavia emerged as one of the biggest conurbations in Asia, Banda, and Amboina produced spice under VOC monopoly—the first European-controlled plantation agriculture in Asia. By 1673, fortress Batavia housed approximately 27,000 people, of which half were slaves. While a substantial section of the enslaved were craftsmen, others were kuli slaves doing menial work on the waterfront as well as in the agricultural lands on the outskirts of the city. As menials, they worked alongside chained gangs of convict laborers or prisoners of war. Slaves at Banda and Amboina were plantation slaves, laboring in commercial agricultural production. Thus, within the nucleus of the Dutch empire in Asia, the VOC not only continued bondage existing in the city-states of indigenous polities but also introduced forms of slavery unknown in the region. They extended slavery in agricultural production on their new possession, the Cape, a colony which the VOC had wrested from English control in 1652. Slaves here labored on privately owned ranches, wine and wheat farms, apart from doing urban maintenance work for the VOC in Cape town. Farm produce fetched profits in the markets servicing ships passing through the Cape. Nigel Worden has argued that the profitability of Cape slave labor-based agriculture was comparable if not more profitable than slave labor-based commercial agriculture in the Caribbean. Finally, the VOC brought slaves to all its settlements in the Indian subcontinent. Of these, the most prominent was Ceylon where the VOC had come to occupy the entire coastline between the 1640s and 1680s. In moving slaves amongst these settlements, the VOC had created a functional linkage within its Asian empire.

With expanding demand for slave labor, the VOC continued and intensified the multiregional network of slave trading that the Portuguese had originally established. For much of the seventeenth century, various Dutch settlements on the Indian subcontinent—Malabar, Bengal, Coromandel—supplied slaves for key settlements in the VOC empire, namely, Batavia, Ceylon, and the Cape. The VOC tapped into a second major source of slaves by the 1660s, when the Dutch inflicted defeat on the kingdom of Makassar in 1669 and set up their settlement in Vlaardingen in Makassar. The immediate benefit was access to the well-established slave traffic passing through Makassar. The Cape colony received slaves from both India and Indonesia. Africans coming from different parts of the West-Central region, like Madagascar, were also part of the enslaved demography of the Cape. Apart from the VOC, several private merchants, or VOC officials operating in private capacities, swelled the number of slaves bought and sold in the VOC settlements. They were extremely crucial to the slave trade centered upon VOC settlements in the eighteenth century. Malabari slaves were brought to the Cape as part of their operations. Thanks to these traders, enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago also ended up in various settlements of the Indian subcontinent. Even as the Dutch wove a thick multidirectional network of slave movements throughout the Indian Ocean, by the eighteenth century the trade tended to move slaves from eastern to western parts of the Ocean.

In order to extract slaves, the Portuguese and Dutch imperial networks utilized existing asymmetrical relationships in indigenous societies but transformed them in the process. The nexus of caste and slavery in European settlements is illustrative. Caste, or jati, is one of the pillars of Indian society. There is no universal caste system in India, but many regional variations of asymmetrical hereditary group relations emerged in the first millennium CE. These identities were important social markers and sometimes survived enslaved people’s entire experience of slavery, even under European slavery. Manumission documents from Portuguese Goa between 1682 and 1760 reveal that caste identities of slaves were documented even at the moment of the formal end to their enslaved status. Most of these 750 manumitted slaves came from lower-caste backgrounds. Elsewhere, such as in Dutch Malabar people hailing from untouchable castes found themselves in slavery. Most regions in the Indian subcontinent have groups of untouchables whose status paradoxically placed them outside the pale of caste society, only to bind them in an exploitative relationship with it. Some of these untouchables were bound to upper-caste proprietors as bonded labor on the land. Some proprietors could even sell these bonded laborers. In South Asian history, such caste-based servile labor is called praedial caste. Demographic information on slaves sold in Dutch Cochin shows that an overwhelming majority of slaves came from untouchable castes such as Paryar and Pulayas. Indigenous inequality thus articulated with long-distance maritime slave trading, structuring the demographic profile of slaves moving between European settlements. Yet, indigenous provenance did not exhaust caste relations. In Dutch Ceylon, the VOC designated certain praedial castes, such as Chandios, Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar, as “slave castes,” thus distinctly assigning to these people the juridical condition of slavery. Such a legal transformation had far-reaching social consequences. Not only were these “slave castes” attached to the VOC as servile labor, but they also became the focus of abolitionist efforts under English colonial rule in the nineteenth century.4

