Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World

329 Pages·2020·2.154 MB·English

by  Matthias van Rossum

Testimonies of Enslavement
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Testimonies of Enslavement
Sources on Slavery from the
Indian Ocean World
Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen,
Bram van den Hout and Merve Tosun
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Copyright © Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen, Bram van den Hout
and Merve Tosun, 2020

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Cover image: Four views of Cochin, ca. 1672. (© Koninklijke Bibliotheek)

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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Th e abduction of Itti Commera 21
2 Searching for Kalie 35
3 Th e enslavement of Barrido 81
4 Falsifi cation of a slave ola 107
5 Disputed status of Malickoema 127
6 Proof of enslavement 165
7 Calij’s fl ight from bondage to conversion 179
8 Slave or free? 209
9 Retrieving abducted children 225
10 Th e value of ‘freedom’ 281
Glossary 311
Index 315
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Introduction
Slavery as global history
Slavery is a contentious issue that remains crucial to study, not only in American,
European and African settings, but also within the context of India and the wider
Indian Ocean world. It is especially in the context of the latter that it is increasingly
important to study and discuss slavery. In recent years, scholars have shift ed
attention to the understudied histories of slavery o utside the Atlantic. For the
wider Indian Ocean world this has brought to the surface the widespread slave
trade in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, signalling the
existence of forms of commodifi ed slavery, while also reminding us of the large
variety of other forms of bondage within which these existed, ranging from
debt- and land- based slaveries to corv é e labour regimes. All these forms of
slavery, as well as long- distance patterns of the slave trade, existed well before the
arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago, but under
the infl uence of increasing globalization and expanding European imperialism
the early modern period witnessed rapid transformations that deeply aff ected
local societies and economies, including the role and shape of slavery and the
slave trade.
Th is source publication provides the translations of selected eighteenth-
century Dutch court records dealing with questions of slavery, the slave trade
and enslaveability – or as literally formulated in the original references in the
Dutch sources, s laafb aarheijd . Th is blunt term confronts us with the hard
questions behind the shaping of historical and contemporary realities of slavery
– who can be enslaved, through which means, by whom, under what conditions
and to do what. And similarly important, these court records on e nslaveability
deal not only with the questions about the practices, their dynamics and their
limits, but also about what this meant for people themselves, especially the
enslaved, about social strategies of survival and contestation, both within and
outside market slavery regimes. Moving beyond the Atlantic narrative, these
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2 Testimonies of Enslavement
sources for the history of India contribute to the reinterpreting of the long lines,
or ‘deep’ histories, of practices of coercion that shaped not only our past, but also
our contemporary world. Th e city of Cochin, located in the present- day state of
Kerala in southwest India, was one of the ancient hubs of the millennia- old long-
distance trade connections running across the Indian Ocean world. It was also
one of the fi rst places that encountered the Portuguese arrivals and later the
expanding empire of the Dutch East India Company. Th ese sources provide an
entrance into the complex everyday manifestation, regulation and contestation
of slavery, and its development in this pivotal period of early modern imperialism
and globalization.
Th e picture that is starting to emerge – and to which this books aims to
contribute – is one that is noticeably more complex than the crude terms in which
we might be inclined to think of slavery, based on American and Atlantic histories
in which the experience of plantation slavery has taken the centre stage. Th is is
not to say, however, that slavery and its histories in the Atlantic and the wider
Indian Ocean world were entirely diff erent. In fact, these histories of slavery were
to a large extent driven by the same dynamics. Th e period from the sixteenth to
the nineteenth century witnessed expanding global trade in luxury and
increasingly (bulk) consumption commodities that fuelled production based on
coerced labour across the globe. Th e rise of enslavement, the slave trade and slave-
