Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900 9004469648, 9789004469648

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Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900

Studies in Global Slavery Series Editors Damian Alan Pargas (Leiden University) Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden University) Editorial Board Indrani Chatterjee (University of Texas at Austin) William Clarence-Smith (University of London) Pamela Crossley (Dartmouth College) Seymour Drescher (University of Pittsburgh) Stanley Engerman (University of Rochester) Roquinaldo Ferreira (Brown University) Luuk de Ligt (Leiden University) Paul Lovejoy (York University) Aurelia Martín Casares (University of Granada) Ugo Nwokeji (University of California, Berkeley) Stuart Schwartz (Yale University) Ehud R. Toledano (Tel Aviv University) Nigel Worden (University of Cape Town)

VOLUME 10

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgs

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900 Edited by

Richard B. Allen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Astérina, Jeune Esclave Malaise [young Malay slave], Ile de Rotti (Rotte), from François Péron, Voyages de découvertes au terres australes, 2nd edition (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1824), plate 42 (collection of Richard B. Allen). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046537

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2405-4585 ISBN 978-90-04-46964-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-46965-5 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Richard B. Allen. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To the memory of Joseph C. Miller Valued friend, esteemed colleague, and distinguished scholar

∵

Contents Preface ix List of Illustrations x Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction: Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studies in Asia 1 Richard B. Allen

Part 1 Conceptualizing Slave Status 1

Slavery and Forced Labour in Asia: Status Quaestionis 33 Anthony Reid

2

Between Slave and Disciple in South Asia 49 Jessica Hinchy

3

Gender and Slavery in Asia 77 Shawna Herzog

Part 2 Slavery, the State, and Society in East Asia 4

Slavery and the Mongol Empire 111 Don J. Wyatt

5

Economic, Social, and Legal Aspects of Slavery and Indentured Labor in Late Ming China (1550–1645): What the Huizhou Documents Tell Us 131 Harriet T. Zurndorfer

6

Human Trafficking in Late Imperial China 150 Claude Chevaleyre

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7

Korea: A Slave Society 178 Christopher Lovins

8

The Abolition of Slavery, Constitutional Reforms, and Modernity in Late Qing China 201 Bonny Ling

Part 3 Slavery, Servitude, and European Colonialism 9

Slaves, Weavers, and the Peopling of East India Company Colonies, 1660–1730 229 Michael D. Bennett

10

Slavery, Conflict, and Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines 256 Stephanie Mawson

11

Pearling and Slavery in the Sulu Zone, 1882–1884: The Letters and Diary of Thomas Henry Haynes 284 James Francis Warren

12

Slavery through Missionary Lenses: Timor in the Nineteenth Century 302 Hans Hägerdal

13

Indebtedness, Socio-cultural Hierarchies, and Unfree Labor on Nineteenth-Century Ceylonese Plantations 321 Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena

Part 4 Reflections 14

Slavery in Asia and Global Slavery 343 Jeff Fynn-Paul Bibliography 361 Index 419

Preface This volume is a product of the conference on “Slavery and Forced Labour in Asia, c. 1250–c. 1900: Continuities and Transformations in Comparative Perspective” organized by the Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) from 1–3 June 2017. I want to thank Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Pargas for inviting me to join them in organizing the conference, and the LSSA for its support in making the conference such a rewarding experience both personally and professionally. My thanks also go to the conference’s participants, some of whom traveled half way around the globe to join us in Leiden, for their enthusiastic participation in our discussions and willingness to share the fruits of their expertise and experience; their generosity of spirit is much appreciated. Lastly, I want to thank Lennart Visser for his conscientious preparation of the maps herein. This book is missing an important chapter that it was supposed to include. Joe Miller was poised to contribute his thoughts and reflections on slavery and bonded labor in Asia when he succumbed to cancer on 12 March 2019. Joe was one of the most eminent historians of slavery of our time. Although trained as an Africanist, much of his career was devoted to understanding the origins, nature, and dynamics of the human experience with slavery and bonded labor on a global scale, and he jumped at my invitation to join us in Leiden where he reveled in the kind of engagement that is at the heart of any scholar’s being. We all benefitted from his presence, his generous sharing of his expertise and insights, and his support for our endeavors, and this volume is dedicated to his memory as a token of the affection and respect in which he was held.

Illustrations

Figures

0.1 Swarte slaef/swarte slavin [black slave/black slave girl] 17 0.2 Arakanese selling slaves to the Dutch at Pipely/Baliapal, India, in January 1663 21 0.3 Balische slavin [Balinese slave girl] 24

0.1 0.2 5.1 6.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 11.2 12.1



Maps Central and South Asia 4 East and Southeast Asia 5 Huizhou and Chinese provinces 135 Chinese provinces 156 British East India Company and India 231 Spanish Philippines 261 Sulu Archipelago 287 Thomas Haynes’s pearling activities 291 Eastern Indonesian Archipelago 304

Table

14.1 Vulnerability index 356

Notes on Contributors Richard B. Allen studied anthropology before earning a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (1999), European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (2014), and more than 55 journal and encyclopedia articles, book chapters, and essays on the social and economic history of Mauritius, slavery and indentured labor in the colonial plantation world, and slavery, slave trading, and abolition in the Indian Ocean and Asia. He is the recipient of two Fulbright research awards and prestigious research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He co-authored the successful applications to designate the Aapravasi Ghat and the Le Morne Cultural Landscape in Mauritius as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) and inscribe the indentured immigration records of Mauritius on UNESCO’s Memory of the World. From 2009–11 he served as special consultant to the Truth and Justice Commission of Mauritius which investigated the legacy of slavery and indentured labor in the country. In addition to serving as editor of Ohio University Press’s Indian Ocean Studies series and consultant to the Aapravasi Ghat WHS, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript on global slaveries since 1500. Michael D. Bennett received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Sheffield, U.K. His Masters research, which explored the forced labor systems developed by the English East India Company in the seventeenth century, was completed in 2016 and was awarded the Roger Scola Prize for the best MA thesis in social and economic history at the University of Kent that year. His doctoral dissertation focused on the English merchants who financed the emergence of sugar plantations and African slavery on Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century. Claude Chevaleyre has a PhD in Chinese history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). A former postdoctoral research fellow at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO, Paris) and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), he is currently a CNRS fellow researcher at the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies (France). He also heads the Junior Research Group on “Dependency in Asian History” at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery

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Studies (Germany). His research focuses on the social, cultural, and legal history of bonded labor and dependency in early modern China. He is currently working on the dynamics of interregional and transnational human trafficking in early modern China and East Asia. Jeff Fynn-Paul is a senior lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research interests include medieval Mediterranean cities, medieval slavery, economic history, and world history. He is the author of The Rise and Decline of an Iberian Bourgeoisie: Manresa in the Later Middle Ages (2015) and Family, Work, and Household in Late Medieval Iberia: A Social History of Manresa at the Time of the Black Death (2017), and has edited two volumes, War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300–1800 (2014) and, with Damian Alan Pargas, Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global History (2018). He is also co-editor of Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery and an area editor for the Journal of Global Slavery. He has contributed to the second volume of the Cambridge World History of Slavery and the first volume of the Economic History of the Iberian Peninsula, 700–2000, both for Cambridge University Press. In 2016, Fynn-Paul won the European History Quarterly Prize for best article. Hans Hägerdal is Professor of History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He received his PhD in 1996 from Lund University where his dissertation examined the professionalization of sinology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of his subsequent research has focused on colonial contact zones and cultural encounters in Southeast Asia. Among his more significant publications are Lords of the Sea, Lords of the Land: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor (2012) and, with Geneviève Duggan, Savu: The History and Oral Traditions on an Island of Indonesia (2018). Shawna Herzog is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, slavery, imperialism, and modern European History. She is the author of Negotiating Abolition: The Antislavery Project in the British East Indies, 1795–1843 (2021) which investigates British abolitionism in the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang, Singapore) and the limits of colonial power in Southeast Asia.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Jessica Hinchy is an Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. Her research has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender and History, and Asian Studies Review, among other journals and edited collections. Kumari Jayawardena taught political science at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka (1969–85), in the Women and Development program at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (1980–82), and was a fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (1987–88). She is the author of books on the rise of the labour movement in Ceylon (1972), feminism and nationalism in the Third World (1986), ethnic and class conflict in Sri Lanka (1985), Western women and South Asia during British rule (1995), and the rise of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie (1998), and co-authored/edited books on female sexuality in South Asia (1996) and class, patriarchy, and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (2015). Rachel Kurian is senior lecturer emerita in international labour economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on economic reforms and labour, plantation labour, trade unions, child labour, protection of the elderly, gender politics and women’s rights, and poverty and social exclusion. Recent publications include (with Kumari Jayawardena) Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest (2015) and “State, Citizenship and Democratic Deficits: Multiple Patriarchies and Women Workers on Sri Lankan Plantations” in Jayadeva Uyangoda, ed., Local Government and Local Democracy in Sri Lanka: Institutional and Social Dimensions (2015). Bonny Ling received her PhD from the National University of Ireland Galway. Her research focuses on international law, human trafficking, and business, labour and human rights. Previous experience includes service with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UN team engaged in facilitating a peace

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settlement in Cyprus, and the UN mission in Liberia, and as an international election observer in East Timor, the Republic of Georgia, and Albania. From 2014–18 she was affiliated with the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Law as a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow and program director of a specialized program on business and human rights at the university’s Centre for Human Rights Studies. She is currently Research Fellow with the Institute for Human Rights and Business, Advisory Board Member of the international human rights organization Human Rights at Sea and Senior Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Human Trafficking. Christopher Lovins is Assistant Professor of Korean History at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, specializing in early modern Korea. His publications include King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea, an examination of King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) as an absolute monarch. He has also published on legitimacy, evolutionary approaches to the humanities, historical film, and science fiction. His latest article is “A Ghost in the Replicant? Questions of Humanity and Technological Integration in Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell.” Stephanie Mawson is a research fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Her work focuses on the contested nature of empire in maritime Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century. She has published in leading historical journals including Past & Present and Ethnohistory and is the recipient of a number of prestigious prizes, including the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize and the Dr. Robert F. Heizer Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory. Anthony Reid is a historian of Southeast Asia based once again at the Australian National University after serving as founding Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (1999–2002) and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2002–07). Best known for Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c.1450–1680 (2 vols., 1988, 1993) and A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (2015), he has also written extensively on Asian slavery, including editing Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (1983).

Notes on Contributors

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James Francis Warren is Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian Modern History at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He is an award-winning historian who has published numerous monographs, journal articles, and book chapters. His books include The Sulu Zone 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (1981, 2007); Iranun and Balangingi: Globalisation, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity (2002); and Pirates, Prostitutes and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethnoand Social History of Southeast Asia (2008). Don J. Wyatt is John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Middlebury College, where he specializes in the intellectual history of China, with a particular emphasis on identity and violence. He holds a BA from Beloit College and MA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited several books including his own The Blacks of Premodern China (2010). In 2004 and again in 2010 he held research residencies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Among his most recent publications are chapters in the medieval volumes of both the Cambridge World History of Violence (2020) and the Cambridge World History of Slavery (2021). Projects in progress include a contribution on medieval slavery in East Asia to the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series and a comprehensive study on foreign slaves in imperial China. Harriet T. Zurndorfer received her PhD in Chinese history in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Affiliated Fellow of the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands where she has worked as a docent and researcher since 1978. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture 800 to 1800 (1989) and China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present (1995), editor of the collection Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (1999), and has published more than 200 scholarly articles and reviews. She served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient from 1992 to 2000 and is the founder (1999) and editor-in-chief of the journal Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China. She is also co-editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 2, 500 to 1500 (2020) and a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Economic History of China.

Introduction

Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studies in Asia Richard B. Allen The work of ethnographers, historians, and anthropologists such as H.J. Nieboer, Bruno Lasker, James L. Watson, James Francis Warren, and Anthony Reid and those who have followed in their pioneering footsteps has steadily expanded our knowledge and understanding of slavery and bonded labor in Asia, especially Southeast Asia.1 Despite this growing body of scholarship, research on chattel and bonded labor in this vast, populous, and culturally diverse part of the globe remains limited. Even a cursory survey of The Bibliography of Slavery and World Slavery that Joseph C. Miller began to compile during the 1970s confirms as much. A search of the approximately 25,000 entries in the online version of this essential reference work using the keyword “Asia” yields only 251 entries compared to 1,627 for “Africa” and 1,282 for “Caribbean.” Searches using more geographically specific keywords produce equally disheartening results: 179 for India, 38 for China, 23 for Japan, 19 for Korea, 16 for Indonesia, 14 for the Philippines, and 5 for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) compared to 40 for the Bahamas, 137 for Martinique, 143 for Guadeloupe, 208 for Barbados, 278 for Saint Domingue, 512 for Cuba, 516 for Jamaica, and 725 for Brazil.2 These figures attest to the continuing “tyranny of the Atlantic” in slavery studies.3 Preoccupied with reconstructing the transatlantic slave trades and 1 H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910); Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950); James L.Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford: Basil Blackwell/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 1981; 2nd ed., Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007); Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 2 http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/bibliographyofslavery (accessed 30 June 2020). Updates are published annually in the journal Slavery and Abolition. 3 Edward A. Alpers, “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 17, no. 2 (1997): 62–81. For a more recent discussion, see Michael Zeuske,

© Richard B. Allen, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_002

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the structure and dynamics of slavery in Africa and the Americas, many historians of slavery remain uninterested in, if not oblivious to, chattel and bonded labor elsewhere in the globe despite Joseph E. Harris’s trenchant reminder half a century ago that the African diaspora of slave origin extended eastward to Asia as well as westward to the Americas.4 This indifference also reflects the difficulties of reconstructing the history of slaving and slavery in Asia and the Indian Ocean world, difficulties that include the relative paucity of archival sources compared to those that exist for the Atlantic, the often fragmentary and problematic nature of the sources that do exist, the need to master various Asian as well as European languages to access these sources, and the fact that these materials are scattered widely among multiple archives in Asia and Europe.5 Asian historians’ reluctance for ideological and other reasons to acknowledge that slavery and bonded labor existed in their own countries, much less search out evidence about such workers, has likewise helped to relegate Asia to the margins of modern slavery studies. Historians in twentieth-century China, to cite a prominent example, frequently subscribe to the Marxist or Marxian-inspired axiom that while slavery was a characteristic feature of ancient Chinese society, it was not particularly important during subsequent eras in the country’s history.6

“Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective,” International Review of Social History 57 (2012): 87–111. 4 Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). See also: Joseph E. Harris, “Expanding the Scope of African Diaspora Studies: The Middle East and India, a Research Agenda,” Radical History Review 87 (2003): 57–68; Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds., The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2003); Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Jean-Pierre Angenot, eds., Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Recent surveys of slavery, slavery in Africa, and the African diaspora reflect this Atlantic-centrism: e.g., Michael A. Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); James Walvin, A Short History of Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2007); Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Sean Stillwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5 Richard B. Allen, “Ending the History of Silence: Reconstructing European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean,” Revista Tempo [Brazil] 23, no. 2, Mai/Ago. 2017, DOI: 10.1590/TEM-1980–542/ x2017v230206. 6 Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 210.

Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studies in Asia

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Other constraints reflect the conceptual challenges inherent in coming to terms with the complexities of the human experience with chattel and bonded labor, not the least of which are those that surround the conceptualization and definition of slave status. At the heart of this problem is the fact that the European- and American-inspired definitions which dominate this field of study are often inadequate, if not inappropriate, to understanding the nature, structure, and dynamics of slavery and bonded labor in many parts of Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and Asia.7 While recent review essays point to a refreshing willingness among some scholars to embrace the complexities of slave and unfree labor status in India, Southeast Asia, and China,8 many remain hesitant to acknowledge the existence of global “slaveries.”9 Slave and cognate labor studies likewise remain constrained by what I have characterized as the “tyranny of the particular,” i.e., the reluctance to transcend the chronological, geographical, and conceptual confines of the case studies that are a hallmark of this field of study and situate the events and developments under consideration in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts.10 Increasing interest in the human experience with slave and bonded labor elsewhere than in the Atlantic and an attendant surge in research on slaving, slavery, and bonded labor in the Indian Ocean world and Asia since the advent of the new millennium prompted the Leiden Slavery Studies Association to devote its second “Slaving Zones” conference to exploring the continuities and transformations in slavery and forced labor in Asia between circa 1250 and circa 1900 in comparative perspective. The conference sought to incorporate

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E.g., Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), vii–xxxii; Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 116. On the problems of conceptualizing slavery in global history, see Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). Annuska Derks, “Bonded Labour in Southeast Asia: Introduction,” Asian Journal of Social Science 38, no. 6 (2010): 839–52; Kerry Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804,” in Eltis and Engerman, Cambridge World History of Slavery, 163–85; Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China”; Andrea Major, “Unfree Labor in Colonial South Asia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2019), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/ 9780190277727.013.360. Zeuske, “Historiography and Research Problems.” Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Convicts, Indentured Laborers, and the Tyranny of the Particular, Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture 1 (Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2020).

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Asia more fully into both academic and public discourse about slave and cognate labor systems by assessing the current state of Asian slavery studies, discussing recent research on chattel and bonded labor in Asia, identifying avenues for future research, and exploring new conceptual and methodological approaches to reconstructing the history of slavery and bonded labor in Asia and ultimately elsewhere in the globe. To this end, the conference brought together an international group of junior and senior scholars working on four broadly defined regions: Central Asia (including, but not limited to, modern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), South Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea).

Map 0.1

Central and South Asia

Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studies in Asia

Map 0.2

1

5

East and Southeast Asia

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia

The following chapters reflect conference participants’ engagement with three topics that are central to understanding slavery and bonded labor in Asia and beyond, beginning with the conceptualization and definition of slave and bonded status, including the ways in which and the reasons why these statuses have changed through time. As Anthony Reid reminds us in his essay, those working on slavery and bonded labor in Asia must be willing to put aside the European and Atlantic-inspired paradigms that have dominated slavery studies and embrace the complexities of slavery and forced labor in this part of the world, a point seconded by Jessica Hinchy in her chapter on slavery and discipleship in India and Harriet Zurndorfer in her discussion of the economic, social, and legal aspects of slave and bonded labor in late Ming China. As Reid notes, doing so requires us to relinquish the historiographical preoccupation with distinguishing between “free” and “unfree” forms of labor and consider the various ways in which enslaved men, women, and children were held in states

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of social, economic, and cultural dependency. Southeast Asianists have long appreciated that debt played a major role in moulding patterns of enslavement and bondage and the relationships between debt slaves and their masters,11 a point reinforced in a number of this volume’s contributions. As Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena demonstrate in their chapter on indentured labor nineteenth-century Ceylon, students of the “new system of slavery”12 that flourished following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 must likewise consider how debt shaped labor and other socio-economic relations in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial plantation world. Recent interest in the relationship between debt, slavery, and bonded labor in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic worlds illustrates how research on slavery in Asia can contribute not only to slave and cognate labor studies in general,13 but also to our understanding of global labor migration and human trafficking during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially to the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf14 and in East Asia.15 More specifically, we may note that debt figures prominently in discussions about how and why an estimated 27–32 million mostly Asian men, women, and children remain de facto slaves in the modern world despite the legal abolition of slavery decades ago.16 11

E.g., Alain Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery,” Revue française de sociologie 43, Supplement: An Annual English Selection (2002): 173–204; Alain Testart, L’institution de l’esclavage: Une approche mondiale (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2018), 261– 87. For a recent overview of bondage in Southeast Asia, see Oliver Tappe, “Variants of Bonded Labour in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, Ulrike Lindner, Gesine Müller, Oliver Tappe, and Michael Zeuske, eds., Bonded Labour: Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th–21st Century) (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 103–31. 12 Proponents of this argument follow Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974; 2nd ed., London: Hansib, 1993). 13 Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013); Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). 14 E.g., Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, “Contract Labour and Debt Bondage in the Arab Gulf States: Policies and Practices within the Kafala System,” in Damir-Geilsdorf et al., Bonded Labour, 163–89. 15 For a recent discussion on combatting human trafficking in East Asia, see the essays assembled by Bonny Ling and Isabelle Cheng in “The Focus” section of the International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, no. 87 (Autumn, 2020). 16 Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 193–215; Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Siddarth Kara, Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia

Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studies in Asia

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Coming to grips with the realities of slavery and cognate labor systems in Asia likewise requires considering the ways in which gender considerations can shape the slave and bonded labor experience. Work on women and slavery in Africa and the Americas during the 1980s and 1990s17 inspired interest in examining enslaved women’s experience elsewhere in the globe,18 women’s role in the history of the free(d) populations of color that developed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century colonial plantation societies,19 and

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(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Siddarth Kara, Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). The International Labour Office and Walk Free Foundation estimated that 40 million people were held in slavery in 2017, 25 million as forced laborers and 15 million in forced marriages (Global Summary of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage Summary [Geneva: International Labour Office and Walk Free Foundation, 2017], 5 [https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/ public/@dgreports/@dcomm/ documents/publications/wcms_575540.pdf]). On the con­ tinuities between past and present slavery, see Elizabeth Swanson and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On unfree labor’s historical roots and contemporary manifestations in Africa and Asia, see Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985; rev. ed., 1999); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: James Currey, 1990); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle/Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener/Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). E.g., Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, vol. 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, vol. 2, The Modern Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). E.g., Richard B. Allen, “Femmes libre ‘de couleur’ et l’esprit d’entreprise dans la société esclavagiste de l’Ile de France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire 5 (2003): 147–61; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Richard B. Allen, “Free Women of Color and Socio-Economic Marginality in Mauritius, 1767–1830,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 181–97; Wilma King, The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006); Richard B. Allen, “Marie Rozette and Her World: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race

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the gendered dimensions of slave emancipation.20 The need to incorporate gender into discussions about slave status is underscored by arguments that women comprised a majority, if not a substantial majority, of those held in bondage in Asia.21 As Shawna Herzog reveals in her essay, the scholarship on women and gender in Asia is more extensive than is often appreciated and invites additional lines of inquiry into the ways in which gender and sexuality shaped slavery and bonded labor in this part of the globe. Such endeavors also need to include research on children, often ignored in slavery studies in general and in Asian slavery studies in particular,22 including the ways in which notions of childhood influenced the ideology of slavery and abolitionism during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.23 A review of published scholarship reveals that slavery and bonded labor in the Indonesian archipelago and, to a lesser extent, colonial India dominate Asian slavery historiography. Studies of slavery elsewhere in Asia remain comparatively few in number despite an expanding body of research during the last two decades on slavery in Central Asia and Eurasia,24 Indochina in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Mauritius,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 2 (2011): 345–65. 20 Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Camilla Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 21 Joseph C. Miller, “Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Women and Slavery, vol. 1, 3. 22 An exception is Jessica Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods in Eighteenth-Century Awadh,” South Asian History and Culture 6, no. 3 (2015): 380–400. 23 Recent studies include: Richard B. Allen, “A Traffic Repugnant to Humanity: Children, the Mascarene Slave Trade and British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 2 (2006): 219–36; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Children in Slavery Through the Ages (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); Colleen A. Vasconcellos, Slavery, Childhood and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788– 1838 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Ana Mae Duane, ed., Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Sandra Rowoldt Shell, Children of Hope: The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). 24 Scott C. Levi, “Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush: Indians in the Central Asian Slave Trade,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 12, no. 3 (2002): 277–88; B.D. Hopkins, “Race, Sex and Slavery: ‘Forced Labour’ in Central Asia and Afghanistan in the Early 19th Century,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2008): 629–71; Alessandro Stanziani, Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), esp. 63–100; Christoph Witzenrath, ed., Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200–1860 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); Jeff Eden, “Beyond

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(Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam),25 and elsewhere across southern Asia including Burma (Myanmar),26 Ceylon (Sri Lanka),27 and Thailand.28 The same holds the Bazaars: Geographies of the Slave Trade in Central Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (2017): 919–55; Jeff Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 25 Trude Jacobsen, “Debt Bondage in Cambodia’s Past – and Implications for Its Present,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 15, no. 1 (2014): 32–43; Karine Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations in Indochina from the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 129–42; Micheline Lessard, “‘Cet ignoble trafic’: The Kidnapping and Sale of Vietnamese Women and Children in French Colonial Indochina, 1873–1935,” French Colonial History 10 (2009): 1–34; Christian Henriot, “Supplying Female Bodies: Labor, Migration, Sex Work, and the Commoditization of Women in Colonial Indochina and Contemporary Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 1 (2012): 1–12; Micheline Lessard, Human Trafficking in Colonial Vietnam (London: Routledge, 2015). 26 Michael Aung-Thwin, “Athi, Kyun-Taw, Hpaya-Kyun: Varieties of Commendation and Dependence in Pre-Colonial Burma,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 64–89; Gordon P. Means, “Human Sacrifice and Slavery in the ‘Unadministered’ Areas of Upper Burma during the Colonial Era,” Sojourn 15, no. 2 (2000): 184–221; Eric Tagliacozzo, “Ambiguous Commodities, Unstable Frontiers: The Case of Burma, Siam, and Imperial Britain, 1800–1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004): 354–77; Bryce Beemer, “Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave-Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand,” The Historian 71, no. 3 (2009): 481–506; Bryce Beemer, “The Creole City in Mainland Southeast Asia: Slave Gathering Warfare and Cultural Exchange in Burma, Thailand and Manipur, 18th–19th C.,” PhD diss., University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2013; David Baillargeon, “‘The Great White Chief’: The Abolition of Slavery in Colonial Burma, 1826–1935,” Slavery and Abolition 40, no. 2 (2019): 380–405. 27 Chandima S.M. Wickramasinghe, “Coloured Slavery in Ceylon (Sri Lanka),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, n.s., 54 (2008): 159–78; Chandima S.M. Wickramasinghe, “The Abolition of Colonial and Pre-colonial ‘Slavery’ from Ceylon (Sri Lanka),” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 315–35; Alicia Schrikker and Kate J. Ekama, “Through the Lens of Slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the Eighteenth Century,” in Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern, eds., Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (London: UCL Press, 2017), 178–93; Nira Wickramasinghe and Alicia Schrikker, “The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Asian Studies 78, no. 3 (2019): 497–519; Nira Wickramsinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 28 R.B. Cruikshank, “Slavery in Nineteenth Century Siam,” Journal of the Siam Society 63, no. 2 (1975): 315–33; Andrew Turton, “Thai Institutions of Slavery,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems, 251–92; David Feeny, “The Decline of Property Rights in Man in Thailand, 1800–1913,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 2 (1989): 285–96; David Feeny, “The Demise of Corvée and Slavery in Thailand, 1782–1913,” in Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 83–111; Katherine A. Bowie, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand: Archival Anecdotes and Village Voices,” in E. Paul Durrenberger, ed., State Power and Culture in Thailand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia

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true for East Asia where studies of slavery in China,29 Japan,30 and Korea31 remain sparse and often focused on certain topics, a proclivity best illustrated by the preoccupation in Chinese slave historiography with concubines and mui tsai.32 As the contributions in part two demonstrate, reconstructing the history of slavery in East Asia requires careful examination of the ways in which the state, society, and labor were intertwined. As Don Wyatt observes, the Mongol conquest of China, long acknowledged as a watershed event in the country’s history, resulted in the use of enslaved Chinese soldiers to serve Mongol military needs, the importation of Korean women as objects of both lust and prestige, and the enslavement of Mongols themselves and kindred peoples, many of whom were subsequently funnelled into the trades that supplied Central Asian slaves to markets in the Black Sea region and beyond.33 In addition to shedding new light on the socio-economic and legal aspects of slave and indentured labor in late Ming China, Harriet Zurndorfer’s study of Huizhou prefecture offers an example of the insights that a careful analysis of legal documents such as contracts can offer into the structure and dynamics of Studies, 1996), 100–38; Thanet Aphornsuvan, “Slavery and Modernity: Freedom in the Making of Modern Siam,” in David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 161–86. See also Bryce Beemer in n. 26. 29 Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries),” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 143–54; L.J. Newby, “Bondage on Qing China’s Northwestern Frontier,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 3 (2013): 968–94. For more detailed discussions of Chinese slave historiography, see the chapters by Harriet Zurndorfer and Claude Chevaleyre in this volume. 30 Thomas Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 463– 92; Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, “Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery in Early Modern Japan,” PhD diss., Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2017; Lúcio de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 31 Bok-Rae Kim, “Nobi: A Korean System of Slavery,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 155–68; Bok-Rae Kim, “Korean Nobi Resistance under the Chosun Dynasty (1392–1910),” in Edward Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Salman, eds., Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005), 67–81. For a review of Korean slave historiography, see Christopher Lovins in this volume. 32 E.g., Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994); Hsieh Bao Hua, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Johanna S. Ransmeier, Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in Northern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 33 Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

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slave status. Although China housed one of the world’s largest markets for human beings before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949,34 we still know little about the magnitude and dynamics of human trafficking in the Middle Kingdom. Claude Chevaleyre draws on Ming and Qing administrative sources to begin the process of filling this important historiographical lacuna, an undertaking which includes challenging the conventional narrative that the European demand for chattel labor spurred the development and subsequent expansion of slave trading in China. Christopher Lovins in turn explores the similarities and differences between slavery in Korea, China, and Japan, an exercise that includes considering whether Korea, where approximately 30 percent of the indigenous population was held in bondage between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, should be regarded as a “slave society” rather than a society with slaves.35 While recent scholarship on abolitionism in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India36 and attempts to examine the abolition of slavery in more explicitly comparative frameworks37 offer a much-needed corrective to the Atlantic-centrism that dominates abolitionist studies, our understanding of this activity elsewhere in Asia remains limited.38 By demonstrating that efforts to abolish slavery in late Qing China were closely tied to Qing reformers’ efforts to modernize the country and stave off further 34

James L. Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems, 223. 35 For a recent discussion, see Noel Lenski and Judith Cameron, eds., What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 36 Allen, European Slave Trading, 179–200. See also: Timothy Walker, “Abolishing the Slave Trade in Portuguese India: Documentary Evidence of Popular and Official Resistance to Crown Policy, 1842–60,” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 2 (2004): 63–79; Allen, “A Traffic Repugnant to Humanity”; Andrea Major, “‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 4 (2010): 501–25; Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 37 Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005); Derek R. Peterson, ed., Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight, eds., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); William Mulligan and Maurice Bric, eds., A Global History of AntiSlavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Hideaki Suzuki, ed., Abolitions as a Global Experience (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2015); Myriam Cottias and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, eds., Distant Ripples of the British Abolitionist Wave: Africa, Asia and the Americas (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017). 38 Thailand is something of an exception. See: Feeny, “The Decline of Property Rights”; Feeny, “The Demise of Corvée and Slavery in Thailand”; Aphornsuvan, “Slavery and Modernity.”

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European imperial encroachment, Bonny Ling provides new insights into the dynamics of abolitionism as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Vasco da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in 1498, the establishment of the Portuguese Estado da Índia between 1500 and 1515, and the expansion of Portuguese activity to China and Japan during the second half of the sixteenth century laid the foundations for ever increasing European involvement in Asian life that continued well into the mid-twentieth century. The colonial era figures prominently in Asian slavery historiography, which also reflects an emphasis on studying slave and bonded labor in those areas, especially Southeast Asia, subject to Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) control or influence and, following its bankruptcy in 1795, direct rule by The Netherlands. The European impact on labor systems in Asia remains a subject of debate, but its long-term significance is suggested by arguments that the VOC generated an increased demand for chattel labor in the Indonesian archipelago, a demand which not only spurred a significant increase in regional slave trading, but also encouraged the development of other forms of bonded labor and the replacement of “open” slave systems by more “closed” ones.39 The contributions in part three seek to expand these historiographical horizons in various ways. James Francis Warren and Hans Hägerdal demonstrate that hitherto ignored archival sources can provide additional insights into, respectively, slave involvement in the global pearling industry that flourished into the early twentieth century,40 and European missionaries’ ambivalent attitudes toward slavery in Timor during the nineteenth century. Studies of British involvement with slavery in India and elsewhere in Asia remain circumscribed.41 However, as Michael Bennett reveals, the East India Company regarded non-Europeans as essential to the survival and prosperity of their 39 Allen, European Slave Trading, 19–21. 40 See Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, and Steven Mullins, eds., Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), especially the chapters by James Francis Warren, “Tea, Pearls, and Pearl Shell: Cross-Cultural Trade, Slave Raiding, and the Transformation of Material Worlds – The Sulu Zone, China, and the West, 1349–1898,” 55–82, and Matthew S. Hopper, “Enslaved Africans and the Globalization of Arabian Gulf Pearling,” 263–80. 41 Margot Finn, “Slaves out of Context: Domestic Slavery and the Anglo-Indian Family, c. 1780–1830,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 19 (2009): 181–203; Anna Winterbottom, “From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660–1720,” in Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia, eds., Maritime History as Global History (St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2011), 95–124; Allen, European Slave Trading, 27–62; Richard B. Allen, “Slavery in a Remote but Global Place: The British East India Company and Bencoolen, 1685–1825,”

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Indian Ocean establishments during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a view which shaped both their strategy of procuring African and especially Malagasy slaves and their policies to recruit and retain Indian weavers in Bombay (Mumbai). Stephanie Mawson expands our understanding of the dynamics of European colonialism by demonstrating that slavery and slave raiding played a significant role in indigenous communities’ efforts to resist Spanish imperialism in the seventeenth-century Philippines. The argument that the indentured labor system which developed in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 was little more than a “new system of slavery” provides the context for Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena’s consideration of the ways in which debt and socio-cultural hierarchies shaped the lives of tens of thousands of indentured men and women who labored on nineteenth-century Ceylonese plantations. 2

Slave Trading in Asia

Astute readers will note that, with the exception of Claude Chevaleyre’s chapter on human trafficking in late imperial China, substantive discussions about slave trading in Asia are missing from this volume. This omission does not reflect a lack of interest in this important topic. Conference participants appreciated the need for sustained research on the dynamics of slave trading in Asia, the links between indigenous and European slave trading networks, and the connections between indigenous slave and other migrant labor trades and the trans-oceanic convict and indentured labor trades which flourished between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.42 Not unsurprisingly, the transatlantic trades cast a long shadow over attempts to reconstruct the global history of slave trading. The last five decades have witnessed the identification and cataloguing of more than 36,100 voyages which carried some 12,521,000 enslaved men, women, and children away from Africa toward the Americas between 1500 and 1866.43 However, as a preliminary census of human trafficking in Asia reveals, transnational/pan-regional slave

Historia Social y de la Educación/Social and Education History [Spain] 7, no. 2 (2018): 151–76. 42 E.g., Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 43 See the transatlantic database in the Slave Voyages website (https://slavevoyages.org/).

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trading also occurred elsewhere in the globe on a massive scale,44 including the Atlantic world’s periphery. A recent overview of slavery in the Mediterranean asserts, for example, that the number of enslaved Christians and Muslims traded across the Mediterranean between 1450 and 1700 equaled, if not exceeded, those exported from Africa across the Atlantic during the same period.45 Estimates that perhaps one million enslaved Europeans from as far north as Britain, Ireland, and Iceland reached North Africa’s Barbary Coast between 1500 and 1800, and that 800,000–900,000 or more North African slaves landed in Italy, Portugal, and Spain between 1450 and 180046 have recently been revised upwards and suggest that at least three million Christians and Muslims were enslaved at sea or on land in the Mediterranean between 1450 and 1850.47 The longevity and vitality of the Mediterranean trades is further attested to in various ways: by the presence of slaves in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century;48 by the exportation of approximately 2,000 slaves each year from the Ottoman Vilâyet (province) of Tripoli (Libya) during the third quarter of the nineteenth century;49 by ships of the Austrian Lloyd line carrying thousands, if not tens of thousands, of African slaves from Alexandria, Egypt to Constantinople during the mid-nineteenth century;50 and by ships of the Ottoman-controlled Mahsuse, Egyptian-controlled Azizye, and Austrian Lloyd lines transporting slaves from Yemen and the Hijaz to Constantinople and Izmir following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.51 44

Richard B. Allen, “Human Trafficking in Asia before 1900: A Preliminary Census,” International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, no. 87, Autumn, 2020: 32–33. The following discussion expands on this essay. 45 Daniel Hershenzon, “Towards a Connected History of Bondage in the Mediterranean: Recent Trends in the Field,” History Compass 15 (2017): e12391, DOI.org/10.1111/hic3.12391. 46 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Daniel Hershenzon, “‘[P]ara que me saque cabesa por cabesa …’: Exchanging Muslim and Christian Slaves across the Western Mediterranean,” African Economic History 42 (2014): 11–36. 47 Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2. 48 Guilia Bonazza, Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750–1850 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 49 Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840–1890 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 39–42, 90. 50 Alison Frank, “The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (2012): 410–44. 51 Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade, 44.

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In addition to furnishing the transatlantic trades with millions of captive men, women, and children, sub-Saharan Africa supplied the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and East African trades with an estimated 10.9–11.6 million slaves destined for the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 650 and 1900.52 Europeans also trafficked large numbers of slaves beyond the Atlantic world. British, Danish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders exported a minimum of 450,000–565,000 African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to European establishments throughout the Indian Ocean basin between 1500 and 1850,53 while the annual Manila galleons carried tens of thousands of Asian slaves across the Pacific to Central and South America during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.54 Striking features of the Asian slave trades include the extraordinary diversity of peoples who were trafficked and these trades’ multi-directionality. The presence of military slaves known as Habshis (“Ethiopians”) in India between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries55 and the existence in modern South Asia of Siddi communities of eastern African ancestry56 demonstrate that any 52 Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27, 46, 61, 138, 151. 53 Allen, European Slave Trading, 15. 54 Tatiana Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave to Spanish Manila, 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 19–38; Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73–108. 55 E.g., Helene Basu, “Africans in India – Past and Present,” Internationales Asienforum 32, nos. 3–4 (2001): 253–74; Richard Pankhurst, “The Ethiopian Diaspora to India: The Role of Habshis and Sidis from Medieval Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, The African Diaspora, 189–221; Helene Basu, “Slave, Soldier, Trader, Faqir: Fragments of African History in Western India (Gujarat),” in Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, The African Diaspora, 223–49; Edward A. Alpers, “Africans in India and the Wider Context of the Indian Ocean,” in Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Edward A. Alpers, eds., Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (Noida, India: Rainbow Publishers, 2004), 27–41; Sunil Kumar, “Service, Status, and Military Slavery in the Delhi Sultanate: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 83–114; Richard M. Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 115–35; Pashington Obeng, “Service to God, Service to Master/Client: African Indian Military Contribution to Karnataka,” African and Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 271–88. On African military slaves elsewhere in South Asia, see Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “Migrants and Mercenaries: Sri Lanka’s Hidden Africans,” in Jayasuriya and Angenot, Uncovering the History of Africans, 155–70. 56 Charles Camara, “The Siddis of Uttara Kannada: History, Identity and Change among African Descendants in Contemporary Karnataka,” in Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Alpers, Sidis and Scholars, 100–14; Beheroze Shroff, “Sidis in Mumbai: Negotiating Identities between Mumbai and Gujarat,” African and Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 305–319; Ababu Minda Yimene, “Dynamics of Ethnic Identity Among the Siddis of Hyderabad,” African and

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history of slavery and human trafficking in Asia must include the African slaves imported into this part of the globe over the centuries.57 The number of such imports cannot be ascertained with any certainty, but estimates that Arab, Muslim, and Swahili merchants exported an average of 2,000–3,000 slaves a year from the Red Sea and East African coasts to the Middle East and South Asia between 800–1700 and 2,000–4,000 a year during the eighteenth century point indicate the possible scale of this activity.58 A lack of data on the number of Africans in India at any given time makes it impossible to determine how many of these 2.0–3.1 million exports reached South Asia rather than the Middle East, but reports that Ahmadabad in Gujarat housed 5,000 Habshis between 1526–37 and that the chief minister of the Ahmadnagar sultanate in the Deccan purchased 1,000 Habshi slaves during the latter part of the sixteenth century suggest that substantial numbers did so. The significance of these trades is underscored by the fact that some Habshis and Siddis, the most famous of whom was Malik Ambar, also became the rulers of Indian states.59 Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 321–345; Helene Basu, “History on the Line: Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity in Western India,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 16. 57 For an overview of the African diaspora of slave origin in the Indian Ocean world, see Richard B. Allen, “Africans in the Indian Ocean World,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African History (2020), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.ORE_AFH-00698. R1. More specialized studies include: Jayasuriya and Angenot, Uncovering the History of Africans; Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “African Migration: Understanding Trends and Traditions,” African and Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (2011): 7–13; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 4 (2019): 805–34. For the life history of a Habshi slave, see Matteo Salvadore, “Between the Red Sea Slave Trade and the Goa Inquisition: The Odyssey of Gabriel, a Sixteenth-Century Ethiopian Jew,” Journal of World History 31, no. 2 (2020): 327–60. On Africans in Sri Lanka, see: Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “Les femmes et l’esclavage au Sri Lanka,” Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire 5 (2003): 99–122; Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “A Forgotten Minority: The Afro-Sri Lankans,” African and Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 227–42; Wickramasinghe, “Coloured Slavery.” On Africans in the Philippines, see: Ghislaine Loyré, “Les musulmans de Mindanao et la traite d’après les sources occidentals (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” in Serge Daget, ed., De la traite à l’esclavage: Actes du colloque international sur la traite des noirs, Nantes 1985, 2 vols. (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1988), vol. 1, 9–18; William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1991), 27–35; Pascal Girard, “Les africains aux Philippines aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in Berta Ares Queija and Alessandro Stella, eds., Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos: Derroteros Africanos en los Mundos Ibéricos (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2000), 67–74. On the Chinese experience with Africans, see Don J. Wyatt, The Blacks of Premodern China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 58 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 27, 46. 59 Faaeza Jasdanwalla, “African Settlers on the West Coast of India: The Sidi Elite of Janjira,” African and Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 41–58; Omar H. Ali, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery Across the Indian Ocean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Figure 0.1 Swarte slaef/swarte slavin [black slave/black slave girl] From Cornelius de Bruins, Reizen over Moskovie, door Persie en Inde … [Travels into Moscovy, Persia and the East Indies …], (Amsterdam: Rudolph en Gerard Westein, Joannes Ossterwyk, Hendrik van de Gaete, Boekverkopers, 1714), plates 89–90. (Collection of Richard B. Allen)

Europeans likewise transported African slaves to South Asia and beyond. The Portuguese shipped a minimum of 42,000–84,000 slaves from Mozambique to their establishments in India (e.g., Daman, Diu, Goa), China (Macau), and Japan (Nagasaki) between 1500 and 1834.60 Other Europeans began to engage in this traffic during the early seventeenth century. The limited evidence currently at our disposal indicates that the VOC shipped no fewer than 4,700 African slaves to its administrative center at Batavia (Jakarta), commercial emporia such as Malacca (Melaka), its spice plantations in the Moluccas (Malukus), and its settlements in coastal Ceylon during the seventeenth century, and used 4,000 60 Allen, European Slave Trading, 16. On African slaves in Portuguese India, see: Ann M. Pescatello, “The African Presence in Portuguese India,” Journal of Asian History 11, no. 1 (1977): 26–48; Jeanette Pinto, Slavery in Portuguese India, 1510–1842 (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1992).