Transactions in slaves structured diplomacy between European powers and indigenous states in the IOW. As scholars of IOW connections have shown, with the coming of the Portuguese, the sea became a theater of imperial diplomacy and high politics involving amongst others, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Safavids, and sultanates such as Gujarat. It is thus not surprising that slave trading—an important vector of the Indian Ocean network by the seventeenth century—figured prominently in these diplomatic relations. Mughal relations with “firingis” (Europeans) revolved around the slave trade. In Bengal, Mughal–Portuguese relations deteriorated as a result of Portuguese enslavement of native populations leading to the expulsion of the Portuguese from their settlement in Hugli in 1632. Similarly, the English East India Company earned the wrath of the Mughal emperor in Madras in 1687, leading to Governor Elihu Yale and the Madras Council’s decision to ban slave trading in 1688. For each illegally traded slave, a penalty of 50 pagodas was set. In Bengal, the Nazim continually issued orders to the VOC and the EIC prohibiting buying and selling Muslim subjects. In 1719 a few VOC employees paid an exorbitant sum of Rs. 760 to a Mughal imperial officer as a shield for their clandestine trade in a Muslim boy. The enslavability of subjects was always a thorn in relations between European companies and the Nazim. Even as late as 1774, when the EIC had considerable control over the judicial system in Bengal, a woman named Naintarra successfully convinced Islamic judicial experts in an EIC court of her unlawful kidnap and detention by four men, arguing she was born to “good parents and never was a slave.”5 Such subtle definitions of who deserved to be enslaved determined the legitimacy of European practices of slavery in the eyes of the Mughals or the Nazims.

The European slave trade in the Indian Ocean influenced indigenous politics, including state-making, in the seventeenth century. The quick rise and fall of the Arakanese kingdom of Mrauk U, between the 1630s and 1660s, depended upon VOC slave trading in the region. As slaves from the Bengal littoral, funneled through the port of Dianga, and Chittagong and Mrauk U satiated the VOC empire’s needs for slaves from the 1620s, the Arakanese kingdom gained a firm fiscal base for consolidation. As a kingdom economically founded on maritime commerce, the Arakanese found the arrival of the VOC a relief from the maritime blockade which Portuguese freebooters had maintained for decades. The Arakanese kingdom also supplied rice which constituted the diet of VOC slaves. Both rice and slave trading, however, dried out in the 1660s, as the VOC’s conquest of Makassar opened up the archipelago as a steady source of slaves and rice, leading to a sudden demise of the Arakanese polity. In the archipelago too the VOC shaped political formations. The Conquest of Makassar created the largest migration in the region, of the Makassarese and Bugis people. This diaspora, especially of the Bugis, became the most important merchant intermediaries for the slave trade, not only for the VOC but also for other polities well into the nineteenth century. Smaller polities became intricately tied to the VOC’s enormous appetite for slaves. The VOC set up two permanent settlements—one in Solor in 1646 and the other in Kupang in 1653—in the Timor region of the southeastern archipelago. This region had over one hundred princedoms that were continuously engaged in internecine warfare. With the VOC’s presence in the region, headhunting, the common outcome of these conflicts, was complemented by the sale of war captives to the VOC settlement. In one of the VOC campaigns against rebels on Rote Island in 1682, the VOC was accompanied by a few Timorese allies. At the end of the campaign, with the help of these allies, the VOC gained 197 men, women, and children as slaves. The VOC in Kupang also created relationships of debt with Timorese elites. If these elites defaulted on their loan payments the VOC officials took away, as compensation, Timorese villagers living within the jurisdictions of these elites. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, slavery and slave trading was a major factor structuring all kinds of polities and inter-state interactions in the Indian Ocean world.