based production in that sense were not only directly related to Atlantic sugar,
coff ee and tobacco, but also to Asian nutmeg, sugar, pepper, silver and gold.
Estimates are most developed for the western Indian Ocean, indicating that at
least some 392,000 enslaved persons from Madagascar, 600,000 slaves from East
Africa and 400,000 slaves from the Red Sea area were transported to destinations
in the Indian Ocean world over the course of the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century. It may well be that these estimates will be revised upward. Th e share of the
French slave trade supplying the expanding Mascarene Islands’ plantation economy
alone is already estimated at some 350,000 enslaved persons. Another 542,000
slaves are estimated to have been transported from the western Indian Ocean to
the Atlantic by European merchants. It is also important to realize that the slave
trade was not confi ned to the western parts of the Indian Ocean world, but was
widespread throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds.
Large numbers of enslaved Asians and Africans were, for example, transported to
the empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Th e empire of the VOC
stretched as wide as the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, but was most heavily focused
on Sri Lanka, south India and parts of Indonesia. It is estimated that over the course
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries somewhere between 660,000 to 1.1
Introduction 3
million enslaved humans were transported to the regions under control of the
VOC, especially to the nutmeg plantations of the Banda archipelago, the sugar
producing surroundings of the city of Batavia (nowadays Jakarta), the silver mines
of Silida on Sumatra and to the farms of South Africa. Th e enslaved were drawn
from regions throughout maritime Asia, such as Malabar (southwest India),
Coromandel (southeast India), Arakan (in present- day Myanmar), East Africa,
Madagascar, South Sulawesi, Nias and the Lesser Sunda Islands. In the eighteenth
century, some 300 to 400 Company- issued permits for the export of slaves were
distributed annually in the city of Cochin (southwest India) alone. For the city of
Makassar (Sulawesi), it is estimated that some 3,000 slaves were exported to Batavia
each year, and for the island of Bali there are (probably too modest) estimates of an
average slave export of 1,000 slaves annually.1
Th e expansion of market slavery in various regions in South and Southeast
Asia in the early modern period occurred alongside the rise and intensifi cation of
bondage by corv é e labour regimes that were geared towards export production.
Under the VOC, obligatory labour service, imposed on local populations,
extended to growing and delivering cinnamon on Sri Lanka, cloves on the
Moluccas and coff ee on Java. At the same time, despite their strong and increasing
impact on global economic and political dynamics, European ‘merchant’ empires
were not the only actors engaged in slave- based production, enslavement and the
slave trade. Local polities and societies, from Southeast Asia to Madagascar,
reacted to the developing world economy by increasing their use of slave and
corv ée labour for global commodities such as pepper. Europeans thus operated in
a much more complex environment than in the Atlantic, acting alongside and in
competition and interaction with Asian, African and Arab polities and merchants.
Th e history of slavery we encounter in the wider Indian Ocean world was
therefore not entirely diff erent from the Atlantic world, but more closely
intertwined and integrated the diff erent dimensions that were geographically
much more distanced in the Atlantic. Th roughout the wider Indian Ocean world,
1 M . van Rossum , K leurrijke tragiek. De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azi ë onder de VOC ( Hilversum :
Verloren , 2015 ) ; R. B. Allen , European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 ( Athens : Ohio
University Press , 2015 ), 22 ; Jane Hooper and David Eltis , ‘ Th e Indian Ocean in Transatlantic
Slavery ’, S lavery & Abolition 34 , no. 3 ( 2013 ): 353–75 , 361 ; R. van Welie , ‘ Slave Trading and Slavery
in the Dutch Colonial Empire: A Global Comparison ’, N ieuwe West-Indische Gids 82 , no. 1–2 ( 2008 ):
45–94 ; M. Vink , ‘“ Th e World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean ’,
Journal of World History 14 , no. 2 ( 2003 ): 131–77 ; H. Sutherland , ‘ Slavery and the Slave Trade in
South Sulawesi, 1660s–1800s ’, in A. Reid and J. Brewster (eds), S lavery, Bondage and Dependency in
Southeast Asia ( St Lucia : St. Martin’s Press , 1983 ), 263–85 ; A. van der Kraan , ‘ Bali: Slavery and Slave
Trade ’, in A. Reid and J. Brewster (eds), Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia ( St Lucia :
St. Martin’s Press , 1983 ), 315–40 .