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Africans to construct a fortress at Colombo during the 1670s.61 EIC ships in turn carried at least 3,100 Malagasy, Mozambican, Comorian, and West African slaves to its settlements in India (Bombay, Fort St. David [Tegnapatam], Madras [Chennai], Surat) and its factories in Java (Bantam/Banten) and Sumatra (Bencoolen/ Benkulen/Bengkulu) between the 1620s and early 1770s.62 Significant numbers of Turkic slaves from Central Asia also reached India.63 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Turkic slaves dominated the mamluk (or ghulam) institution in the Delhi Sultanate which ruled northern India (1206–1526) where they comprised the core of the sultanate’s army. As with Habshis and Siddis, it is impossible to ascertain how many such slaves were imported into the subcontinent, but the possible scale of this traffic is suggested by reports that Sultan Firoz Shah Tughluq (r. 1351–88) maintained 180,000 slaves, 40,000 of whom served in the army.64 As with some Habshis and Siddis, a number of the sultanate’s rulers also began their careers as military slaves. Besides importing slaves from Africa and Central Asia, India exported significant numbers of slaves to other regional markets. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, crossed the Hindu Kush into

61

In 1638, the Banda Islands (part of the Moluccas) housed 2,199 slaves who comprised twothirds of the islands’ population, while the 4,112 slaves in the Bandas in 1794 accounted for three-fourths of the islands’ population (Philip Winn, “Slavery and Cultural Creativity in the Banda Islands,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 41, no. 3 [2010]: 371). 62 Allen, European Slave Trading, 9–10, 16–18. On the EIC’s involvement in trafficking slaves of African and Malagasy origin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see also: Frenise A. Logan, “The British East India Company and African Slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687–1792,” Journal of Negro History 41, no. 4 (1956): 339–48; Virginia Bever Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26, no. 4 (1969): 548–77; Robert J. Young, “European Interests and the Eighteenth-Century Slave-Trade to South and South-East Asia,” Indonesia Circle 45 (1988): 20–46; Robert J. Young, “Slaves, Coolies and Bondsmen. A Study of Assisted Migration in Response to Emerging English Shipping Networks in the Indian Ocean, 1685–1776,” The Indian Ocean Review 2, no. 3 (1989): 23–26; Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “East India Company in Sumatra: Cross-Cultural Interactions,” African and Asian Studies 8, no. 3 (2009): 204–21. 63 Peter Jackson, “The Mamluk Institution in Early Muslim India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1990): 340–58; Sunil Kumar, “When Slaves Were Nobles: The Shamsī Bandagân in the Early Delhi Sultanate,” Studies in History, 10, no. 1 (1994): 23–52. 64 Kaushik Roy, “From the Mamluks to the Mansabdars: A Social History of Military Service in South Asia, c. 1500 to c. 1650,” in Erik-Jan Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 87.

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Central Asia between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries,65 while Indian and other Asian merchants are estimated conservatively to have shipped 600,000 Indians to Southeast Asia between the fifteen and seventeenth centuries.66 Europeans trafficked Indian slaves no later than 1510 when 24 individuals were transported to Portugal from Cochin (Kochi) on the Malabar Coast. The volume of the Portuguese trade is difficult to determine, but assertions that Portuguese ships exported as many as 5,000–6,000 slaves from India in some years during the second half of the sixteenth century suggest that this traffic was relatively substantial at the height of the Estado da Índia’s power and influence.67 The VOC actively traded Indian slaves as well, exporting at least 26,000–38,000 and perhaps 100,000 or more from Arakan, Bengal, and southern India to Batavia, Ceylon, Malacca, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century.68 Indians accounted for 26 percent (16,300) of an estimated 63,000 slaves imported into the Dutch-controlled Cape Colony between 1652 and 1808.69 Other Europeans likewise trafficked South 65

66 67 68

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Muzaffar Alam, “Trade, State Policy and Regional Change: Aspects of Mughal-Uzbek Commercial Relations, C. 1550–1750,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37, no. 3 (1994): 207–08; Levi, “Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush”; Scott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 6–71. Alessandro Stanziani puts the total number of Indian slaves in Bukhara at 200,000 (Bondage, 90). Daniel Perret, “From Slave to King: The Role of South Asians in Maritime Southeast Asia (From the Late 13th to the Late 17th Century),” Archipel 82 (2011): 164. K.S. Mathew, Portuguese Trade with India in the Sixteenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), 137–38. Rik Van Welie, “Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial Empire: A Global Comparison,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 82, nos. 1 & 2 (2008): 72. For life histories of individual slaves in Dutch India, see Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen, Bram van der Hout, and Merve Tosun, Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slaving for the Indian Ocean World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). For overviews of Dutch slave trading in the Indian Ocean world, see Rik van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 1596–1863,” in Geert Ostindie, ed., Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 155–259, esp. 184–201; Matthias van Rossum, “The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds, 1602–1795,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2020), DOI:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.403. Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 40–41. For the life histories of some of these slaves, see: Gerald Groenewald, “Panaij van Boegies: Slave – Bandiet – Caffer,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 59, no. 2 (2005): 50–62; Sirtjo Koolhof and Robert Ross, “Upas, September and the Bugis at the Cape of Good Hope: The Context of a Slave’s Letter,” Archipel 70 (2005), 281–308. On the private trade in Indian slaves to the Cape Colony, see Linda Mbeki and Matthias van Rossum,

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Asians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning in 1622, EIC officials shipped Indian slaves to the company’s factories at Bantam and Bencoolen and its colony of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. Danes, usually ignored in studies of European activity in the Indian Ocean, exported slaves to Southeast Asia from their factory at Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) on the Coromandel Coast during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.70 The French exported perhaps as many as 24,000 slaves from their comptoirs in Bengal (Chandernagore) and along the Coromandel and Malabar coasts (e.g., Mahé, Pondichéry [Puduchcheri], Yanam), to the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Réunion in the southwestern Indian Ocean between the 1670s and 1790s, mostly between 1770 and the early 1790s.71 Small numbers of Indian slaves also reached British colonies in North America and French Saint Domingue.72

70

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“Private Slave Trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean World: A Study into the Networks and Backgrounds of the Slavers and the Enslaved in South Asia and South Africa,” Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017): 95–116. Erik Gøbel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 57–61; Jorge Simón Izquierdo Díaz, “The Trade in Domestic Servants (Morianer) from Tranquebar for Upper Class Danish Homes in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Itinerario 43, no. 2 (2019): 194–217. Richard B. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 41. On Indian slaves in the Mascarenes, see also: Hubert Gerbeau, “Des minorités malconnues: Esclaves indiens et malais des Mascareignes au XIXe siècle,” in Migrations, minorités et échanges en océan Indien, XIXe–XXe siècle, Études et Documents No. 11 (Aixen-Provence: Institut d’Histoire des Pays d’Outre-Mer, 1978), 160–64; Hubert Gerbeau, “Les esclaves asiatiques des Mascareignes: Enquêtes et hypothèses,” Annuaire des pays de l’océan Indien 7 (1980): 169–97; Marina Carter, “Indian Slaves in Mauritius (1729–1834),” Indian Historical Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1988): 233–47; Richard B. Allen, “Carrying Away the Unfortunate: The Exportation of Slaves from India during the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Jacques Weber, ed., Le monde créole: Peuplement, sociétés et condition humaine XVIIe– XXe siècles (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005), 285–98; Marina Carter, “Slavery, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Indian Ocean Colonial World: A Case Study of ‘Indian’ Slaves on Mauritius,” in Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe, eds., Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020), 43–59. Francis C. Assisi, “Indian Slaves in Colonial America,” India Currents, 16 May 2007 (http:// www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2007/05/16/indian-slaves-in-colonial America); Thomas Costa, Virginia Runaways: Runaway slave Advertisements from 18th-Century Virginia Newspapers: Virginia Gazette, 15–27 April 1737, 4 August 1768, 7 March 1771, 13 July 1776 (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-costa?specfile=/); Jean Mettas, Répertoire des expeditions négrières françaises au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, Nantes, Serge Daget, ed., (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer et Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner S.A., 1978), 613–14.

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Figure 0.2 Arakanese selling slaves to the Dutch at Pipely/Baliapal, India, in January 1663 From Wouter Schouten, Reys-togten naar en door Oost Indien … [Travels in the East Indies …], 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Andries van Damme, 1708). (Collection of Richard B. Allen)

These export trades were facilitated by the existence of large indigenous slave populations. Contemporary sources report an abundance of inexpensive slaves in northern India during the Delhi Sultanate,73 while hundreds of 73

Fouzia Farooq Ahmed, “The Delhi Sultanate: A Slave Society or a Society with Slaves?,” Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 30, no. 1 (2009): 7–10.

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thousands of men, women, and children were enslaved during the Mughal wars of expansion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Warfare in southern India supplied many of the captives carried away from the subcontinent by the VOC during six export boomlets during the seventeenth century,74 while the famines which ravaged parts of the subcontinent periodically generated additional tens of thousands of slaves for both domestic and export markets as desperate people sold themselves, and especially their children, into slavery in attempts to stay alive.75 The incidence of involuntary bondage varied widely in Southeast Asia. West Java housed relatively few slaves at the beginning of the eighteenth century, while bondmen and -women comprised 10, 15, and as much as 30 percent of pre-colonial populations among, respectively, groups in Sarawak, on the island of Nias off Sumatra’s west coast, and among the Batak and Toraja on Sulawesi.76 The number of enslaved men, women, and children in the region remains difficult to ascertain, but the scale of this activity is suggested by estimates that island Southeast Asia may have housed 701,500–970,500 slaves in the early nineteenth century.77 An estimated 567,000–806,000 slaves resided in the Indonesian archipelago (excluding Java and Madura) in the mid-nineteenth century where they comprised 8–10 percent of the population, while the period from 1820 to 1850 may have witnessed 386,000–437,000 slave exports from places such as Bali, Batak, Kalimantan, Lombok, Manado, the Mentawai Islands, New Guinea, Nias, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Timor, and 280,000–384,000 slave imports into places such as Aceh in Java, Amboina, Bali, the Banda Islands, Lombok, Kalimantan, Riau, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Ternate.78 Extensive trading networks moved hundreds of thousands of bondmen and -women throughout and beyond the region. Slave raiding and trading was an integral part of life in the Maluku archipelago before and after Europeans arrived in eastern Indonesia.79 Slaves from islands such as Alor, Buton, Manggarai, Mindanao, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, and Timor in the Indonesian and 74

Markus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade.’ Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 133–71. 75 Allen, European Slave Trading, 123–24, 187–88. 76 Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage, 161. 77 Ulbe Bosma, The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 55. 78 Ulbe Bosma, “Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (2020): 114–15. 79 Manuel Lobato, “War-Making, Raiding, Slave Hunting and Piracy in the Malukan Archipelago,” in Y.H. Teddy Sim, ed., Piracy and Surreptitious Activity in the Malay Archipelago and Adjacent Seas, 1600–1840 (Singapore: Springer, 2014), 73–103.

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Philippine archipelagos reached Makassar from whence they were re-exported, together with Bugi and Torajan slaves from Sulawesi, to Aceh, Banjarmasin and Sukadena in Borneo, Jambi and Palembang in Sumatra, and as far away as Ayudhya in Siam.80 The economic importance of this trade is suggested by the fact that slaves accounted for 14.1–21.7 percent of the value of major commodity imports at Makassar between 1720 and the 1780s, and 22.5–33.7 percent of the value of the port’s major exports during the same period.81 The magnitude of this traffic is suggested in various ways. Perhaps 200,000–300,000 slaves arrived in Batavia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one-half of whom were probably imported by the VOC, company employees engaged in private trade, and Batavian entrepreneurs, while Chinese and local merchants based elsewhere in the region supplied the balance of such imports.82 Overall, an estimated 660,000 to 1,135,000 million slaves were transported to areas under VOC control during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.83 Other locales also handled large numbers of slaves. Bali exported an estimated 100,000–150,000 individuals between 1620 and 1830,84 while slave raiding generated 200,000–300,000 imports into the southern Philippines’ Sulu sultanate between 1770 and 1870.85 Perhaps 4,000–5,000 slaves were traded annually in insular Southeast Asia between 1820 and 1850, while another 6,000–8,000 persons fell victim to slave raids each year during the same period.86 Southeast Asian slaves also reached the western Indian Ocean. Some 14,300 “Malays” landed in the Cape Colony between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries.87 Malays, including individuals identified specifically as Balinese, likewise reached the Mascarenes during the eighteenth and early 80 Bosma, The Making of a Periphery, 170; T. Bigalke, “Dynamics of the Torajan Slave Trade in South Sulawesi,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage, 343–44. On slavery and slave trading on Timor, see Hans Hägerdal, “Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (2020): 15–33. 81 Gerrit J. Knaap and Heather Sutherland, Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers and Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Makassar (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 125, 230, 235. 82 Remco Raben, “Cities and the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia,” in Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulter, eds., Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 135. 83 van Rossum, “The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade.” 84 Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’,” 144; Hans Hägerdal, “The Slaves of Timor: Life and Death on the Fringes of an Early Colonial Society,” Itinerario 34, no. 2 (2010): 21. 85 Warren, The Sulu Zone, 2nd ed., 208. 86 Bosma, The Making of a Periphery, 57. 87 Shell, Children of Bondage, 40–41. On these slaves’ specific places of origin, see Nigel Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and its Demise in the Cape Colony,” in Campbell, Abolition and its Aftermath, 31.

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Figure 0.3 Balische slavin [Balinese slave girl] From Cornelius de Bruins, Reizen over Moskovie, door Persie en Inde … [Travels into Moscovy, Persia, and the East Indies …], (Amsterdam: Rudolph en Gerard Westein, Joannes Ossterwyk, Hendrik van de Gaete, Boekverkopers, 1714), plates 202–03. (Collection of Richard B. Allen)

nineteenth centuries, perhaps 3,800–4,750 of whom did so during the illicit slave trade to the islands that flourished between 1811 and the early 1830s.88 Information on human trafficking in Central and East Asia remains rather sparse, but recent scholarship confirms the existence of extensive trading networks that, in addition to large numbers of Indians, funneled huge numbers of Russian, Armenian, and other slaves to Central Asian markets. Hundreds of thousands of Persian Shi’ites also reached these markets after 1500,89 while 88 89

Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade,” 41. See also: Gerbeau, “Des minorités mal-connues”; Marina Carter, “A Servile Minority in a Sugar Island: Malay and Chinese Slaves in Mauritius,” in Weber, Le monde créole, 257–71. Jeff Eden, “Slavery in Islamic Central Asia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2019), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.322. See also: Thomas Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi’i Iran, AD 1500–1900,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 36, no. 4 (2001): 407–18; Robert Dunbar, “A History of Slavery in Central Asia: Shī’ī Muslim

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the Afghan overlord of Herat sold as many as 12,000 of his Shi’ite subjects into slavery in Central Asia during the 1830s.90 Persians comprised the majority of the region’s slave population during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; Khwarazm (Khiva) and Bukhara, for example, each housed populations of 30,000–60,000 mostly Iranian slaves during the nineteenth century.91 Large numbers of Central Asian peoples likewise fell victim to enslavement. Turkic slave regiments formed the nucleus of most armies in the eastern Islamic world by the eleventh century and, as noted earlier, the Delhi Sultanate employed large numbers of Turkic military slaves during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mongols routinely enslaved and sold Kipchaks and other Turkic peoples during the thirteenth century, while Mongols themselves were sometimes reduced to slavery.92 Mountain Tajiks from Badakhshan and Afghanistan were among those held in bondage in Xinjiang during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.93 Overall, an estimated 6.0–6.4 million Central Asians were trafficked into the Black Sea region, the Mediterranean world, and the Ottoman Empire between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries.94 Millions more men, women, and children were held in bondage in East Asia. Slaves comprised approximately 30 percent of Korea’s population from the eleventh into the eighteenth century.95 The complexities of defining slave status in China make it difficult to determine how widespread slavery was in the Middle Kingdom, but arguments that at least 2 percent of an early seventeenth-century population of 150–160 million were described as “slaves” or “bonded” persons (e.g., bandang, dianpu, jianu, nubi, nupu) suggests that large numbers of people endured lives of servitude.96 The Chinese market in human beings was supplied in part by foreign sources such as Vietnam which exported thousands of women and girls to southern China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and probably long before then as well.97 Claude Chevaleyre’s research reveals the existence of well-developed Enslavement in 19th Century Bukhara,” Verbum 15, no. 1 (2018), article 5 (https://fisher pub.sjfc.edu/verbum/vol15/iss1/5). Stanziani estimates that 200,000 Persians reached Bukhara and that a total of 700,000 Indians and Persians were traded into Central Asia (Bondage, 90). 90 Hopkins, “Race, Sex and Slavery,” 642. 91 Eden, Slavery and Empire, 59. 92 See Don Wyatt in this volume. 93 Newby, “Bondage on Qing China’s Northwestern Frontier.” 94 Stanziani, Bondage, 90. 95 See Christopher Lovins in this volume. 96 On these terms, see Harriet Zurndorfer and Claude Chevaleyre in this volume. 97 Lessard, “‘Cet ignoble trafic’”; Lessard, Human Trafficking.

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domestic slave trading networks during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644– 1911) dynasties. Guangdong, for instance, exported slaves from its coastal areas to inland regions while receiving the same from Guangxi and beyond. These networks also supplied slaves to the Portuguese comptoir at Macau, established in 1557.98 Macau’s importance as a slave market is suggested is various ways: by the arrival of an estimated 16,400–24,400 Japanese and Korean slaves via the Portuguese factory at Nagasaki between the late 1550s and 1600, by reports that the settlement witnessed the sale of 2,000–3,000 Japanese slaves in 1610 and 5,000–6,000 Japanese and black slaves in 1613, and by the presence of 5,000 slaves among its population in 1630 and 1639.99 Slaves flowed from Macau to the Spanish-controlled Philippines, from whence thousands of South, Southeast, and East Asians were carried across the Pacific to Mexico and Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.100 East Asian slaves also reached other parts of the globe. Japanese slaves arrived in Portugal during the sixteenth century,101 while sources record the presence of Chinese slaves in Goa, Mozambique, and Mauritius during the eighteenth century.102 The globality of the traffic in Asian slaves raises important questions about the way(s) in which these trades influenced other patterns of Asian overseas migration. Studies of modern South and East Asian diasporas ignore their historical antecedents.103 The need to situate these diasporas in more fully developed contexts is illustrated by what we know about the Indian Ocean origins of the indentured labor trades that flourished during the nineteenth century,104 and by the history of Indian labor migration to the Mascarenes. In addition to thousands of Indian slaves, Mauritius housed free Indian artisans and craftsmen recruited at Pondichéry who became an integral component of 98 See Claude Chevaleyre in this volume. 99 de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade, 293–95, 404–05. 100 Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade.” On Japanese slaves in the Philippines, see de Sousa, Portuguese Slave Trade, 406–24. 101 de Sousa, Portuguese Slave Trade, 464–73. 102 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1968), 223–25, 238; Carter, “A Servile Minority”; Allen, European Slave Trading, 74. De Sousa notes, for example, that 450 slave women were sent to India from Macau in 1563 (The Portuguese Slave Trade, 404). On sources of information about African and Asian slaves in the Estado da Índia, see also: Stephanie Hassell, “Inquisition Records from Goa as Sources for the Study of Slavery in the Eastern Domains of the Portuguese Empire,” History in Africa 42 (2015): 397–418; Salvadore, “Between the Red Sea Slave Trade.” 103 E.g., Judith M. Brown, Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 104 Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the PostEmancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014): 328–48.

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the island’s increasingly numerous and socially and economically important free(d) population of color during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.105 There is good reason accordingly to view the movement of these free Indian artisans and craftsmen and the exportation of as many as 24,000 Indian slaves to the Mascarenes, especially between 1770 and 1810, as establishing at least some of the institutional foundations for the indentured labor trades which scattered 3.7 million African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Javanese, Melanesian, and other non-European laborers, three-fourths of whom were of Indian origin, to the Caribbean (especially British Guiana [Guyana], Cuba, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Suriname, Tobago, Trinidad), eastern and southern Africa (Kenya, Mozambique, Natal, Transvaal, Uganda), the southwestern Indian Ocean (Mayotte, Mauritius, Nosy Bé, Réunion), South and Southeast Asia (Assam, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya), Australasia (New Caledonia, Queensland), the Central and South Pacific (Fiji, Hawai’i, Samoa, Tahiti, Vanuatu), and Central and South America (Mexico, Peru) between the 1830s and 1920s.106 We may note more specifically, for example, that the late 1820s witnessed the recruitment and transportation of some 3,100 indentured Indian laborers to Réunion from the former French slave trading enclaves at Pondichéry, Karaikal, and Yanam,107 and the arrival of 1,500 Chinese and Indian laborers recruited from Calcutta, Madras, Penang, and Singapore in Mauritius where they worked alongside East African and Malagasy slaves in the islands’ cane fields.108 In a seminal article on slavery and agricultural labor in southern 105 Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79–104; Richard B. Allen, “Creating Undiminished Confidence: The Free Population of Color and Identity Formation on Mauritius, 1770–1830,” Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 4 (2011), 519–33. 106 For an overview of Asian indentured labor migration, see Richard B. Allen, “Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2017), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.33. For an overview of the indentured labor system, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 107 Pondichéry and Karaikal figured prominently in the emigration of at least 79,000 indentured Indians to Réunion, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique between 1849 and the mid-1880s. 108 Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Press, 1984), 14–17; Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Chinese Diaspora in the Western Indian Ocean (Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien/Mission Catholique Chinoise, 1985), 268–69; Northrup, Indentured Labor, 60; Marina Carter and James Ng Fong Kwong, Forging the Rainbow: Labour Immigrants in British Mauritius (Mauritius: Alfran Co. Ltd., 1997), 4–5; Jacques Weber, “L’émigration indienne à La Réunion: ‘Contraire à la morale’ ou ‘utile à l’humanité’? (1829–1860),” in Edmond Maestri, ed., Esclavage et abolitions dans l’océan Indien, 1723–1860 (Paris: L’Harmattan,

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India published more than half a century ago, Benedicte Hjejle argued that South India’s praedial slave population supplied a significant number of the migrant workers who reached Ceylon between 1843 and 1873.109 The registers which recorded the arrival of indentured Indian immigrants in Mauritius confirm Hjejle’s argument by revealing that laborers who reached the island from southern India during the late 1830s included individuals identified explicitly as being of “slave” caste status.110 3

Conclusion

The enslavement and trafficking of millions of Asian men, women, and children over the centuries underscores the pressing need to incorporate Asia much more fully into global slavery studies. The complexities of the Asian experience with slavery and bonded labor indicate that determining how best to do so will undoubtedly entail vigorous discussion and debate. In addition to probing the nature and dynamics of slave and cognate labor systems more fully in the states and societies that have already be the subject of interest, historians and scholars from cognate disciplines need to expand their geographical horizons to include hitherto ignored polities and peoples. Expanding the conceptual horizons of Asian slavery studies must also be an integral part of this process, beginning with a greater willingness to situate the history of these labor systems in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts, and to draw on the insights provided by studies of slavery and forced labor elsewhere in the globe. Recent work by Indian Oceanists, for example, highlights the need for Asianists to pay attention to the impact that the environment can have on slave and cognate labor systems.111 Other work 2002), 309–10; Satyendra Peerthum, “‘A Cheap Reservoir of Mankind for Labour’: The Genesis of the Indentured Labour System in Mauritius, 1826–1843,” in Vijayalakshmi Teelock, Anwar Janoo, Geoffrey Summers, Marc Serge Rivière, and Sooryakanti NirsimlooGayan, eds., Angajé: Explorations into the History, Society and Culture of Indentured Immigrants and their Descendants in Mauritius, 3 vols. (Port Louis: Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund, 2012), vol. 1, 158–59. 109 Benedicte Hjejle, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 106. 110 Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Moka, Mauritius: PE 1. The individuals in question were members of the Palin and Pulaya castes. On Pulayas, see K. Saradamoni, Emergence of a Slave Caste: Pulayas of Kerala (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980). 111 Matthew S. Hopper, “Cyclones, Drought, and Slavery: Environment and Enslavement in the Western Indian Ocean, 1870s to 1920s,” in Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen, eds., Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger (New York:

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illustrates the ways in which historical archaeology can deepen our understanding of the slave and indentured experience and these systems’ legacy elsewhere than in the Atlantic world.112 Last, but far from least, is the need for Asianists to draw on the insights and perspectives that non-Asian specialists can offer. Jeff Fynn-Paul’s reflections in this volume’s concluding chapter on the relationship between slavery in Asia and global slavery from the vantage point of a medievalist who works on slavery in Iberia and the Mediterranean are an illustrative case in point. As he and the other contributors to this volume appreciate, coming to terms with the human experience with slavery and bonded labor requires us to transcend our preoccupation with the particular and embrace that experience in all of its intriguing complexity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 255–82; Gwyn Campbell, ed., Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 112 Krish Seetah, ed., Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), especially Richard B. Allen, “History, Historical Archaeology, and the ‘History of Silence’: Forced and Free Labor Migration in the Indian Ocean, 1770–1900,” 121–42; Saša Čaval, “Archaeology and Religious Syncretism in Mauritius,” 230–52; and Diego Calaon and Corinne Forest, “Archaeology and the Process of Heritage Construction in Mauritius,” 253–90.

Part 1 Conceptualizing Slave Status

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Chapter 1

Slavery and Forced Labour in Asia: Status Quaestionis Anthony Reid Although it is the Earth’s largest and most populous continent, Asia remains poorly represented in the literature on slavery and forced labour despite the recent surge of interest in studying these topics in pan-regional contexts.1 As earlier scholarship on servitude in Asia suggests, this part of the world was least influenced by the two systems of slavery that dominate the historiography on slavery and forced labour: ancient Rome and the Atlantic. As historians of Africa and the Indian Ocean world also increasingly appreciate, these two models fail to capture the diversity of the human experience with forced labour and the infinite variety of free and unfree labour relations that have existed in different parts of the world over the centuries. Both of these models represent, in terms of some of the categorizations that I want to develop in this chapter, closed, hard, state-enforced private ownership of chattel slaves. We need to put these paradigms to one side as we consider the nature and dynamics of slavery and forced labour in Asia in all of its complexity. 1

Forced or Unfree Labour

The category of “forced” or “unfree” labour is so broad that we can only make sense of it in terms of what it is not. The wage labour of modern industrial societies comes immediately to mind, whereby employees are theoretically free to accept or reject employment for a living wage on terms that are mutually agreed. Adam Smith set out a theory of labour in which wages are determined by the market, with workers seeking the highest possible and employers the 1 Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2004); Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon and David Blight, eds., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Noel Lenski and Judith Cameron, eds., What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

© Anthony Reid, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_003

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lowest. While a free system of bargaining was theoretically normative, Smith was quick to show that actual conditions in Europe were far from free: “The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.”2 Without reward for his labour the workmen could not long survive and so could not be an equal party to wage-fixing negotiations. Degrees of unfreedom, in other words, continued into the industrial era. Before this era, wage labour is exceptional and genuine freedom in negotiating it highly so. While Jan Lucassen claims to have identified some forms of wage labour in Babylon and Egypt in the first millennium BCE,3 we should consider forced or unfree labour to be the pre-industrial norm. For labour to be paid and free there must be both a market in labour, so that the worker has a choice between possible employers, and a market in food and other goods so that the worker can use his wages to support himself. The latter emerged very early in Asia, but I have not seen much evidence of the former before the nineteenth century. European traders, for instance, complained constantly about the paucity and very high cost of hired labour in Southeast Asian port cities during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, a state of affairs that reflected the bonded status of those workers who were available and whose services could only be rented from those who controlled their labour.4 Even on occasions such as when the first bishop of Manila reported that the Chinese migrant workers who reached the Philippines after 1567 were “hard workers and greedy for money,”5 it is unclear whether these men were or were not bonded to those who brought them to this Spanish colony from China. The same can be said of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants who arrived in Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in Chinese-operated mines and plantations. The well-known reports of European consuls in Bangkok and the Labour Enquiries of 1876 and 1890 in Singapore provide only limited insight into the system of debt and 2 Cited in Paul J. McNulty, “Adam Smith’s Concept of Labor,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34, no. 3 (1973): 356 and passim. 3 Jan Lucassen, “Outlines of a History of Labour,” International Institute of Social History Paper 51 (2013), 10. 4 Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 168; Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 129–31. 5 Bishop Domingo de Salazar, “The Chinese and the Parian at Manila,” in E.H. Blair and J.A. Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands 1493–1898, vol. 7 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clarke Company, 1903), 229.

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obligation that was a hallmark of Chinese migrant labour recruitment and use in colonial Southeast Asia. Where we draw the line between “free” and “unfree” can be equally difficult to determine in the case of convict labour. Because they were reduced to unfree status by virtue of a state’s law code, convict labourers could fit into the broader category of “state slavery” or “state bondage” practised in many parts of Asia over the centuries. Jails were rare in pre-modern Asia, but convicts, along with enslaved prisoners of war, were mobilized to provide the labour that states needed for public works such as the construction of canals, forts, and palaces. Convicts continued to perform such labour during the colonial era. As the Dutch colonial state expanded its control over the Indonesian archipelago during the nineteenth century, for example, it found that condemned criminals offered a much cheaper and more effective way of getting dirty work done than slavery had provided for its Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) predecessor. An 1828 decree stipulated that forced labour (dwangarbeid) replace all other punishments “as far as possible” in order to ensure a steady supply of such labour. Although corvée labourers working for the colonial state were far more numerous than convicts, convicts could be made to go anywhere to do the most unpleasant work on a full-time basis. They accordingly accompanied military expeditions, often in chains, to perform the kind of heavy manual labour invariably required during such undertakings, and mined coal once coal-powered steamships made that necessary. This system reached its peak in 1880–1900 when an average of 26,000 convict labourers were available at any one time, about one-tenth of whom worked in colonial Indonesia’s largest coal mine at Ombilin, Sumatra.6 That convicts, prisoners-of-war, and political prisoners continued to be used during the twentieth century to perform heavy labour for many modern states underscores the need for a category such as “state bondage” to illustrate the continuities, rather than the discontinuities, between slavery and these modern forms of forced labour. 2

The Key Term: Slavery

As the slippery, ambivalent meanings attached to the terms for “slave,” “bondman,” “serf,” and “servant” in the world’s countless vernaculars attest, 6 Anthony Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia,” in Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 74–76.

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the slave’s dual character as a person who is also property and as a trusted yet demeaned intimate7 makes for endless ambiguity. When I organised a conference on slavery in Southeast Asia in 1980, I thought my first task was to work towards developing a definition that those studying forced labour systems in this part of the world could agree on. How naïve! Some of the conference’s participants wanted to abandon the term altogether in favour of examining the range of vernacular terms used to describe different types of inferior status and unfreedom. There was a precedent for doing so; in the introduction to their classic collection of papers on slavery in Africa, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff had tried to use the term only in inverted commas even though most of those who contributed to the volume abandoned this clumsy artifice.8 In the book published after the 1980 conference, Michael Aung-Thwin maintained the opposition he had voiced during it, declining to use the word “slavery” at all. He rightly insisted that, since vertical bonds permeated social relationships in pre-colonial Burma (as I have argued for Southeast Asia more broadly), the proper question to ask was not “Are you bonded?” but “To whom are you bonded and for what purpose?”9 I thought then, and am even more convinced now, that slavery is an essential term of analysis if we can free it from pejorative moral associations. I will try in this chapter to restrict the term slave to the saleable property of another, lower in status than the indigenous population, and obliged to provide labour or other services for his/her owner. The first of these three requirements separates the slave from many other forms of unfree labour or bondage. The essential “slaveness” of the slave emerges in his/her mobility and in his/her being subject to being forcibly uprooted from place, family, and culture by transfer to another, often a foreigner. A paradigmatic example is provided by one of James Warren’s Visayans who, captured by Balangingi raiders and sold to a Chinese shipper at Sulu who subsequently sold her to a Dutchman in Batavia or Makassar, experienced slavery in several different languages and cultural settings. Under such circumstances, we need a category, suitably nuanced by sub-categories and contexts, to explain this process. Slave lives matter. Indeed, they matter more than most because we have a better chance of knowing them than other members of the underclasses from which they came. As property, they had a specific economic value, and thus 7 Compare the dichotomy between the trusted slave/servant and the shiftless hireling in the Biblical Old Testament and in John 10:13. 8 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). 9 Michael Aung-Thwin, “Athi, Kyun-Taw, Hpaya-Kyun: Varieties of Commendation and Dependence in Pre-Colonial Burma,’ in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 67.

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they had to be accounted for as other subalterns did not. I was recently in Cape Town, where the past is fiercely contested. The handsome old Cultural History Museum, which once celebrated the achievements of Western civilization and European settlers in southern Africa, has been recreated since 1998 as the “Slave Lodge” decorated with hundreds of names of the slaves and captives brought to the city on VOC ships. Because their names were recorded, individuals such as Piwtaij van Sumbawa, Tinong van Palembang, and Lourens van Madagascar become historical persons for their latter-day descendants who form a large part of Cape Town’s population in a way that other subaltern migrants cannot. Before the formal abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the great majority of our planet’s population were “people without history.” Those who had a history were those who could write or had enough power, wealth, or notoriety that others wrote about them. Only the tiniest proportion of the underclass, hunter-gatherers, peasants, women, and stateless peoples fell into this category. By making an individual a chattel, slavery can also give them a history. The first Asian to circumnavigate the world, Magellan’s Sumatran or Melakan “captured slave,” whom he christened Enrique, has become a Filipino and Malaysian hero thanks to the extensive documentation that Magellan, Pigafetta, and others left about him.10 The VOC’s insistence on accountability to superiors through written records has left us with particularly rich sources of information about these enslaved men and women. As the work of scholars such as Leonard Blussé, Radin Fernando, Kerry Ward, and Eric Jones attests, Dutch legal records from Batavia, Melaka, Nagasaki, and Cape Town are providing exciting new insights into hitherto hidden aspects of slave life such as inheritance, theft, murder, and escape.11 However, despite such scholarship, the point that David Brion Davis made some 35 years ago is still valid today: “Our striking gains in empirical knowledge have not been matched by a widely accepted paradigm or theoretical model”.12

10 11

12

Carlos Quirino, “The First Man Around the World Was a Filipino,” Philippines Free Press, 28 December 1991. An imagined statue of Enrique is prominently displayed in the Maritime Museum of Malacca, Malaysia. Leonard Blussé, Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century‬ (Trenton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002); Radin Fernando, Murder Most Foul: A Panorama of Social Life in Melaka from the 1780s to the 1820s (Kuala Lumpur: MBRAS, 2006); Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 9.

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Historiographical Issues

The need for such a model is underscored by the conceptual and other problems that characterize modern slavery studies. Foremost among these is the Eurocentrism that colours scholarship on slavery in many parts of the globe. This bias may be traced to the fact that, from the Renaissance onward, European writers understood slavery to be an integral part of life in ancient Greece and Rome, while during the nineteenth century the institution became closely associated with the transatlantic slave trade. Although the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas became a major subject for debate in Europe during the Age of Discovery, Europeans paid little attention to slavery in Asia until the Enlightenment when writers such as Montesquieu read extensively in the existing travel literature as part of their attempt to understand the larger world in which they lived. Montesquieu made use, for example, of William Dampier’s account of seventeenth-century Aceh to show how mild slavery can be in despotic situations.13 He may have also read the 1691 account of Siam in which Simon de la Loubère reported that “the slavery … is so gentle, or, if you will, the Liberty is so abject, that it is become a Proverb, that the Siamese sell it to eat of a … Durian.”14 Even when systematic studies of slavery as a global phenomenon began to appear in the mid-twentieth century, historians continued to have difficulty freeing themselves from a discourse which held that Europeans had fostered not only the slave trade’s development, but also the crusade to abolish it and ultimately the institution of slavery itself. This Eurocentrism has been compounded by the fact that, with the exception of those inspired by Marxist approaches to history, Asian historians have demonstrated little interest in reconstructing the history of slavery in their own societies. Their reluctance to do so is, at least in part, a legacy of the anti-slavery crusade of the nineteenth century and the attendant willingness of Europeans to use abolitionism to justify their acquisition of empire in Africa and Asia. Histories of slavery in Asia,

13

14

Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. T. Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), 239. “At Achim every one is for selling himself. Some of the chief lords have not less than a thousand slaves, all principal merchants, who have a great number of slaves themselves, and these also are not without their slaves. Their masters are their heirs, and put them into trade. In those states, the freemen being overpowered by the government have no better resource than that of making themselves slaves to the tyrants in office.” Simon de la Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam [1691] (rpt., Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1969), 77.

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including Bruno Lasker’s 1950 study of slavery in Southeast Asia,15 my own 1983 collection, the 1998 Historical Guide to World Slavery, and this book have been written largely by non-Asian scholars. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels authored the most influential of the Eurocentric attempts to generalize about the nature of slavery, including that in Asia. Their six evolutionary stages in the history of capitalism defined by changing means of production sandwiched “slave society” between “primitive society” and “feudalism” in a way that only makes sense in Europe. That did not prevent more dogmatic Asian Marxists from combing their own histories to find analogies to a slave mode of production giving way to a feudal one. Mauryan India, Han China, and Heian Japan were hammered into service as examples of slave societies. Marx’s positing of an “Asiatic mode of production” made few converts in Asia, especially when presented (in the first volume of Capital, 1867) as a key to the riddle of “the unchangeability of Asian societies,” despite constant changes of political regime and dynasty. Feudalism had a far bigger career as a pop-Marxist rejection of past social structures.16 An exception was the Indonesian Marxist writer and revolutionary Tan Malaka, who complained that his country “does not yet have a history of its own except one of slavery.”17 Eric Williams, who was to become the first prime minister of Trinidad, subsequently advanced a more sophisticated argument built on this Marxist tradition. His 1938 Oxford doctoral thesis, published in 1944 as Capitalism and Slavery, sought to show that the rise of British capitalism and the industrial revolution were made possible by the profits of the slave trade which was only abolished when declining Caribbean economies made it unprofitable.18 The pioneering work of the Dutch ethnographer H.J. Nieboer (1873–1920) laid the foundation upon which social scientists began to study slavery systematically and comparatively. In 1910, Nieboer published Slavery as an Industrial System, an expanded version of his 1900 Utrecht dissertation. In this classic work which challenged the Eurocentrism of the day, Nieboer used the new 15 16

17 18

Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950). See, for example, Jit Phumisak, Chomna Sakdina Thai (1957), translated by Craig Reynolds as “The Real Face of Thai Feudalism,” in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1994); R. Moh. Ali, Perdjoangan Feodal Indonesia [The Struggle of Feudal Indonesia] (Jakarta: Ganaco, 1954). Cited in R. Moh. Ali, Pengantar Ilmu Sejarah Indonesia (Jakarta: Bhratara, 1963), 145. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

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spate of colonial ethnographies, including many on the Dutch East Indies, to identify 210 “savage” societies that had slavery compared to 181 that did not. He concluded, after correlating this data to the means of production of each of these societies, that slavery is more common where the resources needed to sustain life are abundant so that the only means to compel someone to work is through slavery.19 More recently, Moses Finley has done much to encourage anthropologists and historians of the non-Western world to engage with one another by bringing social science concerns with a Marxist edge to bear on the question of slavery in the ancient world. His two books, The Ancient Economy (1973) and Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), made it easier for historians of slavery to view developments during classical antiquity as part of a continuum of different ways in which societies have sought to mobilize labour.20 Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s controversial Time on the Cross (1974) brought another comparative perspective, that of the economic historian, to the detailed study of slave records and testaments.21 By escaping from, if not even reversing, the moralistic tone of previous academic studies of American slavery, their data purported to show that slavery on American antebellum cotton plantations was a relatively efficient system of production, that plantation slaves’ living conditions were comparable to those of non-slaves, and that their health was rather better than that of freed slaves after the Civil War. Like many recent studies based on slavery records, Fogel and Engerman claimed to be returning dignity and agency to an underclass that mainstream history had seen only as wretched and powerless victims. This provocative assertion prompted many critics to claim that they had misused data and exaggerated the stability of slave families. In addition to witnessing increasing numbers of studies of slavery in Africa and Asia, the 1980s witnessed the publication of major works that reflected the influence of social scientific approaches to studying slavery and forced labour. Particularly prominent among these works were those by Jamaicanborn Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson and Yale historian David Brion Davis. Patterson’s influential Slavery and Social Death (1982) offered the most ambitious global survey of slavery since Nieboer, a survey that covered a large 19 20 21

H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910), 171–79, 384–85. M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); M.I. Finley, Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking, 1980). Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974).

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number of societies including key Asian ones.22 In this work, Patterson also rejected defining slaves as saleable property in favour of a definition that emphasized that enslaved individuals were no longer entitled to being considered as normal human beings. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), Davis discussed the contradictory entanglements of slavery and freedom, while in Slavery and Human Progress (1984), he explored the contested issue of slavery’s relation to human progress.23 4

Necessary Distinctions and Typologies

Defining slavery and slave status requires us to consider three major variables, the first of which is the nexus between land and labour. As Nieboer pointed out more than a century ago, slavery was more common in societies where land and other resources were more abundant than labour. The tendency to replace slavery with serfdom and corvée labour as a means of labour mobilization was largely a consequence of more complex societies having higher population densities that generated surplus labour beyond that needed for subsistence agriculture. Java, to cite one example, was a major exporter of slaves in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when it had a population of barely three million people, but stood out from other areas in Indonesia as a non-slave society by the eighteenth century when the island’s population had grown and state control over its inhabitants had expanded. Colonial administrator, diplomat, and author John Crawfurd made the same point early in the nineteenth century: “The numbers and servility of the population of Java have, among them, rendered slaves of little value.”24 As population grew severalfold during the nineteenth century, landlessness increased and wage labour became affordable, Java began to export labour again, only now in the form of indentured workers. The same process occurred in Korea.25

22 23 24

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Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Davis, Slavery and Human Progress. John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1820), vol. 1, 248. See also John Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands & Adjacent Countries (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1856; rpt. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1971), 404. Martina Deuchler, “Korea,” in Seymour Drescher and Stanley Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 246.

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Despite the greater relative value of labour in the sparsely-settled stateless highlands of Asia (including James Scott’s “Zomia”)26 than in state-controlled lowlands and valleys, labour was frequently transferred from the former to the latter. Slave raiding was a common pattern of incorporation and expansion in those areas between “civilization” and statelessness. This activity is documented as far apart in time as Angkor in the 1290s and Malaya in the nineteenth century when the “hunting” of aboriginal peoples in the Malay Peninsula frequently occurred.27 While this border raiding against stateless hill peoples may be considered an endemic feature of settled rice-growing communities, raiding became a way of life for some only in response to the profits of the longdistance slave trade. Dense settlements of wet-rice-growers were nevertheless more subject to disastrous famines than highland hunter-gatherers with more diverse sources of food. During famines an active slave trade could provide a means to transfer labour out of densely-settled areas on a large scale. During the seventeenth century, the thousands of Indians who were enslaved because of famines in the Deccan (1630–32) and along the Coromandel Coast (1660–90) were exported to labour in the VOC capital at Batavia and later for agricultural work in Aceh.28 The Bugis army that defeated Makassar with Dutch help in 1669 left about 5,000 prisoners to starve to death on a barren island from whence they were rescued as slaves by nearby Buton.29 In the aftermath of the Tambora eruption of 1815, the dense rice-growing complex of South Bali was so devastated that it exported nothing for several years but slaves who were rescued from starvation by French traders to labour on the sugar estates of Réunion and elsewhere.30 A second major variable that must be considered when attempting to define slavery is the distinction between “open” and “closed” systems. In seeking a typology for Southeast Asia, I found James Watson’s distinction between “closed” systems, in which slaves were seen as forever kinless, despised outsiders, and “open” ones which incorporated outsiders into the dominant group 26

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 27 Kirk Endicott, “The Effects of Slave Raiding on the Aborigines of the Malay Peninsula,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 221–36. 28 Anthony Reid, ed., Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2006), 6–7; William Dampier, Voyages and Discoveries [1690], edited by C. Wilkinson (London: Argonaut Press, 1931), 91. 29 Crawfurd, History, vol. 1, 248. 30 Alfons van der Kraan, “Bali: Slavery and Slave Trade,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 332–37; Anthony Reid, “Revisiting Southeast Asian History with Geology,” in Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen, eds., Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 39.