The EIC entered the fray of IOW commerce in slaves tipping the movement of captives primarily from the West of the IOW to the East. Slaves were particularly necessary for the EIC settlements in the Indonesian archipelago. In order to carve out its niche in the pepper trade, the EIC set up its earliest settlements in Asia in Bantam in the Indonesian archipelago, in 1603. Toward the end of the same century, the EIC lost its Bantam factory after the Sultan of Bantam, with the assistance of the VOC, expelled the English. The EIC then set up the new settlement of Bencoolen/Bengkulu with Fort York and then Fort Malborough on the island of Sumatra. In all these settlements, the EIC faced chronic shortages of docile cheap workers, for the local Malays demanded high wages and inflexible work hours. The company sought to remedy this by bringing in slaves from their Indian settlements or by arranging slave voyages from Bombay and Madras to East and West Africa. The Mughal empire made slave trading difficult in the 1680s by which time the EIC also found East African or “Coffree” slaves—alluding to the non-Islamic and non-Christian origins of the slaves—far more industrious than their Indian counterparts. Even though Asian slaves from India and the Indonesian archipelago trickled into Bencoolen, Madagascar, Mozambique, Comoros islands and the Cape Verde became the primary sources of bondspeople for the EIC. Between 1622 and 1772 the EIC in the IOW directly carried out, or planned to, 70 slave voyages on company-owned or licensed ships. These slave voyages were astonishingly “efficient,” given the long distances the ships traversed. Of the eleven voyages that the EIC managed between 1735 and 1765, the mortality rate was capped at 3.7 percent. This figure is jaw-dropping when compared to the 18 percent average mortality on British slavers, for the same years, in the Atlantic. Slaves did not only do menial jobs on the island; for all forms of artisanal work the EIC used slaves. From 1714 onwards the EIC sent a small number of “coffree” slaves to Madras to train them in the crafts of masonry, bookbinding, smithery, and carpentry. In procuring and training their enslaved workforce, the EIC thus built a network of slave movements from the West to the East, even connecting the Indian Ocean with Atlantic slave ports.

The French East India Company was a late entrant to the Indian Ocean world but became one of the largest slave traders. The Compagnie des Indes consolidated slave labor-based sugar plantations on Reunion Island in 1663 and Mauritius in 1721. Sugar plantations required a constant supply of slaves making the French, equal if not greater, slave traders than the Dutch. In 1735 Mauritius and Reunion islands housed some 7221 slaves. This number grew to 13,599 by 1807–1808. One estimate suggests that around 243,000 slaves from all over the Indian Ocean littoral went to the Mascarenes islands between 1670 and 1810. Much like the EIC the French had sourced slaves from the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean ports centering the Mascarenes. Slaves came from Ouidah and Goree on the West African coast, the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, Indonesia, and even China. The majority, though, came from Madagascar, especially after 1767. In this year, the sugar islands came under the direct rule of the French crown putting an end to the French company’s monopoly, and leading to an explosion in slave trading. Two years later French private merchants garnered the privilege of selling slaves in the islands and this privilege was extended to all European and North American merchants by 1787. Thus, 69 percent of all slaves brought to these islands, were acquired after 1767, most from Madagascar. The slave trade reoriented the economy of Madagascar by the mid-eighteenth century, when the African island became heavily dependent on slave and rice trading to the Macarenes as its fiscal base. Of the French free traders facilitating the trade via Madagascar and the IOW, many came from ports of France while others were locally born. While French merchants adopted all previous trends of IOW slave trading, their major contribution was widening the practice of slave labor based commercial agriculture in the Indian Ocean.

Household slavery made all European settlements by the late eighteenth century slaveholding outposts. Care work—both sexual and non-sexual—made up a substantial part of the work necessary for the maintenance of settlements where mostly single men from Europe traveled to Asian lands as part of company service. Keeping domestic slaves was a long-standing practice amongst mercantile communities residing in the Indian Ocean littoral. In fact, Asian merchants residing in the company settlements too kept enslaved men and women for household work. For generations, observers from Europe derided and sometimes outright condemned the lavish lives of European company officials particularly their train of personal slaves and servants, as symbols of “oriental decadence” devoid of Christian values. Yet there were important differences between European and Asian forms of domestic slavery. Enslaved men and women of most Europeans rarely or never expected to be part of their masters’ families, unlike the slaves of most Asian merchants and elites. Such familial practices ensured that enslaved people and their children, even when freed, formed an underclass of workers serving the needs of European officials. Irrespective of their value as workers, or as components that added panache to retinues of European officials, the very presence of these slaves generated local-level complex networks of slave trading. In settlements that were not nodes of long-distance commerce in slaves, many of these slaves were locally sourced captive men and women. The sale of these slaves also put private merchants belonging to different European companies/settlements in touch. As needs for such slaves, though small, were continuous, the enslaved moved in multiple directions connecting numerous settlements in the IOW.

Slaves of all kinds persevered to end their condition of bondage. Flight was the most common act of insubordination. Never an individual act, flight required careful planning, and years of accumulated knowledge, and interpersonal relationships amongst slaves, freed people, and local populations. In places where European powers jostled with other competing powers, acts of desertion displayed slaves’ knowledge of the legal limits of their masters’ powers. By running away, slaves repeatedly exposed the vulnerability of European sovereignty on foreign lands. Flight also jeopardized profits. In sugar islands of the Mascarenes, between the 1770s and 1830s, annually 5–11.5 percent of slaves absented themselves from work for over a month causing considerable monetary damage to their masters. Shipboard insurrections were not uncommon. At least 35 known cases of slave ship revolts took place on Dutch, French, and English ships between the 1750s and 1790s. Within the Dutch empire certain slave ethnicities, such as the Makassarese, Bugis, and Balinese, were feared for their propensity to revolt. The fear was so intense that VOC authorities passed ordinances restricting the import of male slaves from the Eastern Indonesian archipelago, in 1757 and 1767, in Batavia and the Cape Colony, respectively. There are also evidences of maroon community formation in the Cape, and the Mascarenes islands. A group of runaways created a community in Hangklip on the coast of False Bay of the Cape Colony which survived the entire eighteenth century. Reunion, in the Mascarenes, was known for its strong maroon communities, from time to time terrorizing the plantation owners. Most of the maroons were Malagasy slaves. “Longing for Madagascar” spurred quite a few of these maroons to undertake the often-fatal journey back to Madagascar. Many European accounts recall these daring acts of reversing sail even though none was sadly a story of victory.

Slavery and slave resistance generated multiple identities in the IOW. European colonial authorities created slave identities in their assiduous efforts to document the enslaved population in the settlements. The VOC accordingly added to the names of their slaves toponyms such as van Bengale, or van Boegies indicating the ethnic identity of the slaves. However, such classification was inaccurate, for the toponyms were based on the places of sale, and not the cultural background of the captives, as slaves changed hands multiple times before arriving at the place where VOC officials laid hands on them. The imperial classification was always tied up with surveillance. Fear of revolt amongst subjugated populations reflexively shaped categories of identity. Desire to revolt was equated as a trait present amongst certain slave ethnicities as mentioned above. In the eyes of colonial officials, this trait was a pathology; hence, the “disease of the Malagasies” of yearning to return to their native island, or the “deranged” behavior amongst the Bugis, Makassarese, and Balinese of “running amok.” Freed or manumitted slaves also added to identities in the settlements. In Batavia ex-slaves formed the group of mardijkers. The term had its origins in Bugis law texts separating free people (meherdika), and the enslaved (ata). In Batavia, mardijkers formed a section of the subject population with roots in slavery, yet enjoying marginal privileges such as joining the VOC military, wearing European-style clothes and hat. These privileges were fenced; mardijkers could not wear shoes marking the ostensible difference between them and the European/Eurasian ruling class in Batavia. Experiences of both slave trading and slavery sedimented in the Portuguese or Free Christian community all over the IOW. Freebooting Portuguese slave traders who kidnapped local working people such as boatmen as well as manumitted slaves who had entered the fold of Roman Catholicism through the Augustinian or other churches were part of this community. Certain freed or runaway slave communities grew around the Portuguese settlements on the West coast of India. These ex-slaves adopted the name of Sidis, reminiscent of the elite military slave diaspora in the IOW of the Zanjis and Habashis before the coming of the Europeans.6