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within two or three generations, to be useful.31 Closed systems were characteristic of relatively resource-rich, labour-scarce societies, often in the highlands, where emphasizing the distinctive apartness of slaves was a means to preserving their labour, which was essential to production. Open societies, on the other hand, were more prevalent in expanding conquest states which used the newly-conquered to perform construction work and menial tasks. Over the longue durée that reaches from antiquity to the nineteenth century, open systems of slavery allowed stronger lowland or urban polities to incorporate labour and population from stateless highland societies.32 Although the “open” category is particularly useful when discussing slavery in the Southeast Asian gunpowder states that expanded rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is also probably applicable to earlier Asian empires such as Cambodia’s Angkor, Han and Tang China, and Mauryan India. Conquered peoples could pass through slavery to subject-hood as second or third generation slaves were absorbed into the dominant culture. Static or declining highland societies, on the other hand, needed to retain their servile labour across generations by emphasising slaves’ outcast quality. The Torajans of highland Sulawesi provide an informative example of such a closed system. Societies influenced by Islam or Christianity were inclined to use religion as the boundary marker between in-group and out-group status. Their slave systems could be “open” towards co-religionists but “closed” to others. How slaves were treated is a third variable that definitions of slave status need to take into consideration. Although early European observers tended to characterize Asian slavery as “mild,” a better word might be “soft” in the sense of being flexible and often temporary. “Hard” slavery needed to be legally enforced by an overarching state authority, a condition rarer in Asia than in Europe and its colonies. Societies held together by personal or patriarchal bonds were easier to escape from. The possibility of escaping to the forest or to another community provided the most effective check on brutality. One of the first Portuguese captains of Melaka after its conquest complained in 1539 about how even royal slaves in the city had to be indulged: “to rear his son, to provide him with clothing for his wife and for himself; one has to pamper him so that he does not run away from Your Majesty.”33

31 32 33

James L. Watson, “Slavery as an Institution: Open and Closed Systems,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems of Slavery, 9–13. Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems,” 156–58. Pero de Faria, cited in Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Manpower and Labour Categories in Early Sixteenth Century Malacca,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 209.

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The majority of slaves in human history differed little in genetic makeup, geographic origins or appearance from their masters. William Dampier found himself confused in seventeenth-century Aceh about the distinction between slave and free in a social system where vertical obligations were more important than precise status categories. Even those, he wrote, who “are slaves to slaves, yet have their slaves also; neither can a Stranger easily know who is a slave and who not among them: for they are all, in a manner, Slaves to one another.”34 This is a soft system, whereas a hard element was added in the river-valley states of Burma, Siam, and Cambodia where the status and labour obligation of state slaves or bondsmen was frequently tattooed on their wrist or elsewhere on their body.35 Expanding mercantile city-states needed to attract and retain private merchants by undertaking to safeguard their property of which slaves were an important part. In Muslim-ruled ports such as Melaka, Aceh, Banten, and Makassar, Islamic Shari’ah law provided an international legal basis for dealing with people-as-property. Batavia and other VOC cities were other prime examples of expanding city-states, but they produced a “harder” legal system underpinned by race. Thomas Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant governor of Java following the British conquest of the island in 1811, noted that the “[Dutch] Roman law regarding slavery in all its extent and vigour” applied in these settlements.36 While slaves were initially introduced to provide essential labour and might be owned by European and Asian elites as well as the VOC itself, by the eighteenth century, when other sources of labour became available, they were overwhelmingly owned by Europeans and Chinese and used as domestic servants. 5

Conclusion

Let me conclude this discussion by addressing two of the questions that have recently animated the debate about how slavery should be defined or conceptualized. Firstly, are slavery and forced labour necessarily obstacles to human progress, prosperity, and welfare, doomed to extinction as societies grow in wealth and sophistication? Expansive empires, civilizations, and religions in the past 34 35 36

Dampier, Voyages and Discoveries, 98. Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 78, 124. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, 2 vols. (London: Black, Parbury, and Allen, 1817; rpt. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1965, 1978), vol. 1, 76.

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often proclaimed the opposite view, that enslavement was a great advance over exterminating enemies in battle and a means to the advancement, civilization or salvation of the slaves themselves. Religious reformers, such as the great sixteenth-century Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas, pioneered the opposite view that slavery was a violation of the equality of all people before God, a perspective that made little headway in Europe until the Enlightenment elevated ideals of freedom and universalism to prominence. While philosophes and others might concede that slavery may have been a necessary stage in human history, they argued that Europe had progressed beyond it as other societies should aspire to. Nineteenth century anti-slavery reformers tended to take a stronger view that slavery was not only evil but regressive, and that societies based on it stagnated and failed to innovate. Marxists saw it as an early stage of human production, perhaps more productive than the primitive societies that went before, but infinitely less so than capitalism. The surge of scholarship on slavery and forced labour since the 1950s has introduced new perspectives on this issue. Fogel and Engerman, for example, generated a massive body of statistical data that challenged the idea that slavery in the antebellum South was inefficient and destroyed individuals’ morality and work ethic. They claimed that southern slave-based agriculture was 35 percent more efficient than northern family-based farming, and that per capita income in the South grew more rapidly than elsewhere in the United States. Like many recent researchers who work with the detailed judicial and administrative records that exist about slaves, they also made a case for slave agency, adaptability, and creativity,37 variables which demonstrate that while we often view the abolition of slavery as the most obvious measure of human progress, we cannot assume that a lack of “freedom” is an accurate indication of the exploitation or oppression to which labourers can be subjected. The development of new perspectives on slavery since the 1950s manifests itself in other ways. David Brion Davis, for one, has emphasized that, “It was not the enslavers who colonized and subjugated Africa, but the European liberators.”38 During the “Scramble” for colonies in Africa and the remaining un-colonized corners of Asia after 1870, the claim that they were suppressing slavery, slave-raiding, and piracy provided Europeans with the moral high ground to justify their belief that they were entitled to conquer the world. The credibility of such claims withered quickly, however, in the face of colonial realities. No sooner had the Dutch suppressed the last resistance facing them on Sumatra and outlawed slavery on the island than they forced the indigenous 37 38

Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, xvii.

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population to perform corvée labour one day every week to build the roads, prisons, and other infrastructure of a modern state. By 1916, 150,000 contract labourers had been transported from Java to labour on the tobacco plantations of East Sumatra under appalling conditions that exceeded anything known under the old regime. As Davis observes, “Western conceptions of slave and ‘free’ labour were wholly alien to Asian and African societies, where bondage took a variety of forms and seldom fit the paradigm of New World plantation slavery.”39 The second of the questions that animate current discussions about the nature and dynamics of slave and forced labour is related to the first: is a strong conception of slavery as unfreedom a necessary prerequisite to our placing a high value on personal freedom in the modern era? Various scholars have noted that freedom is most valued where, in places such as ancient Greece and eighteenth-century Virginia, it is most denied. Edmund Morgan, for example, influentially labelled this issue as the “central paradox” of the American Revolution.40 Others, such as Moses Finley, have viewed this issue not so much as a paradox as a necessary symbiosis. Slavery served in these two cases both to remove the fear of chaotic mob politics, since the slave underclass was disenfranchised, and to make the dominant class of citizen freemen proudly tenacious of their liberties.41 Orlando Patterson, having made his name as a perceptive analyst of global slavery, argued provocatively that freedom was a peculiar obsession of Europeans.42 More specifically, he declared that freedom failed in the nonWestern world because indigenous societies lacked the peculiar European combination of a sharp distinction between slave and free, strong competitive states founded on that distinction, and the evolution of a civic sense of freedom. Citing the case of the Toraja people of highland Sulawesi, he conceded that “some notion of freedom existed wherever slavery was found” but that it failed to progress beyond the most basic notion of “sovereignal freedom” to encompass notions of civic and personal freedom.43 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid, 302. Edmund Morgan “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. See also Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975). Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1978), 1–23; M.I. Finley, “Slavery,” in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 14 (New York: Collier & Macmillan, 1968), 307–13. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Kelly, “The Chinese Search for Freedom,” 28–33.

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Patterson’s argument was, in one sense, the latest and most persuasive variation on the stereotypical notion of “oriental despotism” first advanced by Herodotus and most famously articulated in Hegel’s declaration that “the Orientals knew only that one [the Emperor] was free.” Many Chinese liberals agreed that it was fruitless to look for models of freedom in their history. China’s most famous modern writer, Lu Xun, condemned Chinese history as an alternation between periods when “people managed to enjoy a simple slave condition” (order) and those when “people wished in vain to enjoy a simple slave condition” (chaos).44 Consciously or not, Patterson provided intellectual justification for the 1993 “Bangkok Declaration” in which a number of authoritarian Asian states held that the right to freedom enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights was not truly universal but parochially European. In 1994, a group of Asianists, provoked by Patterson’s argument, set out to re-examine the place of freedom in Asian history, an exercise that resulted in the publication in 1998 of Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia.45 Having demanded that we Asianists produce a riposte to Patterson, I turned out to be in a distinct minority in arguing on the basis of Asian evidence for the autonomous development of the ideal of personal freedom from an original slave/free dichotomy to a passionately-held civic one. I noted more specifically that the Malay/Indonesian term merdeka, understood for centuries as designating a free (i.e., non-slave) person or a freed slave, came to epitomize an ideal of personal freedom during the political awakening that swept through Southeast Asia during the 1920s. As one leftist newspaper complained at the time, “Wherever people gather, there we hear people talking about freedom. We want to sit free, sleep free, eat free, work free, play free … in short, to be free is generally understood to mean ‘not to be interfered with’, ‘not to be prohibited from’, etc.”46 The Bugis of Sulawesi, on whom I pinned much of my argument, were not alone in Southeast Asia in considering themselves to be, by definition, a “free people.” Despite the existence of an absolute monarchy, many Thais, along with many of the upland “Zomia” peoples celebrated by James Scott for their “art of not being governed,”47 likewise defined themselves as being free people in contrast to their unfree neighbours. Had our book 44 45 46 47

Lu Xun (1925), cited in David Kelly, “The Chinese Search for Freedom as a Universal Value,” in David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93. See n. 42. Cited in Shiraishi Takashi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 324. See the discussion in Anthony Reid, “Merdeka: The Concept of Freedom in Indonesia,” in Kelly and Reid, Asian Freedoms, 141–160. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

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included research on South Asia, I believe that the quest for the indigenous roots of a high valuation on personal freedom would have provided an additional important corrective to the gloomy view advanced by Chinese scholars. The study and analysis of slavery in Asia remains woefully inadequate, both empirically and theoretically. The pejorative connotations attached to this term continue to discourage serious research and discussion. One of the consequences of a deeper understanding of slavery in Asia, especially its more arduous forms, may be to give rise to a greater yearning for personal freedom. Studies of serfdom, indenture, and convict and corvée labour, regardless of how oppressive these labour systems have been, appear not to have done so. However slavery and forced labour studies evolve in the coming years, it is clear that Asia can no longer be excluded from the great debates about the nature, dynamics, and consequences of human servitude, if for no other reason than nothing so stirs the soul as the encounter between slavery and freedom.

Chapter 2

Between Slave and Disciple in South Asia Jessica Hinchy Many historians of slavery in Asia appreciate the problems that stem from Eurocentric definitions of slavery which emphasize a dichotomy between “slave” and “free” labour. Scholars seeking to develop a more nuanced understanding of slavery in Africa and Asia have pointed out the connections and convergences between slavery and other social statuses. Gwyn Campbell, for example, has argued that “The meaning of slavery in the IOW [Indian Ocean World] becomes clearer if Western notions of a division of society into free and slave, and of slaves as property, are replaced by a vision of society as a hierarchy of dependency in which ‘slaves’ constituted one of a number of unfree groups from which menial labour was drawn.”1 Campbell’s observation raises the important question of precisely how slavery related to other forms of “dependency” and how this relationship varied across different temporal, geographic, social, and cultural contexts. More particularly, it challenges us to explore the areas of intersection between discipleship, which is a particularly salient type of asymmetrical power relationship in many South Asian societies, and slavery. Discipleship consists of hierarchical relationships between teachers/spiritual guides, often called gurus, and their disciples, who submit themselves to their guru’s moral code and practices of mental and physical discipline. Despite the existence of a significant body of literature on discipleship in South Asian monastic communities,2 few historians have explored the intersections between slavery and discipleship in depth. William R. Pinch’s work has been pioneering in this respect. In his analysis of the life of Anupgiri Gosain, Pinch 1 Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xxii. For a rather different argument on property in the South Asian context, see Indrani Chatterjee, “The Locked Box in Slavery and Social Death,” in John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017), 151–66. 2 David N. Lorenzen, “Warrior Ascetics in Indian History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 98 (1978): 61–75; William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Nile Green, “Migrant Sufis and Sacred Space in South Asian Islam,” Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 4 (2003): 493–509; Malavika Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2009): 1039–83.

© Jessica Hinchy, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_004

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highlighted that slavery and discipleship were interrelated in communities of Shaiva and Vaishnava warrior ascetics known, respectively, as gosains and bairagis, by demonstrating the close similarities between master-slave and guru-disciple relationships and examining the recruitment of enslaved children into gosain and bairagi discipleship lineages.3 The relationship between slavery and discipleship can be discerned not only in Shaiva and Vaishnava lineages, but also in other social settings. Discipleship was intertwined with slavery in South Asia in at least four ways. First, slaves were often described as disciples or chelas, that is, the language of discipleship was used to describe the status of being a slave. Second, enslaved young people were sometimes initiated into discipleship lineages because they made especially good disciples, in which case the guru could be the master as well as the teacher of the slave/ disciple. Third, in some cases, hierarchies of teachers and trainees internally structured slave corps, in which case the teacher was a senior slave. Finally, some especially powerful slaves could attract non-slave chelas who entered into the slave’s “devoted service.”4 This chapter analyzes these connections between slavery and discipleship in South Asia, with a particular focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north India. In addition to monastic communities, it examines the relationship between slavery and discipleship in two other groups: the hijra community comprised of performers who collected donations, especially on the birth of children, and the corps of khwajasaras or eunuch-slaves who were employed in various capacities in elite households and governments. Focusing on these three contexts provides a unique opportunity to understand the ways in which discipleship and slavery overlapped. This chapter draws upon my archival research on hijras and khwajasaras in eighteenth-nineteenth century north India,5 as well as secondary literature on monastic communities and eunuch slaves in other periods and places. 3 Vijay (William R.) Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif: Slaves, Sex, and Ascetics in Rasdhan, ca. 1800–1857,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 559–97; William R. Pinch, “The Slave Guru: Masters, Commanders, and Disciples in Early Modern South Asia,” in Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame, eds., The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 73–74. Pinch discusses slavery more briefly in William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and William R. Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur? Gosains, Rajputs and the British in Bundlekhand, ca. 1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, no. 3 (1998): 293–335. 4 Nicholas Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, nos. 1–2 (2020): 85. 5 On khwajasara slaves, see: Jessica Hinchy, “The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Colonial Rule in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North India,” Gender

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Disentangling enslaver-enslaved and guru-disciple ties can be a difficult undertaking since hierarchies of enslavement and discipleship were deeply enmeshed with kinship relationships and discourses. Son/daughter, disciple, and slave were closely related social categories. Other interpretative difficulties reflect the fact that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources employed euphemistic language which obscured enslavement or, alternatively, engaged in the kind of moral denunciation that oversimplified slavery.6 This propensity to oversimplify slavery is especially evident in nineteenth-century colonial and middle-class Indian accounts of marginalized social groups such as the hijra. 1

Conceptualizing Slave Status in South Asia

While noting a diversity of forms of enslavement, several scholars have suggested certain reoccurring characteristics of South Asian slavery. The concept of dependency is central to Richard Eaton’s characterization of slavery in South Asia as “the condition of uprooted outsiders, impoverished insiders – or the descendants either – serving persons or institutions on which they are wholly dependent.” Eaton thus points to the relationship between slavery and other forms of dependency by firstly, highlighting that slavery was usually the most acute form of dependency, and secondly, by suggesting that people were “embedded in webs of hierarchically structured groups, classes or castes” so that slavery’s “antithesis” was “complete detachment” from these “webs.”7 In addition, slavery was a “historical process” rather than a “fixed status.” Slavery was a “particular origin” and a “particular relationship” to a master. A person’s slave origins could be “forgotten over time or submerged by new regional identities” and their bond to their master could gradually become a “patron-client” relationship.8 Of course, this should not blind us to the inability of many slaves and History 26, no. 3 (2014): 414–37; Jessica Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods in Eighteenth Century Awadh,” South Asian History and Culture 6, no. 3 (2015): 380–400; Jessica Hinchy, “Eunuchs and the East India Company in North India,” in Almut Hoefert, Serena Tolino, and Matthew Mesley, eds., Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2017), 149–74. On hijras, see especially Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 6 Indrani Chatterjee, “Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287–315. 7 Richard M. Eaton, “Introduction,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 2–7. 8 Eaton, “Introduction,” 2–7.

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to lessen their dependence on their master, or as Sylvia Vatuk has highlighted, to enslavers’ use of violence for discipline and labour extraction.9 Nevertheless, Eaton argues that conceptualising slavery as an intense dependency and as a process avoids projecting aspects of Atlantic plantation slavery (such as “chattel status” and “dishonour”) onto South Asian slavery.10 The concept of property is central to Chatterjee’s recent work on South Asian slavery. She argues that masters typically prioritised the cultivation of the loyalty of slave offspring over the intergenerational entrenchment of legal slave status. Slaves were historically defined as “intensely valued” property within property regimes that differed significantly from later European colonial ones. Due to the importance of “wealth in people” in the context of a “material economy of gifts” that symbolised the “social dominance of the recipient,” Brahmanical and Buddhist treatises and Islamic jurists minutely delineated property rights in slaves, while South Asian polities sought to ascertain the ownership of slaves and record slave transfers. At the same time, in Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Islamic contexts, there was a general tendency to emphasize “the reproduction of loyalty, rather than of the jural status of slavery.” The Brahmanical Arthashastra gave slaves the right to “enjoy” their earnings and inheritance and to pass property onto their kin. Both Brahmanical and Islamic jurisprudence “insisted on the freedman status” of children “born of a female slave and her master.”11 Many of Eaton’s and Chatterjee’s conclusions – that slavery was a form of dependency and a process, that slaves were “intensely valued” property, and that the reproduction of loyalty was key – resonate with the connections between slavery and discipleship in the contexts examined in this chapter. However, Nira Wickramasinghe has recently cautioned scholars against encapsulating a “variety of slave systems and forms of bondage” in the “catch-all” category of “South Asian slavery.” She highlights that Sri Lanka – which under Dutch and British rule was characterised by a “mélange of … praedial castebased forms of slavery” with “racialized forms of servitude” – was “an anomaly that resembled neither the Indian subcontinent nor other Indian Ocean islands.” While Wickramasinghe agrees with many scholars of South Asia that “[f]reedom is clearly a misleading antithesis to slavery,” she critiques much of the existing scholarship for the “implicit idea … that South Asian/Indian 9 10 11

Sylvia Vatuk, “Bharattee’s Death: Domestic Slave-Women in Nineteenth Century Madras,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 210–33. Eaton, “Introduction,” 3. Note that Chatterjee’s argument on the “reproduction of loyalty” is quite compatible with Eaton’s argument that slavery was a “process” (“The Locked Box,” 151–58).

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slavery works through intimacy and kinship ties.”12 While this chapter suggests that kinship and intimacy/proximity are vital to understanding the intersections between slavery and discipleship, Wickramasinghe’s caution against “South Asian slavery” as a reductive framing reminds us of the sheer diversity of structures of enslavement in what we today denote as South Asia. Moreover, for this reason, positioning particular forms of slavery or parts of South Asia as relatively more “open” or “closed,” as Reid proposed for Southeast Asia,13 may obscure the highly contingent patterns of enslavement evident, even for a particular category of slave like khwajasara (enslaved eunuch), between different periods, regions/polities, and social settings. The relationship between caste and slavery has also been a key point of debate in the literature on South Asian history. In the late twentieth century, a number of authors equated low-caste status with slavery. In contrast, in her study of the Mughal successor state of Murshidabad, Chatterjee emphasized that people from both low and high jatis (castes/birth groups) could be enslaved. Moreover, a slave’s jati identity “derived from the interlocking political and social powers of their holders” so that a slave often assumed the jati status of their master.14 However, Rupa Viswanath’s recent analysis of paraiyars or “Pariahs” (untouchables) in the late nineteenth century highlights that caste, 12 13

14

Nira Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 5–8. In the 1980s, James Watson and Anthony Reid proposed that a contrast between “open” and “closed” slave systems is a useful comparative framework. Reid argued that in precolonial Southeast Asia, “closed” slavery was more common in “relatively static” societies without developed money economies where there was limited commerce in slaves and slaves’ labour was secured “by reinforcing their distinctiveness from the dominant population,” especially through ritual. In “open” slavery, “constant recruitment” allowed the gradual assimilation of second and third generation slaves into the dominant group. This was more common in early modern city states where there was extensive commercial exchange and the “property aspect” of slavery was “marked.” Additionally, “transitional” societies displayed certain features of both “open” and “closed” slavery. Slavery in South Asia has appeared to be a “closed” form of slavery to some observers, including Watson, due to the existence of caste hierarchies. This obviously oversimplifies slavery in the region, and stands in stark contrast to Chatterjee’s and (especially) Eaton’s conclusions noted above. At the same time, the debate over caste examined below suggests a highly contextual relationship between slavery and caste. See: James L. Watson, “Slavery as an Institution, Open and Closed Systems,” in James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 1–15; Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 156–81. Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4–10.

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“labour subordination,” and land control were closely interlinked in Tamilspeaking regions. Indeed, Tamil terms for “untouchable” and “slave” were used interchangeably. There was a correlation between caste status and land rights, since mirasidars or landowners were overwhelmingly of high caste status, while landless labourers were almost entirely “untouchable.” Pariahs were subject to a specific form of bondage called al-ataimanam or “man-mortgage” which mortgaged not just an individual, “but his entire line of descendants.” Repayment was not “part of the design” – these were not simply “loans.”15 However, in other contexts, we see a rather different relationship between slavery and caste, including in southern India.16 These debates about how to conceptualise slavery in the context of South Asia highlight the difficulties of synthesising particular patterns or structures across time and space. This chapter suggests several different ways that discipleship and enslavement could be interrelated and highlights that even within a particular social category or community, the connections between slavery and discipleship often varied. Moreover, discipleship was only one form of dependency with which diverse forms of enslavement could intersect. 2

The Slave as Disciple

There are numerous terms for teachers and disciples in the languages and religious traditions of South Asia. Common terms for teacher or spiritual guide include guru, acharya, and, in the Sufi tradition, pir and murshid. Disciples are also referred to by various terms including chela, shishya, bhakt/ bhakta/bhagat/bhakat (a devotee or more specifically, a Vaishnava initiate), and murid (a Sufi initiate). For the sake of clarity and conciseness, I will generally refer to gurus, acharyas, and pirs as “gurus” since this term is widelyknown both within and outside South Asia, and to chelas, murids, etc. as “disciples.” Although there were distinct forms of initiation, ritual, and discipline associated with different South Asian religious traditions, these differences were arguably outweighed by the commonalities between various 15

16

The distinction between Pariahs and others was also policed through “stipulations concerning dress, mobility and access to resources” as well as the geographical separation of their houses from the main village. See Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3, 24–32. In contrast, Ravi Ahuja interprets al-ataimanam as “tribute in labour” (“Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 [2002]: 797–803). On urban contexts, see: Vatuk, “Bharattee’s Death”; Ahuja, “Labour Relations.”

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Buddhist, Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Sufi forms of “political organisation” based on discipleship ties.17 Gurus are usually understood either as spiritual guides or objects of devotion, and they frequently fluctuate between these two meanings of guru-hood depending on context. Gurus and disciples trace their spiritual genealogy through a parampara (lineage) of successive gurus.18 Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegama have described gurus’ power as “expansive agency” because they derive power from multiple sources: their spiritual ancestors (antecedent gurus); the “multiple and layered associations” they have with deities or other spiritually potent people; and “the collective image of their followers.” In some cases, a guru’s power may be closely connected to their asexuality and celibacy, but this is not always the case.19 Historically, a number of religious traditions and communities did not prohibit gurus and their disciples from marrying or engaging in sexual activity.20 While gurus are often men, there is also a long history of female gurus (or guruanis) as canonical Hindu texts attest.21 There are also feminine-identifying gurus in the hijra community. Gurus seek to continue their spiritual lineage through the initiation of disciples. Becoming a guru’s disciple involves the disciple renouncing her/his natal origins and subsuming her/his identity to that of the guru and the spiritual lineage. This self-abnegation increases over the course of disciples’ lives as they progress in their training and their personhood becomes increasingly absorbed by that of their guru/lineage.22 Guru-disciple relationships are a form of “radical asymmetrical exchange” in which the disciple always receives far more from the guru in the form of spiritual truth, other knowledge, discipline, and/or skills than she/he can hope to return.23 Such an asymmetrical 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38. Although “lineage” usually denotes a group of people descended from a common ancestor through biological kinship, the Hindi/Urdu term parampara refers to both a family line and, in the case of guru-shishya parampara, to a succession or line of gurus and their disciples. Lineage is an appropriate translation; indeed, Copeman and Ikegama use the term “guru lineage.” See Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru: An Introduction,” in Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame, eds., The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 25. Ibid, 13–20. Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families,” 1039–83; Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 569, 578, 582– 85; Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 11–15, 56–62, 128–37. Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 29–30. Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur?,” 311; Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 4–5. Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 34; Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5.

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relationship creates a situation of indebtedness for the disciple which is often repaid through “acts of guru seva [service] as a kind of counter-gift that can never measure up (hence its repetition).” Guru seva has historically taken the form of extreme physical tests of devotion and, at a more mundane level, doing the work of a menial servant and worshiping the guru.24 Scholars have pointed to several conceptual and structural similarities between discipleship and slavery. First, both slavery and discipleship imply subjection to a master and highly asymmetrical power relations. Second, both statuses suggest the assumption of new social identities; often, the identity of the disciple and of the slave gradually became merged with that of the guru or master. Disciples’ identities became increasingly amalgamated with that of their guru and her/his spiritual lineage over time.25 Even when master-slave relationships transformed into something more like patron-client ties, slaves nonetheless identified closely with their master/patron.26 Third, slavery and discipleship both involved regimes of bodily and mental discipline and training that were designed to inculcate loyalty and obedience.27 Finally, some scholars have suggested that kinlessness is an additional connection between slavery and discipleship. Copeman and Ikegame write that gurus and their disciples are often understood to be “kinless,”28 and Pinch has argued that slavery and discipleship both implied deracination through the severance or loosening of ties to one’s natal family.29 However, it is important to note that recent studies of enslaved eunuchs, for instance, have not only shown their formation of families of adopted kin, disciples, slaves, and dependants, but also suggest that some khwajasaras retained ties to their natal families.30 Nonetheless, these various similarities between slavery and discipleship may partly explain why the term chela (disciple) could refer to slaves in northern India. Moreover, guru-ship and discipleship are flexible discourses that can be used to describe various relationships, social situations, and types of labour (particularly when marked subordination is involved) including, but not limited to, slavery.31 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 34–37. Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 4–5. Eaton, “Introduction,” 4–9. Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 5–7; Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur?,” 305–06. Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 32–33. Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 567–68. Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 81–86. See also: Emma Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power: Eunuchs in the Service of the Mughal Elite, 1556–1707,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2020, 18–19, 203–04; Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods,” 385, 389–40. Hijras also formed new kinship relationships and sometimes retained natal connections McKean, Divine Enterprise, 5; Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 6, 10, 12. Hijras also formed new kinship relationships and sometimes retained natal connections.

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In the late sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor Akbar reportedly encouraged the use of the term chela, a word associated with discipleship in Vaishnava or Shaiva settings, in place of the term banda or slave. Akbar’s vizier and biographer, Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, recounted the emperor’s use of chela in his Ain-i Akbari (“Constitution of Akbar”) written in the 1590s: His Majesty, from religious motives, dislikes the name bandah, or slave; for he believes that mastership belongs to no one but God. He therefore calls this class of men Chelahs, which Hindi term signifies a faithful disciple … Various meanings attach to the term slave. First, that which people in general mean by a slave. Some men obtain power over such as do not belong to their sect, and sell and buy them. The wise look upon this as abominable. Secondly, he is called a slave, who leaves the path of selfishness, and chooses the road of spiritual obedience. Thirdly, one’s child. [The fourth, fifth and sixth types of slaves are categories of enslaved criminals.] … Seventhly, he who cheerfully and freely prefers to live as a slave. The pay of Chelahs varies from 1 R. [rupee] to 1 d. [dam] per diem [in the army]. His Majesty has divided them into several sections, and has handed them over to active and experienced people, who give them instruction in several things. Thus they acquire knowledge, elevate their position, and learn to perform their duties with propriety.32 This text highlights the several parallels between slavery and discipleship in late sixteenth-century India. First, Abu’l Fazl described religious devotees as slaves subject to God. This connection was linked to Akbar’s attempts to create a new religion, the din-i illahi, which imagined him as the amalgamation of a Hindu guru and a Sufi pir and the spiritual teacher to the nobles of his court who were seen as his disciples.33 Secondly, Abu’l-Fazl re-categorized slaves as chelas, an act that made cultural sense because practices of knowledge transmission and physical and mental discipline were central to defining both discipleship and slavery, especially military slavery, which had a long history on the subcontinent.34 Yet even in the guise of discipleship, slave status still

32 33 34

Italics in original. Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, Ain-i Akbari, trans. by H. Blochmann, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1873), 253. Pinch, “The Slave Guru,” 75–76. Jos Gommans, “Indian Warfare and Afghan Innovation During the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in History 11, no. 2 (1995): 261–80; Sunil Kumar, “Service, Status, and Military Slavery in the Delhi Sultanate: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 83–114; Richard M. Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South

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carried a sting; chelas received the lowest pay of all those who served in the Mughal army.35 Moreover, as Abu’l Fazl’s account makes clear, slavery and discipleship were understood to be distinct statuses with slavery implying a much more asymmetrical and coercive power relationship than discipleship. Pinch suggests that sixteenth-century Indians would have understood the disciple’s “subjection” as “appropriated from below,” while the slave’s subordination was “imposed from above.”36 Discipleship was evidently a more palatable form of subordination than slavery. The slavery-discipleship relationship evident in the Ain-i Akbari is rendered even more complex because the categories of slave, disciple, and child were closely related; Abu’l Fazl names “one’s child” as a type of slave.37 There were structural similarities between parent-child, master-slave, and guru-disciple relationships.38 These resemblances meant that the social meaning ascribed to particular hierarchical relationships could cross definitional boundaries; gurus, for example, were frequently described as the disciple’s father.39 It is unclear if slaves were referred to as chelas or any of the other terms used to designate disciples before the late sixteenth century. After this period, however, chela became a common term in north India to refer to slaves. As Nicholas Abbott’s research has shown, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persian texts the term chela could indicate discipleship, enslavement, and/or “quasi-formal adoption.” In some circumstances, chela was used interchangeably with pisar-i mutabanna (“adopted son”), pisar-i khwand (“so-called son”), tifl-i sarkar (“offspring of the household/state”) and khanazad (“sired in the house”).40 Thus, after the late sixteenth century, slaves in north India (and possibly elsewhere) were frequently, if contingently and ambiguously, termed both disciples and kin. However, the connections between slavery and discipleship do not end here; communities of ascetics and monastics that were structured by discipleship lineages also often included people of slave origin.

35 36 37 38 39 40

Asian History, 115–35; Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105–28. Ibn Mubarak, Ain-i Akbari, 231–54. Pinch, “The Slave Guru,” 75–76. Ibn Mubarak, Ain-i Akbari, 253. Pinch, “The Slave Guru,” 70, 74. Copeman and Ikegame, “The Multifarious Guru,” 33. Nicholas Abbott, email communication, 12 December 2016.

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Enslavement and Monastic Communities

The basic structure of a monastic community was a group of disciples clustered around a spiritually potent teacher, a community that was formed through a ritual of initiation and, in some cases, an additional ritual of ordination or renunciation. Undergoing initiation entailed submission to the legal and moral regime and practices of disciplining mind and body that were associated with a particular teacher. Indrani Chatterjee has shown that in the Brahmaputra Valley region of northeast India, trade, alliances, and marriages linked monastic centers of Vaishnava, Shaiva, Sufi, and Buddhist lineages across “sectarian” lines. Lineages of lay-initiated (non-ordained) disciples who had sexual partners, ordained people with sexual partners, and ordained celibates often “overlapped” in monastic communities. The senior-most disciple of a deceased guru, rather than his biological offspring, usually inherited the guru’s position and property. However, in some cases, Chatterjee notes, adoption rituals cemented a disciple’s inheritance.41 By way of comparison, Kasturi notes that the status of biological sons in sampradayas (religious sects) varied in nineteenth-century northern India: in some cases, they became chelas and mahants (chiefs), but in other sampradayas they could not.42 Yet in both northeast and north India, marriage alliances were pivotal to the formation and expansion of monastic communities.43 Initiation into a spiritual lineage required some kind of payment either in the form of goods or one’s own labour or, in the case of wealthier people, in land or the services of people who owed labour to the wealthy donor. That donated lands were often located some distance from a monastic community’s center created networks through which both people and goods circulated. Donated lands were usually exempt from taxation and remained inviolate to a ruler’s police forces which meant that the heads of monastic centres exercised sovereignty within their estates. Chatterjee has highlighted that communities of teachers and disciples were an important form of political organization which she terms “monastic governmentality.”44

41 42 43 44

Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 4–7, 12, 37–38, 41–42, 129. See also Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 573. Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families,” 1040. Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 11–5; Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families.” Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 4–7, 12, 37–38, 41–42; Indrani Chatterjee, “Monastic ‘Governmentality’: Revisiting ‘Community’ and ‘Communalism’ in South Asia,” History Compass 13, no. 10 (2015): 498–501, 504.

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In the early modern period, some disciples in monastic communities were enslaved,45 evidence of which can be seen in the corps of “warrior ascetics” that existed in monastic establishments associated with various religious traditions. There were several factors that led to the establishment of these “monastic militias,” including attempts to grow the pool of adherents from whom labour and goods could be obtained by expanding monastic estates as well as competition and conflict between different discipleship lineages.46 Pinch’s research on gosains shows that slavery and discipleship were intertwined in bands of warrior ascetics. Gosains were soldiers in the militias of the ten “Dasnami” lineages of Shaiva sanyasis or renouncers. Gosain means “in control of the senses” and thus refers to the complete bodily and mental discipline that was required of the gosain warrior, discipline that was inculcated in training grounds (akharas). Child slaves were among the initiates trained in the akharas, although not all gosains were of slave origin. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, Rajendragiri Gosain bought two young brothers, Umraogiri Gosain and Anupgiri Gosain, from their widowed mother and made them his chelas. Unfortunately, the historical record reveals little about the lives of such child slave-disciples, even those such as Umraogiri and Anupgiri who became famous gosains. Childhood enslavement was not a bar to elevation within gosain hierarchies and may have even facilitated a successful career since slaves were regarded as especially devoted disciples. Anupgiri Gosain became a major military entrepreneur in Awadh in the 1770s, figured prominently in Mughal politics in the 1780s, and was the “single most powerful warlord” in the Bundelkhand region by the end of the eighteenth century. Slave-gosains often acquired their own corps of devoted chelas that included both slave and non-slave disciples. Thus, in adulthood the enslaved gosain frequently became a slave holder.47 Pinch argues that the social and political power which slave-gosains could achieve did not “make the experience any less harsh for the [slave] child.”48 At 45

46 47 48

However, early Buddhist Sanskrit and Pali texts stipulate that slaves (including those who entered slavery via indebtedness) could not be ordained as monks, although (nonordained) slaves were frequently donated to the sangha (monastic order). See Gregory Schopen, “On Some Who are not Allowed to Become Buddhist Monks or Nuns: An Old List of Types of Slaves or Unfree Laborers,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 2 (2010): 225–34. Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 300; Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 7, 72, 186. Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur?,” particularly 293–94, 299–300, 306–10, 312–26. See also Lorenzen, Warrior Ascetics; Pinch, “Slave Guru”; Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif.” Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 567–78. He adds that career advancement did not make slavery “any less a ‘social death’.” However, others have critiqued Orlando Patterson’s notions of “social death” and “dishonour” in South Asian contexts, e.g., Chatterjee, “The Locked Box.”

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the same time, most gosains began their training in the akharas at a young age which raises an important question: how might the experiences of a child slave chela differ from a young non-slave chela within the akhara? Existing studies do not provide a clear answer to this question but Pinch and Chatterjee’s research hints at some possible answers. First, soldier-disciples, whether or not of slave origin, “were inculcated from youth in the merits of complete loyalty to the guru according to the abject servitude implicit in the guru-chela relationship.”49 Second, discipleship in akharas seems to have involved a degree of natal alienation, regardless of whether the soldier-chela was of slave origin. Pinch notes that a chela’s identity in an akhara was determined not by his “biological ties” but by his martial skills, knowledge, and deportment.50 Becoming a chela required self-abnegation51 which was a characteristic feature of not only the gosain and bhairagi akharas, but also all kinds of “monastic governments,” since discipleship often required a renunciation of natal identity.52 The degree of natal alienation may have been more pronounced for slave soldier-disciples than for their non-slave counterparts. But the evidence of distinct similarities in the experiences of young slave and non-slave chelas in the akharas highlights the complexities of attempting to situate slavery within a “hierarchy of dependency.”53 Some ordained disciples in spiritual lineages came not only from the ranks of people of slave origin, but also from among individuals whose labour had been donated to monastic communities by pious laypeople. Chatterjee demonstrates that in northeast India, donors such as rulers and wealthy laypeople gifted cultivators, skilled artisans, and other labourers to monasteries so they might acquire merit. These labourers (known as paiks, particularly in Assam) were permanently alienated from those who donated them to a monastery and could not be resold or transferred. Paiks were exempt from any labour demands that lords could make on local populations. Paiks were also often termed bhugguts (devotees) and while this implied “dependence” upon a guru, Chatterjee emphasizes that such dependence was highly valued. She interprets the donation of such “labour pools” as a form of “sacral manumission” that gave paiks permanent “freedom” from punishment, debt, and other obligations they owed to laymen.54 Although Chatterjee cautions that paiks should not be termed “slaves,” paik status appears to be an additional way in which discipleship 49 50 51 52 53 54

Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur?,” 305–06. Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif,” 593. Pinch, “Who was Himmat Bahadur?,” 311; Pinch, “Slave Guru,” 70–71. Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 47. Campbell, “Introduction,” xii–xiii. Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 42, 185, 194–96.

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and forms of bonded labour were enmeshed since such paiks/bhugguts had a permanent obligation to labour for the guru-lord. In sum, the categories of “slave” and “disciple” overlapped in monastic communities through the initiation and/or ordination of enslaved people as disciples, while lay people also donated pools of bonded labourers who were termed devotees. Relationships of enslavement and discipleship were also contextually interrelated with ties of marriage and various kinds of kinship. 4

Slavery in Hijra Lineages

“Monastic governmentality” is evident in several social contexts since discipleship ties were an important form of social hierarchy. The hijra community was another example of “monastic government,” although a comparatively socially marginal one. Discipleship lineages and histories of enslavement were entangled in nineteenth-century hijra households and, as in other contexts of monastic governmentality, slaves probably made particularly desirable disciples. Hijras have historically performed, collected donations, and given congratulatory blessings for prosperity and fertility at the times of births, weddings, and other festive occasions, a practice known as badhai (literally, a “congratulatory gift”).55 Hijras expressed femininity through clothing, grooming, and gestures,56 possibly also combining feminine and masculine “cultural symbols.”57 Reflecting contemporary hijras’ predominantly feminine Hindi/Urdu conjugation, I use “she” and “her” pronouns.58 Hijras were usually assigned male at birth and were emasculated or described themselves as having been “born as a hijra,” meaning with an atypical body or a sense of being hijra.59

55

56 57 58 59

H.A. Rose, “Muhammadan Birth Observances in the Punjab,” Journal of the Anthropologi­ cal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 37 (1907): 243. Hijras also received grain from cultivators at certain points in the yearly agricultural cycle and performed and begged in markets, religious fairs, and streets. See R.V. Russell, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1916), 207. Hardyal Singh, Report on the Census of 1891, Volume II: The Castes of Marwar Illustrated (Jodhpur: Marwar Darbar, 1894), 122. Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 32. Kira Hall and Veronica O’Donovan, “Shifting Gender Positions among Hindi-Speaking Hijras,” in Victoria Lee Bergvall, Janet Muelle Bing, and Alice F. Freed, eds., Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice (London: Longman, 1996), 247. Being born a hijra was an important identity, although it is impossible to determine the historical incidence of castration.

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As persons who were incapable of sexual reproduction, they were thought to have the ability to bless or curse the fertility of others.60 Hijras also represented themselves to colonial ethnologists as spiritual ascetics.61 Nineteenth-century accounts mention both “Hindu” and “Muslim” hijras, though their religious practices appear to have been somewhat syncretic including, for instance, worship at Sufi shrines and of Hindu deities.62 Although badhai performance was important to hijra identity, nineteenth century hijras also engaged in diverse forms of work including tenant farming, agricultural labour, shop-keeping, itinerant trading, weaving, tailoring, and domestic service.63 Before analyzing the circumstances in which hijras were initiated as disciples and the extent to which the community practiced slavery in nineteenthcentury north India, it is necessary to consider the problematic nature of the archival sources at our disposal.64 The euphemistic language frequently used to record personal histories of enslavement in nineteenth-century India means that the life histories of hijras that survive from this period are often silent about important aspects of their lives.65 At the same time, the colonial and elite Indian accounts that provide much of the information we have about the history of this marginalized group tend to characterize all child chelas – indeed all hijras – as victims of kidnapping and enslavement. This discourse was evident in Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 under which north Indian police compiled registers of “eunuchs,” as the colonial state termed hijras, and prohibited registered “eunuchs” from performing in public, wearing female

60

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 135; Reddy, With Respect to Sex, 97. 61 Russell, Tribes and Castes, 209. 62 Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Allahabad (hereafter UPSA/A) COV/119/12, R. Annesley, Officiating Superintendent of Police, Benares, to Magistrate of Benares, 12 April 1873; R.E. Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, vol. 3 (New Delhi: D.K. Publishers, 1997), 228; H.A. Rose, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1911), 207, 331–32; William Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1896), 495–97; Russell, Tribes and Castes, 207; Reddy, With Respect to Sex, 78–98. 63 UPSA/A/COV/119/12, Waddington, “List,” circa 1872; UPSA/A/COV/119/12, B. Alone, Officiat­ ing Superintendent of Police, Azamgarh, “Register of Eunuchs in the District of Azimgurh,” 9 October 1872; Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality, 143–50. 64 There is a need for further research prior to the nineteenth century. The most in-depth study of hijras in the eighteenth century is Abbott’s comparison of the community with khwajasaras in Awadh (“‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 89–93). 65 UPSA/A/COM/29/8, Short, “List,” circa January 1873; Chatterjee, “Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence”; Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality, 157–63.