Slaveries and Empires in the Age of Abolition

The high politics of abolitionism in the British empire followed on the heels of an intensified wave of slave resistance after the 1750s. The Somerset case of 1772 made the recapture of slaves on English soil illegal. Two years later, in Bengal, the EIC passed a regulation restricting the sale of only those slaves for whom the masters had drawn up written deeds. Further legislation of 1789 prohibited export of slaves from Bengal. The following decade witnessed in England the rise of anti-slavery advocacy and activism. This agitation culminated in the English Parliament’s passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which not only forbade England or English merchants’ involvement in the slave trade but also encouraged the British state to patrol the high seas in order to prevent other nations from engaging in the slave trade. The law unleashed a form of diplomacy wherein abolition framed many of Britain’s engagements with other foreign nations, both European and non-European. The evangelical humanitarian motive for such diplomatic politics of abolition went hand in glove with imperial aims. Establishing imperial superiority of Britain, eliminating its competitors, and financial incentives guided many of these negotiations. Within its own empire, it took almost forty more years until 1843 to abolish slavery. The years between 1774 and 1843 were not just a period of gradual progressive abolition. Laws such as Regulation X of 1811 of the EIC state in India contradicted the Parliamentary law of 1807 as it allowed the EIC ships to import slaves from elsewhere to Calcutta. Such paradoxes in the politics of abolition and the practice of slavery in the nineteenth century were many.

Perhaps the biggest paradox was the expansion of IOW slavery on an unprecedented scale in the age of abolition. The involvement of non-European polities in slavery and slave trading in the nineteenth century was key to this explosion. Throughout the eighteenth century, Asian merchants had indirectly played an important role in European-led slavery and slave trading. Gujarati merchants, for example, collaborated with Portuguese and French merchants, sending slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar to Western India and the Mascarenes throughout the eighteenth century, primarily as financiers. Yet, from the late eighteenth century, indigenous polities turned to large-scale use of slave labor both in the archipelago as well as in the western Indian Ocean. The Sulu sultanate in the South China Sea region is a good example. By the early eighteenth century the Sulu sultanate had formed trade relations with Qing China with its precious commodities such as birds’ nests, pearls, and trepang. When the EIC entered this Sino-Sulu trade its primary motive was to reverse the silver flow from the coffers of imperial China. For longs the EIC had been unable to bring any commodity other than silver bullion in order to pay for the tea that they bought in bulk in China for the European market. In order to tip this balance of trade in its own favor, the EIC had introduced Indian peasant-grown opium into the Chinese market in the 1770. The company saw a second opportunity in the commodities of Sino-Sulu trade. The Sulu nobility quickly realized that to supply the EIC’s enormous demand for luxury goods they needed to utilize captive Filipino labor. In exchange for the luxury commodities from Jolo, capital of the Sulu sultanate, the EIC brought in opium and firearms, which further galvanized slave trading within the Sulu zone. Between 200,000 and 300,000 slaves were sold in the markets of Jolo, between 1770 and 1870. As the Sulu sultanate became integrated in the global commodity chain driven by the British opium trade, other regions in the archipelago too produced for the market using evermore enslaved laborers. On the East African coast, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, massive plantation complexes emerged, growing commodities such as cloves, coconuts, grain, copra, oil, sugar, dates, and pearls. The number of East Africans sold into slavery grew from 400,000 in the eighteenth century to 1,618,000 in the nineteenth century. These economies thrived under the nose of the British abolitionist patrols, declining only as a result of the competitive impulse of the global market. Thus, slave labor-based date production in the Arabian Peninsula catered to the cravings of North Americans from the 1860s. This industry declined as the US started producing dates in California commercially in the 1920s. The IOW slave trade in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century transformed several Asian economies into slave-sending regions. By the nineteenth century the relationship between Asian economies and the slave labor had changed—many Asian states now built their economies on the backs of slaves to ensure their participation in an all-engulfing global market system.

The years of French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars bolstered British imperial abolitionist efforts throughout European colonies in the IOW with some success. When war broke out between Revolutionary France and Britain, and when Napoleon subsequently overran major parts of Europe, both the EIC state and the British crown seized during this era of political crisis opportunities to expand their empire in Asia. Abolition accompanied these imperial acquisitions. The EIC government in India seized French as well as Dutch territories, in 1793 and 1795 respectively, and ended their slave trade in India. Soon after, between 1795 and 1806, the occupying British government prohibited slave trading in Dutch possessions in the Indian Ocean as they fell one by one to British forces. British occupation of French Mascarenes and Dutch Batavia also started the process of abolition in these slave-majority islands, between 1811 and 1816. In the Mascarenes as soon as the British abolished the slave trade in 1811, illegal trade in slaves flourished. In Mauritius, which remained under British control, it was only after 1818 that authorities consciously clamped down on illegal trade. However, in Reunion, which France got back as a result of the Treaty of Paris, which it signed with Britain in 1814, the French government made no effort to stop the clandestine trade. French Reunionaisse and Mauritian merchants participated in the trade which only declined by the 1830s. In their efforts to abolish the slave trade in the Mascarenes, the British honed their skills in abolitionist naval patrol which they would then use in the Atlantic along the West African coast from 1819. In the Indonesian archipelago, Stamford Raffles, the first Lt. Governor of British occupied Dutch East Indies, decreed the abolition of slavery in 1813. This law consternated Dutch public opinion in the metropole even after the reinstitution of Dutch rule in 1816. Yet, the Batavian government was resistant to such measures. Slave trading was fully abolished in 1818, but it was only in 1864 that the Dutch government ruled to abolish all forms of slavery in its possessions, including slavery practiced in indigenous societies. In the 1870s they extended their abolitionist efforts to all places within the Eastern Indian Ocean and South China sea region.

In some places, European imperial abolition enabled slave-holding societies to replace slavery with other forms of captive labor. The Merina empire in Madagascar saw a massive change in its social structure as a result of British abolitionist efforts to end the Mascarenes slave trade. Since Madagascar was the main supplier of slaves to the Mascarenes, the British authorities approached Radama I, Merina ruler, signing two treaties in 1817 and 1820 to close several slave ports in Madagascar. These treaties put a great deal of pressure on the royal purse, as the capitation tax on slaves was a steady source of income. Loss of revenue pushed the most powerful indigenous empire in Madagascar to take a path of economic autarky. From mid-1820s Merina empire looked inwards to control more lands on the island and use resources available there to build up an economy independent from slave exports. Toward these ends, the Merina rulers utilized the corvee service-labor system, fanompoana, to levy work hours from skilled and unskilled free persons within Madagascar. The Merina empire used fanompoana in all institutions, from the military to new industries such as leather and armament. From the mid-1820s, the Merina emperor had set up these industries with the help of European missionaries, adventurers and skilled workers. From the industrial shop floor to the construction sites of these new factories the state utilized compulsory fanompoana labor. While most Eastern and Western parts of the IOW had transitioned to full-scale slave economies, the Merina empire under the pressures of British abolitionism took a different path of replacing slavery with corvee labor.

In certain places abolition transformed institutions often associated with slavery, such as family. In much of Asia, slavery was integral to family formation, and female slave dependents were intrinsic to ideas of family structure. Manumission, especially after the female slaves bore their master’s children, was generally an accepted norm in households of Muslim slaveholders, who shared their patrilineity with all children irrespective of the mother’s status. British colonial administrative and judicial fiat in India distinguished between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” genealogies within families based on slave birth. The marriage ritual that any woman had undergone to become part of the male household—temporary marriages to slave-women (muta’a or suria) were always present in polygamous Muslim male-headed families—became a marker of social rank. Conversely, as the colonial judiciary propped up despotic control of male household heads over female members of the family and “lawful guardianship” of masters and mistresses over minors, it enabled family as an euphemism for slave holding and slave trading. Any ostensible proof of familiality—“father”/”mother” and “husband”/”wife”—was enough for colonial courts to condone the master’s claim over their slaves, even if there were ample proof that such familial members were bought. The use of family as an anti-abolitionist measure in colonial India created troubles for British abolitionist patrols in the Arabian sea. As British residencies dotted the Persian Gulf making inroads into the region’s political relations, clandestine trading in female slaves from the Indian subcontinent and neighboring Arab countries flourished under the garb of marriage. British officials complained that traffickers married women only to divorce them on arrival to the Gulf states and then sell them into slavery. Though slavery was always part of familial relations in the Indian subcontinent and the Gulf region, it was only under abolitionist patrol that marriage became a cover/mechanism for slave trading. The compatibility of marriage and slavery within the institution of family was thus inverted under the scrutiny of abolitionist law.