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clothing, and living with a male child under sixteen.66 In 1871, J.F. Stephen, a member of colonial India’s legislative council, stressed the necessity of a law targeting hijras, because these “eunuchs … perpetuated their class by kidnapping and castrating boys whom they either bought from the kidnappers or stole themselves.”67 Middle-class Indian men also decried slavery in the hijra community. In 1866, for example, Murdan Ali Khan, a government official, declared that the chief crime of the “wicked race” of hijras was “[p]urchasing slaves to make them eunuchs.”68 In addition to such criminalising and stereotyping discourses, further difficulties arise because the “eunuch” category conflated “hijra” with several other affiliations since various people whose gender expression challenged binary concepts of gender were classified as “eunuchs.”69 However, as I have shown elsewhere, colonial state archives include multiple, often contradictory narratives about hijra-hood, especially in district-level files and brief life histories recorded on police registers, providing openings to a more complex history of the community.70 Fragmentary biographies of hijras compiled by British and Indian officials and anthropologists show that they traced their personal histories through discipleship lineages.71 Knowledge about various forms of hijra work, embodiment, and behavioural norms was transmitted between generations of gurus and chelas.72 Life histories on police registers highlight that gurus trained their 66

“Eunuch” implied hijras were “men” and thus erased hijra gender expression. See Jessica Hinchy, “Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India,” Asian Studies Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 274–94; Jessica Hinchy, “The Eunuch Archive: Colonial Records of Non-Normative Gender and Sexuality in India,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (2017): 127–46. 67 Quoted in India Office Records, British Library, London (hereafter IOR): V/9/11, W. Stokes, Secretary, Government of India, Abstract of the proceedings of the Council of the Governor-General of India, 3 October 1870. 68 “Nagpore,” The Pioneer (Allahabad), 27 June 1866, 4. 69 Including zananas (so-called “effeminate men” who were often performers) and various men who embodied femininity in ritual or theatrical contexts (Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality, 126–36, 141–3, 167–93). 70 Ibid., 117–63. 71 IOR: P/438/61, P.C. Dalmahoy, Superintendent of Police, Etawah, “Statement of Makhun Eunuch, 6 or 7 years old,” circa 1865. 72 Like their present day counterparts, nineteenth-century hijras probably described each other primarily through feminine language but used the masculine terms guru and chela, rather than female equivalents, because they conceptualized discipleship as a fatherson relationship to emphasize the senior hijras’ power (although hijras may also sometimes conceptualise gurus through motherhood as gurumas). See Hall and O’Donovan, “Shifting Gender Positions,” 247. Guru, pir and chela are the terms used in nineteenth century sources.

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disciples in performance traditions of song and dance.73 Hijras’ skill in bawdy, humorous, and insulting talk which Mahtab Rai, an Indian lawyer, described as “very obscene and filthy language,” was also learned from gurus.74 Thus, chelas were required to submit themselves to particular forms of physical and behavioural discipline in order to learn how to be a hijra.75 Hijra households typically contained a senior guru, her chelas and nati chelas (grand-disciples).76 Some hijras lived alone, or with non-hijras, although such hijras may have maintained discipleship ties.77 Hijra households constituted a small-scale form of monastic government. Hijra lineages had defined geographical areas in which they could collect badhai and perform.78 Individual hijra households also functioned as nodes in broader networks that linked geographically distant households and hijras related by lineage.79 Moreover, like Vaishnava, Shaiva, Buddhist, and Sufi monastic governments, some hijra lineages had been granted rent-free land or allowances by pre-colonial states.80 Discipleship ties and kinship intersected. The members of a hijra household/ lineage referred to each other through familial terminology. In his ethnographic glossary of Punjab, Rose described a hijra household in Panipat of seven or eight members who “call one another by such names as mási, ‘mother’s sister,’ phuphi, ‘[paternal] aunt,’ and so on.”81 A police register from Bulandshahr mentions that Hossein Buksh was “was taught dancing and singing by one [illegible] Eunuch who had adopted him [sic],” implying that guru-chela relationships were sometimes understood as adoptive kinship.82 Discipleship ties in the hijra community probably involved highly asymmetrical power dynamics. Contemporary anthropology has shown that hijra chelas are considered indebted to their guru since the knowledge imparted by the guru underpins 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

E.g., UPSA/A/COM/29/8, W.A. Short, Superintendent of Police, Muzaffarnagar, “List of Eunuchs in the District of Mozuffurnuggur,” circa January 1873. National Archives of India (hereafter NAI) HD/JB 02/1890 111, Mahtab Rai, Pleader, Delhi, to Private Secretary to Governor-General and Viceroy of India, 1 November 1889. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes, 227; Bhimbai Kirparam, “Pavávás,” in James Campbell, ed., Hindu Castes and Tribes of Gujarat, vol. 2 (Haryana: Vintage Books, 1988), 506–08. UPSA/A/COM/29/8, Short, “List,” circa January 1873; Rose, Glossary, 331–33. UPSA/A/COM/29/8: Short, “List,” circa January 1873. IOR/P/92, Tiernan, 2nd Grade Inspector of Police, Gorakhpur, to Superintendent of Police, Gorakhpur, 26 May 1871. UPSA/A/COV/119/12, Amson to Comm Benares, 16 November 1872; Rose, Glossary, 331–32. These grants to hijras were usually small in value. See Laurence Preston, “A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in Nineteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 2 (1987): 283–84. Rose, Glossary, 332. UPSA/A/COM/29/8, Campbell, “Register of Eunuchs,” Bulandshahr, 6 January 1873.

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both the disciple’s izzat (respect) and ability to earn a livelihood.83 An 1852 court case suggests that disciples were expected to perform seva (service) for their guru through menial work, such as cooking and cleaning, and possibly also acts like rubbing the guru’s feet or caring for her in sickness.84 How, then, did discipleship hierarchies interact with practices of enslavement? While taking into account the criminalising discourses of nineteenth century archives noted above, there is substantial evidence that some individual hijras were initiated as chelas following enslavement. Young enslaved chelas are referred to in nineteenth century colonial and elite Indian sources as “boys.” Yet we cannot know the gender subjectivities of young people in hijra households and, moreover, the ways in which hijras defined childhood is unclear. The story of two male-assigned children, Agbega and Makhun, who were taken into police custody in 1865, is an illustrative case in point. According to the colonial records, in 1857 two Chamar85 men kidnapped Agbega, aged twelve, while he86 was sleeping beside his mother and sold Agbega to a hijra named Peer Buksh for 10 rupees. Agbega was then sold to a fakir (Muslim ascetic) with whom he lived for two years before being sold to another hijra, Ameer Buksh or Ameera, for 20 rupees. Agbega recalled that five or six days after Ameera bought him, he was emasculated at midnight in the presence of several hijras. Agbega’s story suggests that some children in the hijra community were sold several times and, moreover, may have moved between groups of religious ascetics and hijras. A few years later, Ameera acquired another child, Makhun, whose story illustrates another means by which some children were enslaved. Makhun, who was thought to be six or seven in 1865, told the police that following his mother and father’s death, “… I then went to my mother’s brother in Muddoopore. One day at noon my uncle’s son Murdan Singh fetched me … and sold me to Ameera Eunuch for a handful of Rupees.”87 Ameera subsequently sent Agbega and Makhun to a travelling troupe of bhagatiyas, or performers who “represent[ed] Hindoo deities.” The bhagatiyas taught the children to sing and dance and provided them with food and clothing on the understanding

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Reddy, With Respect to Sex, 156–59. “Government v. Ali Buksh,” Decisions of the Nizamat Adalat of the North-Western Provinces (hereafter DNA NWP) 2 (1852): 1314–6; Reddy, With Respect to Sex, 156–59. 85 The Chamar caste has been historically considered “untouchable” and was stereotypically associated with leather tanning. 86 As noted, we cannot know Agbega’s gender subjectivity. 87 IOR/P/438/61, Dalmahoy, “Statement of Makhun Eunuch,” circa 1865.

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that the children would return to Ameera following their training.88 Agbega and Makhun’s stories substantiate other evidence that some hijras were initiated as child slaves as a part of the wider trade in enslaved children.89 It is likely that in hijra lineages, as in other forms of monastic government, child slaves were especially well-suited to be disciples since they could be initiated and immersed in regimes of mental, behavioral, and/or bodily discipline at a young age. Young people were initiated into hijra lineages in ways other than enslavement. During famines, such as that in the Upper Doab region during 1860–61, hijras “took in” children.90 In some cases, the provision of food, shelter, and care in the face of starvation may have made the young person indebted to the hijra since broader “[c]odes of aggressive hospitality” created “binding obligations.”91 Some children and youths also entered hijra households along with their relatives, suggesting that initiation did not always result in natal alienation. Many hijra initiates who maintained natal ties reportedly lived in a hijra household with their widowed mother, in which case the family’s impoverishment may have played a role in the hijra’s initiation.92 Importantly, not all children in hijra households were initiated as hijras. Hijras sometimes took in or “adopted” children whom they married to suitable partners rather than initiating as chelas.93 People who were probably understood as “youths” also became hijras. Ameer Bux from Muzaffarnagar district was reportedly initiated around the age of fourteen, while another member of her household, Pearee was initiated at a somewhat older age.94 Colonial records also record several instances of “adult” initiation. For instance, three of five criminal cases of castration that were heard in Shahjahanpur in 1864–65 involved adult emasculation.95 88 IOR/P/438/61, P.C. Dalmahoy, Superintendent of Police, Etawah, “Statement of Choonee Eunuch, aged about 12 years,” circa 1865. 89 “Government v. Munsa and 4 others,” DNA NWP 10 (1860), 6 March 1860; IOR/P/438/61, R. Drummond, Sessions Judge of Shahjahanpur, “General remarks to cases No. 79 of 1864, and Nos. 16, 17, 18 and 19 of 1865,” circa 1865; IOR/P/438/61, B. Sapte, Officiating Commissioner of Agra, to Secretary, NWP, 16 September 1865. 90 IOR/P/92, F. Williams, Commissioner of Meerut, to Secretary, NWP, 31 January 1870. 91 Chatterjee, “Slavery, Semantics,” 295. 92 UPSA/A/COM/29/8, Short, “List,” circa January 1873. 93 UPSA/A/COM/29/8: Short, “List,” circa January 1873; UPSA/A/COV/119/12, Office of the Commissioner of Benares (signature illegible), “Abstract of replies of Magistrates of Districts of the Benares Division to Commissioner’s Circular No: 39,” 23 November 1875. 94 The register is less clear on Pearee’s age but implies her initiation around her late teens or early twenties. (UPSA/A/COM/29/8: Short, “List,” circa Jan 1873). 95 IOR/P/438/61, W.G. Probyn, Magistrate of Shahjahanpur, to Sessions Judge of Shahjahanpur, 12 December 1864; IOR/P/438/61, Drummond, “General Remarks,” circa 1865.

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These examples illustrate that initiation into the hijra community cannot be labelled simply as either “voluntary” or “coercive.” This oversimplifies the variable intersection of factors that contextually shaped the initiation of young and older individuals, factors that included gender expression, performance traditions, social marginalization, poverty, indebtedness, and orphanhood. Moreover, a voluntary/coercive dichotomy oversimplifies the extent to which enslavement was a process.96 Enslavement was not a permanent status marker for hijras. While enslavement may have intensified the already highly asymmetrical power relations between a hijra guru and chela, there is no evidence of slave origin effecting the status of adult hijras or limiting their chances to become the senior guru of their household. Colonial officials reported that a panchayat (council) of hijras would gather upon a guru’s death to decide the successor.97 However, life histories of hijras do not report why a certain hijra succeeded a deceased guru. The Muzaffarnagar district register describes the succession of Ameer Bux to the head of a household in Jansath, but does not state why she was chosen over the chelas of the other gurus of the previous generation. It may be significant that Ameer Bux was the oldest member of the household.98 Political considerations likely played a role in shaping who ascended to the position of the senior guru.99 Furthermore, the length of time that one had been an initiated member of a hijra household and the status of one’s guru were probably major factors. However, I have not found any evidence that enslavement earlier in life effected an individual’s chances of becoming the head of a hijra household. In sum, enslavement was one among several processes through which hijra guru-chela hierarchies and the kinship ties with which these discipleship lineages intersected were reproduced. 5

Enslaved Eunuchs’ Trainees and Disciples

Thus far, we have examined two main patterns of intersection between slavery and discipleship: the use of the term chela to refer to slaves and the initiation of slaves into discipleship lineages. The case of the khwajasaras – slave-eunuchs who had wide-ranging roles in elite households and bureaucracies – suggests a situation of varied and contingent relationships between enslavement and 96 Eaton, “Introduction,” 4–9. 97 IOR/P/92, Tiernan to SI Police, Gorakhpur, 26 May 1871. 98 Jowaha and Wufatee were of slave origins, but Pearee was not (UPSA/A/COM/29/8, Short, “List of Eunuchs,” circa January 1873). 99 On monastic succession generally, see Chatterjee, “Monastic ‘Governmentality’,” 501.

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discipleship. On the one hand, senior khwajasaras oversaw eunuch bachaganas (novices/trainees) which involved intergenerational knowledge traditions and succession to administrative positions. On the other hand, some khwajasara slaves were objects of devotion to chelas (disciples) who do not appear to have been enslaved.100 The recent research of Emma Kalb on the Mughal Empire and Nicholas Abbott on Awadh has considerably extended our understanding of khwajasaras’ complex relationships, building on the earlier work of Ruby Lal, Indrani Chatterjee, and myself.101 Khwajasaras in northern India were either locally enslaved, having been war captives, kidnapped, orphaned, or sold by their families, or were transported from East Africa.102 In the Mughal Empire, khwajasaras mediated and policed access to both female and male spaces, while the nazir or harem superintendent was an exclusively khwajasara role.103 In the Mughal world, power radiated outwards from the body of the ruler to his household and then to his kingdom which meant that royal and noble households were politically significant spaces.104 Like many other slaves, khwajasaras’ duties crossed the boundary between the “inner” and “outer” spheres of social and political life.105 100 Khwajasaras appear to have been a distinct community from the hijra historically. However, Abbott notes that hijras and khwajasaras were “linked discursively,” in part by “occupying a space of effeminacy or gender liminality and intersexuality” (Abbott, ‘“In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 91). Moreover, Pakistani hijras have recently began to adopt the term khwajasara. See Shahnaz Khan, “What is in a Name? Khwaja Sara, Hijra and Eunuchs in Pakistan,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 23, no. 2 (2016): 218–42. 101 Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power”; Abbott, ‘“In that One the Ālif is Missing”’; Ruby Lal, “Harem and Eunuchs: Liminality and Networks of Mughal Authority,” in Almut Hoefert, Serena Tolino, and Matthew Mesley, eds., Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018), 92–108; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, especially 44–57; Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods”; Jessica Hinchy, “Eunuchs and the East India Company in North India,” in Hoefert, Tolino, and Mesley, Celibate and Childless Men in Power, 149–74; Jessica Hinchy, “Sexual Politics.” 102 Gavin Hambly, “A Note on the Trade in Eunuchs in Mughal Bengal,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94, no. 1 (1974): 125–27; Ibn Mubarak, Ain-i Akbari, vol. 1, 389– 90; Muḥammad Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizábád, Being a Translation of the Tarikh Farahbakhsh of Muhammad Faiz-Bakhsh, ed. and trans. by William Hoey, 2 vols. (Allahabad: Government Press, 1888), vol. 2, 46–49, 218–19. The prominence of African khwajasaras increased in the early nineteenth century. See Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 82; NAI/FD/PC 24/11/1849 165, Sleeman to Secretary GoI, 30 October 1849. 103 Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power,” 40–41, 199. 104 Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 142, 152; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 36–37; Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Kingdom, Household and Body: History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 5 (2007): 889–923. 105 On slaves generally, see Lal, Domesticity and Power, 166, 194–96.

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Mughal khwajasaras performed a variety of roles in which non-castrated men were also employed, including as advisers, scholars, military commanders and revenue collection officials. Some khwajasaras were acknowledged as members of the Mughal umara or nobility through their mansab (imperial service) rankings. However, Emma Kalb notes that between 1556 and 1706, khwajasaras generally only achieved high-ranking positions after “serving in the imperial household” due to “the necessity of a slave first establishing a personal, trusting (and even affectionate) relationship with the master before being granted greater responsibilities outside of the household.” Eunuch-hood was one “path into the Mughal elite” even as “slave status” left an “enduring mark … on even the most high-ranked eunuchs.”106 In Awadh, a successor state of the Mughal Empire that existed between 1722 and 1856, khwajasaras managed elite and royal households and had various duties in the female quarters of homes including serving as guards, attendants, and administrators. Additionally, khwajasaras served as business managers and revenue collectors for their master or mistress and, in the case of the nawab’s eunuchs, as state functionaries. Because they traversed both masculine and feminine spaces, khwajasaras were important sources of information and frequently served the nawab as negotiators and diplomats.107 Abbott writes that “the power of the dynasty’s senior women and its chief khwājasarās was mutually linked and co-constituting” since khwajasaras were their mistress’ agents and “public faces.”108 Some khwajasaras commanded the Awadh nawab’s military forces and a few became military entrepreneurs in their own right.109 Although master-khwajasara relationships could develop into something like patron-client ties, most powerful khwajasaras remained dependent; indeed, their success hinged upon increasing their proximity to their master or mistress.110 Moreover, this picture of elite eunuch slaves in both the Mughal Empire and Awadh misrepresents the lives of most khwajasaras. The majority of enslaved eunuchs did not achieve powerful positions, remained low-ranked and ultimately left no “archival trace.”111 106 Alternatively, some elite khwajasaras had been in the service of a Mughal noble (Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power,” 166–67, 182–212). 107 Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 25–26, 48–50, 129–30, 138–39, 192–93; Hinchy, “Eunuchs and the East India Company.” 108 Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 97–98. 109 Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 7, 25–26, 48–49, 129–30, 138–39, 192–93; Hinchy, “Sexual Politics,” 424–8. 110 Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 113–14, 163, 304. On other types of slaves: Campbell, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii; Eaton, Social History of the Deccan, 111–12. 111 Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power,” 167.

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Two sets of relationships are relevant to understanding the connections between enslavement and discipleship in the khwajasara context. First, Persian texts often mentioned khwajasaras’ bachaganas (a Persian term equivalent to the Hindi bachkana), literally meaning juvenile or immature, but here evoking “novice” or “trainee.”112 Possibly, chela was not used for senior khwajasaras’ novices because that term might imply that the bachagana was enslaved to the khwajasara, rather than the bachagana’s master or mistress. Moreover, as we will see, non-slave disciples of khwajasaras were sometimes called chelas. Although there was not a “highly organized, institutionalized training system” for eunuchs in the Mughal Empire, a few Persian texts mention the trainees of senior eunuchs, highlighting forms of “social connectivity” between khwajasaras. In some cases, trainees succeeded to the position of the senior eunuch.113 In Awadh, Abbott notes that senior khwajasaras trained eunuch bachaganas, who resided in khwajasaras’ sarkars (“household-cum-administrative establishments”) and were part of khwajasaras’ “families fashioned through bonds of kinship, adoption, service, and enslavement.”114 For example, Muhammad Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh (history) of Faizabad, which focused on the lives of his two khwajasara patrons, Jawahir Ali Khan and Darab Ali Khan, indicates that khwajasara personal histories were traced through the genealogies of successive senior khwajasaras and their bachaganas. Faiz Bakhsh also suggests that the senior khwajasara teacher of a bachagana was as dominant an authority figure in the life of the young slave as their master or mistress. A senior khwajasara was responsible for their bachagana’s education but, given their numerous administrative duties, often appointed a tutor to instruct their bachagana. According to Faiz Bakhsh, many adult khwajasaras were illiterate which suggests that they had received more practical training. In contrast, elite eunuchs received an extensive education in Persian literature and poetry, the Quran, and Urdu115 in order to achieve adab, a combination of “intellectual knowledge, spiritual cultivation, and correct behavior.”116 In addition to organizing the education and training of child eunuchs, senior khwajasaras 112 Kalb uses “trainee” and Abbott uses “novice.” In eighteenth-century Mughal sources, the term tarbiyat-karda was also used. Emma Kalb, email communication, 1 April 2021. 113 These texts mentioning trainees are all from the eighteenth century, though Kewal Ram’s Tazkirat al-Umara’ describes a seventeenth century khwajasara’s trainee. See: Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power,” 18–9, 203–4, 252–3; Emma Kalb, email communication, 1 April 2021. 114 Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 84–85. 115 Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 1, iii, and vol. 2, 47, 195; Hinchy, “Eunuchs and the East India Company”; Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods,” 380–400. 116 Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Introduction,” in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California

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were also expected to enforce discipline and codes of proper behavior and deportment.117 Khwajasaras in Awadh attempted to bequeath property to their bachaganas (and other kin and dependents), but were often unsuccessful.118 However, on the death of a khwajasara, one or more of his bachaganas commonly succeeded to his appointments, suggesting a form of succession comparable to the other discipleship lineages discussed in this chapter. For instance, Jawahir Ali Khan, the chief agent of Bahu Begam, the mother of the nawab of Awadh, was succeeded by his bachagana Darab Ali Khan.119 The succession of a bachagana was partly dependent upon achieving the status of adib (a man with adab) which appears to have marked the boundary between boyhood and adulthood for khwajasaras.120 Interestingly, the relationship between kinship and bachagana-hood may have varied. There is at least one documented case of a sixteenth-century Mughal khwajasara adopting a junior khwajasara: I‘tibar Khan was the adoptive father of Khwaja Bahlol.121 In contrast, in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Awadh, bachaganas were not referred to as adopted children (e.g. as mutabanna) although khwajasaras did formally adopt “normatively sexed sons.”122 This apparent Mughal-Awadh contrast might suggest change over time, differences between polities, or alternatively, that khwajasaras’ adoption of young eunuchs was somewhat unusual. Turning to the second relevant set of relationships, in Awadh khwajasaras’ households included “normatively sexed” chelas who “voluntarily entered into a form of devoted service” as young people, but who do not appear to have been enslaved.123 The term chela had a very contextual relationship to enslavement in Awadh, sometimes being used interchangeably with ghulam (slave) and sometimes denoting a relationship distinct from enslavement, as with eunuchs’ non-slave disciples. Moreover, khwajasaras’ chelas were “often

117 118 119 120 121 122

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Press, 1984), 1–22; Indrani Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest for Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Hindustan,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, no. 1 (2000): 53–86. Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 195–96; Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods,” 380–400. Passing on property required the cooperation of the master/mistress and became increasingly difficult in the nineteenth century (Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 85–86. Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 265–6. Hinchy, “Enslaved Childhoods,” 380–400. The son was later known as Khidmatgar Khan (Kalb, “Slaves at the Center of Power,” 19, 203–04). Formally adopted children were usually “normatively sexed sons from among their biological siblings’ children,” since locally enslaved khwajasaras sometimes maintained connections to natal kin (Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 85). My thanks to Nicholas Abbott for elaborating on this point in an email communication, 29 March 2021. Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 84–85.

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considered akin to adopted sons.”124 Faiz Bakhsh mentions some of the disciples of khwajasaras. For instance, around the 1770s, a young pigeon-fancier named Yar Ali recognized the growing power of the khwajasara Jawahir Ali Khan and “by close attendance night and day, and ready service” became a valued chela. But Faiz Bakhsh portrays Yar Ali as a wayward disciple who was eventually excluded from Jawahir Ali Khan’s circle due to his “pride and haughtiness” and fell into “insignificance.”125 In sum, a picture of contextual connections between slavery, knowledge traditions, guru-chela ties and kinship emerges from khwajasara histories, although further research is needed to tease out temporal and regional differences. Intergenerational ties between khwajasaras and their bachaganas were significant to narratives of their lives and careers but were not usually conceptualised as adoptive kinship or chela-hood. Meanwhile, khwajasaras’ relationships with chelas suggest that elite slaves could become an object of devotion, a guru, including to non-slaves and, moreover, that such discipleship relationships could be expressed as kinship ties. 6

Conclusion

Several broad patterns of convergence between slavery and discipleship can be discerned in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north India which may also be evident in other parts of South Asia and other periods. First, slaves were often referred to by the term chela (disciple). This discursive imbrication was shaped by the similarities in the power dynamics of slavery and discipleship, both of which were extremely asymmetrical. However, calling slaves chelas was also premised on the distinct social meanings of “slave” and “disciple” in which discipleship was understood as a less coercive form of subordination than slavery. Although the use of the word chela for slave appears to have originated during the sixteenth-century reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar, it continued to be used into the nineteenth century, highlighting that slavery and discipleship overlapped through time. Second, many disciples in monastic government lineages were of slave origin. This was the case in comparatively socially elite and politically powerful monastic communities such as Shaiva, Vaishnava, Buddhist, and Sufi monasteries and the militias attached to them, as well as in more marginal forms of monastic government such as that of hijra performers 124 Abbott, email communication, 29 March 2021; Abbott, “‘In that One the Ālif is Missing’,” 84–85. 125 Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi, vol. 2, 225–29.

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and collectors of badhai. Recruiting disciples was crucial to maintaining a lineage’s power and durability, a process in which child slaves were particularly valuable because of the relative ease with which they could be imbued with the lineage’s intellectual and behavioural discipline. Disciples often eventually acquired their own disciples, both through enslavement and other methods of recruitment, thereby attaining the status of a guru in the community. Their ability to do so makes it clear that slavery was not a permanent and unchanging marker of status. The evidence suggests that enslavement did not prevent upward mobility within hierarchies of discipleship. Third, some slave corps were organised internally on the basis of relationships between senior slave teachers and novices/trainees. Senior khwajasaras instructed young bachaganas in ethical, intellectual, and behavioural norms. Such knowledge traditions and genealogies structured the khwajasara corps and created distinctions in status between slaves. These intergenerational ties were important to the narration of khwajasaras’ lives, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Awadh. Finally, evidence from Awadh also suggests that powerful slaves (in this case, khwajasaras) could attract chelas who dedicated themselves to the service of the enslaved person, including non-slave chelas. High-ranking slaves might thus become gurus, in the sense of being objects of devotion. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw significant transformations in these communities in which discipleship intersected with enslavement.126 Colonial law marginalised discipleship lineages by emphasising a patrilineal mode of inheritance based on biological and affinal kinship. Colonial governments interfered in succession and inheritance within monastic governments, did not recognise the tax-exempt status of donated labourers, and, in some cases, took possession of monastic estates.127 Additionally, between 1871 and 1911, the colonial administration in north India criminalised and policed hijras, removed children from hijra households, and sometimes prevented chelas from inheriting property.128 The annexation of several Indian principalities, including Awadh in 1856, severely diminished khwajasaras’ political patronage, resulting in their impoverishment and eventual disappearance.129 The 126 However, this was a long and gradual process (Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families,” 1041–42). 127 Chatterjee, “Monastic ‘Governmentality’”; Chatterjee, “The Locked Box,” 159–63; Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 90–91, 173–74; Kasturi, “‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families.” 128 The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 gave authorities power to interfere with inheritance, but this was applied very unevenly. The priority of the government was policing adult hijras’ gender embodiment and performances and removing children (Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality, 222–24). 129 Hinchy, “Sexual Politics,” 427–31.

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politics of the Indian middle class were also a major factor in these processes of marginalization. The English-educated middle class criticised the “thraldom” of monastic slaves, hotly debated whether slavery was religiously justifiable and were outraged by hijras, in the context of new models of gender and sexual “respectability.”130 Historical intersections of slavery and discipleship have several broader implications for our understanding of slavery in Asia. In north Indian communities in which discipleship and slavery were closely connected, these overlapping statuses were frequently complicated by a language of kinship, highlighting the intricate and contingent manner in which different forms of hierarchical and dependent relationships were interrelated. Whether reproductive and conjugal relationships shaped inheritance and succession within discipleship lineages varied between monastic governments. The use of kinship language to describe discipleship and the role of adoption also varied. In some circumstances in Shaiva and other monastic governments, the disciple’s succession to leadership was more likely if their status in the lineage was shored up by adoption rituals which recognised the disciple as an adoptee. Moreover, there is evidence that guru-chela relationships in hijra communities were described through kinship terms, while hijras who were related by lineage were also termed aunts, nieces and so on. The non-slave chelas of khwajasara slaves were sometimes described in terms of adoptive kinship, but their bachaganas (eunuch novices/trainees) do not seem to have been viewed as adopted sons. Discipleship, slavery, and kinship could be linked in subtly different ways. Evidently, the interplay between slavery and discipleship was highly contingent. Indeed, processes of enslavement were not always evident in communities that were structured by discipleship ties in South Asia.131 This circumstance raises the important question of why slavery and discipleship were interlinked in some contexts, but not in others. This is an especially pressing issue since slavery, forced labour, and discipleship overlapped in other parts of Asia as well. In Burma, kyun or bondsmen were given to the sangha (Buddhist monastic 130 Avril A. Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists and the Issue of Slavery in Islam,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 262–86; Chatterjee, “The Locked Box,” 163; Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality, 80–92. 131 For instance, the situation was somewhat different in communities of temple, court, and salon dancers in south India (which came to be known as devadasis in the nineteenth century). These women were sometimes of slave origin, but their natavas (“dance masters”) were usually appointed by the woman’s master or employer and were not themselves of slave origin. See Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3, 55–56.

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order) by lay donors to gain merit, while people who did not possess bondsmen donated themselves. These monastic kyun variously maintained temples and religious buildings, cared for monks, or performed scribal and administrative duties. Michael Aung Thwin writes that the key issue was not whether one was a slave, but rather to whom one was bonded and “for what purpose.” In this context, monastic kyun “acquired a superior spiritual status” by virtue of their bondage.132 Building on Aung Thwin, Indrani Chatterjee has noted that in her Bengali sources for northeast India, “the issue is not whether you are slave or free” but “whose lok [person] are you?”; that is, “whose entourage you belong in, who you serve and for what purpose.”133 The entanglement of slavery and discipleship was not unique to the region we today call “South Asia,” a reminder that present-day geographical classifications can limit histories of slavery. It is only by appreciating the complex and contextual ways in which slavery and discipleship interacted within and beyond South Asia that we can begin to understand the rich kaleidoscope of relationships that are a hallmark of slavery in Asia. 132 M. Aung Thwin, “Athi, Kyun-Taw, Hpaya-Kyun: Varieties of Commendation and Dependence in Pre-Colonial Burma,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 65–89. 133 Jessica Hinchy and Girija Joshi, “Towards a More Varied Picture of Slavery: An Interview with Indrani Chatterjee on Histories of Enslavement in South Asia,” Journal of Global Slavery.

Chapter 3

Gender and Slavery in Asia Shawna Herzog For at least a century, the transatlantic slave trade and chattel labor in the Americas have been the focal point around which scholars have constructed our understanding of modern slavery. Scholars agree that the horrific and dehumanizing images of plantation labor in the Caribbean spurred the growth of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement in Europe. The field of study that developed from this movement has helped us to acquire a fuller understanding of socially constructed racial inequalities, the consequences of exploitation, and the value of human labor. However, as Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson note in a recent review of slave historiography, men performing publicly visible labor became the standard referent – the normative image of a slave – in slavery studies, while women, who worked mostly in private spaces, have been invisible, or nearly so, in much of the scholarly discourse on slavery. They argue that historians have tended to universalize definitions of slavery, mask the realities of “domestic” slavery for women, and to devalue and conflate slave and free women’s labor.1 These observations, coupled with a growing awareness that slave women’s experiences differ significantly from that of slave men2 and the publication of an expanding body of scholarship on women and slavery in Africa, the Americas, and parts of the Indian Ocean world3 underscores the need for 1 Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson, “Re-modeling Slavery as if Women Mattered,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, vol. 2, The Modern Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 253, 273. 2 Joseph C. Miller, “Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, vol. 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 2. 3 See, for example: Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?

© Shawna Herzog, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_005

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those who study forced labor in Asia to participate actively in the larger discourse about slavery in world history. Contributions from scholars of Asian slavery could offer new insight into how slave status can be defined and conceptualized and illustrate the importance of examining women and the role of gender in such systems. However, while scholars are beginning to pay attention to slavery in parts of Asia, especially colonial South and Southeast Asia, interest in and analysis of women’s labor or gendered structures within Asian slave systems remain limited despite enslaved women’s ubiquitous presence as wives, concubines, and domestic servants. While Asianists have been willing to debate the nature of slave status and explore the dynamics of the slave experience in this part of the world, most have not considered the gendered dimensions of these complex systems of servitude, a failing that has frequently obscured and depreciated the importance of slave women’s labor. Despite the horrific realities of Asian slavery, the perception that eastern slave-systems, consisting primarily of women and children, were predominantly “domestic” in nature stands in stark contrast to American plantation slavery. Although many considered Asian slaves’ labor as being necessary to maintaining households, most people in the nineteenth century did not view such work as “slavery” per se. The same is true of modern scholars. Some early scholars of slavery in Southeast Asia contended that slavery was more of a “marriage market” than a slave trade,4 and that slave women’s experiences were somehow mitigated by the fact that they became the wives, concubines, or domestic servants of the wealthy. The implication is not only that slave women’s labor was not especially oppressive or demeaning, but also that marriage and family life nullified the inhumanity, violence, and trauma that likely accompanied their circumstance. Stories about generations of loyal men and women serving as domestic slaves who were treated as part of the family and lived happily and contentedly with their masters obfuscate the harsh and desperate lives of the enslaved who provided a panoply of services throughout Asia. Regardless of how they became slaves – through inherited status, by selling themselves or being sold by their families, by being lured into slavery under false pretenses, or by being kidnapped – women’s association with family and household duties in Indian Ocean or East Asian slave systems made them less deserving of both Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1999); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Women and Slavery, vols. 1 and 2. 4 Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 207.

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the protections afforded by early anti-slavery legislation and later scholarly attention. While there were certainly some anti-slavery activists within the British East India Company’s ranks, there were also many who believed that eastern slavery was “stamp[ed] with a character of mildness” and that there was accordingly no need to interfere with it.5 This construct not only minimizes the strenuous labor performed by many enslaved men, but also allowed nineteenth-century imperialists to regard women and girl slaves in domestic situations as a “natural” means to diversify and grow colonial populations. One consequence of this view has been to encourage modern scholars to focus on the stories of slave wives, mistresses, or servants to the wealthy, an approach which necessarily reinforces exclusively binary positions and limits our understanding of the extent to which gender is woven into the history of slavery. Gender analysis did not find its way into slavery studies until the latter part of the twentieth century. During the 1970s and early 1980s, feminism, area studies, and the post-modern linguistic movement, all spurred by decolonization and the social revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the emphasis on political, economic, and military topics in historical research. After a decade or so of identifying women and their behaviors in historical narratives, Joan Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (1988) offered historians a new lens through which to analyze history.6 Rather than just identifying and reporting on what men and women did in their individual spheres, Scott explained that using a gendered lens allowed historians to better understand how those spaces functioned, generated and enforced constructions of masculinity and femininity, and how those roles shaped perceptions and attitudes between and among individuals. Scott asserted what has since become common academic parlance: gender is a subjective identity linked to traditional roles and supported by cultural symbols which set normative expectations based on conceptions of sexual difference. Gender is performative; the prescribed components of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are all culturally specific and a “primary way of signifying relationships of power.”7 So, while locating and describing the unique lives and experiences of women was, and still is, an incredibly important project, doing so does not, by itself, critically unpack social, political, and economic structures that created the relationships and hierarchies shaping those experiences.8 Instead, gender should interrogate the 5 John Hobhouse, Returns: Slavery (East Indies) (London: Great Britain Foreign Office, 1838), 189. 6 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 7 Ibid, 44. 8 Ibid, 31.

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“complex connections among various forms of human interaction,” a position particularly relevant for those investigating slavery in Asia.9 Scholars of slavery in Asia have nonetheless been slow to incorporate a gendered perspective in their analyses, most likely because they have spent most of their efforts focused on distancing themselves from the Atlantic system and redefining what it meant to be a slave. The nature of Asian slavery has required area specialists to at least identify differences in the jobs performed by men and women slaves, but there has been little interrogation of the nature and influence of those differences. Most studies after 1980 acknowledge women and children’s dominance in the eastern slave trades and discuss their daily tasks in some detail, but few interrogate the social, religious, economic, or political structures that are foundational to gendered divisions of labor or consider the economic, social, or cultural effects of such divisions. For example, although there is evidence of concubinage and female domestic slavery in every major Asian culture, few studies seem interested in examining the gendered nature of the social structures that perpetuate the demand for concubines or how the institution of concubinage impacted gender and social hierarchies. The same holds true for eunuchs and harems, which were clearly the result of gendered hierarchical relationships and are found in most Asian cultures. These are just some of the historiographical lacunae yet to be filled. The various and sometimes opaque definitions of slave status in Asia have been a source of frustration, if not anxiety, among western scholars. Early works that discussed slavery in Asia challenged the western European distinction between “free” and “unfree” labor,10 thereby complicating attempts to understand phenomena such as slave resistance and emancipation.11 Another definitional problem stems from a propensity to conflate slavery in the east with the perceived degraded status of Asian women. In his classic study of bondage in Southeast Asia, Bruno Lasker wrote that there “was great demand for women on the part of Chinese”12 and described attractive women’s value 9 10

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Ibid, 47. E.g., James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). For a more recent discussion of such issues, see Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004). E.g., Edward Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Salman, eds., Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005); Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight, eds., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 35.

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as wives, concubines, or prostitutes, roles that have become synonymous in the minds of many people with female slavery. Although recent scholarship has begun to investigate the influence of gender on slave status and challenge presumptions about how heteronormative sexualities shaped that status, we need much more research on slave women’s productive, reproductive, domestic, and sexual labor, the ways in which constructed notions of masculinity and femininity shaped slave lives, and how sex and sexuality have influenced the demand for slaves.13 Scholars must also pay attention to the ways in which some enslaved men and women in Asia may have used slavery as a method for social advancement. In sum, we can no longer ignore the role that women and gender played in shaping slavery and servitude in Asia. 1

Slavery and Bondage in South Asia

Before the mid-1990s, historians of slavery in Asia focused largely on debating the meanings of the term slave, clarifying the nature of enslavement in their respective regions of interest, and distinguishing how these systems differed from those in the Americas. Those writing about South Asia argued that Hinduism and caste were key to understanding slavery in the Indian subcontinent while Chinese specialists held that Confucian patriarchy determined the fate of Chinese slaves. Southeast Asianists focused on the endemic nature of vertical relationships, the role of debt, and the changing status of women in the region’s pluralistic societies. The general picture that emerged from these studies was that the definition of slave status in Asia was highly variable, that women and children rather than men were most frequently sold in slave markets, that a slave’s status depended on the socio-cultural circumstances in which they found themselves, and that the demand for domestic and sexual labor underpinned slave trading networks throughout Asia. These ideas are readily discernible in the scholarship on slavery and bondage in India. In their 1985 study, Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney assert that slavery and bondage are only “one form of forced labor” and that servitude in the subcontinent “is best looked upon as a continuum, comprising various degrees of unfree status; and that the relative importance of different

13

This is the term that Robertson and Robinson use for the productive, reproductive, domestic, and sexual labor regularly expected of women slaves (“Re-modeling Slavery,” 253).

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types of servitude altered over time with economic expansion.”14 Earlier works, such as Dharma Kumar’s Land and Caste (1965) and K.K. Kusuman’s Slavery in Travancore (1973) focused squarely on describing Indian servitude while highlighting the role caste played in defining a servile population in the region; neither the role of women, nor the influence of gender were of concern.15 Amal Kumar Chattopadhyay’s 1977 study of slavery in the Bengal Presidency describes the differences between domestic and agrestic slavery and identifies specific jobs expected of men and women within Hindu and Muslim households. However, these first studies are primarily descriptive and limited to individual states rather than creating a cohesive image of South Asian slavery. Chattopadhyay also briefly mentions the effects of aging on the value of female slaves,16 which is another aspect of this conversation that has not received enough scholarly analysis, particularly in the case of women and girls used for sexual labor – slave work changes as they age. While laying important foundations for future research, early works on slavery in South Asia tended to map out the system without much examination of the people within it. As elsewhere in Asia, the experience of Indian slaves often depended on their master’s profession and social position. Patnaik and Dingwaney’s collection, Chains of Servitude, took the first step toward creating a cohesive history of slavery in India and looked more deeply into specific forms of bondage throughout India. The authors in this volume more thoroughly distinguished between agrestic, domestic, and aristocratic slaves and established that some slaves were kept purely to enhance their masters’ status and pleasure. They echoed previous assertions about the importance of caste in defining slave status, especially in southern India.17 However, despite a chapter entitled “Bondage Among Women in Jaunsar Bawar,” which offers detailed descriptions of policy and custom but very little discussion about actual women, the authors did not investigate the differences between the experiences of men and women slaves or examine the Hindu and Muslim patriarchal structures maintaining gendered divisions of labor.18 The essays in Patnaik and Dingwaney’s anthology demonstrated that the polar opposition between “slave” and “free” 14 15 16 17 18

Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney, Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India (Madras: Sangam Books Ltd., 1985), 25. Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965); K.K. Kusuman, Slavery in Travancore (Trivandrum: Kerala Historical Society, 1973). Amal Kumar Chattopadhyay, Slavery in the Bengal Presidency, 1772–1843 (London: Golden Eagle Publishing House, 1977), 41. Patnaik and Dingwaney, Chains of Servitude, 99–101. Ibid, 258–80.

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did not exist in South Asia, and argued that systems of debt bondage permitted the “disguised continuation” of this institution even after the legal abolition of slavery.19 Although they touch on the fact that domestic labor consisted primarily of women slaves and discuss the “taste for exotic prostitutes [that] had to be catered to,” their study sought to differentiate slavery in India from that in the Atlantic world, to expose the consequences of monetized servitude, and to illustrate the failure of British colonial policy to put an end to it. They left women’s experiences, the gendered analysis of labor divisions, domestic and aristocratic servitude, and sexuality for others to explore. As demand for gendered analysis grew, Marina Carter’s Lakshmi’s Legacy (1994) uncovered the impact of changing labor migration and colonial law on the position and expectations of Indian women, both free and indentured, in the nineteenth-century British colony of Mauritius.20 Although not about slaves in India per se, Carter’s book made two key contributions to the study of South Asian slavery. First, this is a story from the perspective of Indian women and exposes their lack of physical and legal protections from both the state and Indian men in general and underscores the abuse and exploitation that slavewomen likely encountered because of their sex. Second, it demonstrates the power of colonial policy and illustrates an unspoken “sexual contract” between men used to maintain patriarchal order.21 Similar to the East India Company’s (EIC) position of non-interference during abolition, officials in Mauritius used colonial law to reify Indian men’s authority over their wives.22 Although Carter begins her study after the legal abolition of slavery, her research illustrates the perseverance of slave-like conditions in the wake of slave emancipation which forces us to ask, in turn, what were the lives of slave women like, and how did anti-slavery policies effect their lives? Indrani Chatterjee’s Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (1999) was the first full-length examination of the influence of gender and sexuality on the division of labor and everyday lives of slaves in colonial India. Chatterjee exposed how British officials used anti-slavery legislation as leverage against 19 Ibid, 38, 98. 20 Marina Carter, Lakshmi’s Legacy: The Testimonies of Indian Women in 19th Century Mauritius (Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien, 1994), 23–34, 57–73; Saraswati Raju and Deipica Bagchi, eds., Women and Work in South Asia: Regional Patterns and Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1993). 21 Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 6. Pateman’s argument is that there is an implicit, sometimes explicit, contract between men about women which secures the transformation of men’s “natural right over women into the security of civil and patriarchal right.” 22 Carter, Lakshmi’s Legacy, 57–60.

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indigenous slave-owning elites. Her work on slavery in the private households of Mughal elites in early nineteenth-century Bengal led her to argue that “in the face of abolitionist agitation, the simple reduction of the complex and different grades of slavery into ‘marriage’ relations by the Law Commission absolved the Company of any responsibility to legally end slave-concubinage in the English Officers and soldiers’ households.”23 Echoing Carter, she demonstrates that the British used language, law, and social constructs of gender to maintain their ability to exploit the ubiquitous domestic and sexual labor of women. Western misinterpretations of cultural structures and mores meant that the terms “wife” and “concubine” obscured, rather than elucidated, the status of women who were clearly slaves. Chatterjee also examined the gendered experiences of eunuchs within Muslim families, exposing the “importance of androgyny and ambivalence as political attributes” within Indian society. More specifically, she argues that because they embodied “commercial and political ‘agency’ for law-keeping and therefore punishment,” eunuchs in India were seen to hold “special power” which enabled them to breach the various boundaries that separate male from female worlds.24 This ability to straddle the boundary between the public and private spheres of social life has made eunuchs both heroes and villains in popular literature. Indeed, Jessica Hinchy’s recent publication, “The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion,” argues that because eunuchs were the “keepers of social and sexual boundaries” within the Mughal court, British officials quickly saw them as a direct threat to imperial expansion and worked to castigate and represent them as symbols of corruption in order to dislodge them from their perceived positions of power.25 However, while Chatterjee and Hinchy highlight exciting new directions for the study of slavery and servitude on the subcontinent, other parts of Asia, and elsewhere in the wider Indian Ocean world, eunuchs have been the subject of only a handful of scholarly articles,26 23 24 25 26

Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. Ibid, 47. Jessica Hinchy, “The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Rule in Mid-Nineteenth Century North India,” Gender and History 26, no. 3 (2014): 417. E.g., Ehud R. Toledano, “The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: From Africa to the Heart of Islam,” Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 3 (1984): 379–90; David Robinson, “Notes on Eunuchs in Hebei during the Mid-Ming Period,” Ming Studies 34 (1995): 1–16; Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective,” History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007): 495–506; Jane Hathaway, “Eunuchs in Istanbul, Medina and Cairo during the Ottoman Era,” Turcica: Revue d’études turques 41 (2009): 291–303; Jessica Hinchy, “Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India,” Asian Studies Review

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and remain an understudied group whose existence was largely due to socially constructed gendered ideologies that can be difficult to reconstruct. In an attempt to expand the conceptual range and better understand the long, entrenched, and complex nature of slavery in India, Chatterjee and Richard Eaton’s Slavery in South Asian History (2006) documents the changing positions of slaves and gendered divisions of labor from pre-history to the legal abolition of slavery in the subcontinent in the mid-nineteenth century.27 The essays in this anthology sought to differentiate between the various types of slaves, identify the specific jobs they performed, assess the role of caste in determining slave status, and examine the systemic social and cultural hierarchies that maintained systems of servitude. In his introductory essay, Eaton reminds us that “slavery [in India] was understood not as a fixed status, but as a particular career, and a particular relationship to a ruler or politically important master.”28 More importantly, this volume pays attention to the experiences of both men and women slaves. It reveals, for example, that war and poverty generated most slaves in Indian history, that they performed a wide range of productive, domestic, and sexual labor, and that women were usually assimilated and sometimes used as “reproductive pools” to increase populations.29 Several of the book’s contributors investigated the influence that the Mughal Empire and British and Portuguese colonial states had on the economic and cultural value of slaves and how slavery became a point of contention between competing imperials powers. Despite these studies, there is a need for more sustained analysis of the gendered social, political, religious, and sexual constructs surrounding South Asian slavery. Scholars must examine the stories of South Asian slaves more deeply and think more critically about the ways in which their histories connect with those of slaves throughout Asia.30 One of the most compelling

27 28 29

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38, no. 2 (2014): 274–94; Gilbert Chen, “Castration and Connection: Kinship Organization among Ming Eunuchs,” Ming Studies 74 (2016): 27–47. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2. Richard M. Eaton, “Introduction,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 6. Ibid, 4; Indrani Chatterjee, “Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Histo­ riography of South Asia,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 25; Richard M. Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 129; Michael H. Fisher, “Bound for Britain: Changing Conditions of Servitude, 1600–1857,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 204. The following are particularly interesting examinations of how sex and gender affected the lives of slaves, particularly women, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:

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features of Chatterjee and Eaton’s volume is their call for South Asia to be included in the wider discussion about slavery as a global process. As Eaton notes, “slaves helped integrate peoples, economies, and cultures of South Asia with those of central Asia and the Indian Ocean rim.”31 He argues for the need to release South Asian scholarship from the grip of the “area studies” paradigm, a model which contributes to our current inadequate understanding of global processes, sentiments which Chatterjee clearly shares: “only in dialogue do we hope for a genuinely global history of slavery.”32 Ironically, India’s role as both a powerful independent state and Britain’s most treasured colony make it the most obvious candidate for comparative analysis waiting to be written. Shobhita Jain and Rhoda Reddock attempted to remedy the rigid separation between scholars of Asian and Atlantic systems with their anthology Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences (1998), which used examples of plantation societies in the Caribbean, Pacific, and South Asia to highlight patterns among the “oppressed and superexploited women” living within these “total institutions.”33 In a 2017 review essay of two books on plantation societies in Sri Lanka and Assam, Reddock echoed Eaton and Chatterjee and asked again why slavery in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic were still kept in “separate boxes.”34 As scholars of slavery move forward, it will be critical that future research not only considers the ways in which gender influenced slavery in these oceanic worlds, but also how the histories of female slaves in these world connect to the larger discourse about slavery in world history. 2

Slavery and Bondage in Central Asia, China, and the Far East

Slaves were abundant and valuable commodities throughout Central Asia since at least the second century CE, yet there is surprisingly little written

31 32 33 34

Vijay Pinch, “Gosain Tawaif: Slaves, Sex, and Ascetics in Rasdhan, ca. 1800–1857,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 559–97; Margot Finn, “Slaves Out of Context: Domestic Slavery and the Anglo-Indian Family, c. 1780–1830,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 19, no. 6 (2009): 181–203. Eaton, “Introduction,” 11. Chatterjee, “Renewed and Connected Histories,” 35. Shobhita Jain and Rhoda Reddock, eds., Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1. Rhoda Reddock, “South Asian Plantation Histories and Their Enduring Legacies: Indian and Atlantic Ocean Connections,” Development and Change 48, no.1 (2017): 189.

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about slavery in the region.35 B.D. Hopkins’ 2008 article on race, sex, and slavery was the first to bring Central Asia into the discourse on slavery. Hopkins argued that while this “vast area did not constitute a single unitary market, or even practice the same ‘type’ of slavery, it did share the cultural, economic and sexual institutions” so common in Asia.36 Like Robertson and Robinson, he asserted that women slaves worked in an “‘invisible’ economic sector,” which made their labor “easy to ignore,” that there was both a “social and sexual” function to slavery in Central Asia, and that most of the slaves were female domestic servants and concubines.37 Here, concubinage was cheaper than marriage and some slave women had more personal freedom than many of the “free” women in their communities.38 They were “generally a luxury good for symbolic, and often sexual consumption” that Europeans also enjoyed.39 In Central Asia, education and beauty were highly valued in slaves, not all harems were full of women and, and as in so many of its colonial outposts, the British government was very anxious about the sexual relationships that EIC officials had with their slaves.40 While Hopkins’s article focused of the physical and sexual exploitation of enslaved women and girls, it also underscored the need for more sustained and thorough analysis of the gendered dimensions of slavery in Central Asia. The most recent works on Central Asian slavery demonstrate that women and gender have become an essential part of modern historical analysis. Christoph Witzenrath’s Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History (2015) and Jeff Eden’s Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (2018) each include gendered perspectives within their larger examination of slavery in the region. Aleksandr Lavrov’s chapter on captivity, slavery, and gender in Witzenrath’s anthology uses women’s “real status in times of war” to investigate the

35

36 37 38 39 40

William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 4, 71–77, 83–91; Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History with Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67–68, 89–90, 305, 364; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 43–44, 168. B.D. Hopkins, “Race, Sex, and Slavery: ‘Forced Labour’ in Central Asia and Afghanistan in the Early 19th Century,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2008): 630–631. Ibid, 629, 640. Ibid, 657. Ibid, 670. Quoting Rustam Khan-Urf, Hopkins explained that, “the last ruler of Bukhara [Amir Said Alim Bahadur], was reported to have two harems – one of over 100 women and one of ‘nectarine-complexion dancing boys’” (ibid, 657, 665).

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differences between the experiences of men and women slaves.41 He explains that while legally Muscovites treated women and men captives equally, gender hierarchies, patriarchal structures, and fear of “speak[ing] about their specific experience” meant that in practice women felt “some submissiveness and dependence on men,” demonstrating that de jure equality did not equate to de facto experiences.42 While the case studies and evidence he cites are compelling and support his modest conclusions, his analysis fails to engage critically with existing gender theory, discourse on gender and slavery in Islam, or sexual power dynamics. Lavrov claims, for instance, that there was not “one single mention of sexual exploitation” in all of the testimony he examined.43 He failed to consider that if the women did not talk about their experiences in general, it was highly unlikely (except in cases involving a crime or outrageous violence) that they would report incidents of sexual assault or exploitation, especially to other men. Examining gender roles, women’s status, or Russian masculinity might have added depth to his analysis of sexuality. Eden’s milestone survey of slavery in Central Asia from 1750 to 1873 devotes a chapter to examining slave social relationships and family life, but his book is focused primarily on proving the inefficacy of Russian anti-slaving efforts and examining “how slaves influenced the nature of their captivity”44 rather than with unpacking Central Asian gender constructs. As these studies illustrate, sex and gender shaped and defined slavery in this region in ways that have yet to be explored as fully as they should. Similarly, there is still a paucity of studies on slavery in China. Like those on India, early scholarship focused on contextualizing the concept of slavery and servitude in Chinese history, identifying slave populations in relation to existing cultural hierarchies, and challenging assumptions that all slavery had economic motivations.45 Fortunately, the dominance of patriarchy in Chinese cultural institutions made gender and women’s status a key component in the analysis of slavery and servitude in the Middle Kingdom. Sue Gronewold’s pioneering research exposed the vulnerability of Chinese women 41 42 43 44 45

Aleksandr Lavrov, “Captivity, Slavery, and Gender: Muscovite Female Captives in the Crimean Khanate and in the Ottoman Empire,” in Christoph Witzenrath, ed., Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History 1200–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 311. Ibid, 319. Ibid. Jeff Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2. James L. Watson, “Chattel Slavery in Chinese Peasant Society: A Comparative Analysis,” Ethnology 15, no. 4 (1976): 361; E. G. Pulleyblank, “The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, no. 2 (1958): 185–220; C. Martin Wilbur, Slavery in China During the Former Han Dynasty 206 B.C.–A.D. 25 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1943), 60–97.

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and girls who were sold into slavery for the purpose of prostitution. Gronewald explained that purchase was the most frequent method to obtain women for brothels, many of whom were household servants before they worked in the sex industry.46 While she did not explore slavery as an institution, Gronewold’s research was an important first step in investigating the role that patriarchal systems played in the enslavement of Chinese women and illustrates that prostitution was just one of many undervalued labor services that women and slaves have performed in Asia. The collection of papers on women and Chinese patriarchy edited by Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (1994) was the first book to focus solely on women’s servile status in China.47 Not only did this volume illustrate the changes in the position of women over the preceding 150 years, it also allowed Chinese women to “speak for themselves.”48 Meirs’ study of mui tsai, or slave girls, was groundbreaking because it examined the experiences of girl and women slaves and revealed an intricate structure of servitude and obligation within Chinese households. Her analysis of the story of Janet Lim, the author of the wellknown autobiography Sold for Silver, outlined this culturally and economically entrenched institution “at its worst.”49 Lim’s story also provided an opportunity to examine the role that religion and western imperialism could play in shaping slave women’s lives. For some of these women, Christian missionary schools were pathways to freedom.50 Lim’s account reveals the oppressively hierarchical system within which mui tsai existed, underscores the rigid differentiation between wife, concubine, and servant in Chinese households, and illustrates women’s roles as primary enforcers within this patriarchal system. The patriarchal structures and exploitation to which women in general, and female slaves in particular, were subject in China was replicated in Chinese diasporic communities throughout Asia. Hsieh Bao Hua and Johanna S. Ransmeier have made significant contributions to the study of slavery in China.51 Like Meirs, they analyze complicated 46 47 48 49 50 51

Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1860–1936 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1982), 12. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994). Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, “Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System: Submission, Servitude, Escape and Collusion,” in Jaschok and Miers, Women and Chinese Patriarchy, 10. Suzanne Miers, “Mui Tsai Through the Eyes of the Victim: Janet Lim’s Story of Bondage and Escape,” in Jaschok and Miers, Women and Chinese Patriarchy, 108. Ibid, 117. Hsieh Bao Hua, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China (London: Lexington Books, 2014); Johanna S. Ransmeier, Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in Northern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

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life histories to reveal what Ransmeir describes as “a robust market in servants, wives, slaves, concubines, child brides, apprentices, and adopted children” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China.52 Their use of a gendered lens adds a significant dimension to understanding how women and men experienced slavery differently. Hsieh’s analysis of the lives of Chinese concubines and patriarchal power structures within the Ming and Qing dynasties, for example, reveals how an intricate, hierarchical system of serving women and eunuchs in the emperor’s harem helped to preserve the imperial lineage.53 Ransmeier in turn investigates the lives of slave traffickers and enslaved young women and children in northern China at the dawn of the twentieth century to provide a more complete image of Chinese slave systems and slave trading networks. More specifically, she argues that patriarchal Chinese family structures and notions about marriage and family life in particular “fixed a woman’s value and introduced the idea that she might be sold.”54 In China, as elsewhere in Asia, famine, poverty, and destitution have historically made women and children particularly vulnerable to enslavement and her study examines how traffickers sold these socially exposed people as household slaves and then distributed them throughout northern China to add to the wealth and prosperity of the families who bought them. To date no monograph exists which is dedicated to the study of slavery in Japan or Korea other than those that focus on “comfort women” during the Second World War. The few articles on this subject that exist do not examine women, gender, or sexuality. According to Daniel Botsman, by the seventeenth century, slavery had already “ceased to exist” in Japan.55 In 1587, efforts at economic expansion and a growing resentment of the Portuguese and their growing involvement in human trafficking prompted Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi to prohibit both the international and domestic trade in slaves.56 This early regulation did not eliminate private slavery in Japan, nor did it protect Japanese workers from the exploitive conditions of what was becoming a global market in cheap labor. Botsman’s exploration of a high-profile case against a Portuguese slaver in Meiji Japan touches on a key issue thus far unexplored. In spite of the early prohibition on the sale of humans, the Japanese government did not consider the sale of girls into brothels, still a common practice at the time, as slavery until U.S. attorney Frederick Dickins brought 52 53 54 55 56

Ransmeier, Sold People, 2. Hsieh, Concubinage and Servitude, 41–48, 96–104, 198–201, 209–48. Ransmeier, Sold People, 2. Daniel V. Botsman, “Freedom without Slavery? ‘Coolies,’ Prostitutes, and Outcastes in Meiji Japan’s ‘Emancipation Moment,’” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1327. Ibid.

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it to their attention during this era. In 1872, comments made during a trial about Japanese prostitutes in Japan motivated the Meiji government to issue the “Emancipation Edict for Female Performers and Prostitutes.” In addition to reasserting the prohibition on the sale of people, the edict “ordered that all prostitutes and others bound by similar kinds of service contracts” were to be released “without exception.”57 Although Botsman does not address the patriarchal culture, status of women, or gendered perceptions about labor that this case highlights, he left an important opening for future scholars. Like so many others investigating Asian slavery, those writing about Korea began by defining the complexities of slave-status within Korean society but have also exposed important commonalities this system has with its neighbors. Bok Rae Kim’s article analyzing Korean slave resistance, for example, explains that social class was hereditary in pre-modern Korea and the nobis (hereditary slaves) often came from among the “low-born.”58 Poverty and debt were also common causes of enslavement while slaves were subject to “authoritarian domination” and held to “strict Confucian principles of subordination and obedience.”59 Kim’s article does not, however, consider the rigid gender divisions within Confucianism or what authoritarian subordination might have meant for slave women. The most comprehensive examination of Korean slavery comes from a chapter in James Palais’ Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions (2015) which offers a thorough outline of the origins and basic structures of Korean slavery.60 Palais’ principal aim though is to historicize the social, cultural, and political “path to abolition” for Korea’s slaves and the chapter in question did not to examine the gendered nature of the institution. His demonstration of “Chinese precedent” does provide clues to Korean perceptions about enslavement and servitude but, as in the case of scholarship on slavery in Central Asia, more research is necessary for a fuller understanding of the effects that gender and sexuality had slavery in East Asia. 3

Southeast Asia

More than 35 years ago, Anthony Reid noted that Southeast Asia offers “a particularly fruitful place to study different types of servitude: Arab, Chinese, 57 58 59 60

Ibid, 1339. Bok-Rae Kim, “Korean Nobi Resistance under the Chosun Dynasty (1392–1910),” Slavery and Abolition 25, no.2 (2004): 48. Ibid. James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyongwon and the Late Chosen Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 208–70.

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Indic, and modern European, as well as a range of indigenous forms.”61 While scholarship from this era noted that slavery was a fundamental component of Southeast Asian social structures and women and children’s prominence among the region’s slaves,62 these studies generally paid little attention to the gendered structures that propelled local slave systems. Reid asserted, for example, that enslaved women in Southeast Asia had more opportunities than men slaves for upward mobility since wealthy men and elites surrounded themselves with numerous wives, concubines, and female retainers.63 In so doing, however, he did not discuss the patriarchy that underpinned local systems of slavery, the various forms of productive, domestic, and sexual labor that female slaves performed, or the reasons why they outnumbered men in regional slave trading networks. The attendant, often implicit, assertion that slave women’s lives were easier than those of male slaves because their labor as wives, domestic servants, and sex partners was less physically demanding minimized the value of these activities and these slaves’ contribution to their masters’ wealth, power, and influence. The first study to address the gendered dimensions of slave life in Southeast Asia was Jean Gelman Taylor’s 1983 analysis of the changes in the status of Batavian women brought about by Dutch colonialism and the power of intimacy in colonial spaces from the seventeenth to twentieth century.64 Taylor observed that from the beginnings of the Dutch presence in Batavia early in the seventeenth century “there was the freest intercourse with slave women” and that officials and servants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were known to choose wives from among local women and slaves imported as concubines.65 Through marriage and personal cunning, some of these women were able to make their way into the colonial elite. However, the great majority of the slaves purchased by the Dutch worked as household servants who were 61 62

63 64

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Anthony Reid, “Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 2. E.g., Lasker, Human Bondage; James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981; 2nd ed., Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007); Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency; Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia, esp. 181–212. Reid, “Slavery and Bondage,” 25–26; Anthony Reid, “Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 629–45. Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 69–71. On Dutch colonialism’s effect on women’s status, see also Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 15.

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totally under their masters’ control. As Taylor notes, the harsh reality for most of these domestic slaves was that they faced abuse and “lurid tortures” within the privacy of the household.66 Taylor’s work helped to lay the foundation for the expansion of gender studies in Southeast Asian historiography that began with the advent of the new millennium, an expansion that has had a marked impact on the study of slavery in this part of Asia. A succession of publications by Barbara Watson Andaya forcefully injected gender analysis into Southeast Asian historiography and dramatically changed our understanding of how foreigners influenced the status of women and the ways in which sex and gender affected institutions of debt and servitude in the region. In her seminal article, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute,” Andaya analyzed the enormous contributions that women’s sexual labor made to Southeast Asian economies from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. More specifically, she chronicled the “attitudinal shift” that occurred after 1500, which increasingly condemned women who exchanged sex for material gain.67 She argues that before Europeans arrived on the scene, “it was widely accepted that a foreign trader could establish a sexual relationship with a local woman who would act as his wife and economic partner for as long as required.”68 Such arrangements were purely economic and the labor and business connections these women supplied were more important than their individual status as princess or slave. Andaya explains that, “by receiving valuable or unusual gifts from foreign traders, women and their families acquired prestige items that could be displayed or exchanged, significantly enhancing their status within the community.”69 As a result, well-placed village women and the wives and daughters of elite households, looking to strengthen the trading power of their families, sought these “temporary marriages” with arriving traders.70 Reminiscent of the “Danish Christian Mulatresses” in West Africa described by Pernille Ipsen or the roles of slave-women in the Caribbean, many Europeans depended on women’s trade networks and business acumen to establish and maintain lucrative trade relationships.71 66 67

68 69 70 71

Ibid, 70. Barbara Watson-Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 12. Andaya expands her analysis of this subject in The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 104–33. Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute,” 28. Ibid, 13. Ibid. There are a variety of studies on women’s dominance in West African business and trade which caused a great deal of anxiety for Europeans, as well several works that analyze slave women’s role in trade in the Americas and the Caribbean. For Africa, see: Pernille

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In addition to expertly buying and selling their products, temporary wives also attended to the domestic comforts of their foreign spouses. This included cooking, washing and mending laundry, as well as sexual intimacy. The relationship was mutually dissolvable at any time, the men in such relationships were expected to abide by local norms, and the woman’s family made sure her marital rights were honored.72 However, in addition to growing restrictions on elite women’s sexual autonomy and changing economic structures, Andaya avers that by the eighteenth century there were so many foreign traders in the region that merchants ceased relying on “princess-emissaries” and began instead to “marry” concubines and slaves connected to local households who had fewer protections. In an increasingly monetized economy, non-elite women unconcerned with “premarital chastity” commonly exchanged sex for money or goods as income for the family and, if “particularly pressed, daughters could be mortgaged as debt-slaves” while domestic servants were also available for sex.73 Eventually, European and Chinese traders preferred more transactional relationships without the obligation of a marriage contract and began paying local slave women for domestic and sexual services. They were, as Andaya demonstrates, a “disposable asset” and yet Southeast Asian trading economies and the expansion of global trade within the region depended on women’s labor, and that of slave women in particular, and the profit and position gained from it.74 Although she does not focus on slavery, Andaya demonstrates one of the many ways in which gender directly affected slaves’ experiences. The collection of papers that Andaya edited in 2001, Other Pasts, set out to examine men and women’s roles, expectations, and experiences in early modern Southeast Asia in the context of sexuality, language, religion, culture, and slavery.75 Hendrik Niemeijer’s chapter offers an exemplary study of the

72 73 74 75

Ipsen, Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriages on the Gold Coast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 114–139; Claire C. Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 64–100; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 20–29. For the New World, see: Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 34–56; Janet Momsen, ed., Women and Change in the Caribbean: A Pan-Caribbean Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 28–30, 40, 66; Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 72–87. Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute,” 15. Ibid, 24. Ibid, 23. Barbara Watson Andaya, ed., Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).

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gendered lives of seventeenth-century Batavian slaves.76 He argues that patterns of cohabitation and marriage were inherently linked to systems of slavery, bondage, and debt within this flourishing multicultural society.77 Physical proximity and sexual availability served as the primary factors determining the extent to which the city’s Dutch émigré residents married local women, and these sexual encounters “often reflected relationships of status and power in which women were subordinate.”78 A domestic slave, for example, had less control over her life than a concubine but perhaps more than did a local prostitute. Nonetheless, what is clear from the discourse about gender and slavery in Asia as a whole is that even when women were not slaves, they did not have the rights and protections of free men, which in many cases made them vulnerable to slave-like living and working conditions. While Taylor and Andaya’s work demonstrated that the status and lives of free and slave women could be quite similar, we cannot automatically conflate all women with enslavement and servitude, a point that Eric Jones makes in his Wives, Slaves and Concubines (2010) which places women at the center of a world history about slavery in Dutch Asia.79 In his monograph, Jones draws on the voices of underclass women to explain how the increased presence of European women, the construction of the Suez Canal, and the use of anti-malarial drugs changed the nature of colonialism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. The increasing commodification of labor motivated slave owners to begin to value “their underlings” less in terms of the prestige or status that slave ownership could convey and more in terms of the economic return they provided as laborers.80 Like Taylor and Niemeijer, Jones shows that “economic pragmatism often took precedence over matters of race in the mixed ethnic societies of the early modern world.”81 More importantly, he demonstrates how the imposition of Dutch law and European slave structures on Asian systems “erected a firm partition between free and slave status” that initiated a devaluation of Southeast Asian women.82

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Hendrik Niemeijer, “Slavery, Ethnicity and the Economic Independence of Women in Seventeenth-Century Batavia,” in Watson-Andaya, Other Pasts, 174–94. Ibid, 175. Ibid, 178. Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). Ibid, 145. Ibid, 5. Ibid, 7.

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Slavery through the Eyes of the Colonizer

This body of scholarship on slavery in India, China, and Southeast Asia points to the existence of something akin to a universal truth in Asian slavery studies: the creation of European empires initiated dramatic changes to the lives of slaves throughout Asia. However, a fuller understanding of these changes is impossible without carefully considering the role that gender played in shaping the broader European colonial experience in Asia. Scholarship on women and the British Raj in India is an especially instructive case in point. Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj (1988) is an early example of research that gazed through the lens of the colonizer to explore the effects of British constructions of gender and class on society and social relations in India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.83 MacMillan’s study examined the negotiation of power between colonizing women and their servants within a patriarchal empire that not only exposes the importance of gender and domesticity to the imperial project, but also inspired questions about the fluidity between Victorian ideals of marriage and domestic slavery/ servitude. In her study of the everyday lives of the wives, sisters, and daughters of colonial officials in India, MacMillan reveals the ways in which the gendered expectations and restrictions placed on European women affected their relationships with Indians in general, and with their personal servants in particular. The majority of these European women, she explains, were ordinary middle-class women placed in an extraordinary situation and held to a very narrow definition of what it was to be a “good woman.”84 Because they had little contact with indigenous populations other than their servants, they knew little about the rules of Indian society and the caste system and were unaccustomed to the abundance of servile labor at hand. Placed at an intersection of racialized class identity politics, many British women feared India and they projected that fear into colonial society.85 Anxieties around overly sexualized Asian women made female slaves particularly problematic in this scenario. These “memsahibs,” who faced enormous pressure to conform to rigid standards of Victorian paternalism, are often blamed for the gap that existed between rulers and the ruled in late nineteenth-century British India. Their lives, shaped by the male chauvinism they encountered on a regular basis, placed them on a societal plane not all that different, in many respects, from 83 84 85

Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988). Ibid, 8–10. Ibid, 13, 61.

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that of the Indian servants they supervised, at least some of whom we know were slaves. Ultimately, the widespread fear of a weak Raj after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–58 encouraged a more aggressive assertion of the kind of gendered imperialism that often resulted in uneasy or strained relations between British men and women and their Indian servants, and directly affected the lives of slaves in the wider British colonial world.86 A decade after the publication of MacMillan’s work, Nancy Paxton’s Writing Under the Raj (1999) set out to chart “the progression of British perceptions and eroticization of slavery” in India.87 Paxton did so by drawing on ideas articulated in Edward Said’s Orientalism to examine the ways in which British writers used rape narratives and gendered metaphors of India to describe colonization and conquest, while eroticizing and vilifying the harem in British consciousness after the Mutiny.88 She argues that early novelists associated sexual slavery with the violation of Indian women in harems and the “erotic excesses of the Muslim conquerors” and that their accounts of the “brutalities of domestic life” within the harem evoked sympathy from the British reading public.89 By the late 1850s, however, Indian wives and concubines came to be perceived as despots within the harem, and “Englishwomen replaced Indian women as the victims of abduction, imprisonment, intimidation and rape by violent and lawless Indian men.”90 Colonists around the world believed nonwestern peoples were, as Philippa Levine has noted, “morally lax and sexually unencumbered.”91 This perception fed into Orientalized fears about a “white slave trade” supplying European women to eastern harems where they were the subjects of domestic and sexual exploitation, an image that became a dominant stereotype of Asian life and the center of attention for international reformers in the twentieth century.92 The European campaign against “white slavery” underscores the orientalist and gendered perceptions embedded in western notions about Asian slavery and their campaigns against it. 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid, 11. For more on Britain’s aggressive colonial transformation after the Sepoy Rebellion, see: Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 1–5; C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 10–16, 250. Nancy L. Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1999), 33. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 167–68, 190. Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, 33, 71. Ibid, 5. Philippa Levine, “Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,” in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 135–37. Ibid, 67.

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MacMillan and Paxton’s work on British conceptions of gender, class, race, and slavery in India demonstrated how fundamental notions of gender and sexuality were to the maintenance of colonial power.93 In so doing, they laid the foundation for the “new imperial history” that sought to engage in a more thorough probing of the ways in which race, gender, class, and sexuality intersected in the colonial world. Recently, Tillman Nechtman, Joseph Sramek, and Andrea Major have all looked to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period before the Raj was firmly established and fear and terror of rebellion poisoned British public opinion, to examine how the British interacted with their Indian subjects.94 Although only Major focused specifically on slavery and abolition, Nechtman and Sramek’s works are instrumental to understanding the gendered lens through which the British viewed their empire, and the effect that the shifting political and cultural landscape in Britain between the 1780s and the 1850s had on European attitudes and behaviors in colonial spaces. Nechtman’s Nabobs recounts the story of the first wave of EIC servants who, because they became extremely wealthy and adopted Indian dress, mannerisms, and customs during their sojourn in the subcontinent, became a threat 93

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There is a rapidly expanding body of scholarship on how gender and sexuality were embedded in European imperialism, and especially in the British Empire. See: Ann Laura Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 634–60; Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 97–136; Claire Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Philippa Levine, “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities,” Feminist Review 65 (2000): 5–21; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, esp. 1–34; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. 84–170; Shirley Foster, “Colonialism and Gender in the East: Representations of the Harem in the Writings Of Women Travellers,” Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 6–17; Durba Ghosh, “Gender and Colonialism: Expansionism of Marginalization?” The Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 735–55; Philippa Levine, “What’s British about Gender and Empire? The Problem of Exceptionalism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 273–82. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism, and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).

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to British society.95 The nabobs’ adoption of the extravagant and seemingly less masculine habits of their eastern subjects, perhaps best illustrated by their maintaining large retinues of servants and slaves, became a symbol of company excess and uncontrolled opulence. Nechtman argues that “the wealth was foreign and nabobs seemed to want to naturalize this alien form of wealth in Britain at a time when marking out difference – between Britain and India, between nation and empire, between here and there, and between us and them – was increasingly important to domestic audiences.”96 Like the Dutch in Indonesia, the British sought to tap into indigenous trading networks by adhering to local customs and conventions such as wearing lavish clothing, being attended by large entourages of slaves, and engaging in public displays of wealth that threatened established concepts about British class hierarchies. As early as the 1760s, politicians and the British public viewed the nabobs as symbols of company mismanagement and insisted on a more distinct separation between British colonial officials and their subjects. As Nechtman notes, the British public was not comfortable with the idea of empire and, in an era of increasingly sympathetic to social reform, saw the east as a place characterized by the kind of depravity, despotic rulers, and oppression with which they did not want to be associated.97 Joseph Sramek argued in turn that British conceptions of masculinity were deeply intertwined with notions of independence and morality and provided a foundation for the racism that became an integral part of the Raj.98 He contends that certain officials sought to render various groups of Indian men as less than “manly” as part of their strategy to monopolize political power, and demonstrates that the British were concerned with the maintenance of moral and racial superiority well before the 1857–58 rebellion.99 More specifically, he asserts that the idea of empire in India “derived most of its power from the preservation of prestige” and that its proponents wanted this empire to be a “moral” one untainted by behavior such as the corrupting affluence of the nabobs or the drunken violence of soldiers which could undermine British colonialism’s legitimacy as well as threaten Indian loyalty.100 The Raj accordingly took steps to create both physical and emotional distance between 95 Nechtman, Nabobs, 11. 96 Ibid, 158. 97 Ibid, 9. See also Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 98 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 9. 99 Ibid, 157–63. British constructions of masculinity and martial races are thoroughly discussed in Streets, Martial Races, 156–84. 100 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 3–4, 32–34, 157–63.

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themselves and the indigenous population, which included the large number of slaves they ruled. This moral agenda posed problems when it came to the abolition of slavery. Although some scholars have highlighted the humanitarian efforts and sentiments made by company officials, Andrea Major demonstrates that not everyone in the EIC was eager to abolish slavery in their eastern colonies.101 As soon as Company officials realized that the abolitionist movement was gaining ground in Britain, many set about reconstructing the image of slavery in India and, indeed, elsewhere in Asia, as the antithesis of the Atlantic system, i.e., as purely domestic and consequently a milder form of coerced labor that did not need reform or abolition. Major notes that the British also saw slavery in India as a gendered institution composed predominantly of “females, who, being more employed for domestic purposes than those of the other sex, [were] in greater demand,”102 sentiments that echoed Europeans’ infatuation with the harem as a place of sexual exploitation and moral reprobation that epitomized the repression and immorality they associated with eastern society. My research on the British-controlled Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang, and Singapore) during the early nineteenth century likewise highlights the influence of gendered conceptions of slavery and demonstrates how Europeans regularly conflated women and domestic servitude in ways that made it nearly impossible to distinguish between the wife, the concubine, the domestic servant, and the slave.103 Labeling the slaves they encountered as wives, concubines, or indebted domestic servants, so long as they were nonEuropean women and their masters were non-European men, allowed colonial officials to avoid potentially damaging conflicts with local social and economic elites whose support, or at least acquiescence, was crucial to the maintenance of colonial rule.104 Moreover, colonial officials believed that the importation of 101 Major, Slavery, Abolitionism, 6–7. Paul E. Lovejoy makes a similar argument for Africa and claims that Europeans were only “nominally committed to emancipation and abolition” (Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 245). However, Richard Allen disagrees. Using correspondence and the policies of individual EIC officials, as well as demonstrating their personal connections to abolitionists in Britain, Allen contends that there was an emerging humanitarian and abolitionist sentiment within the company’s elite and that some officials went to extraordinary lengths to eradicate the institution of slavery or reduce slaves’ suffering (European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 [Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014], 182–90). 102 Major, Slavery, Abolitionism, 147. 103 Shawna Herzog, “Domesticating Labor: An Illicit Trade to the British Straits Settlements, 1811–1845,” Journal of World History 28, nos. 3–4 (2017): 341–69. 104 Rebecca Shumway and Martin Klein have illustrated similar challenges for European governments with indigenous leaders in Africa. See: Rebecca Shumway, “Palavers and

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slave women would bring civility, by providing sexual and domestic services, to the transient population of migrant laborers, seamen, merchants, and travelers passing through. Consequently, when abolitionists’ attentions remained focused on the brutal inhumanity of the Atlantic system, most company officials were relatively indifferent to the illegal traffic of slave women and girls, who they generally labeled as debtors, flowing through the Straits of Malacca.105 Such attitudes highlight the strategic pragmatism often deployed in European’s implementation of anti-slavery legislation, and allows us to look more closely at ways western attitudes and perception affected Asian slaves’ lives. Significantly less scholarly attention has been paid to Portuguese, Spanish, and French involvement with slavery in Asia. William Henry Scott and Michael Salman describe the challenges that the Portuguese, Spanish, and American empires encountered in their efforts to regulate and ultimately abolish slavery in the Philippines.106 These studies, like those elsewhere in Asia, recognize gendered divisions of labor but do not interrogate or analyze them. The first full-length project examining the slave traffic between Vietnam and China during the French colonial period uses a feminist lens to illustrate the ways French, Chinese, and Vietnamese patriarchal social and political structures made women and children particularly vulnerable to slavery and indenture during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.107 Unfortunately, this study is seemingly unaware of the existing scholarship on Southeast Asian slave networks,108 a state of affairs which highlights the need for more historically grounded analyses of slavery in France’s colonial possessions in Asia. Research on the French Antilles and Mauritius provides some important guideposts for those writing about slavery in Asia. Bernard Moitt’s Women and Slavery in the French Antilles (2001) fully engages the question of “what it

105 106

107 108

Treaty Making in the British Acquisition of the Gold Coast Colony (West Africa)” in Saliha Belmessous, ed., Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 161–84; Martin A. Klein, “Slavery and Emancipation in French West Coast Africa,” in Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern African and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 171–91. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 268. William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1991), 19–25; Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 44–59, 99–120. Micheline Lessard, Human Trafficking in Colonial Vietnam (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), xv–xvi, 1–40. E.g., Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York: Avon Books, 1979); Lynn D. Long, “Anthropological Perspectives on the Trafficking of Women for Sexual Exploitation,” International Migration 42, no. 1 (2004), 5–31.

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meant to be a female slave”109 in the Antilles and expertly demonstrates how race and gender worked interchangeably and simultaneously to disadvantage women of color. Although set in France’s Atlantic colonies, this book investigates the unique relationships that women formed, their experiences engaging with the French colonial state, and the “ways they functioned as mothers, wives, concubines, and prostitutes.”110 Moitt illustrates the strength and cunning with which slave women navigated sex and intimacy within the confines of a French colonial slave society. By virtue of its geographical location in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius, known as the Ile de France from 1721 to 1810, was a French and, after 1810, British colony where African and Asian slavery intersected. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mauritian society was an amalgam of different cultural norms and ideologies. Megan Vaughan’s exploration of French masculinity on the Ile de France, within the context of same-sex relationships in particular, reveals the significant impact that colonial sexualities had on the construction of slaves’ sexuality.111 More recently, Sue Peabody’s microhistory of slavery, family inheritance, and the French colonial state reveals the boundaries that race and gender imposed on women of color within the French Empire.112 By highlighting the continuities and connections between colonial societies around the world, such imperial perspectives not only provide a more comprehensive and inclusive vantage point from which to analyze slavery in world history, but also offer models upon which future research on women slaves and gender in Asia can be based. 5

Expanding the Scope of Analysis

Efforts to develop a fuller understanding of slave systems in Asia have been stimulated in part by attempts to contextualize slavery in the Americas. In 1993, Martin Klein, a historian of colonial Africa, brought together a group of area specialists to analyze slavery, bondage, and emancipation in both modern Africa and Asia.113 The collection that Klein edited sought to challenge 109 Moitt, Women and Slavery, xiv. 110 Ibid, xvii. 111 Megan Vaughan, Creating The Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteen-Century Mauritius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 152–77. 112 Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84, 97. 113 Martin A. Klein, “Introduction: Modern European Expansion and Traditional Servitude in Africa and Asia,” in Klein, Breaking the Chains, xi.

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western conceptions of slavery and servitude, dismantle existing constructions of what it meant to be a slave, and examine European colonialism’s impact on various indigenous institutions. The studies presented in this volume are representative of the state of slavery studies a quarter of a century ago, studies that included descriptions of the different kinds of work that men, including eunuchs, and women slaves performed but failed to examine the gendered perceptions or institutions that shaped male and female divisions of labor.114 A little more than a decade later, Gwyn Campbell, James Warren, and Janet Hoskins made even greater efforts to differentiate the slave experience in Africa and Asia from that in the Atlantic. In the first of two edited volumes, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa, and Asia (2004), Campbell argued that in Asia girls and young women who were valued especially for their sexual attractiveness and reproductive capacity comprised the majority of slaves in China, Southeast Asia, India, and the Islamic world, and that they performed a wider range of tasks than female slaves in the Americas.115 Warren’s essay, for example, explained that the banyaga, or Sulu version of a slave in the Philippines, were “raiders, concubines, wet nurses, tutors, craft workers peasants, and fishers, and there was a clear division of labor between the work of male and female[s].”116 In addition to rice farming and domestic labor, women banyaga also served as attendants in their female owners’ entourage, while some were the concubines of local elite men.117 The question of whether or not slave women in Asia performed more or less diverse tasks than those in the Americas is a compelling question and exposes yet another opportunity for future analysis. In the second of these volumes, Janet Hoskins examines brides and marriage as a form of resistance in Indonesia and complicates perceptions about the vulnerability and victimhood of women slaves. Her discussion of “people inside the house” not only points to the persistence of slavery in modern Indonesia, but also highlights the expectations for women slaves to have many children who can help the raja’s household in the years to come.118 In addition 114 Ehud R. Toledano, “Ottoman Concepts of Slavery in the Period of Reform,” in Klein, Breaking the Chains, 44–45. 115 Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and other forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, xi. See also Gwyn Campbell and Edward A. Alpers, “Slavery, Forced Labor, and Resistance in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia,” in Alpers, Campbell, and Salman, Slavery and Resistance, 7. 116 James Francis Warren, “The Structure of Slavery in the Sulu Zone in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 115. 117 Ibid. 118 Janet Hoskins, “Slaves, Brides, and Other ‘Gifts’: Resistance, Marriage, and Rank in Eastern Indonesia,” in Alpers, Campbell, and Salman, Slavery and Resistance, 112.

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to interrogating the class and gender structures which have maintained this form of slavery in Indonesia since well before the arrival of Europeans, Hoskins’ examination of reproductive expectations for women slaves highlights the linkages that can exist between slavery and kinship in Asia.119 More particularly, she notes how systems of indebtedness between families, especially surrounding marriage, are based on presumptions about a woman’s reproductive abilities. Other than Chatterjee’s examination of Mughal harems, Hoskins’ work constitutes the most thorough analysis to date of the reproductive expectations for women slaves in Asia. Some scholars have used the world of Islam as a cohesive unit within which to examine slavery in Asia, including attention to women, gender and slavery. Ehud R. Toledano’s Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (1998) began the effort with his exemplary use of a gendered lens to illustrate that slavery was “both an important, albeit involuntary, channel of recruitment and socialization into the elite and a major, though forced means of linking individuals into patronage networks.”120 Here, in addition to a thorough explanation of the status of slaves in the Ottoman Empire, we are introduced to “kul/harem slavery” comprised of male (kul) and female (harem) slaves who Toledano describes as “two complementing elements of the same social institution.”121 This system provided unique opportunities for advancement and, in some cases, slaves wielded significant amounts of power. Toledano also exposes the “other face of harem slavery” and uses the story of Semsigül, a girl enslaved in the Caucasus as a result of poverty, to illustrate what many, if not most, women experienced as slaves: physical and psychological abuse, exploitation, powerlessness, and separation from their children.122 In Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (2006), William Gervase ClarenceSmith looks at Islam as “an empire of faith” that connects parts of Africa with the Indian Ocean world and China in order to highlight the similarities that existed between geographically diverse slave systems.123 His interest in concubines and eunuchs in the Ottoman sultanate is important for historians of gender and slavery because he reveals the realities surrounding the competitive nature of concubinage in Muslim societies, including a discussion about

119 Ibid, 109. 120 Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 4. 121 Ibid, 6, 29–33. 122 Ibid, 60–64. 123 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2.