Imperial goals compromised British abolitionist intentions after the 1820s. Abolitionism in India was always selective. Even when abolition was made part of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, there was no bureaucratic consensus on who was a slave. There was the constant reluctance of the British government to transform servile social relations in India, as it feared such change would adversely affect state revenue extraction, the whole raison d’etre of British imperialism in India. Political stability in the region was of paramount interest to the British crown as was the need to eliminate recalcitrant indigenous elites. On the one hand, in order to build stable, subservient allies the British state refused to call certain relationships “slavery,” thus saving the Crown both the financial and political costs of liberating workers. On the other hand, the crown clamped down on slavery within certain indigenous courts, breaking down the familial power networks of indigenous elites, so that they could never raise their heads under the financial, political, and psychological pressures of colonial governance. Such calculations were present in the British abolitionist efforts in the Arabian sea. Between 1822 and 1873, the British crown concluded a number of treaties with the sultanates of Oman, Muscat, and Zanzibar to staunch the flow of slaves into the Gulf region. Yet, these treaties were poorly safeguarded. By 1873 there were only two British naval ships patrolling the length and breadth of the Western Indian Ocean. With diminishing resources for abolitionist vigilance, the Admiralty office distributed its Circular No. 33 in July 1875, ordering ship captains of naval patrols to only rescue runaway slaves who were in life-threatening situations.7 In the Gulf region, the primary goal of the British state was stability and control of the routes leading to Britain’s prized possession, India. Hence the British patrol refrained from disturbing the economic order in the region. After Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890, the abolitionist ardor of the British empire was further dampened.

Insincere commitments to abolition were made worse with British patronizing, racist, and exploitative attitudes toward freed slaves. British patrols often dropped off liberated Africans at the Christian mission stations that had grown around the coasts of Eastern Africa and Western Indian Ocean islands. These Africans received new names from their saviors. The missionaries also inculcated the virtues of work discipline amongst the new arrivals by making them work in plantations growing cloves, vanilla, and cacao. The profits from these plantations subsidized the missions. These circumstances warranted the liberated Africans at the mission stations the Swahili epithet watumwa ba wangereza (slaves of the British).8 The expression was hardly an excess of unreasonable indignation if one considers the memoirs of the British naval ship captains which described enslaved Africans as meriting merely the compassion reserved for dogs and sheep. The situation was a little better in Bombay where the freed Africans could hope to join the Sidi community, historically formed by African runaway slaves of the Portuguese empire. Even while the community head worked as a labor contractor for British steamship companies, feeding the steamships with cheap Sidi labor, the liberated Africans could expect a social network of people with similar lineage. Nevertheless, even for the Sidis, the opportunities beyond a life of labor for a colonial wage were practically closed off.

Slavery in the Arabian sea region, which flourished especially in monarchical polities with Muslim rulers as a result of a plethora of reasons, including a weak British abolitionist patrol, had fired debates regarding legitimacy and reform of slavery in Islam by the late nineteenth century. Scholars and statesmen with allegiance to a wide variety of Islamic theology and jurisprudence participated in these discussions. Bu’ Saidi, the sultan of Oman, justified the 1822 treaty he had concluded with British naval officer, Fairfax Moresby, to confiscate slaves on ships a few miles away from the coast of East Africa, as a measure to prohibit the sale of Africans “to Christians of all nations.”9 As British imperial assault on the sovereignty of many Asian and African countries coincided with the implementation of abolition, indigenous responses occupied a broad spectrum, at one end of which was the preservation of all forms of social relations including slavery and at the other end was absolute abolition and reform, sometimes with British imperial assistance. In Oman Bu- Saidi sultan’s successor Sultan Bargrash did not abolish slavery; following the advice of the Ibadi ulama, he declared that the Koran permitted slavery. The next sultan Hamud bin Muhammad was a British appointee of the recently-formed British protectorate of Oman. The new sultan overturned Bargrash’s injunctions and abolished all forms of slavery at the behest of his British masters. He even set a personal example of freeing all his slaves, which evinced a range of social reactions. Some masters refused to take the compensation money offered by the British and many slaves feared a lack of social mobility if offered emancipation by law designed by an alien authority (the British empire) rather than manumitted by their own masters. Ibadi ulama of Oman remained lukewarm to abolition up until the 1960s. Muslim intellectuals, who had witnessed the violent end of the Mughal empire in the hands of the British war machine in India, also participated in this debate. Reformers and modernists such as Syed Ahmad Khan and Muhamad Iqbal denounced slavery as un-Islamic and incompatible with the life of the Prophet. Iqbal went so far as to say that individualism was inherent to Islam, and hence slavery as an institution only existed in name in Islam.10 In opposition to such views, Maulana Said Ahmad Akbarabadi, a scholar attached to the Deoband madrasa in North India, argued that there existed no concept of abolition in Islam. These debates were ultimately commentaries on the relevance of slavery in a colonial world order dominated by Europeans and whether in its elimination or continuance, there was a hope of transforming the hegemony of this order.