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“harems of male concubines, and the prostitution of eunuchs.”124 His work, together with Mayna Kravets’ study of eunuchs in the Crimean khanate125 and Indrani Chatterjee’s work on cultural perceptions of eunuchs in India, provides a much-needed challenge to the heteronormative narrative that currently dominates scholarship on slavery in Asia. 6

Gender and Slavery in Asia in Perspective

In light of the scholarship discussed above, what can we say collectively about gender and slavery in Asia? First, it is clear that gender was a primary factor in determining both who became a slave and what kind of work they did. The demand for domestic and sexual slaves meant that women and children were frequently more sought after than men. This does not mean that enslaved women in Asia did not work in mines or on plantations next to male slaves, or that enslaved men were never subjected to sexual violence and exploitation, but that there was a market for a wide range of services that young women and girls provided other than serving only as the domestic and sexual partners of men who could afford them. As in the Americas,126 women’s sexual and reproductive capacities were highly sought after. However, women’s servitude entailed more than just sex, and they were regularly expected to provide productive labor both inside and outside the household. Although scholars have described the intricacies of slave status in Asia and demonstrated the futility of drawing a sharp distinction between “free” and “unfree” labor in Asia, they have yet to come to terms with the lack of “freedom” experienced by non-slave women in patriarchal societies or considered the effects of western conceptions of gender and domesticity on indigenous systems of concubinage and domestic servitude. As Robertson and Robinson argued, the propensity to hide the experience of women and child slaves behind the distinction between “public” and “private” labor established by the abolitionist discourse against plantation slavery in the Americas has also served to omit Asian slave women from historical scrutiny.127 However, Julia Martinez has recently argued that the entire idea of a “female slaving zone” in 124 Ibid, 45–48, 88–89. 125 Mayna Kravets, “Blacks Beyond the Black Sea: Eunuchs in the Crimean Khanate,” in Behnaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009), 21–36. 126 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3. 127 Robertson and Robinson, “Re-modeling Slavery,” 255.

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Asia has been “culturally constructed” and resulted from a western abolitionist campaign to protect enslaved women and children that was simply another European nab for power.128 Were there more women and children in eastern markets, or was it just what western colonizers chose to focus on? Did colonizers and abolitionists use images of helpless Asian women enslaved by despotic and lecherous Asian men as propaganda to garner support for their causes? Considering the powerful essentializing imperial culture discussed in Paxton and Nechtman’s work, Martinez is not out of order accusing colonial governments and western powers of fabricating a myth that Asian slaves were predominantly women and girls as a tool of expansion.129 This is an important point for all scholars of slavery in Asia to consider. Coming to terms with this issue will require scholars to read against “the archival grain” and investigate what is not discussed in the officially constructed record.130 Theoretically there were clear distinctions between wives, concubines, and domestic servants, but the literature on slavery in Asia has only begun to investigate the reality of these distinctions. Many slave women married, yet the experience of motherhood and slave breeding for elite households has been left virtually unexplored. Works like Hilary Beckles’ Natural Rebels focuses on the variability in the experiences of enslaved Caribbean women and offers scholars an important analytical model to address the question of how enslaved Asian women navigated status within their communities. While every Asian society has some form of concubinage, only Hsieh Bao Hua and Eric Jones have sought to highlight the ways that some slaves used their sexuality to acquire greater control over their lives or became wives and concubines in order to improve their social, economic, and even political position and power. That many scholars have acknowledged that this was a desirable path for some female slaves to follow requires us to reevaluate our understanding of the dynamics and meaning of enslavement, including exploring the question of how enslavement affected the masculinity of Asian men. The same can be said about prostitution and sexuality which are among the least studied and analyzed aspects of slave labor in Asia. James Francis Warren’s study of Japanese Kariyuki san and Chinese a ku provides an important vantage point from which to begin to understand what could happen to 128 Julia Martinez, “A Female Slaving Zone? Historical Constructions of the Traffic in Asian Women,” in Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 330. 129 Ibid, 310, 330. 130 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 50.

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those women who did not become part of wealthy households as wives, concubines, or servants but were forced into prostitution and, more often than not, condemned to a life of poverty, disease, and violence.131 Scholarly attention on the traffic of women and girls for the purpose of sex work is virtually nonexistent, and this lack of historical perspective inspired Trude Jacobsen’s recent study of sex trafficking in Southeast Asia within the framework of modern analyses of trafficking and prostitution.132 Sex has always been an obligation for most women slaves regardless of legal or customary measures intended to protect them. Some owners demanded that their domestic servants prostitute themselves or gave their sexual labor to another man as a reward. To date, only Toledano and Clarence-Smith’s study of Islamic harems have directly challenged the trope about the relative ease of slave women’s experiences as concubines or in harems. Current scholarship suggests that historians are beginning to approach gender and slavery in new and exciting ways. The 26 papers published in Sex, Power, and Slavery (2014) are indicative of a concerted effort to reconstruct a larger story about slavery as an institution in world history.133 There is also a greater appreciation that sex and gender are intricately intertwined in slave systems in ways that had important consequences for slaves’ everyday existence. We must remember, however, that a focus on women does not necessarily constitute gender analysis, and future research must incorporate men and constructions of masculinity and femininity in our histories; patriarchies do not regulate only women’s behavior and more research is needed accordingly on the gendered lives of slave men and eunuchs. Other questions that require serious attention include how did conceptions of “martial races” shape the experiences of men slaves in Asia? In what ways do the experiences of eunuchs in China differ from those in Southeast Asia or India? How has the historical demand for women’s bodies in Asian slave systems affected sex, love, marriage, and family in vulnerable populations? How does age affect any or all of these scenarios? That slavery in Asia was an 131 James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). Warren investigates the historical factors contributing to the prominence of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes in Singapore and examines the vulnerabilities, debts, and obligations that literally and figuratively enslaved so many women during that period. 132 Trude Jacobsen, Sex Trafficking in Southeast Asia: A History of Desire, Duty, and Debt (London: Routledge, 2017). 133 Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne, eds., Sex, Power, and Slavery (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).

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inherently gendered institution requires us to strive to place the experiences of Asian slaves much more firmly within the larger discourse about slavery in world history. Since, as Robertson and Robinson remind us, most the world’s slaves were and are women, we cannot limit ourselves to simply identifying their presence, but must seek to incorporate them into our histories precisely because “they mattered.”134 134 Robertson and Robinson, “Re-modeling Slavery,” 253.

Part 2 Slavery, the State, and Society in East Asia

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Chapter 4

Slavery and the Mongol Empire Don J. Wyatt Few, if any, historians of imperial China would dispute that the Mongol conquest was a watershed event in Chinese history. Prior to its occurrence, no threat had posed a greater challenge to the continued sovereignty of China as an empire or to the identity of the Chinese as a people. To be sure, a succession of similarly predatory and ruinous incursions occurring over a century and a half before the Mongol conquest and culminating during the early thirteenth century had anticipated and presumably prepared the Chinese psychologically for this tragic event. However, these earlier marauding tribes – whether the Kitan, the Tangut, or the Jurchen – had confined themselves wholly to the northern portions of the country. The Mongol seizure of the already muchdiminished territory of the Song (960–1127) and Southern Song (1127–1279) dynasties, by comparison, inflicted trauma everywhere, on the grandest of scales, and made the Mongols lords of all China. All of those who managed to survive the Mongols’ genocidal takeover found themselves suddenly reduced, at least potentially, to being their slaves. The Mongol conquest of China is sometimes characterized as a disruptive “interregnum” and even as an “interruption” in the country’s history and, indeed, the change brought about by the imposition of Mongol rule involved much more than a mere difference in leadership. Although the imperial mandate had passed to a people that would at first set out to lead the Chinese state in a totally different manner than it had been governed before, the Mongol regime came around increasingly, if only grudgingly, to administering the country in accordance with numerous preexisting Chinese norms. However, while they practiced and probably were even deeply appreciative of some of the administrative aspects of Chinese civilization, the Mongols, much like their predecessors, especially the Kitan, would, in the long run, resist wholesale sinicization, making them the last of the conquest dynasties in China to do so successfully. Given their staggering numerical disadvantage, the Mongols’ successful conquest and rule of China, even if only for a comparatively brief period of just under a century, is rarely accorded the recognition it deserves. The most generous estimates of the Mongol population throughout their extensive empire

© Don J. Wyatt, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_006

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at the time they took over China under the Yuan dynasty (declared in 1271; in existence, 1279–1368) place it at between one and two million.1 At about the same time, the Chinese population, despite the large number of deaths that occurred during the Yuan conquest and from the plague,2 is reliably thought to have been as much as 100 million.3 Estimates for the early thirteenth century, half a century before the Mongol conquest of China, are more conservative; historian Carter Vaughn Findley offers a figure of merely 700,000.4 Another conservative pre-conquest estimate that accounts for population distribution and which is based on a primary source is proffered by Morris Rossabi, a historian of the Mongols in China, who contends that the Mongols had only “a few hundred thousand people residing in China, whereas the Chinese population of the North amounted to about ten million and the Chinese of the Southern [Song] accounted for another fifty million.”5 These disparities between the miniscule aggregate number of Mongols and the populous throngs that they conquered reveals the motive for their engagement with slavery. Slavery was foremost a tactic in the grand strategy of enhancing their meager resources of human capital. By enslaving those they chose not to kill, the Mongols succeeded in augmenting their own numbers, even if only by proxy. Thus, the animating rationale for the practice of slavery among the Mongols is that it made them appear to be a more numerous people than they actually were. This principle applied both to war and governance. Not unsurprisingly, the Mongols used the battlefield as the initial proving ground for this concept of slavery. 1

Slaves of War

The most universal of calculations about waging war is the tacit understanding that the strength of one’s own forces will be enhanced proportionally by weakening those of the enemy being confronted. Conventionally, doing so is 1 Witold Rodzinski, The Walled Kingdom: A History of China from Antiquity to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 129. 2 Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), 339–40. 3 Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 43. 4 Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 77. 5 Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 71–72. See also his The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 68.

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usually thought best achieved by physically eliminating one’s opponent. A far less obvious or intuitive but craftier and shrewder approach is to realize the advantages that can come from using survivors among the defeated to replenish, reinforce, and even swell one’s own ranks. Since the time that a welter of competing tribes had been melded into a cohesive confederation under the leadership of Chinggis Khan (ca. 1162–1227), the Mongols, as part of their program of waging total war, obliterated every town that they conquered. As a result, they are believed to have been responsible for the deaths of approximately forty million people. The gruesome slaughter for which the Mongols became known is believed to have been a tactic designed to prevent their enemies from seeking revenge. At least during their earliest forays, the Mongols believed that if they did not kill all of the inhabitants of a town, then the same people might pursue them surreptitiously and attempt to kill them while traveling.6 The standard procedure during these conquests was for the Mongols to kill a village or town’s men and children and rape and then kill the women. However, any men who looked fit to fight would be taken prisoner and forced to join the Mongol army. If the grizzly fate suffered by their fellow townsmen and villagers did not sufficiently incentivize these captives or if they proved unable to keep up with the army as it traveled, the Mongols would simply kill them. The same fate befell at least some of their captives when they were so numerous as to impede the army’s progress or when they simply proved no longer to be of any value.7 Thus, as historian Valerie Hansen has observed, “The Mongols recruited new soldiers from among the conquered.”8 In China, at least initially, the Mongols used captives taken in battle to fill the ranks of their infantry. These foot soldiers, placed strategically in the Mongol army’s front ranks, perversely became the leading edge of the force that their countrymen confronted.9 The shock of having to serve as little more than disposable human shields in their Mongol captors’ vanguard was compounded by the extreme cognitive dissonance and discomfort of being forced to engage and kill their former comrades in arms. The Mongols eventually made slaves items of standard military issue. Along with as many as five horses, a weapons wagon, and a small herd of sheep and goats, most individual Mongol mounted soldiers were also equipped with one 6 Leo de Hartog, Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 49. 7 Ibid, 48–49. 8 Hansen, Open Empire, 315. See also Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251–1259 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 9 Particularly in their sieges of the ubiquitous walled cities and towns of China, Mongol captors subjected even their unarmed captives to this tactic. See de Hartog, Genghis Khan, 48.

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or two slaves.10 The actual overall size of Mongol armies has accordingly been a subject of considerable debate. During the early Chinggisid era, the Mongol mounted fighting force was thought to number a mere hundred-plus thousand men.11 However, there are accounts of an army led by Chinggis Khan’s successor, Ögödei Khan (r. 1229–1241), that numbered nearly a million men at the time of his death.12 Such disparities can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that the Mongols were masters of deception and subterfuge such as employing dummy riders on the backs of remounts to make their forces appear, at least from a distance, considerably more numerous than they were.13 That slaves accompanied mounted warriors on campaigns and perhaps even into battle may also help to explain why contemporary accounts described Mongol armies as huge. The technique of deploying vanquished men in battle proved to be an effective military tactic in establishing the Mongol-ruled Chinese dynastic state envisioned by Chinggis, initiated by Ögödei, and completed by Chinggis’ famous grandson Khubilai Khan (1215–1294; r. 1260–1294). This technique, first used by Chinggis, was employed extensively and successfully by his successors. During the campaign to take the Southern Song capital of Lin’an (the future Hangzhou) in 1274, for example, Khubilai supplied Aju, one of his field commanders, with 20,000 Chinese infantrymen.14 There is good reason to believe that the great majority of these infantrymen had been defeated earlier in battle and were not killed following their capture because the Mongols perceived them as being able-bodied and capable of being coerced into fighting against their own countrymen. Regardless of whether the Chinese who fought in Mongol armies were technically “slaves,”15 it is clear that large numbers of defeated but impressed Chinese soldiers played a major but largely unexplored role in the Southern Song state’s demise. Although their day-to-day existence undoubtedly remained frightfully tenuous, these captive Chinese troops assuredly internalized the first hard lesson of any encounter with a mortal adversary: resist and die, or surrender and be spared to live in bondage. 10 11 12 13

George Lane, Daily Life in the Mongol Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 116. Ibid, 115. Ibid, 116. H. Desmond Martin, The Rise of Chingis Khan and His Conquest of North China (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 39–40; de Hartog, Genghis Khan, 48; Hansen, Open Empire, 315. 14 James Waterson, Defending Heaven: China’s Mongol Wars, 1209–1370 (London: Frontline Books, 2013), 107–08. 15 Allsen, Mongol Imperialism, 190–91. Without considering or referring to the Chinese, Allsen contends that the non-Mongols comprising the Mongol infantrymen were hardly ever slaves.

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Slaves of Servitude and Lust

Once ensconced in China, the Mongol elite also retained slaves for more purely domestic purposes. Evidence of this use of bondservants who were not connected directly with the military is perhaps best illustrated by the paradoxical status of women during the Yuan dynasty. Moreover, these were circumstances of bondage to which the Mongols subjected not their own women but those of other peoples that they were to encounter and vanquish. Compared to their Chinese counterparts, Mongol women of Yuan dynastic times generally enjoyed high status, especially within their own culture arena. The relatively elevated status that Mongol men accorded their women was mandated by the realities of nomadic life. More specifically, women derived their high status from the fact that responsibility for tending to the all-important herds fell to them while their men fought.16 This largely functionalist demand that they serve routinely as proxies for their men effectively freed Mongol women from a host of cultural constraints which ensnared so many Chinese women. For Mongol women, as for Mongol men, mobility was among the most prized of life skills, and the expectation that they had to be proficient in riding and driving wagons exempted them from debilitating customs such as the Chinese practice of foot binding.17 Mongol women had also long enjoyed certain legal privileges that their Chinese sisters traditionally did not share, such as the right to own property and divorce their husband.18 A mission of Franciscan friars who journeyed to and sojourned in the Mongol empire between 1245 and 1247 commented on this fact that Mongol women enjoyed a greater degree of equality with men in some areas of life than in other contemporary societies: [The Mongols] have as many wives as they can afford, and generally buy them, so that except for women of noble birth they are mere chattels. They marry anyone they please, except their mother, daughter, and sister from the same mother. When their father dies, they marry their [stepmother], and a younger brother or cousin marries his brother’s widow. The wives do all the work, and make shoes, leather garments, and so on, while the men make nothing but arrows, and practice shooting with bows. They compel even boys three and four years old to the same exercise, and even 16 Rossabi, Mongols, 11. See also Hansen, Open Empire, 311. 17 Lane, Daily Life, 228–29; Hansen, Open Empire, 311. 18 Lane, Daily Life, 227. See also Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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some of the women, especially the maidens, practice archery and ride as a rule like men. If people are taken in adultery and fornication, man and woman alike are slain.19 Since the friars, mindful of their mission to promote the Christian faith, were less inclined to serve as apologists for the Mongols, we can probably accept their assessment at face value. There are, moreover, other corroborating reports from the same general period.20 However, as this account also demonstrates, Mongol women of the Yuan era were oftentimes treated no differently from any other commodity that could be bartered or exchanged. As historian George Lane has remarked, “Men acquired wives as they might horses and cattle, and the richer and more powerful the man the more wives he would have.”21 Moreover, as was usually the case in Chinese society, in Mongol households with multiple wives, the primary wife occupied a hegemonic position with all other wives being subservient to her. Only a principal wife’s sons could continue the family bloodline, while on their husband’s death, only the chief of his wives might be helped in finding a new husband.22 The Jurchen-Mongol authority Herbert Franke argues this “rather ambivalent attitude” toward women in Mongol society existed long before the conquest of China in the thirteenth century.23 What is most important is that if this view of women as commodifiable entities was applied to their own women, we should expect that the Mongols would have few compunctions about commodifying non-Mongol women. In keeping with Chinggis’s dictum that they should go forth and multiply, the Mongols were hardly averse to sex, for procreative purposes or otherwise. From their earliest foreign conquests, Mongol warriors routinely returned with women to serve as concubines and slaves. One such woman, whose story was recorded by William of Rubruck (ca. 1220– ca. 1293), the famous Flemish Franciscan missionary who traveled throughout the Mongol empire from 1253 to 1255, was Pascha or Paquette of Metz. The 19

R.A. Skelton, T.E. Marston, and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 94, para. 49. 20 See Bertold Spuler, History of the Mongols, Based on Eastern and Western Accounts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, tr. Helga and Stuart Drummond (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd., 1972; rpt., New York: Dorset Press, 1988). See also Christopher Dawson, ed., The Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Medieval Academy of America, 1980). 21 Lane, Daily Life, 227. 22 Ibid. 23 Herbert Franke, China under Mongol Rule (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), VI.36.

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Mongols captured Pascha in Hungary, probably during the Battle of Mohi in 1241. After being transported back to the original Mongol capital of Karakorum, Pascha entered the service of a Mongol princess who subsequently permitted her to marry a captive Russian man.24 In their extensive and arduous forays into foreign lands, the Mongols regarded women as rewards for the risks they had undertaken and as part of the spoils to be divided among the victors, with the khan receiving those females thought to be the most beautiful. The situation that confronted the countless women either captured in raids or in battle or acquired through trade by the Mongols seems to have been a good deal more prurient than Pascha of Metz’s story implies. A portion of the Mongol demand for tribute from the Syrian city of Antioch in 1260, for example, reputedly included 3,000 virgins.25 After the Yuan dynasty’s establishment, the protocols governing tribute became more regularized and bureaucratized. These new strictures applied especially to human tribute such as the women that the imperial court acquired periodically from foreign states and people, often by means of threats or extortion. Those women deemed worthy of entering the great khan’s harem because of their beauty were subject to particular scrutiny. Korean women in particular were preferred during the Yuan dynasty’s last decades, so much so that a curious fetishism developed around them.26 Contemporary Chinese informants described the situation as follows: Among prominent officials and influential people in the capital city [Daidu; the future Beijing], acquiring a Koryǒ [Korean] woman has become a “must-have” in order to be regarded as a notable. Koryǒ women are pleasant and receptive; they are accomplished in serving [their lords] to such an extent that they often become favored [by their men above other women]. Since the Zhizheng reign period [1341–1368], most of the palace stewards and attendants in the imperial palace are Koryǒ women.

24

25 26

William of Rubruck, Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Mongke, 1253–1255, tr. Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), 182; William of Rubruck, “The Journey of William of Rubruck,” in Dawson, Mission to Asia, 157; Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, ed. Jean Richard (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1965), 48, 75; Gregory G. Guzman, “European Captives and Craftsmen among the Mongols, 1231–1255,” The Historian 72, no. 1 (2010): 136. Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 221. Ibid, 221. See also David M. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 52.

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For this reason, now everywhere clothes, shoes, hats, and utensils are all based on the Korean style.27 It is clear from this account just how instrumental the predilections of the emperor, his court, and the upper echelons of officialdom were in making Korean women the item of choice. The extent to which Korean women were associated with imperial prestige radiated outward from Daidu even to Jiangnan (“south of the Yangzi”), the most affluent and culturally sophisticated region in China at this time.28 Curiously, much of the allure of the Korean women specifically acquired by the Mongol court may also have stemmed from their statuses prior to acquisition. Korea, despite being already by that time the most rigidly entrenched hereditary slave society in East Asia,29 like many of the states that the Mongol onslaught reduced to vassalage, was too weak to impose tribute on any of its surrounding states in order to transship acquired enslaved individuals of other populations along to the Yuan regime. Consequently, lacking either foreign or native slaves in sufficient numbers to meet the quotas of the frequent – annual, at the very least – that tribute missions demanded, a situation exacerbated by widespread flight of a terrorized citizenry from the cities,30 the Koreans were forced send along their own free countrymen, with them accounting for most of those so dispatched.31 Hence, by the time Korea became fully a client state of the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century, most of the slaves that had already been delivered to China had formerly been free persons.32 From their court, the Mongols had, of course, been and continued to be insistent that those women and girls delivered as tribute, just like the typically male hostages often arriving as parts of any single tribute mission, be persons of certifiable pedigree.33 Yet, we can hardly doubt that another 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

Quan Heng and Ren Chongyue, Gengshen waishi jianzheng (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1991), 96, cited in Shi Weimin, Dushizhong de youmumin (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1996), 106. See the alternative translation in Robinson, Empire’s Twilight, 53. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight, 53. Bok Rae Kim, “Nobi: A Korean System of Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 155–68. See also William E. Henthorn, Korea: The Mongol Invasions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963), 212–13; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 39, 42; Christopher Lovins in this volume. Henthorn, Korea, 75. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 123. Henthorn, Korea, 212–13. See also Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 123. Ibid, 212–13. For more on the Mongol hostage-taking convention, see Hsiao Ch’i-ch’ing, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1978), 34–44. See also Lane, Daily Life, 97–98, 282.

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factor contributing to the feverish appeal of Korean females for the Mongols was simply the abiding assumption that they had never been previously enslaved in their home country. Irrespective of their collective standing as having been free upon entry, once in China, this elevation of Korean women was nonetheless antithetical to the hierarchical four-tiered legal classification of ethnicities that Khubilai himself had established, a classification that consisted, in descending order, of Mongols, Central Asians or semuren (including those of Turkic, Uyghur, and Indian descent), North Chinese, and South Chinese.34 Technically, Koreans, along with other “northern” groups as the Kitan and Jurchen, were to be subsumed with the ignoble northern “Han” as opposed to the much loathed southern “Mânzi” Chinese, under the third of these categories. However, at least for those Korean women introduced into the imperial court, the possibility of marriage into Mongol and semuren elite circles was a critical component of their mystique. There was an obviously lascivious dimension to this Mongol and semuren fascination with Korean women as Chinese observers of the time reported. Hao Jing (1223–1275), an official envoy to foreign lands who lived in Korea at the time the Yuan dynasty came into being, left little to the imagination when he articulated what appears to have been the generally held consensus that Korean women had “Flesh like jade snow emitting clouds and mists.”35 Ye Ziqi (ca. 1327-after 1390), a philosopher who lived during the Yuan dynasty’s waning years, echoed these sentiments when he wrote that “As for the northerners, for maids, they must get Koryǒ women and girls…. If it is otherwise, then they are said not to be deserving of becoming officials.”36 Such statements indicate that Korean women brought to China under the Yuan could have a radically different experience and fate than other non-Mongol women. Although they entered the Yuan court as little more than human tribute, these women could rise to wield considerable power. As empresses and consorts, they could be formidable political forces unto themselves and, in at least a few instances, left a lasting imprint on the course of Eurasian interstate relations. No better example of their ability to do so is the indomitable Empress Gi (also Qi or Ki) (1315–1369/70?), who began her life in China as nothing more than a lowly servant girl responsible for the emperor’s tea.37 We must remember, however, 34 35 36 37

Lane, Daily Life, 219; Rossabi, Mongols, 68; Hansen, Open Empire, 325–26. Hao Jing, Lingchuan ji (Taibei: Commercial Press, 1983), 10.21. Ye Ziqi, Caomuzi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 3B.63. Henthorn, Korea, 215. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight, 11, 118–27, 129, 176, 220–21, 224, 236–37, 245–51.

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that the fate of these women depended ultimately on the temperament and designs of the men who had brought them to China as well as those who were subsequently to control their lives in the Middle Kingdom, lives that could span the spectrum from the sublime to the utterly sordid. Despite its intensity, this obsession with procuring Korean women during the Yuan dynasty was nothing new. There were Chinese precedents for doing so more than a half a millennium earlier, and the frenzy with which Mongols embraced this custom merely replicated these earlier practices. Extant records reveal that, especially during the first half of the Tang dynasty (618–907), female Koreans were trafficked in great numbers into China not only as part of the network that funneled tribute to the imperial court, but also, as a result of piracy, for sale to private individuals.38 As Edward H. Schafer noted in his discussion of the trade in “human souls” that was endemic across the Sinic zone during Tang times, Koreans, and especially girls from the states of Koguryǒ and Silla were in great demand as personal maids, concubines, and entertainers in rich houses.39 Thus, as during the Tang dynasty, Korean women brought to China during the Yuan period came basically as slaves. 3

Enslaving Their Own Kind

Notwithstanding their wanton disregard for the lives, liberty, and dignity of many of those who they enslaved, the Mongols themselves were also the victims of slavery. This enslavement appears to have been largely self-inflicted and may be traced to the Yuan practice of garrisoning soldiers strategically throughout the empire as part of its program to detect and control potential resistance to its rule. These garrisons were especially prevalent in areas with populations that the regime viewed as restive, or potentially so, especially in many of the more rural areas in southern China. The Mongols in these garrisons established families and, in keeping with Mongol adherence to notions of self-sufficiency, were supported by the income they derived from the harvests of their Chinese tenants. However, to maintain their nomadic heritage and ensure order by preventing these garrisons from developing close ties with 38 C. Martin Wilbur, Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty, 206 B.C.–A.D. 25 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1943; rpt., New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 92–93. 39 Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 44.

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the local population, these garrisons were also rotated around the country. The expense that these men incurred equipping themselves and moving on a regular basis soon began to outstrip their income. Debt bondage, as in many other Asian societies,40 had been long practiced by the Mongols. As early as 1290, Mongol soldiers across the empire were selling their children into slavery to compensate for their shrinking incomes. Cognizant of the damaging effects that this practice had not only on preserving the Mongol cultural heritage and his ability to sustain Mongol rule in China, Khubilai Khan took steps to squelch it. In 1291, for instance, he issued an edict forbidding the sale of any Mongols abroad. Despite this and other injunctions, however, the sale of Mongols, and Mongol children in particular, into bondage continued and even escalated over time.41 As historian Elizabeth Endicott notes, “Impoverished Mongolian families in the fourteenth century were repeatedly warned not to sell their sons and daughters into slavery.”42 Endicott cites two excerpts from the Yuanshi (History of the Yuan) to illustrate this point. These excerpts, which date to 1317 and 1321, come from edicts issued in the names of the Mongol emperors Ayurbarwada (r. 1311–1320) and his son Shidebala (r. 1321–1323), respectively. In the first case: [T]he Emperor decreed to the ministers of the [Central] Secretariat (Sheng for Zhongshu sheng): “We have recently heard that various Mongolian tribes are extremely destitute, and that they frequently sell their sons and daughters to [other] people’s households (minjia) as slaves (bipu). We order the officials to redeem them and return them each to their [respective] tribes.”43 In the second case, “It was decreed that the [relevant] officials should gather and care for Mongolian boys and girls who had been sold as slaves to [Uyghurs] (Huihui) and Chinese (Hanren, i.e., Northerners).44 40 41 42

43 44

See, for example, Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Morris Rossabi, “The Reign of Khubilai Khan,” in Herbert Franke and Denis C. Twitchett, eds. The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 488–89. Elizabeth Endicott, “The Mongols and China: Cultural Contacts and the Changing Nature of Pastoral Nomadism (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries),” in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 469. Ibid, 469–70. Ibid, 470.

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Shidebala’s succession to his father’s throne is the only example of a peaceful succession on the basis of primogeniture in the history of the Yuan dynasty. Apart from this distinction, these two monarchs are remembered mainly, and disapprovingly so while they were alive, for the extent to which they became sinicized. Ayurbarwada, the first Yuan emperor to receive a fully Chinese education, was a lover and collector of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Shidebala inherited his father’s pro-Chinese and pro-Confucian sympathies.45 These sympathies notwithstanding, their edicts attest to the fear among Yuan authorities that the sale of Mongol children threatened not only Mongol dominion over China, but also Mongol identity. What is perhaps most interesting about this debt bondage crisis is that it illustrates the continuity of slaving practices in China before and after the Mongol takeover. Reports by Westerners who visited China at this time reveal that the enslavement of children was particularly prevalent in China. The Travels or Description of the World (Divisament dou Monde) by Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324) is among the most descriptive of these accounts of child enslavement. His description of what happened to children from impoverished families in South China is not unlike the fate suffered by Mongol children that the Yuanshi rescripts sought to redress: “Again, in the province of Manzi almost all of the poor and needy sell some of their sons and daughters to the rich and noble, so that they may support themselves on the price paid for them and the children may be better fed in their new homes.”46 In sum, poverty was a major impetus among both the Mongols and the southern Chinese to sell their offspring to others. Polo’s account also underscores the similarity between the Chinese and Mongols in terms of the symbolic importance attached to slavery during death rituals. Speaking about the South Chinese, Polo observed: Let me tell you next that when some rich man dies and his body is being carried to the pyre, all the relatives, male and female, don a mourning garb of sack-cloth and escort the body on its way, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, chanting prayers to their idols. When they have reached the spot where the body is to be burnt, they halt. They are provided with horses and slaves, male and female, and camels and cloth of 45

Ann Paludan, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial China (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 156. 46 Marco Polo, The Travels, tr. Ronald E. Latham (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1958), 227.

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gold in great abundance – all made of paper! When all these have been got ready, they make a big fire and burn the body with the effigies. And they say that the dead will have all these things in the next world, alive in flesh and bone, and the money in gold, and that all the [honor] they can do him while he is burning will be done to him correspondingly in the next world by their gods and their idols.47 His account of death rituals among the Mongols, who he consistently called Tartars,48 illustrates the similarities between these two people’s cultural practices: Here is another strange custom which I had forgotten to describe. You may take it for a fact that, when there are two men of whom one has had a male child who has died at the age of four, or what you will, and the other has had a female child who has also died, they arrange a marriage between them. They give the dead girl to the dead boy as a wife and draw up a deed of matrimony. Then they burn this deed, and declare that the smoke that rises into the air goes to their children in the other world and that they get wind of it and regard themselves as husband and wife … And here is something else that they do. They draw pictures on paper of men in the guise of slaves, and of horses, clothes, coins, and furniture and then burn them; and they declare that all these become possessions of their children in the next world. When they have done this, they consider themselves to be kinsfolk and uphold their kinship just as firmly as if the children were alive.49 Polo’s well-known propensity to exaggerate necessarily raises questions about his credibility and reliability as an eyewitness. However, if we accept that these two accounts are relatively true and accurate, it is clear that both the Chinese and the Mongols ascribed significant symbolic meaning to slave ownership whether or not an individual actually owned slaves in life. More specifically, these accounts suggest that slave ownership was a normative aspirational goal held by the Chinese and Mongols alike.

47 Ibid, 224. See also Hansen, Open Empire, 321. 48 For a fascinating discussion of the etymology, use, and abuse of the term Tartar, see Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 1–4. 49 Polo, Travels, 102.

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Enslaving Kindred Peoples

For many modern historians, slavery must, by definition, include the critical element of salability. Indeed, the ability of one person to sell another is often seen as the cynosure of the relationship between the slave owner and the slave, and thus no operative definition of slave status is viable without this capacity. Aside from a master killing his or her slave, the sale of one human being by another is, in many ways, the ultimate act of depersonalization or commodification of what would otherwise be an abidingly personal relationship. As we have seen, salability was a crucial component in the many transactions whereby Mongols acquired Korean women as brides, concubines, or servants, and when they consigned their own children to slave status. Conversely, salability did not figure in those cases where captured Chinese soldiers were compelled to join the Mongol army and fight against their own countrymen; indeed, there is reason to believe that the Mongols viewed such captives as unfortunates who possessed little, if any, value beyond the next battle. However, given the premium they placed on martial prowess both before and during the Yuan dynasty’s existence, we should not assume that the Mongols regarded all of those they captured during war as having no pecuniary value. Indeed, there is evidence that trafficking in enslaved fighting men was among the more lucrative enterprises in which the Mongol state engaged and that the Mongols were very selective about the warriors taken from among the peoples they had defeated who were sold.50 Ironically, the Mongols engaged in trading fighting men from populations similar to themselves linguistically and culturally. Among the groups whose warriors were routinely enslaved and sold by the Mongols were the Kipchak (also Kibca’ut or Qipchaq) Turks, who are remembered collectively in history as the Golden Horde of the Kipchak Khanate or the Ulus of Jochi (1240s–1502).51 The Kipchaks originally inhabited the lands north of the Aral Sea in what is now modern Kazakhstan.52 Beginning in the tenth century, the Kipchaks began to ally themselves with peoples in the Caucasus, most notably the Cumans (Kumans, Qumans, Polovtsi [Polovtsy]) but also with the Alans, Circassians, and others and, by the early twelfth century a Cuman-Kipchak confederation 50 May, Mongol Conquests, 138. 51 Ibid, 59, 67, 68–69. In Mongol usage, the term Kibca’ut denoted the Turkic peoples of the western Russian steppe, the Polovtsi and the Quman inhabitants of Russia and Hungary, respectively. See Paul D. Buell, Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2003), 180. 52 Ibid, 43.

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had come into existence, which – as the then dominant hegemony – preyed brutally upon the populations of the Kievan Rus’ for slaves in its own right.53 However, over the course of the first three decades of the thirteenth century, the Mongols undermined this Cuman-Kipchak alliance, weakening it through a series of battles and ultimately defeating it, forcing its dissolution in 1241, together with all other alliances that the Kipchaks had formed.54 Although the Kipchaks fleetingly allied themselves with the Mongols during the summer of 1241 to annihilate Christian resistance in the high valleys of Hungary,55 the dominant pattern in Mongol dealings with their Kipchak cousins thereafter was to subject them to an unrelenting campaign of isolation that facilitated their mass enslavement. Following the occupation of their home territories and the establishment of the Jochid Khanate by Jochi (ca. 1181–1226), Chinggis Khan’s eldest son, who had succeeded in making himself the first Mongol suzerain over their region,56 Kipchak fighting men appear to have become especially favored targets for enslavement.57 Indeed, historian Timothy May observes that the decisive Mongol conquest of the Kipchak steppe flooded the slave markets of the Middle East which became “glutted with Kipchaks.”58 Mongols were not the only ones to trade in Kipchak and other Turkic slaves. Italian merchants, especially from Genoa, also competed to acquire such slaves who they subsequently sold in Mamluk Egypt59 as well as in places like Syria, which at that time (1250–1517) was under Egyptian control.60 Mamluk amirs sought slaves who could be employed as soldiers after having been trained to fight and, if necessary, converted to Islam.61 These mamlūk or slave warriors were, quite literally, the “property” of their new masters and were regarded as superior to ordinary slaves only by virtue of their bearing arms.62 The use

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Lawrence N. Langer, “Slavery in the Appanage Era: Rus’ and the Mongols,” in Christoph Witzenrath, ed., Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200–1860 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2015), 146–50. Peter Brent, Genghis Khan: The Rise, Authority and Decline of Mongol Power (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976), 111–13, 118–21. Harold Lamb, The March of the Barbarians (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1941), 158. May, Mongol Conquests, 59, 67, 68–69. Ibid, 77, 138, 227–29. Ibid, 138, 228. Ibid, 77, 228–29. Findley, Turks in World History, 108, 114. Ibid, 65–68, 70, 71, 76, 99, 101, 108, 127. May, Mongol Conquests, 77, 138, 228.

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of slave soldiers was common in the Islamic Middle East,63 but what distinguished the Mongol trade in Kipchaks and other Turks under the Jochid Khanate was its expansiveness which reached well beyond Egypt to such farflung locales as Tuscany.64 Once transported to and transplanted in such a distant and truly antithetical environment as fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Tuscany, these Mongolsubjugated Turks – again, as in Polo’s time, referred to as Tartars by their new European masters – found that their martial skills were neither needed nor regarded as being of any consequential value.65 Instead, with a premium placed on their youthfulness,66 they were typically employed domestically as groomsmen and serving-maids67 and, because they were the “the product of a hostile, alien culture,”68 were regarded as a kind of “permanent enemy on the inside.”69 Viewed as the “domestic enemy,” these imported slaves in Tuscany were predominantly Turks but also included Russians, Circassians, Greeks, Moors, and Ethiopians.70 As the biographer and writer Iris Origo noted, because these slaves were “Mostly small and squat, with yellow skins, black hair, high cheekbones and dark slanting eyes, many of them deeply marked by smallpox and by scars or tattooed patterns on their faces, they certainly seemed to belong to a different race from the Florentine.”71 She continued on the basis of a preponderance of evidence extracted from the relevant European-language primary literary as well as visual sources, that “Every prosperous noble or merchant had at least two or three of them; many had more. Even a notary’s wife, or a small shopkeeper’s, would have at least one, and it was far from uncommon to find one among the possessions of a priest or nun.”72

63

See Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). See also Reuven Amitai, “The Mamlūk Institution, or One Thousand Years of Military Slavery in the Islamic World,” in Christopher Lee Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 40–78. 64 May, Mongol Conquests, 228–29. 65 Iris Origo, “‘The Domestic Enemy’: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum 30, no. 3 (July 1955): 321–66. 66 Ibid, 327. 67 Ibid, 321. 68 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 39. 69 Ibid, 39. 70 Origo, “‘Domestic Enemy’,” 321. 71 Ibid, 321. 72 Ibid, 321.

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Mongol Slavery in Perspective

It is clear that the Mongol Yuan dynasty of China oversaw a great expansion of slavery. In this respect, Mongol rule conformed to the general pattern that characterized periods of nomad domination. As studies such as that by Wang Yi-t’ung have shown, in practically every period in Chinese history the suzerainty of nomadic outsiders over the native sedentary populations appears to have contributed substantively to the expansion of slavery.73 Such was also the case with the Mongols, at least in the more populous areas of the extensive empire that they established. Korea at the time that the country was subject to Mongol incursions is an illustrative case in point. We know that, especially during the years of intensive resistance to these incursions (1231–58), Korean authorities engaged in the widespread destruction of slave registers, which served as official proof of slave status, as a way to encourage slaves to enlist in the country’s defense. Desperation even drove authorities to promise official rank to all those who expended maximal effort in trying to repel the predatory Mongol forces.74 However, for many if not most of these suddenly liberated slaves, this “emancipation” was neither permanent nor inheritable by their children. Records reveal that despite such measures, the period of Mongol hegemony (1230s–1350s) actually witnessed an appreciable increase in the number of slaves in Korea;75 some scholars suggest that the number of enslaved swelled to as much as one-third of the total Korean population.76 Despite their problematic nature, such data indicate that, as was noted earlier, victory or defeat in battle was the crucial determinant in Mongol ideas about who deserved enslavement. In short, as William E. Henthorn stated, “When the Mongols captured a city they regarded everything and everyone in it as their absolute chattels, an idea which appears to be closer associated with the Muslim East than with China. When they conquered a nation, the same principle applied.”77

73 Wang Yi-t’ung, “Slaves and Other Comparable Social Groups during the Northern Dynasties (386–618),” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 16, nos. 3/4 (1953): 293–364. 74 Henthorn, Korea, 113. See also Keith Pratt, Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006), 103. 75 Ibid, 175, 213–14; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 288. 76 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 468, n. 69. 77 Henthorn, Korea, 212.

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Beyond underscoring Mongol ruthlessness, Henthorn highlights that Mongol notions of slavery during the Yuan dynasty were linked most closely to the nomadic traditions of their homeland and not to Chinese conventions. He adds further that while Koreans were familiar with the age-old system of tribute and hostages, the Mongol interpretation of that system was new and shocking. The premise that all people residing in a defeated state constituted chattel diverged greatly from the assumptions underlying what Henthorn called “the Chinese-oriented system.”78 As a result, “[t]he demands seemed endless: goods, hostages, ‘transplanting’ of farming families, armies of men, ships, etc.”79 This premise of universalistic subjugation, which extended to everything within a vanquished territory, including its human occupants, is also stressed by Christoph Witzenrath who notes that wherever they prevailed militarily, “The taking of captives as slaves was standard Mongol operating practice.”80 As Edwin G. Pulleyblank has observed, our knowledge of nomad conceptions of slavery and those notions’ influence on the expansion of slavery as an institution remains extremely shallow, a state of affairs which may be attributed to the scarcity of primary sources that contain information about nomad social institutions and practices in their natural steppe settings, i.e., outside China. This problem is compounded by the fact that, time and again, the unremitting pressures of sinicization meant that the once distinct nomadic practices succumbed to being framed largely in Chinese terms and, to one extent or another, modified by or assimilated into Chinese practice.81 Despite such problems, Pulleyblank underscored an important point: that regardless of whatever situation prevailed during the pre-imperial age of internecine war, it is evident that from the time of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) onward, China’s nomadic enemies surpassed the Chinese when it came to “the widespread enslavement of prisoners of war and civilians captured in war.”82 As we have seen, no factor was more prominent or consistent in the dramatic upsurge in the numbers of people held in bondage against their will under Mongol dominion than war. Indeed, war itself seems to have been very much at the core of the Mongol conception of slavery. Given the manpower shortages that the Mongols faced as they sought to establish and then maintain an empire, that those fortunate enough to survive with their lives amidst 78 79 80 81

Ibid, 70. Ibid, 70, 201–06. Christoph Witzenrath, “Introduction,” in Witzenrath, Eurasian Slavery, 12. E.G. Pulleyblank, “The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, no. 2 (1958): 21, n. 1. 82 Ibid.

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war against the Mongols were potentially subject to enslavement comes as no surprise. Perhaps Chinggis Khan’s keenest insight was to realize that if those peoples who opposed him could be so terrorized that they regarded simply being left alive as a blessing, then they could also be pressed into the service of their mortal enemies. This insight is arguably the greatest tactical gift that he bequeathed to his successors. Thus, we may elect to see the Mongol involvement with slavery as clearly predicated on its intimate association with the demands of warfare in the interest of governance. However, hardly less important for us to appreciate is a subtler but no less compelling connection between the expansion of slavery under the Mongols and the vital need as they themselves perceived it for engagement in trade. Indeed, apart from the aggressive drive for making war, the obsessive compulsion on the part of their leaders for trade may well have served as the companion impetus behind the impulse of the Mongols for enslaving others. The thirst for trade certainly made them more favorably disposed toward merchants and their activity than their Chinese contemporaries ever were.83 Moreover, as Carter Vaughn Findley speculatively states, “Aside from enabling the Mongol elite to enjoy the luxuries of the sedentary world while still living on the steppe, trade interests may have stimulated Mongol ideas of world domination, long-standing motifs in steppe culture that suddenly became tangible reality with the lightning conquests to the west.”84 In the end, we are probably not amiss in regarding this inclination on the part of the Mongols to make every effort at conducting trade as arising directly from their experiences with the economic vagaries that were an inherent part of nomadic life on the Eurasian steppes. In accounting for it in this way, we can rationally understand, if not justify, how this impulse disposed them even to the supplying of others with human chattel via long-distance commercial networks. Severe droughts, harsh winters, and the constant stresses of inhabiting an ever-challenging environs wherein their herds – being the only reliable source of wealth – could be decimated by disease compelled the Mongols not only to live modestly, but also to trade with their Central Asian and Chinese neighbors in order to stay alive.85 After all, it was the threat of not being able to pursue trade, a threat that was, in Mongol eyes, all too commonplace as a tactic intended to thwart their progress as a people, that had compelled them to form their armies and mobilize them in raiding and plundering for what they needed. We therefore should not be surprised that, over the course of time 83 Findley, Turks in World History, 84. 84 Ibid, 85. 85 May, Mongol Conquests, 9, 13, 21.

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and especially with the advantage of their acquisition of empire, the Mongols were also enticed into valuing, as the Chinese already had for centuries, and seeking to establish an enterprising niche for themselves in the procurement of a great multitude of less customary goods. Certainly to be included among these new objects of wealth in which they became among the most proficient acquirers, marketers and dealers of their time was that most human of commodities, slaves.

Chapter 5

Economic, Social, and Legal Aspects of Slavery and Indentured Labor in Late Ming China (1550–1645): What the Huizhou Documents Tell Us Harriet T. Zurndorfer 1 Introduction Slavery has existed throughout Chinese history and, according to investigative journalists, persists even today in some areas of the country.1 As in other regions of Asia, slavery in China took many forms from unfree agricultural labor to household bondservants, chattel sold at markets to military captives, and voluntary to involuntary servitude. Over the millennia, successive Chinese governments compelled large numbers of persons to build and maintain largescale public works, including irrigation systems and fortifications, or clear land for agricultural purposes. Such government-sponsored “forced labor” may be distinguished from private persons extracting labor from others for their own profit. In other words, since earliest times China has had both government and private slavery. Compared to other topics such as gender, demography, and cultural history, scholarly interest in slavery in China has been minimal despite the existence of extensive archival materials. An interest in the past and the results of archaeological research has prompted scholars to pay some attention to slavery in the earliest periods of Chinese history,2 while the ground-breaking work of James Watson, who compared Asian and African systems of slavery, has inspired interest in slavery in the more recent Chinese past.3 Even though slavery or forms of indentured labor increasingly shaped the lives of millions of people during the Ming period (1368–1644), it is ironic that this subject has continued to generate little interest. Pamela Crossley argues that this continuing lack of interest may be traced, firstly, to the influence of a “conceptual idiom” based on the Marxist paradigm that only ancient Chinese society had slaves which 1 See The Global Slavery Index (http://www.globalslaveryindex.org), accessed 13 April 2017. 2 Robin Yates, “Slavery in Early China: A Socio-Cultural Approach,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3, nos. 1–2 (2002): 283–331. 3 James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979).

© Harriet T. Zurndorfer, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_007

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meant that historians in China did not regard slavery as an important socioeconomic phenomenon in subsequent eras.4 Secondly, Crossley notes that the early twentieth-century Chinese nationalist preoccupation with the intrusive nature and exploitative behavior of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) overshadowed enslavement and coerced labor regimes during the Ming or earlier dynasties. A third explanation for this lack of continuing lack of interest in slavery in China is tied to China’s recent economic success. As China has become an increasingly important global power over the last two decades, Chinese historians have gravitated toward writing about the country’s earlier commercial history and the achievements of its merchants rather than the rural social inequalities that helped generate slavery. This historiographical shift is also marked by a greater interest in the role that imperial era legal institutions and practices played in quotidian life with a view to developing a greater understanding of the interaction between imperial ideology and the local particularities of a vast empire.5 This chapter seeks to demonstrate how this interest in Chinese legal history can reshape our understanding of slavery and social relations in imperial China by using archival sources to more closely analyze state-society relations during the late Ming period (1550–1644). 2

Defining Slave Status in China

While the terminology applied to persons deemed to be “slaves” was extensive, legally complex, and changed over the centuries, there were two continuities in social attitudes and legal conventions about slavery in China. First, from the pre-imperial through the imperial eras, there was a basic social differentiation between liang 良 (“good”) and jian 賤 (“base” or “mean”) people. The majority of the population belonged to the first category, while the second included government and private slaves, as well as persons such as actors, prostitutes, government runners, night-soil carriers, grave diggers, and others employed in tasks deemed to be “filthy” or disreputable.6 Not all persons classified as “base,” however, were held in some form of slavery. As Chinese society and economy became more complex as a result of increasing commercialization 4 Pamela Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3: The Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–214. 5 William Alford and Eric Schluessel, “Legal History,” in Michael Szonyi, ed., A Companion to Chinese History (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 277–89. 6 Anders Hansson, Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).

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and occupational specialization, social prejudice against occupations determined to be defiling also intensified. By the late imperial era (1550–1911), persons in a dependent or servile position in society suffered legal discrimination even though they might officially hold liang classification. The widespread use of contracts also characterized slavery in China through time. Beginning no later than the Western Zhou dynasty (1045–771 BCE), written contracts played an important role in the exchange of property and persons.7 Written contracts (hewen 和文) were a common feature of daily life in China by the period that encompassed the Tang (618–907) to the Song (960–1279) dynasties, and were used to formalize the purchase, sale, or rental of a house, a plot of land, and draft animals as well as slaves, concubines, and even children.8 Contracts generally included the following information: the date of the transaction, the names of those entering into the contract, a description of the property being bought or sold, its price, terms of the sale, including penalties for reneging on the contract, and the signatures or marks of the participants, including witnesses.9 Beginning in the eleventh century, contracts became even more important as Chinese society became more pluralistic and China’s economy more marketdriven and diversified.10 It was also about this time that printed handbooks containing sample contracts became available, and by 1261, the first legal casebook, the Minggong shupan qingming ji 名公書判清明集 (Luminous Collection of Judgments by Illustrious Figures), was compiled and printed.11 The decisions reported in this collection, usually written in the first person by a district 7

Zhang Chuanxi 张传玺, ed., Zhongguo lidai qiyue huibian 中国历代契约会编 [Collec­ tions of deeds in Chinese history], 3 vols. (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2014); Hugh Scogin, “Between Heaven and Man: Contract and the State in Han Dynasty China,” Southern California Law Review 63, no. 5 (1990): 1325–1404. 8 Valerie Hansen, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600–1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 9 These agreements were drawn up and sometimes ratified with the coveted government red stamp which legitimized the agreed-upon terms and entitled the participant(s) to challenge the other party should they renege on those terms. Contracts registered with the government received a red stamp upon payment of a fee for this service. Unstamped (also known as white) contracts also existed which some authorities would admit as evidence in litigation. Social historians consider the red stamp on contracts as a means for the government to generate revenue. 10 Robert Hymes, “Sung Society and Social Change,” in John Chaffee and Denis Twitchett, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 5, part 2, Sung China, 960–1279 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 526–664. 11 Brian E. McKnight and James T.C. Liu, The Enlightened Judgements ‘Chíng-ming chi’: The Sung Dynasty Collection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Their translation includes about 40 per cent of the collection’s cases.

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magistrate (the lowest rank of imperial administrator at a local level), demonstrated the official’s knowledge of the legal code and administrative processes.12 This collection recorded thousands of instances in which people from all social classes all over southern China (Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang provinces) engaged in contractual disputes about not only land and goods, but also household affairs, educational matters, and social relationships such as betrothal, marriage, and divorce, and the legality of their social status. Such conflicts, which would be characterized as “civil” matters in Europe, were designated as “minor matters” (xishi 細事) in imperial China. Despite their status as “minor matters,” litigants and judges approached these cases with a certain resoluteness since the fierce competition for resources, especially agricultural land, in a commercialized economy engendered the kind of insecurity that made contracts all that much more important and lawsuits over them ever more rife. Resolving these disputes involved negotiation between litigants and the local government, negotiation mediated through various individuals and groups, including the district magistrate, his assistants, village officers, and the local gentry who occupied a position of power and prestige within the community. The use of contracts to settle disputes, including those between “base” people and their social superiors, became all the more important during the second half of the Ming dynasty when rapid economic development fueled by ever-increasing agricultural specialization, illegal overseas trade, and demographic expansion caused an increase in land prices and a decrease in wages.13 As the disparities between rich and poor increased, more and more common people found themselves in dire economic straits and entered forms of servitude in order to survive. It is well-known, for example, that there was an upsurge in sexual servitude during this era; diaries, travel logs, and stories written by contemporary literati recount the living and working conditions of “singing girls” as well as male and female prostitutes.14 Families experiencing 12

13 14

Charlotte Furth, “Introduction: Thinking with Cases,” in Charlotte Furth, Judith Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung, eds., Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 9–10. The magistrate was responsible for the fiscal, police, and judicial components of local government. See John Watt, The District Magistrate in Late Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). Harriet Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity in Chinese History: The Development of Huichou Prefecture, 800 to 1800 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), chap. 3. Harriet Zurndorfer, “Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian Moral Universe of Late Ming China (1550–1644),” International Review of History 56 (2011): 197–216. Xie Zhaozhe 謝肇淛 (1567–1624), a well-known observer of Ming life, wrote about the ubiquity of prostitutes: “In the big cities they run to the tens of thousands, but they can be found in every poor district and remote place as well, leaning by doorways all day long, bestowing

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Huizhou and Chinese Provinces

economic distress were known to sell their daughters into slavery. Such transactions were formalized by a contract which usually carried the clause, “In case she runs away, I will chase her and return her to you.” The widespread use of contracts to sell persons is confirmed by the large number of such documents preserved and cited in household encyclopedias such as the Wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (Encyclopedia of Myriad Treasures) dating from 1596.15 It was also not uncommon for husbands to sell their wives for “misbehavior.”16 However,

15

16

their smiles, selling sex for a living.” See his Wu za zu 五雑組 [Five Assorted Offerings] (Beijing: Zhonghua chubanshe, 1959), 196. See Document 1 for a translation of this kind of contract. A vibrant publishing industry in the late Ming created a huge market for materials focused on “daily life.” Popular, general knowledge of the law and its role in society was also transmitted through oral and performance traditions: the gong’an 公案 (court case) genre in short stories and drama conveyed the ambiance of courtroom proceedings and the triumph of legal justice. See James St. André, “Reading Court Cases from the Song and the Ming: Fact and Fiction, Law and Literature,” in Robert Hegel and Katherine Carlitz, eds., Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 189–214. Mio Kishimoto 岸本美绪, “Qi ke mai fou? Ming Qing shidai de maiqi dianqi xisu 妻可卖否? – 明清时代的卖妻、典妻习俗 [Wives for sale? On the customs of wifeselling and wife pawning during the Ming Qing era], in Chen Qiukun 陳秋坤 and Hong

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not all contracts stipulated that the servitude into which people were sold was permanent; there is considerable evidence of the limited or flexible nature of this servitude. In the late Ming period, for example, it was not unusual for common people facing starvation or extreme physical insecurity to sell themselves voluntarily into slavery via a contract which also stipulated the conditions of their redemption, usually after a period of 10 to 15 years. The conditions of slavery/bondage varied by location in Ming China. South China boat people known as the Dan 蛋, musicians in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, and beggars in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces all suffered legal discrimination as “base” people.17 The largest body of documentation about the circumstances under which indentured or servile persons lived and worked comes from Huizhou 徽州 prefecture in southern Anhui province.18 These documents afford an opportunity to examine the social, economic, and legal factors that influenced how servitude in Huizhou evolved and functioned at a time of population growth, accelerating commercial expansion, and devolution of central government influence. In so doing, they reveal the complexity of servitude at a time of increasing economic instability and change in late Ming China.

Liwan 洪麗完, eds., Qiyue wenshu yu shehui shenghuo 契约文書與社會生活, 1600– 1900 [Contractual Behavior and Social Life, 1600–1900] (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Taiwan shi yanjiu suochou beichu, 2001), 225–64. Ming-era legal compendia contained regulations about the buying and selling of persons, e.g. The Great Ming Code Art. 298 “Kidnapping Persons or Kidnapping and Selling People”; Art.399 “Purchasing Honorable Persons to Entertain.” For further information, see Jiang Yonglin, trans., The Great Ming Code: Da Ming lü (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). 17 Hansson, Chinese Outcasts. 18 There are an estimated 500,000 documents now in the possession of research institutes, universities, libraries, and museums in Beijing, Nanjing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Huizhou. These documents consist not only of land and labor contracts, but also rent books, official tax registers, account books, and judicial administrative papers that date from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. For an overview, see Li Bian, “One Thousand Years of Historical Relics: The Huizhou Documents,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 10, no. 2 (2016): 248–68. Huizhou also has a wide range of extant Ming-Qing era local gazetteers and family genealogies discovered during the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s/90s. See Joseph McDermott, The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: I. Village, Land, and Lineage in Huizhou, 900–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). To date only a few scholars have worked with these documents. See Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity, for the first major study in English to utilize a portion of these records. For an analysis of published scholarship on Huizhou by Chinese scholars, see Guo Qitao, “Huizhou Studies in China: Scholarship and Sources,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 17, no.1 (2015): 165–80.

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Huizhou Prefecture in the Ming Dynasty and Its Labour Regimes

Huizhou prefecture, located in the southeast corner of Anhui province, is approximately 360 km southwest of present-day Shanghai and covers an area of 13,870 square kilometers. First populated around the fourth century CE, this mountainous region attracted settlers fleeing warfare and conflict elsewhere in China. Although land for growing grain or other foodstuffs was limited to narrow valley plains and upland basins, the topography and soil conditions were ideal for tea production and forestry. The local economy thrived on the sale of tea, timber, and timber products (tung oil, ink, lacquer, paper), and by the Song dynasty, Huizhou achieved a reputation as a center of commercial agriculture. Local merchants and traders exported these products using the rivers that linked the prefecture to Hangzhou on the coast and inland commercial centers such as the well-known porcelain-making center of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. These merchants operated within extended family or lineage networks, with bases in their home towns or villages, and in the guildhalls of the towns in which they traded. The lineage organization, a collectivity of families (with the same surname) acknowledging group cohesion through their male members, became the dominant social unit of Huizhou, and the central reference point of identity in this community. Many Huizhou lineages claimed long pedigrees, tracing their ancestry from the time of their southward migration centuries earlier. Their wealth rested on landed property which they accumulated over time. To avoid the officially-sanctioned system of partible inheritance ( fenjia 分家), in which each son received an equal share of his father’s estate, thereby fragmenting a family’s landed property, powerful and wealthy lineages in Huizhou sought to keep their land and other assets intact and undivided. By the time of the Ming dynasty, the richest lineages secured their property through a system of inalienable land-trusts. Lineage leaders, many of whom were closely connected with the central government, rented out land, the profits of which were returned to the trust. These trusts were known to raise the rents that they charged their tenant farmers and increase their income by lending money and grain at high rates of interest of around 10 to 20 percent, practices which helped to exacerbate social inequality in Huizhou. The custom of lineages selling land only to their own members, which limited the opportunity for others to acquire land, also intensified this social inequality. The peace and prosperity of the first half of the Ming era led to a significant increase in Huizhou’s population which approximately doubled by the midMing period, and an attendant increased demand for arable paddy land. By the late Ming period lineage trusts were expanding their financial interests into

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mountainous land where the profits from the sale of timber became an alternative source of income to raising tenant farmer’s rents. Forested mountain land also escaped taxation,19 and the various types of trees found in these forests supplied fuel and materials used to manufacture products such as furniture and printing blocks demanded by the urban commercial economy. As the risks of renting paddy land intensified, with some recalcitrant tenants absconding from their obligations, lineage trusts invested increasingly in forested mountain land. Unlike rice-paddy land (tian 田) which could produce two or three crops a year, the development of a timber crop took much longer (sometimes as much as 20 years), and thus required different managerial arrangements between the land’s owner and the peasants who labored in these mountainous areas. These arrangements inhibited the ability of peasant families to accumulate land and compelled them to diversify their economic activities, which ranged from maintaining paddy land to collecting forest products and picking tea, depending on the time of the year.20 The laborers who worked Huizhou’s fields and mountainsides varied in status and their obligations to land owners. At the lowest stratum of society were nupu 奴仆 or bandang 伴儅 (slaves or bondservants) who were classified as “base.” Above them was an intermediate class of “good” tenant farmers and hired laborers.21 According to local gazetteer records, some nupu or bandang families had been designated as such for many generations, in some cases since the eighth century. Not as tightly bound to their masters as the bandang, but still subservient to their landlords, were the dianpu 佃僕 (agricultural workers) who lived close to their masters’ homes and were bound to the land they cultivated. Dianpu worked for the landlord for a share, usually onethird, of the crop they produced, and were expected to perform other duties as well, such as providing recreational services during weddings, funerals, and festivals, repairing and constructing houses, paving roads, building stages for operatic performances during festivals, and carrying sedan chairs. Some of the services demanded from these servile tenants, such as handling corpses, protecting graves, and assuming submissive positions in lineage rituals, were considered to be “spiritually polluting.”22 Landlords in turn provided dianpu with land to farm, housing, and a burial place for their families. The conditions 19 McDermott, Making of New Rural Order, 369. 20 Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity, 121–24, 144–45. 21 See Document 2 for an example of a typical contract between an ordinary tenant and a landowner. 22 Ye Xian’en 業顯恩, Ming Qing Huizhou nongcun shehui yu dianpuzhi 明清徽州農村 社會與佃僕制 [Huizhou’s Rural Society and Servile Tenant System in the Ming-Qing period] (Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1983), 249–68, 329–46.

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under which dianpu lived and worked were hereditary, and thus generations of agricultural laborers in Huizhou knew no other way to provide for themselves. If a landlord sold the land on which these tenants worked, they automatically became the dianpu of the new owner.23 Above these two groups in the social hierarchy were free tenants. Although they may have cultivated the same family’s land for several generations and were dependent on the landlord for tools or loans, their legal status as “good” commoners meant that they could dissolve their legal relationship with the landlord. During the second half of the Ming period, however, many free tenants voluntarily entered into a contract of servitude (maishen 賣身, literally “selling the self”), with their employers and thus lost their free status.24 Poverty and debt were the most common reasons for free tenants doing so; men and their families pledged their labor in exchange for food and shelter or to cover the cost of purchasing a burial plot.25 As Document 3 demonstrates, a landlord could demand not only a variety of services from his servants, but also that their descendants remained in servitude. Men such as the one referred to in Document 4 accepted servitude willingly because they could not afford a wife. Beginning in the 1580s, workers hired for a year or longer were considered legally inferior to their employers; law cases indicate, for instance, that landlords could beat these laborers without fear of punishment.26 Slave status in late Ming China was more complex than these legal designations might otherwise suggest. During this period, large numbers of bondservants, despite their official status as “base” persons, were known to wield certain powers in the name of their landlords. Bondservants designated as haonu 豪奴 (brazen servants) were household retainers who conducted business in both towns and the countryside for their masters.27 As their master’s agent, they monitored the free and bonded tenants working his properties. In cities and towns, they collected revenues from their master’s shops and businesses, and enforced the payment of overdue loans. One seventeenth-century observer, Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–82), noted in his reflections on late Ming 23

Sucheta Mazumdar, “Rights in People, Rights in Land: Concepts of Customary Property in Late Imperial China,” Extrême Orient-Extrême Occident 23 (2001): 89–107. 24 Pamela Crossley claims that since rural landowners generally charged farming tenants 20 per cent interest per month on loans, it is not unexpected that these people would “pawn” themselves in lieu of cash or gifts (“Slavery in Early Modern China,” 192). 25 For other examples of peasants entering servitude because they had no burial land, see Ye Xian’en, Ming Qing Huizhou, 243–48. 26 Christine Moll-Murata, “Work Ethics and Work Evaluations in a Period of Commercial­ ization: Ming China, 1500–1644,” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 165–95. 27 Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity, 200.

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life, Rizhi lu jishi 日知錄集釋 (Record of Knowledge Gained Day by Day, with Commentaries), that “[sometimes] the bondservants act like a master and the master acts like a bondservant.”28 The first generation of PRC Chinese scholars who researched Huizhou’s “servile tenants” stressed this group’s inferior social standing, but tried to go beyond conventional Marxist-Maoist interpretations that cast all tenants as victims of rapacious gentry landlords. In his path-breaking 1983 book on Huizhou in the Ming and Qing eras, Ye Xian’en showed that neither Huizhou gentry nor merchants were keen to acquire land for private use because of the relatively low rates of return on investments in land compared to commerce and restrictions against the sale of lineage properties to outsiders.29 Ye’s work probes the complexities of landlord-dianpu relations, and finds some instances of servile tenants cultivating their master’s land where the contract did not include any obligations other than paying rent. On the basis of the statistics that he compiled from the activities of one lineage, he argued that, in some cases, the incomes of those who labored as tenants and “servile tenants” were not all that different.30 Both Ye and another well-known scholar of Ming rural relations, Fu Yiling, discussed instances where servile tenants, like free tenants, had property rights to a particular field which they might sub-lease, sell, mortgage or bequeath to another party in lieu of being compensated in cash for their labor.31 On the other hand, both scholars also found a series of contracts from 1557 to 1604 involving three generations of a family of tenants from Huizhou’s Qimen county that demonstrate how this group became increasingly subservient to their master who pressured them to perform extra services.32 The picture that emerges from these and other studies is that the relationship between the landlord and his dianpu was a paternalistic one which meant that any dianpu violation of the contract was labeled as “unfilial.” These servile tenants were supposed to behave according to Confucian kinship principles 28

29 30 31 32

Gu Yanwu 顧炎武, Rizhi lu jishi 日知錄集釋 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1930), 13:29a. Similar observations about haonu were made by other Ming contemporaries, including He Liangjun 何良俊 (1506–73), Guan Zhidao 管志道 (1536–1608), and Wang Shixing 王士性 (1547–89). Ye Xian’en, Ming Qing Huizhou, 43–53. Ibid, 314–15. Ye Xian’en, Ming Qing Huizhou, 256; Fu Yiling 傅衣凌, Ming Qing nongcun shehui jingji 明清农村社会经济 [Rural Society and Economy in the Ming Qing Period] (Beijing: Sanlian, 1961), 10–11. Ye Xian’en, Ming Qing Huizhou, 234–35; Fu Yiling, Ming Qing, 14–15.

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of en 恩 (kindness), xiao 孝 (filial piety), zhong 忠 (loyalty), and yi 義 (dutifulness), and to recognize the absolute ruling authority of the lineage head and other esteemed elders.33 However, the head of a family and senior lineage members also had obligations toward their inferiors: they were expected to show benevolence, forbearance, conciliation, toleration, and patience. In the cases of crop failure or famine, and sometimes as a reward for a servile tenant’s extra labor, rent could be reduced or forgiven. In sum, ritual and the ethos of collective welfare were seen as key instruments in preventing conflict between lineage members and servile tenants. But this “balance” between landlord responsibility and tenant/servant deference was a tenuous one, and servile laborers could challenge their contracts and ask for adjudication of their grievances at any given moment. 4

Contracts, Servitude, and Litigation

During the Ming dynasty, Huizhou achieved something of a negative reputation for its inhabitants’ disputatiousness, a trait that some contemporary observers deplored. In an essay written in 1488 to advise the newly-appointed magistrate of Huizhou, the famous local literatus Cheng Minzheng 程敏政 (1445–99), then serving in the capital as a Hanlin scholar, apologized for the prefecture’s inhabitants’ penchant for resorting readily to lawsuits: … Though legal disputes are numerous in Huizhou, the reasons for these disputes are indeed of only three categories: over land, over graveyards, and over adoption … These disputes could span the tenure of several local officials, or last many years. It looks that people there are really disputatious. However, these are indeed excusable. Lands are the properties inherited from ancestors, grave-yards concern the ancestors resting place, and adoptions relate closely with lineage principles. Although the involvement of selfish interests is undeniable, it also out of the imperative of the situation and principles….34

33

Mi Chu Wiens, “Kinship Extended: The Tenant/Servants of Hui-chou,” in Kwang-ching Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 231–54. 34 Huangdun wenji 篁墩文集 [Collected Writings from Huangdun] 27:12a-13b.

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Ten years later, when Cheng was back in Huizhou, he wrote a similar apology to the magistrate’s successor in which he noted local people resorted “to legal disputes for trivial issues … they may engage in argument for years, even at the cost of bankruptcy. In this sense, it is hard to govern indeed.”35 The readiness with which all social strata in Ming-era Huizhou challenged contracts is attested to in a variety of local sources including gazetteers, literati writings, and family histories. Japanese scholar Nakajima Gakushō’s groundbreaking study, Mindai gōson no funsō to chitsujo: Kishū monjo o shiryō to shite (Disputes and Order in Ming Rural Society: An Analysis Based on Huizhou Documents) reveals the extent to which local people in Huizhou, including those classified as “base,” were prepared to resort to juridical means to challenge their contracts.36 The litigation process was complicated by the role that “village elders” (laoren 老人) and “tax captains” (lizhang 里长) played in it. The central government required these men, who came from the richest local families, to mediate contractual disputes, thus freeing magistrates from engaging in this kind of legal activity. These local worthies’ participation reflected the fact that by the late Ming period, when China’s population reached about 150 million, the centralized state found it impossible to expect magistrates to deal with “minor affairs,” a development underscored by central government support for the revival of two kinds of local community organization, the baojia 保甲 (mutual security association) and the xiangyue 鄉約 (village covenant association) which sought to maintain local safety and uphold morality, respectively.37 Joseph McDermott has argued that the leaders of Huizhou’s richest lineages sought actively to limit direct governmental influence in local affairs during the last decades of the sixteenth century by utilizing their position and power to promote agricultural and ceremonial practices consistent with Confucian principles. In other words, as Huizhou’s most prestigious and wealthy lineages became more and more like self-governing entities, they invoked the prestige 35 36

37

Ibid. Nakajima Gakushō 中島樂章, Mindai gōson no funsō to chitsujo: Kishū monjo o shiryō to shit e 明代鄉村の 紛爭と 秩序:徽州文書を 史料として [Disputes and Order in Ming Rural Society: An Analysis Based on Huizhou Documents] (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2002). See also the publication by Han Xiutao 韩秀桃, Ming Qing Huizhou de minjian jiufen ji qi jiejue 明清徽州的民间纠纷及其解决 [Disputes among the People and their Resolution in Huizhou in the Ming Qing period] (Hefei: Anhui daxue chubanshe, 2004). Joseph McDermott posits that Huizhou local elites enforced village covenant rituals that exhibited devotion to the emperor as a way of reinforcing their own hold on local society (“Emperor, Elites, and Commoners: The Community Pact Ritual of the Late Ming,” in Joseph McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in China [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 317–29).

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of Confucian ideals and ritual to promote hierarchy and respect for their position in the local community. Nakajima’s study confirms that laoren or lizhang took an active role in resolving conflicts over matters such as the sale of the same plot of land to two purchasers, the right to fell trees, access to creeks and other small waterways, inheritance rights over particular fields, entitlements to burial plots, and various other disputes.38 The results of his examination of 52 contract disputes involving dianpu between 1487 and 1645 are of particular interest. Only 15 of these 52 cases were brought to the magistrate while 37 were settled by various mediators, including the landlords named in the contracts. Equally interesting is his finding that in some of these disputes, dianpu were at odds with their overseers because of the extra income they had earned by planting other commercial crops on the land allotted to them and selling them for a profit. In other instances, some dianpu who accompanied their masters to markets outside Huizhou found ways to make money on their own initiative by selling the extra crops they had managed to harvest or engaging in casual labor, and then trying to break the contact with their lords.39 Nakajima’s work reveals how the instability brought about by economic change during the late Ming period affected society in Huizhou where the majority of dianpu were not allowed access to the new wealth being generated during this period. When they litigated their contracts, Huizhou’s servile laborers entered the world of Ming jurisprudence which was based on the principle that imperial law was a complex set of texts that bound people together. By combining formal and informal elements that balanced “principle,” especially the principle of fairness, with the “sentiment” associated with the particularities of specific circumstances, Ming jurisprudence sought to achieve equilibrium and harmony between litigants.40 The problem of settling disputes in late Ming Huizhou was that too many people had fallen into “mean” status which restricted their access to legal justice in the first place. We can assume that lizhang who dealt with these cases were familiar with Ming legal culture, a culture that included the formal provisions of the Ming Code and its supplements which were part

38

39 40

The cases are reproduced in the important compilations. See Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院歷史研究所, comp., Huizhou qiannian qiyue wenshu 徽州千年契約文書 (A Thousand Years of Huizhou Contract Ageements), 40 volumes (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1991–93). Nakajima Gakushō, Mindai gōson no funsō to chitsujo, 266–95. Jiang Yonglin and Wu Yanhong, “Satisfying Both Sentiment and Law: Fairness-Centered Judicial Reason as Seen in Late Ming Casebooks,” in Furth, Zeitlin, and Hsiung, Thinking with Cases, 31–61.

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of the “core set of books” most educated persons owned and could consult.41 As supervisors of covenant assemblies, lizhang would have led the recitation of the moral exhortations that reinforced Confucian kinship principles and obligations and upheld their superior social status in the local community. Since the individual lizhang was the keeper of social order and harmony, he was bound in his role as judge or adjudicator to seek solutions that would ensure both of these goals. That so many individuals, both men and women, young and old, and rich and poor, chose, as the Huizhou documents attest, to seek legal redress of their grievances implies that they had a certain faith in how the lizhang would deal with their cases. By demonstrating both his knowledge of Ming law and his capacity for fair-mindedness, a lizhang could overcome the tensions, problems, and potential crises brought about by a rapidly changing economy. In Huizhou, as elsewhere in Ming China, there were no sharp divisions between personal morality on the one hand and the political values of the state on the other. Everyone shared the same ethical discourse and relied on a common set of standards. By the last decades of the Ming dynasty, however, it would seem that litigation to redress grievances between servile laborers and their landlords was no longer enough to prevent conflict. In 1645, Huizhou witnessed one of the most violent and cataclysmic rebellions in Chinese history.42 As northern China fell to the invading Manchu troops, the rest of the empire descended into chaos in the wake of large-scale domestic uprisings. In Huizhou, indentured laborers, “free” commoners, and hired laborers under the leadership of Song Qi 宋氣, a bondservant and former soldier with a reputation as a good boxer, competent horseman, and skilled archer, pillaged the community, murdered members of the great lineages and their “brazen servants,” and built fortresses to protect themselves from the remaining Ming authorities.43 Song informed his followers that, “Ever since my grandfather became a bondservant, his descendants have been registered as bondservants, and we have been unable to cast ourselves free of these registers. Now we have a chance to do so, a chance given 41 42

43

Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 131. Harriet Zurndorfer, “Servage domestique, conflits socioaux et la transition Ming-Qing dans la prefecture de Hui-chou, 1644–1646,” in Alessandro Stanziani, ed., Le travail constraint en Asie et en Europe (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2010), 241–64; W. Andreas Mixius, “Nu-pien” und die “Nu-p’u” von Kiangnan: Aufstände Abhängiger und Unfreier in Südchina 1644/5 (Hamburg: Gesellschaft fur Natur-und Vőlkerkunde Ostasiens, 1980). Tanaka Masatoshi, “Popular Uprisings, Rent Resistance, and Bondservant Rebellions in the Late Ming,” in Linda Grove and Christian Daniels, eds. and trans., State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Ming-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), 165–214.

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by Heaven. Our masters are all weak and cannot be expected to fight back.”44 His statement confirmed that all formal and informal bonds between Huizhou masters and slaves had broken down and reflected his many followers’ desire for social justice, justice that included cancelling their contracts. Song Qi’s army fought Ming loyalist forces for several years, but finally met defeat in 1648 when the Qing army conquered Huizhou and destroyed both the remnants of the Ming forces and the rebels. Although the warfare, famines, and epidemics that characterized life in midseventeenth century Huizhou caused a severe decline in the size of the local population, servile tenancy and other practices associated with hereditary servitude did not disappear during the Qing era. Even the 1727 Emancipation Edict of the Yongzheng 雍正 Emperor (r. 1722–35), which released “base” people from their status and sought to reduce the worse abuses of servile tenancy, failed to change conditions in Huizhou. It was only after 1911 with the birth of the Republic that slavery and its variants in Huizhou gradually began to disappear. 5 Conclusion It was once commonly believed that imperial China lacked a legal tradition that would permit ordinary people to seek justice. This belief reflected those of many Westerners in nineteenth-century China who viewed Chinese law as “barbaric” and maintained an enduring hostility toward Chinese legal institutions.45 This “legal Orientalism,” as Teemu Ruskola has characterized it,46 prevented generations of scholars from exploring, much less appreciating, the complexity of Chinese state-society relations. As the intricacies of how Huizhou landholders, tenants, and retainers in their varying degrees of bonded servitude interacted with and challenged each other demonstrates, these state-society relations relied on contracts as well as Confucian ethos to achieve balance, harmony, and, to a certain extent, fairness between different groups in Chinese society. If the litigation initiated by “base” people reflected the differences between an overseer and his social inferiors, it was also a demonstration of the fluidity of Ming state-society relations which were complex and increasingly blurry in the last decades of the dynasty. One may even ascribe the term “centralized minimalism” to the degree to which the state and 44 Yixian zhi 黟縣志 (Gazetteer of Yi county [Huizhou]), 1871 ed., 15:14a. See also Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity, 212–15. 45 Alford and Schluessel, “Legal History.” 46 Teemu Ruskola, “Legal Orientalism,” Michigan Law Review 101 (2002–03): 179–234.

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its agents retreated from exercising its demands directly on society, and relied on informal institutions and procedures to insure order and stability.47 For many modern historians of China, “the dominant narrative arc of the Ming has become one of a shift from the state at the center to the market at the center.”48 Thus, if we eschew the conventional trope that Ming authoritarianism was fundamental to the functioning of the Ming state, then the diverse power relationships that actually characterized Chinese society during this period become all that much more important to understanding the nature and dynamics of servitude in Huizhou. The resolution of disagreements between landlords in Huizhou and their servile labor force may be viewed in terms of the notion of “society-making,” a concept first posited by the legal theorist Roberto Unger and later discussed by the Ming historian Timothy Brook.49 Brook defines “societymaking” as “the process by which people interact with each other through structured networks and make the conditions of their social existence on the basis of the resources available to them by virtue of their social position.”50 He emphasizes that it is society, and not the state, that forms these processes which depend on the practices current in everyday life. Brook’s intention is not to marginalize the state’s effectiveness, but to stress how the “society-making” forces such as kinship collectivities or ritual practices are pertinent. In the case of Huizhou, for example, the intricate web of reciprocal rights and obligations meant that the labor of the living was linked to the burial rights of the dead – poor people without the means to acquire land for graves were willing to enter servitude to fulfill their familial responsibilities.51 In effect, slavery and indentured servitude in late Ming Huizhou must be viewed as part of an extensive social web reinforced by the tangled complexity of a stratified society, a web that could offer the possibilities of exchange and negotiation between disparate groups, but not the transformation of social relations at a time of economic instability and disparity. The under-studied phenomenon of slavery in China, as elsewhere in Asia, presents an intellectual challenge to China historians as well as other specialists of social and economic history. Without further research on this important subject there remains a tremendous gap in our grasp of China’s long-term development. 47

See Philip Huang, “Centralized Minimalism: Semiformal Governance by Quasi Officials and Dispute Resolution in China,” Modern China 34, no. 1 (2008): 9–35. 48 Michael Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 14. 49 Roberto Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and its Task, vol. 1 of idem. Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 151–2; Timothy Brook, The Chinese State in Ming Society (Abingdon, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 8–9. 50 Brook, Chinese State, 8–9. 51 Mazumdar, “Rights in People.”

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Appendix

Document 1: Example of a contract for selling a daughter; from the Wanbao quanshu (1596)

In [name blank] village, I [name blank] had a daughter, [name blank]. When she reached adulthood, I arranged her to be the concubine of [name blank]. The engagement price was received today at the moment when this contract is completed. In the auspicious day and time, she will be sent to her husband’s household. With heavenly blessing, she will produce many children. The daughter, as my biological child raised in the family, was never engaged before. There is no cheating in this sale. As soon as she is taken into [name blank’s] family, she belongs to [name blank]. In case she runs away, I will chase her and return her to you. We will have no complaint even if she dies. Her death is not the owner’s responsibility, but her destiny. This contract is the evidence of marriage. Cited in Bao Hua Hsieh, “The Market in Concubines in Jiangnan during Ming-Qing China,” Journal of Family History 33 (2008): 276.



Document 2: Sample contract of an ordinary tenant (commoner) renting land from another lineage

Hu Sheng, a resident of the fifth du, now rents two clumps of land, paddy field and dry land, of the Hong (family) in the fifth du. Their location is at the place called ‘Atop the Pond and Below the Raised Plot’. Each year [Hu] agrees to pay back four cheng and ten jin of grain, and each year on the day of the autumn harvest he will allow his master to check the harvest. If there is additional land to be opened up, allow Hu Sheng to open it and work at it, with also no increase in rent. Now fearing that there is nothing to rely on, we set up this contract as evidence. Signed (in the year) Hongzhi 13.11.13 (1500.11.13) The person who sets up the contract Hu Sheng, scribed by Rao Yongshan. [cited in Liu Hehui, “Mingdai Huizhou Hushi dianpu wenyue [Ming dynasty tenant/ servant contract with Mr. Hu of Huizhou],” Anhui shixue 2 (1985), 64–65.]



Document 3: Contract of agricultural workers entering into servile tenancy in order to acquire burial ground

The servants Hu Shengbao, Hu Zhubao, Hu Chibao, and the sons and grandsons of the four Hu branch families, draw up this contract. Previously our ancestors, Hu Ang and Hu Sheng, besought from Master Hong Shou one piece of land, the Lower Pond Hill, located in our county, for the purpose of burying our ancestors, Hu Fu and his wife. Since then, fifteen more coffins have been buried there. Each coffin occupies the space of nine paces. Kept in this cemetery was also one small coffin of the master’s family and one stone tablet. Our ancestors had drawn up statements specifying that we could bury no one outside these given spaces. It stated that we could only have further burials

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in the master’s cemetery with his permission. It is agreed that the descendants of our Hu family will observe this regulation in perpetuity; no arbitrary burial is allowed. If there are any violations of this rule, the master can present the case to the court and have us punished as violators. Recently because of our failure to perform adequately our duty of escorting his children to school, the master expressed his intent to present the case to court. All the four branch families, realizing our weak position, pleaded for forgiveness and were willing to accept punishment. It is agreed that from now on, whenever there are marriages, funerals, or sacrifices in the master’s house, we will offer our services. The master, in consideration of the fact that we live far away from his estate and that the servants on the estate are sufficient, only requests to send over two people to help with the sacrifice and cleaning during the Clear and Bright Festival [for honoring the dead]. In addition, on occasions when members of the master’s family are going to school, going to the examinations, or responding to the call to serve in public office, the descendants of the four families will each dispatch one person to serve for one day. We dare not refuse the call for service. We also agree to keep watch carefully over the master’s family graveyard. After the drawing up of this contract, the descendants of the four Hu families will observe the regulations in perpetuity. Should there be any violations, the master can present the case to the court and have us punished as violators. In order to guarantee the agreements, we draw up this contract as evidence. Dated the 17th day of the twelfth month of 1605. The servants who draw up the contract: Hu Shengbao, Hu Xibao, and their sons and grandsons…. Scribe: Hu Chengming Cited in Patricia Ebrey, ed., Chinese Civilization and Society: A Sourcebook (New York: Free Press, 1981), 143–44.



Document 4: Sample contract of someone in need of a wife and becomes a ‘servile’ tenant

Tenant Wang Mengxi draws up this contract. The resident-tenant Lu San of the Old Father Temple Estate, Hu Family Mountain, passed away, leaving behind him his widow, Juxiang, née Lin, and two sons. The elder son is Yushou; the younger one is Baoshou. They are both young and weak and unable to perform the duty of cultivating the field for the estate. The master, considering that I have not been married, permitted me to marry the widow, Lin, to enter her family, to raise her two children, and to pay the rent to the master. Previously, Lu San had separated his property from that of Lu Xing. I will take possession of the house and lands which belong to Lu San. Upon entering the widow’s

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house, I will carefully serve the master, diligently cultivate the land, and earnestly raise the two children. I do not dare to come or go at will or to make trouble. Later on if I have children of my own, I will divide my earnings and the field and the house equally among all of them. If I am lazy or indolent, the master can proceed against me. In order to guarantee this agreement, I have drawn up this contract as evidence. Dated the 27th day of the eleventh month of 1634. The person who drew up the contract: Wang Mengxi Witnesses: Lu Xing (younger cousin) Lin Fahu (roommate) Ebrey, ed., Chinese Civilization, 144.