As soon as the first cracks in IOW slave trading and enslavement had appeared, new systems of forced movement of people, as laborers, emerged. In 1789, the year the EIC state prohibited the export of slaves from Bengal, it permitted a free trader to transport twenty convicted robbers with life sentences to utilize their labor. A year later, the EIC transported seven prisoners to Penang, and by the first decade of the nineteenth century, the EIC had sent 3000 Indian convicts to its old and new settlements of Bencoolen, and Penang and settlements the EIC had wrested from the VOC, Amboina. These outposts were always in need of labor; by the end of the eighteenth century, the EIC had replaced the enslaved workforce with convicts. The Indian convicts considered themselves workers, or company ke naukar (servants of the company).11 Between 1789 and 1939, the British empire in the IOW transported 108,000 Indian, Burmese, Malay, and Chinese convicts to various penal settlements. Other European empires too moved their convicts to various penal settlements. In fact, the exchange of convicts between empires became a new form of inter-imperial relations in the nineteenth century. Eighteen years after British-held Mauritius received convicts from India in 1816 it became the site for the first experiments in indentured servitude. Seventy-five privately-recruited Indian workers reached the island as contract laborers in 1834, a year after Britain had abolished slavery in all its colonial possessions outside India. In the next four years, the island received twenty-four thousand such Indian migrant workers. The Mauritius experiment was the canary in the mine, as the next nine decades witnessed over 2 million Asians, Africans and Melanesians move as indentured workers across the globe to various plantations in predominantly European colonies. Apart from convicts and indentured servants, the Mascarenes islands especially Reunion also received freed African labor. Under the engage system of the French empire, French traders moved 34,000 engages, or African apprentices, to Reunion and 50,000 from all over the French Indian Ocean empire.

As slavery surged in the age of abolition, imperial abolition itself created forms of unfree labor in a bid to replace slavery in a few places where it declined. The numbers for these forced migrations are not complete, but even by considering the few known fragments—1.5–2.1 million sold into slavery in the Western Indian Ocean between 1820 and 1880; 2 million indentured servants moved around the world between 1834 and 1920; 108,000 convicts moved within the British empire in the IOW—one can put the nineteenth century into perspective. These mobilizations reveal in stark clarity abolitionism as a largely humanitarian shield for imperial competition and largesse. The age of empire, industry, and abolition might have given birth to the ideals of liberty and rights-bearing individuals but for many peoples in the IOW, it was an age of unprecedented unfreedom.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Ashin Das Gupta, “Indian Ocean and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies, 19, no. 3 (1985): 482.

  2. 2.

    Richard Eaton, “The Rise and the Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650,” in Slavery and South Asian History, eds. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 127.

  3. 3.

    Teotonio R De Souza, “Manumission of slaves in Goa during 1682 and 1760 as found in Codex 860,” The African Diaspora in Asia, eds. Kiran Kamal Prasad and and Jean-Pierre Angenot (Bangalore: Jana Jagriti Prakashana), 172.

  4. 4.

    Alicia F. Schrikker and Kate J. Ekama,“Through the Lens of Slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the Eighteenth Century,” Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, eds, Zoltan Biedermann and Alan Strathern (London: UCL Press, 2017), 178– 93.

  5. 5.

    Indrani Chatterjee, Gender Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 185.

  6. 6.

    Edward Alpers, “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1862,” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 60; Matthias van Rossum, “‘Amok!’: Mutinies and Slaves on Dutch East Indiamen in the 1780s,” International Review of Social History, 58 (2013): 109–30. Manilata Choudhury,  “The Mardijkers of Batavia: Construction of a Colonial Identity, 1619–1650,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 75 (2014): 901–910.

  7. 7.

    Matthew Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press), 143.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 175.

  9. 9.

    William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Islamic Abolitionism in the Western Indian Ocean from c 1800,” Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, eds. Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon and David Blight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 81–97.

  10. 10.

    Muhammad Iqbal, “Islam as a Moral and Political Ideal,” in Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 307.

  11. 11.

    Anand Yang, Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (Oakland: University of California Press), 96.