Chapter 6

Human Trafficking in Late Imperial China Claude Chevaleyre 1

Introduction

During a discussion in 2016 on the academic network H-Slavery about whether the slave regime in the antebellum United States was the largest in history, anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö mentioned the need to talk about imperial China.1 Quoting James Watson’s statement that China “had one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of people in the world,”2 Fiskesjö observed that China had “enormous numbers” of slaves, some of whom “would be instantly recognizable to us as slaves” while others were “held under the pretenses of patriarchal kinship, but also very much slave-like in relation to their masters.” He concluded by noting that “slavery in the Chinese empire is underestimated in much of the literature.” If Fiskesjö’s comments point to a growing scholarly interest in slavery in Chinese history, they also demonstrate that China is still largely terra incognita in the history of global slavery. That slavery’s role in Chinese history has been undervalued is undeniable in light of the simple fact that since the early modern period, more than one-fifth of the world’s population has lived in China. This demographic reality means that if we regard the existence of a “market for the exchange of people” as a defining feature of slavery, then China may have been the largest slave society in world history. However, as many historians of slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean world appreciate, identifying “slaves” is a problematic exercise since definitions of slave status based on slavery in the Americas are inappropriate elsewhere in the world.3 The slavefree dichotomy that underpins discussions about slavery in the Americas,4 1 “US the Largest Slave System?,” H-Slavery, 2016. 2 James L. Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs,” in James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 223. 3 See, for example: Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xxii; Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 1–15. 4 Many historians have underlined the historical exceptionality of the “slave vs. free” paradigm. See: Igor Kopytoff, “Slavery,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982): 224–25; Moses I. Finley, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 6, no. 3 (1964): © Claude Chevaleyre, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_008

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for example, is inapplicable to late imperial China where hierarchy and interpersonal obligations based on age and generation, gender, occupation, and notions of honor were the crucial variables that defined social status. It is clear that some socio-legal categories in China can be characterized as “slave-like.” Persons categorized as nubi 奴婢, for example, occupied a position of almost absolute inferiority and dependency in society and their master’s household. Their social relationships mimicked the highly asymmetrical father-child relationship and were exclusively mediated through the person of their master (the household head).5 However, while characterizing the nubi as “slave-like” persons can be of heuristic value to understanding their status in China, the emotions that all too frequently accompany the term “slave” also mean that we can easily fail to appreciate the complex meanings and realities that can be inherent in such a category. The problem of defining nubi status is indicative of other difficulties that surround our understanding of the commodification and sale of human beings in late imperial China.6 As Eduard Erkes noted more than 65 years ago and Michael Zeuske has observed more recently, China “has a problem with slavery.”7 This problem is a multi-faceted one that includes not only how “slavery” in China is or should be defined and conceptualized8 or its scale

5 6

7 8

248; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). See Claude Chevaleyre, “Asservir pour punir: la nature pénale du statut d’esclave dans la Chine des Ming (1368–1644),” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 41 (2017): 93–118. For recent contributions to the history of human commodification in China, see Wang Xueping 王雪萍, 16–18 shiji binü shengcun zhuangtai yanjiu 世紀婢女生存狀態研究 (Harbin: Heilongjiang daxue chubanshe, 2008); Hsieh Bao Hua, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Matthew H. Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Johanna S. Ransmeier, Sold People. Traffickers and Family Life in North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Eduard Erkes, Das Problem der Sklaverei in China (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1952); Michael Zeuske, “Versklavte und Sklavereien in der Geschichte Chinas,” Dhau. Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 2 (2017), 25. The study of slavery in pre- and early imperial history is currently very dynamic. See, for instance: Robin D.S. Yates, “The Changing Status of Slaves in the Qin-Han Transition,” in Yuri Pines et al., eds., Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 206–23; Anthony Barbieri-Low and Robin D.S. Yates, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2015), sect. 4. Chinese and Japanese historians have been very prolific in studying nubi 奴婢 in Ming and Qing China. Most of them concur in rejecting the relevance of “slavery” in that context. Studies in Western languages include: Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of HuiChou Prefecture 800 to 1800 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), chap. 5; Joseph P. McDermott, “Bondservants in the T’ai-hu Basin: A Case of Mistaken Identities,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (1981): 675–701; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in David Eltis and

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and importance in Chinese history, but also the extent and ways in which men, women, and children were trafficked, a topic that previous studies of human bondage in China frequently ignore. This chapter seeks to begin the process of filling this important historiographical lacuna by examining the scope and dynamics of human trafficking during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) eras. In so doing, it raises issues that future research will need to address such as evaluating the transnational dimensions of human trafficking in China and this traffic’s entanglement with local practices of bondage and servitude, markets in human beings, and commodity chains. Before we proceed, however, a few words need to be said about data (or the lack thereof) at our disposal. The unreliability of imperial censuses, the fact that many social categories (especially “mean” ones like nubi) were poorly registered, that enslavement was often concealed behind other transactions (like adoptions), that bondage was not limited to nubi, and that many cases of trafficking were never brought to the attention of judicial authorities, mean that any quantitative reconstruction of the size of the enslaved population and the scale of human trafficking in China can only be an approximation. In the absence of accurate statistical data, historians often quote early Qing scholars who, after the late Ming “slaves’ revolts,” complained about rich families keeping “thousands” or “tens of thousands” of nubi.9 Historian Ping-ti Ho has estimated that “mean people” (to which nubi belonged) amounted to approximately 1 percent of the population during the Qing period.10 Since slavery was allegedly at its paroxysm during the Western Han period (206 BCE–23 CE) when slaves amounted to about 3 percent of the total population, Ho’s figure seems plausible.11 However, fragmentary data suggest that these figures were actually higher. Inventories of the properties seized by Manchu armies during the conquest of Jinzhou (Liaoning province) in 1642 reveal that the 25 Ming officers in charge of the garrison

9 10 11

Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420– AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 163–85; Claude Chevaleyre, “Acting as Master and Bondservant: Considerations on Status, Identities, and the Nature of ‘Bondservitude’ in Late Ming China,” in Alessandro Stanziani, ed., Labour, Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia, 17th–20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 237–72. Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 and Huang Rucheng 黃汝成, ed., Rizhilu jishi 日知錄集釋 [1834] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006), vol. 2, 799–800. Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China. Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 19. Slave population figures for the Western Han period are still highly debated. Cf. Jin Guantao 金觀濤 and Liu Qingfeng 劉青峰, Xingsheng yu weiji. Lun Zhongguo chaowending jiegou 興盛與危機︰論中國社會超穩定結構 (Hong Kong: Xianggang zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 1992), 219.

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town possessed a total of 1,584 nubi (male and female of all ages), 433 of whom belonged to the regional commander Zu Dashou (?–1656).12 Bondage was supposedly far less developed in northern China than in the south. Estimates of the number of people legally entitled to possess nubi suggest that during the late Ming period, nubi comprised a minimum of more than 2 percent of the total population. Such an estimate sheds little light, however, on the scale of human trafficking at this time. Indeed, it is impossible even to speculate at this point in time about the number of people who were trafficked since, in the Chinese context, bondage, trafficking, and commonplace transactions in human beings were often distinct but overlapping phenomena. Nubi, although closest to being defined as “slaves,” were not the only social stratum to be caught up in forms of extreme dependency. Trafficked men, women, and children were not always sold as nubi (or even as bonded persons), and nubi were not necessarily acquired through trafficking. Under such circumstances, it is important to use the sources at our disposal to discern the elements of a Chinese definition of “human trafficking.” Expanding our knowledge and understanding of bondage and dependency in late imperial China will depend on historians’ ability to engage in such an exercise. 2

Slave Trading in China

Ming and Qing administrative sources are replete with fragmentary reports of human “trading” (maimai, lit. “buy and sell”) and “trafficking” (guaimai, lit. “abduct and sell”). While previous scholarship has not completely ignored these sources, historians have made no attempt to use them to develop a more comprehensive picture of human trafficking in China. The need to undertake such a task is mandated by the information at our disposal which indicates that well-organized interregional human trafficking networks have existed in China since at least the fifteenth century, and probably well before then. Previous studies of human trafficking in early modern China have focused almost exclusively on the activities of “alien” slavers including Europeans and non-Chinese peoples such as the Tibetans, the Miao,13 or the Manchus. According to the conventional narrative, the European presence in East Asia 12 “Chongde qinian zoushi dang 崇德七年奏事檔,” in Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, ed., Qingdai dang’an shiliao congbian, (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), vol. 11, 4–7. 13 “Miao” was an official term referring to various non-Han populations living in the so-called “Miao territories” of Western Huguang and Eastern Guizhou provinces. See Jiang Yonglin, “Thinking about ‘Ming China’ Anew: The Ethnocultural Space in a Diverse Empire – With Special reference to the ‘Miao Territory’,” Journal of Chinese History 2 (2018): 72–77.

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during the sixteenth century spurred the expansion of slave trading from the country’s interior toward its coastal areas where slavery had supposedly been extinct for centuries. Western sources attest to European interest in procuring Chinese slaves. As early as 1518, the (in)famous Portuguese captain Simon Peres de Andrade abducted Chinese people in the Pearl River estuary, giving rise to “loud complaints” from and violent clashes with local officials.14 Another source recounts that during a punitive expedition in 1542 to recover a debt from a Chinese businessman, Lanzarote Pereira and his followers plundered the houses of peasants in Ningbo (Fujian), killed many of them, and seized their wives and children.15 Jesuit narratives also report that, as early as 1563, two batches of 450 and 200 Chinese women were dispatched to Goa by the Portuguese.16 Contemporary Chinese accounts also provide information about such activities. Ye Quan (1522–1578), a native of Xiuning district in Anhui province, reported what he saw in Macao in the mid-1560s: Nowadays, several thousand foreigners have assembled in [Macao], they occupy a strategic point, where they use Chinese spouses, slaves (nu), sons, and daughters at their service. […] They [also] have “black devils” at their service. Originating from countries where people are poor, they are slaves (nu) to the Folangji [the Portuguese]. Their appearance is fierce, and their hair is curly like that of the huyang sheep. Their skin is [as black as] ink. […] In a foreigner’s house, I saw a six- or seven-year-old crying. I asked the translator: “Is this the foreigner’s child?” He replied: “No. He was abducted in Dongguan [Guangdong] and sold here earlier this year. He cries because he misses his parents.”17 The foreigners can have five or six of them. And in some cases, up to ten girls. All of them look like the boy. […] They have no underwear and walk barefoot, even in the cold of the twelfth month. On that island, at least one thousand [Chinese] are 14 15 16

17

Hugh Murray et al., An Historical and Descriptive Account of China, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1836), 186; Qiong Zhang, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 280. T’ien-tsê Chang, Sino-Portuguese Trade, from 1514 to 1644 (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 77–78. Henri Bernard, Aux portes de la Chine: Les missionnaires du seizième siècle, 1514–1588 (Tientsin: Hautes études, 1933), 76–77; Jean Mocquet, Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales. Faits par Jean Mocquet, garde du Cabinet des singularités du Roy, aux Tuilleries (Paris: Jean de Heuqueville, 1617), 316. Earlier, the Portuguese had helped the Chinese to subdue mutineers in Dongguan. See John E. Wills, China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 38–39.

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slaves and concubines (puqie) of the foreigners. All come from honorable Chinese families. How pitiful and how so sad!18 Ye’s account is of interest because it not only speaks to the ways in which Chinese were enslaved and funneled into the networks that supplied the Portuguese with slaves, but is also an early reference to the Portuguese bringing African and Indian slaves to their establishments in China.19 Other accounts demonstrate that the Chinese viewed the Portuguese as looters and kidnappers as early as the 1520s. The Annals of the Ming Dynasty record that during the Zhengde era (1506–21), the Portuguese “traveled and plundered, abducting children whom they even cooked and devoured. […] Those who stayed at the Huaiyuanyi [the foreign visitors’ inn in Canton] also kidnapped and bought good people.”20 In 1523, at the end of the second Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese authorities reported that 10 men and women had been abducted by the Portuguese.21 Ninety years later, in 1613, a Chinese observer related that “countless numbers of sons and wives from the cities were abducted and sold for profit to foreigners every year.”22 Late Ming judicial sources also bear witness to Portuguese trafficking in Guangdong province. The Official Documents Kept at the Mengshui Studio, compiled by Yan Junyan ( js. 1628),23 include several cases of abductions by the Portuguese. Circa 1632, a culprit named Qu Rimei was sentenced to penal servitude and deportation for his failed attempt to abduct and sell the daughter of a man named Huang Yuju to foreigners.24 In another case, a man named Huang Yu was prosecuted for the alleged abduction and sale of Ye Maochang “as a 18

Ye Quan 葉權, You Lingnan ji 游嶺南紀 (1565), Chinese Text Project online edition, [https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=459656] (accessed 10 April 2018). Translation based on Zhang, Making the New World Their Own, 288–89. 19 Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 161. 20 Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 et al., comp., Mingshi 明史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974 [1739]), 8430. On purported Portuguese cannibalism, see Zhang, Making the New World Their Own, 281–82. 21 Huang Zhangjian 黃彰健 et al., eds., Ming Shizong Su huangdi ( Jiajing) shilu 明世宗肅 皇帝嘉靖實錄 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1966), 693–94. 22 Guo Shangbin 郭尚賓, Guo jijian shugao 郭給練疏稿 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 12. 23 js = jinshi 進士: the date that a scholar passed the central examination and earned the “doctor” degree. Used in Chinese studies when the dates of an individual’s birth and death are unknown. 24 Yan Junyan 顏俊彥, Mengshui zhai cundu 盟水齋存牘 (Beijing: Zhongguo Zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2001 [pref. 1631]), 256.

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Map 6.1

Chinese provinces

slave to foreigners.”25 Maochang’s inability to name his kidnapper and specify how much money he was supposed to have been sold for prompted officials to question his truthfulness and conduct a second investigation into his case. Whether or not his allegations were true, his case demonstrates that slaving and slave trading remained widespread a century after the Portuguese arrived in South China. Huang and Qu’s cases also highlight an issue that has hitherto remained almost unnoticed. Following the lead of Western colonial administrators,26 historians have highlighted the importance of the law against the “crossing of the frontiers without authorization” to explain imperial authorities’ constant struggle against the exportation of Chinese subjects overseas.27 A recent study has argued, for example, that “Although buying and selling children was tolerated inside China, no human traffic was allowed across its borders [emphasis 25 26 27

Ibid, 275. See, for example: Correspondence with the Superintendent of British Trade in China upon the Subject of Emigration from that Country (London: Harrison and Son, 1853), 10. Statute 246 of the Great Ming Code (“Sichu waijing ji weijin xiahai” 私出外境及違 禁下海 [Crossing Frontiers without Authorization or Going to Sea in Violation of the Prohibitions]), in Jiang Yonglin, trans., The Great Ming Code/Da Ming lü (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 140–41.

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added].”28 In other words, the criminalization of human trafficking was supposedly contingent upon slaves’ “crossing the borders.” Huang and Qu’s cases demonstrate, however, that human trafficking was not unknown to Chinese officials, and that persons found guilty of such activity inside the empire’s borders were subject to severe punishment. According to the reports included in the Official Documents Kept at the Mengshui Studio, “crossing the borders” was not a necessary pre-condition for charging individuals with “human trafficking.” Qu and Huang were not prosecuted according to the (military) statute on “Crossing the borders without authorization,” but according to the (penal) statute on “Kidnapping and selling people.”29 “Crossing the borders” was not even invoked in Qu Rimei’s case, while it appears in Huang’s only as an aggravating circumstance. If Huang had been found guilty of selling Ye Maochang “who crossed the border,” he would have been liable to death by strangulation rather than exile 3,000 li (approximately 1,500 km) away, the penalty mandated by the statute that prohibited the kidnapping and sale of people within the country’s borders. This was made possible by the promulgation, in the first half of the sixteenth century, of a sub-statute introducing the aggravating factor of “crossing the borders” to the crime of “kidnapping and selling”.30 The tensions that resulted from the increase in human trafficking during the sixteenth century led to various measures to prohibit the exportation of slaves from the South China coast. In the mid-1560s, Pang Shangpeng (1524– 81), then investigating censor for Zhejiang province, ordered the reassignment of the vice-commissioner for coastal defense to Xiangshan, north of Macao, to monitor Portuguese activities closely.31 He also issued a proclamation forbidding Chinese subjects to seek refuge on board “foreign” ships or to kidnap and sell Chinese subjects to the Portuguese.32 A few decades later, in 1614, the vicecommissioner for coastal defense, Yu Anxing, had a series of five “Prohibitions” engraved on a stele; one of these prohibitions targeted the growth of the 28 Zhang, Making the New World Their Own, 279. 29 Statute 298 of the Great Ming Code (“Lüeren lüe mairen” 畧人畧賣人 [Kidnapping Persons or Kidnapping and Selling Persons]), translated in: Jiang, The Great Ming Code, 164–65. 30 Ming Sub-statute 298.2. See: Gao Ju 高舉 et al., Minglü jijie fuli 明律集解附例 (Beijing: Xiuding falüguan, 1908), 18:61a–b. Included in the 1550 edition of the Itemized Regulations for Trying Penal Matters, this sub-statute was promulgated no later than 1521 and remained in use until the early eighteenth century. See: Huang Zhangjian 黃彰健, Mingdai lüli huibian (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1979), 786. 31 See, more generally: Li Kangying, The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition, 1368–1567 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), chap. 4. 32 Pang Shangpeng 龐尚鵬, Baike ting zhaigao 百可亭摘稿 (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1994–97 [1599]), 131.

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Japanese enslaved population in Macao while another banned the sale of Chinese slaves to the Portuguese: “The selling of people being prohibited, new and old-established Portuguese barbarians will not buy sons and daughters of Tang [i.e., Chinese] people. Once discovered, the culprits will be detained, prosecuted according to the name [of their crime], and sentenced to the matching punishment.”33 Despite such measures, human trafficking remained a major bone of contention in Sino-Portuguese relations well into the eighteenth century. A convention dated 9 November 1749 with the Portuguese government of Macao stipulated that, “Neither Chinese nor Europeans are allowed to sell sons and daughters of Chinese breed. Any body violating this regulation shall be punished in conformity to the law of Keen-lung IXth year [1744].”34 This article, one of twelve that sought to redress “the situation with the foreigners in Macao,” followed in the wake of new instances of Portuguese trading Chinese slaves in 1748.35 The picture that emerges from these sources is that Macao was an important hub for human trafficking in East Asia as early as the late sixteenth century.36 Not only did the Portuguese buy Chinese slaves for use in their farflung establishments, but also trafficked slaves from other regions through Macao. In the early 1830s, Swedish consul general Anders Ljungstedt observed that, “Formerly, the merchants in Macao dealt largely in slaves, kidnapped in China, Japan, and many other places, or bought….”37 Historian Charles Boxer observed that during the heyday of the Pacific silver trade and the so-called age of piracy in the China seas (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), Japanese slaves sold for a very good price in Macao.38 Enslaved Koreans, Japanese, and “blacks” 33

Yin Guangren 印光任 and Zhang Rulin 張汝霖, Aomen jilüe 澳門紀略 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1996–2002), 678. 34 Anders Ljungstedt, An Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China (Boston: J. Munroe, 1836), 216. “Law of Keen-lung IXth year” refers to an “established regulation” (dingli) promulgated in 1744 to manage litigations involving Chinese and foreigners. See: Wang Juxin 王巨新, “Qianlong jiunian dingli yanjiu 乾隆九年定例研究,” Aomen yanjiu 51 (2009): 21–26. 35 Engraved on two steles (one in Chinese, one in Portuguese), the text is recorded in Yin and Zhang, Aomen jilüe, 686. 36 This is well illustrated in a 1598 document translated by Léon Pagès: “Consultation tenue par l’Evêque Cerqueira au sujet des esclaves achetés ou engagés et transportés hors du Japon,” in Léon Pagès, Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu’à 1651: Comprenant les faits relatifs aux deux cent cinq martyrs béatifiés le 7 juillet 1867 (Paris: C. Douniol, 1870), vol. 2, 70–79. 37 Ljungstedt, An Historical Sketch, 29. 38 Japanese slaves were another cause of Sino-Portuguese friction. See: Yu Anxing, “Memoir for the Expulsion of the Japanese from Macao,” trans. in Tang Kaijian, Setting off from Macau. Essays on Jesuit History during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Leiden: Brill, 2015),

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from Africa (Mozambique) and India were also found in the settlement, as were slaves from Malacca.39 The Portuguese are also known to have exported at least small numbers of Chinese and other Asian slaves from Macao to the Estado da Índia, South Asia, and Western Europe.40 These reports provide the foundation for modern arguments that the Chinese slaves being traded by the Portuguese were supplied either by local traffickers (“native pimps” in Boxer’s words)41 who abducted people, mostly in Guangdong province, or by Portuguese who pillaged areas themselves.42 Historian George Bryan Souza has observed that “The Portuguese traffic […] was an impediment of a singular nature to better Sino-Portuguese relations.” The Portuguese would arrange to meet Chinese merchants in the Pearl River estuary or the islands south of Macao to purchase human cargoes that included children who, according to the ouvidor Manuel Luiz Coelho, sold in Manila for 10 pardaos apiece.43 Chinese sources seem to confirm this narrative. In his Preserved Manuscripts from Xieshan (pref. 1592), Chen Wude (1528–59) states that the Portuguese “abducted the sons and wives [of the Chinese] in illicit connection with [local] ruffians.”44 A native of Canton, Huo Yuxia ( js. 1559)

39

40

41 42 43 44

116–18. Their traffic would soon be targeted by prohibitions in Portugal (notably through the 1571 charter of King Sebastian) and Japan (1587). See: Thomas Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 465; Charles R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1968), 223–24. On the efficacy of the prohibitions and the ambivalent attitude of the Jesuits vis-à-vis the Asian slave trade, see Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, “Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery in Early Modern Japan,” PhD diss., Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2018, 40–44, passim. The term “black slaves” refers either to Africans or to Indians. See: Boxer, Fidalgos, 223, 225; Tang Kaijian 湯開建 and Peng Hui 彭蕙, “16–19 shiji Aomen ‘Heiren’ laiyuan kaoshu 16–19 世紀澳門“黑人”來源考述,” Shijie lishi 5 (2005): 77, 80. The famous “pirate” and “loyalist” Zheng family used battalions of black soldiers probably acquired in Macao. See: Jin Guoping 金國平 and Wu Zhiliang 吳志良, “Zheng Zhilong yu Aomen – Jiantan Zheng shi jiazu de Aomen heiren 鄭芝龍與澳門. 兼談鄭氏家族的澳門黑人,” Haijiao shi yanjiu 2 (2002): 52. Boxer, Fidalgos, 223–25, 238. According to Thomas Nelson, the first Japanese to set foot in Europe were probably slaves (“Slavery in Medieval Japan,” 463). See also: Boxer, Fidalgos, 236; Cao Gaiping 曹改平, “Neidi yimin yu Aomen zaoqi kaifa 內地移民與澳門早 期開發,” MA thesis, Southwest Jiaotong University, 2008, 28; Tatiana Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 20–21. Boxer, Fidalgos, 223. Liu Zhenggang 劉正剛, “Ming-Qing Aomen nüxing yanjiu 明清澳門女性研究,” Lishi dang’an 2 (2001): 84. George Bryan Souza, The Survival of Empire. Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 195. Chen Wude 陳吾德, Xieshan cungao 謝山存稿 (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1994–1997 [pref. 1592]), 424.

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also reported in the 1570s that Westerners travelling eastward to Youyuzhou (Fujian?) often “kidnapped large numbers of people and sold them with great profit.”45 Other narratives recount that the Portuguese abducted people at different places along the southeastern Chinese coast such as Zhangzhou harbor (Fujian) where many were kidnapped in 1547.46 More than a century later, provincial judge Pan Siju (1695–1752), worried by the scale of such activity in Guangdong, accused foreigners of inducing “local rascals” associated with them to “lure ignorant people into following their religion, sell boys and girls as slaves, and smuggle goods prohibited from export.”47 By suggesting that human trafficking was conducted by foreigners, sometimes with the assistance of Chinese scoundrels and unscrupulous officials, this conventional narrative implies that foreign adventurers and merchants were the impetus behind the development of human trafficking in China and that their demand for slaves stimulated a new market for this human commodity. The concerns voiced by Chinese officials indicate that this activity was perceived as challenging the established order and violating imperial law as well as being unprecedented. However, this narrative begs a number of important questions: Where did all of these Chinese slaves really come from? Were they acquired only in the areas surrounding Portuguese settlements, or did they also come from more distant regions? Did the Portuguese really stimulate the development of a new market for chattel labor, or were they merely new participants in an already established market in such labor as is suggested by the fact that some of the Chinese slaves traded through Macao to India in the late sixteenth century were captives acquired in Japanese ports together with Korean and Japanese slaves.48 3

Beyond the European Mirror

Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Western accounts provide incidental information about human trafficking within China, information that must be taken with a grain of salt since these accounts often sought to emphasize China’s “backwardness” and encourage sympathy for its poor and 45 46 47 48

Chen Zilong 陳子龍 et al., comp., Huang Ming jingshi wenbian 皇明經世文編 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1996–2002 [1638]), 368:6a. See Deng Kaisong 鄧開頌, Aomen lishi 澳門歷史 (Macao: Aomen lishi xuehui, 1995), 147. Yin and Zhang, Aomen jilüe, 680. See da Silva Ehalt, “Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery,” 225–29.

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oppressed people. The following statement, written after the “Tianjin massacre” of 1870,49 is representative of Western clichés about the last decades of Qing rule: Kidnapping of children has from the earliest historic times been prevalent in China; and the various Foreign and Mixed Courts established in China have made it indisputable that the practice is still of daily occurrence. Female children so kidnapped are sold to brothels which, in fact, are mostly replenished from this source, while male children are sold as slaves or are bought for adoption by childless persons.50 On rare occasions, Western observers provided more detailed information about enslavement and slave trading in China. In 1891, Rev. Thomas McCloy described a network that supplied Canton with children abducted in Henan province: During theatre times and processions these men often select their victim and lie in wait for the first opportunity to seize and secure him or her. In this latter case the Mandarins will interfere, and sometimes exert considerable ability in tracing the kidnappers. […] There is a place in Honan where slaves are bought and sold and much money is made by it. There is a man now at Ping Nam, Kwong Sai, who was bought by this place at $80 and sold to Ping Nam ln K’un at $100. Many such cases could be given. There is a man who lives in a village opposite Ng Chau, who is a regular slave dealer. He came to my boat and offered boys for sale from $50 upwards. When I saw him he had six on hand for disposal. It is said that

49

For contemporary documents on the “Tientsin massacre,” see Philibert Dabry de Thiersant, Le massacre de Tientsin et nos intérêts dans l’Empire chinois (Paris: Ch. Douniol et Cie, 1872). 50 The Tientsin Massacre, Being Documents Published in the Shanghai Evening Courier, from June 16th to Sept. 10th, 1870, with an Introductory Narrative, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: A.H. de Carvalho, 1870), ix. Adoption was a ritually and legally sanctioned procedure meant to help perpetuate the (male) descent line. However, children (and sometimes adults) were adopted for other purposes. Some resorted to adoption to secure loyalty, while many, especially in the late Ming period, used it as a means to circumvent the law prohibiting the enslavement of ordinary subjects. On adoption and bondage, see Ann B. Waltner, Getting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), 85–88.

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several hundreds yearly pass down through Ng Chau to be sold in Kwong Tung province.51 McCloy also reported that, in addition to being abducted, children were sold into slavery by their parents or other relatives in times of extreme want or were acquired under false pretenses: “Men go into the interior of China, tell fathers and mothers that their sons and daughters may have easy work and large wages, if they will go with them to a different district or to some foreign port. Thus, by fair promises and bright prospects, the young men and women are beguiled away to slavery and, to ruin.”52 Fifteen years later, Rev. William Cornaby reported that the Yangzi River was a major route used by kidnappers and slave dealers operating from Hankou (Hubei) to supply Shanghai, 500 miles to the east, with Chinese “slave girls,” some of whom were subsequently sent overseas to unspecified places.53 The fragmentary evidence of human trafficking in Ming and Qing China at our disposal indicate that people were enslaved and trafficked for many reasons including war, natural disasters, poverty, and, as modern Chinese historians have emphasized, the devastating consequences of peasants being dispossessed of their land.54 Although it is impossible to determine the scale of human trafficking in early modern China, Chinese sources leave little doubt that trafficking networks existed well before the Portuguese arrived early in the sixteenth century. The Veritable Records of the Chenghua era (1464–87), for instance, report that in the 1480s, networks of outlaws in Nan’an and Ganzhou prefectures in southern Jiangxi concealed “vagrant people to supply [rich families] with house slaves ( jianu) and bonded tenants (dianpu).”55 Other sources attest to the fact that during both the Ming and Qing eras, the area around Suzhou (Jiangsu) was famous not only for its gardens, but also for its “households storing [young girls] awaiting [to be sold]” (dengtun hu); these girls, from poor families, had been bought and raised by people who, “expecting great profit, sold them to distant provinces as concubines and servants.”56 51

Thomas McCloy, “Is Slavery as Practiced Among the Chinese Immoral?,” The Chinese Recorder (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1891), vol. 22, 570–71. 52 Ibid, 568–70. 53 William Cornaby, “Letter to the Times” (Sept. 29, 1906), in Hosea B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1921), 484–85. 54 Niu Jianqiang 牛建強. “Mingdai nupu yu shehui 明代奴僕與社會,” Shixue yuekan 4 (2002): 101. 55 Ming Xianzong Chun huangdi (Chenghua) shilu 明憲宗純皇帝成化實錄 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1966), juan 281, 4733. 56 See Wei Qingyuan 韋慶遠, Wu Qiyan 吳奇衍 and Lu Su 魯素, Qingdai nubi zhidu 清代 奴婢制度 (Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1982), 47.

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Human trafficking was also often a sideline business for outlaws involved in smuggling illicit goods. Mao Yilu (?–1629), the prefectural judge of Songjiang in the first decade of the seventeenth century, was once confronted with the case of a notorious scoundrel by the name of Huang Gai from Shanghai district who was at the center of a sprawling criminal gang.57 The judge’s sketchy report reveals that in addition to a wide array of illicit activities that included smuggling salt (xingfan), Huang had illegally enslaved a man, sold the man’s wife after he died, and then seized their son. Mao Yilu also records that Huang had purchased a woman as a concubine only to sell her for profit. Although it is unclear whether Huang and his associates dealt in human merchandise on a regular basis, the judge’s report shows that smugglers and criminals did not hesitate to do so if the opportunity presented itself. The opportunistic enslavement and trafficking of men, women, and children is a regular theme in Chinese judicial narratives which also provide more detailed information about the dynamics of this activity. A case included in Li Jun’s ( js. 1817) Record of Surviving Judgements is a telling example of the connection between opportunistic and professional trafficking.58 More specifically, in June 1829, Li Tiancheng came before the Luoyang prefectural court (Henan) accused by one Han Deyuan of having “illicitly sold” his wife, née Shu. The year before, Li decided to visit relatives in Ruzhou, 40 miles away from his home in Songxian district. Unable to find his relatives, he returned to Songxian. What happened next was all too common in late Qing China: Running out of travel money, [Han] agreed with Madame Shu. He entrusted her to the Innkeeper Li Tiancheng who, as a go-between, sold her as a wife to Liu Shiqian for 132 cash. Afterwards, observing that in those dearth years people were cheap in Hubei [province], [Han] had the idea to engage in the business and make profit. He entrusted Tiancheng with 152 cash to buy a widow, née Qiu, from the Li family of Gucheng [150 miles south of Luoyang], whom he sold again to Xu Diankui as a concubine for 165 cash.59 Li and Han ultimately had an argument in which Li, claiming that Han had not honored his gambling debts, retained more than his share from the sale of 57

Mao Yilu 毛一鷺, Yunjian yanlüe 雲間讞略 [ca. 1605], in Yang Yifan and Xu Lizhi, eds., Lidai panli pandu (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005), vol. 3, 439–40. 58 Li Jun 李鈞, Panyu lucun 判語錄存 [pref. 1832], in Yang Yifan and Xu Lizhi, eds., Lidai panli pandu (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005), vol. 10, 9–10. 59 Ibid, 9.

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the widow Qiu. In retaliation, Han accused Li of having abducted and illicitly sold his wife, Madame Shu. After eventually untangling this case’s details, the judicial authorities determined that the sale of Madame Shu was only a minor offence not worth discussing since Han had only engaged in the all-too-common offence of “sale of divorce” (maixiu), i.e., selling one’s wife.60 However, the purchase of the widow Qiu in Hubei province only to sell her for profit in Henan was a far more serious crime for which Li and Han were sentenced to penal servitude according to the sub-statute on “Kidnapping and selling” promulgated in 1759 and revised in 1801. That law stipulated that “He who traffics (xingfan) wives, sons, and daughters and resells them to others as slaves shall be sentenced to one hundred blows and exile to 3,000 li. He who resells them to others as wife, concubine, child or grand-child shall be sentenced to one hundred blows and three years of penal servitude […].”61 Although Han and Li do not appear to have been professional traffickers, they clearly knew enough to find potential buyers hundreds of miles away and were aware of regional price differentials that allowed them to sell these women for a profit. As other court cases attest, large-scale human trafficking networks also operated in and across various provinces. One of the 33 judgements collected in the Anthology of Yu Chenglong’s Judgements provides an unusual example of trafficking networks that sprawled over Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. This judgment dates from Yu Chenglong (1617–84)’s service as magistrate of the district of Luocheng in Guangxi (1661–67), a district devastated during the Ming-Qing transition and still populated by “Miao barbarians.”62 The summary appended to a Republican-era edition of this undated judgment opens with the following statement: Niu Sen, an intelligent man, had a six years old son. One day, as he was strolling out of the gates, kidnapers abducted [his son]. Panic-stricken, [Niu] quickly reported to the district magistrate’s office. After hearing the report, Mr. Yu issued a warrant. Yet, everyone had evaporated. Where was [the boy] in tears to be found? As the runners were searching everywhere, the kidnapper attempted to break out and take Niu’s son to the

60

Statute 367 of the Great Qing Code (“Zongrong qiqie fanjian” 縱容妻妾犯姦 [Facilitating and Tolerating Wives or Concubines to Commit Fornication]). See Xue Yunsheng 薛允 升, comp., and Huang Jingjia 黃靜嘉, ed., Duli cunyi [chongkanben] 讀例存疑[重刊本] (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970), vol. 5, 1087. 61 Sub-statute 275.12: “Lüeren lüe mairen,” in Xue, Duli cunyi, vol. 4, 732. 62 Jiang Biqiu 江碧秋 and Pan Baolu 潘寳籙, eds., Luocheng Xianzhi 羅城縣志 (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1974), 277–79.

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countryside, acting precipitously. Although [the boy] was remaining quiet, his face was covered in tears. Upon seeing him, the runners found it suspicious. They approached [the kidnaper], took him by surprise, threatened him with their weapons, and brought him to the magistrate’s office.63 Upon questioning the suspect, named Ping Deyuan, Yu discovered that Ping had kidnapped boys and girls, all chosen for their appearance, on ten occasions during the preceding three years and sold them in Guangdong province, mostly as (male and female) prostitutes. Ping also confessed to belonging to a network of 80 child traffickers headquartered in Jiaying district, 300 miles east Luocheng in Guangdong, that operated all over Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Yu sentenced Ping to be beaten to death immediately and then reported his findings to the provincial judge and the governors-general of Guangdong and Guangxi so the other traffickers could be arrested. Twenty of them were captured and likewise sentenced to death. Yu estimated that at least 200 children had been victims of this hideous traffic. This was not the last time Yu Chenglong had to deal with human trafficking during his career. In a “Report to governor Zhang on local events” written when he was sub-prefect of Huangzhou in Hubei province (1669–74), Yu describes a local form of trafficking hitherto unknown to him: There is another sort of bandits. Gangs are constituted of three to five [people]. They hide in the woods. At dusk, they watch out for lonely travelers. Disguised as wild tigers, as soon as their rallying-cry resounds, they run out of the woods, swoop on the traveler, and force him into the deep woods. They tie him up and conceal him in a cave house deprived of daylight until they sell him away.64 Kidnapping “women and daughters” was so frequent in Huangzhou in the late 1660s that Yu officially admonished the local population against this practice.65 Almost a decade later, during the Three Feudatories revolt (1673–81), Yu, then treasurer of Fujian province (1679–80), once again had to face an increase in trafficking. One of Yu’s biographers provides the following statement: 63 64 65

Jinxia Gezhu 襟霞閣主, ed., Qingdai mingli pandu qizhong huibian 清代名吏判牘七種 匯編 (Taipei: Laogu wenhua, 2000), 37. Yu Chenglong 于成龍 and Fan Biaoxi 範彪西, comp., Yu Qingduan gong ji 于清端公集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), 2:11a–b. Ibid, 2:26a.

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In times of disorders, many boys and girls were abducted from Eastern Zhejiang and Jiangxi [to Fujian], and forced into slavery (nubi). The old and the weak were thrown away into ditches where hordes of corpses piled up. Mr. [Yu] raised funds to redeem them and help the little boys and girls return their villages and foster those who had nowhere to return. [Yu’s] office was soon filled with hundreds and thousands of people. A boat was fully loaded and supplied with provisions so that they could return to their parents and families.66 Administrators such as Yu Chenglong were often faced with instances of human trafficking during the early Qing period. It is important to note that imperial administrators did not oppose enslavement or slave ownership; when Yu traveled to Luocheng from his native Shanxi, he took five of his own “slaves” (nu) with him.67 During his attempts to reinstate the age-old Community Compact system (xiangyue),68 he also issued guidelines on how slaves (binü, nuli) were to be treated.69 What made Yu’s actions in Ping Deyuan’s case noteworthy was, therefore, not that Ping had enslaved children or that these children had been sold as prostitutes, but that the scale of his activities and their association with organized criminality threatened the social order. Although Yu’s documents do not contain information that allows us to reconstruct human trafficking networks in early Qing China in any detail, they point to a general pattern in which trafficked people were moved from poor, underdeveloped, and war-stricken inland areas such as Guangxi and the hinterland of Zhejiang and Jiangxi to economic centers in coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Fujian. Other sources help to flesh out this sketchy picture. At about the same time that Yu Chenglong was exposing the network of human trafficking between Guangxi and Guangdong, the governor-general of Guangdong, Lu Shandou, promulgated a “Prohibition against human trafficking by rascals from other provinces”:

66

Chen Tingjing 陳廷敬, “Yu Qingduan gong zhuan” 于清端公傳 (Biography of Mr. Yu Qingduan), in: Ibid, appendix 16a–b. 67 Ibid, 29a. 68 Originating in the Song period, the “Community Compact” was one of the various forms of gentry-led local community organizations “within which social harmony was to be promoted through proper instruction and material aid.” See Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 117. 69 Yu and Fan, Yu Qingduan gong ji, 2:13a–14a.

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Since the seas of the province of Guangdong are troubled, fathers and sons are forced to vagrancy, husbands and wives to separation, and one cannot rescue them all. There are also people who sell themselves because of hunger and cold, who are forced to sell [their children?] because of usury, who leave because of taxation, and fall into selling because of litigations. Recently, some have also lost their occupations due to [forced] relocations.70 Deprived of any prospect, husbands sell wives, fathers sell daughters, abandoning their own flesh and blood for a last respite, accepting dishonor to save their kin. The circumstances of their miserable lives are worth compassion. Nevertheless, they still sell Cantonese women and girls inside Guangdong. After a temporary separation, they can expect reunion when better times come. Even if they [remain apart], they still can expect to see one another. […] Once in the hands of traffickers they are as far from each other as Heaven and Earth. […] Moreover, seeking a good price, some forcibly sell [their wives and daughters] as entertainers who, refusing such a demeaning, jump into the river or hang themselves. For those women, crossing the border [of the province] is a turning point from life to death, from honorability to demeaning. Those whose responsibility it is to protect the people should apply greater severity and show extreme attention. When the passes are not strictly controlled, kidnappers proliferate. When the territory is not strictly scrutinized, receivers are attracted. When officials do not investigate trafficking, intermediaries feel enticed. […] From now on, if criminals from other provinces hide within the borders [of Guangdong] and buy wives and daughters, or if local scoundrels from our province, serving as intermediaries, try to entice [people] and take them out of the territory, everyone is entitled to investigate and report secretly to the local official. […] He who arrests one authentic trafficker and takes him to the tribunal will, if proved true after investigation, be rewarded with ten ounces of silver. […] The trafficker will be sentenced to immediate death by beating. If people have been compelled by cold and hunger, if they have sold willingly only to survive, they are permitted to present the sale agreement to the local official. Only after it is authenticated and affixed the official’s seal, is [the person] allowed to enter the [buyer’s] house. However, one might only be sold inside the province, not out of its frontiers.71 70 71

“Relocations” refer to the early Qing policy of coastal evacuation in their fight against “piracy.” Recorded in Li Yu (1611–80)’s New Book to Help in Government (Zizhi xinshu 資治新書): Li Yu 李漁, Li Yu quanji 李漁全集 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1992 [1663]), 476–77.

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Lu Shandou’s statement is noteworthy on two counts. First, it indicates that during the troubled years following the Qing conquest, Guangdong was not only a destination for persons trafficked from elsewhere in China, but also a source of captives for the domestic market. Unfortunately, his comments do not allow us to ascertain whether these locally-sourced captives were transported to other provinces, neighboring countries, or traded overseas. Secondly, Lu demonstrates a remarkable degree of compassion for those compelled by poverty, warfare, debt, heavy taxation, and other circumstances to sell their wives and/or children in order to survive, a degree of compassion consistent with a provincial official’s duty to “protect the people” from the tragic consequences of disorder.72 Lu’s narrative is very much in line with that of Yu Chenglong and many of their contemporaries that selling people as slaves and prostitutes was tolerable only when this commerce was driven by necessity and remained local. In Lu’s mind, such expediency was preferable to starving to death, all the more so since it was rectifiable once better times had returned. Trans-regional human trading, on the other hand, was perceived to be very harmful because it resulted in the traded person’s irreversible separation from his/her family and, moreover, was associated with criminal activities likely to destabilize social order. Lu’s “Prohibition against human trafficking” is therefore indicative of the conceptual distinction drawn in late imperial China between legitimate transactions in human beings motivated by survival and reproductive strategies, and the kind of long-distance, impersonal, and involuntary trafficking motivated solely by profit. Lu’s proposal to control the provincial borders and the validity of each transaction was meant to help distinguish between such “legitimate” and “illegitimate” transactions; it also bears witness to the Qing obsession with regaining control over the trade in human beings.73 Hubei province, in central China, was another important source of human trafficking long before Han Deyuan noticed that “people were cheap” there. In the early eighteenth century, the area around the city of Wuhan was a major destination for traffickers from Hunan province attracted by the prospect of acquiring cheap human merchandise. A 1725 memoir to the throne reports that in Wuchang and Hanyang districts “illegal intermediaries routinely lure the sons and daughters of the local people to sell them. There are also traffickers from Hunan hiding in the cities who lure and kidnap sons and daughters to 72 73

On the emperors’ and officials’ responsibility to prevent the enslavement of honorable subjects, see Chevaleyre, “Asservir pour punir,” 100–05. See Zhang Ning, “Entre loi des Miao et loi sur les Miao : Le cas du trafic d’êtres humains dans le Guizhou au XVIIIe siècle,” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 40 (2016): 95–97.

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traffic them to distant places.”74 This phenomenon had already been noticed by another Yu Chenglong (?–1714), governor-general of Huguang between 1703 and 1705. In a series of “Regulations for the prefectures and districts,” he vividly depicts “the custom of trafficking and decoying”: I heard of travelers from Hunan who, when in Hubei, buy people regardless of cost to use as obedient servants. Some criminals, organized in groups of three to five, set up traps to lure boys and girls from good families. Posing as [legitimate] sellers, they establish sales agreement. Once the money received, they share it and let the sold persons be boarded on ships. Then, they secretly bribe the passes and ferries controllers to have [the buyers] investigated; or they incite the sold person’s relatives to go after them and have them arrested and interrogated. When apprehended, they falsely pretend that the buyer is a kidnapper and a trafficker who should be taken to the tribunal. The [criminals’] acolytes then get out of their hideout and force [the buyer] to release [the person]. Not knowing what is true or false and wanting only to escape, the travelers from Hunan do not even ask where their money is gone. […] Some buyers, however, know how to avoid the traps. Once they have bought people, they conceal their date of departure, or board them on a different ship, so that many sons and daughters of good families are taken into the pitfalls of demeaning and servility.75 Like his colleagues in Guangdong and Guangxi, Yu did not question the legitimacy of slavery itself. However, unlike Lu Shandou, he did not seem to oppose the trans-regional traffic per se. His denunciation of opportunistic criminal activities that resulted in demeaning servility for the “sons and daughters of good families” confirms the importance of two elements in how human trafficking was defined in late imperial China: the misappropriation of the right to sell another person (rather than the sale itself), and its association with “banditry” which was seen as a major threat to social stability. Yu’s “Regulations” also confirm what recent studies have underlined about the post-Opium Wars and Republican eras, namely, that contrary to popular belief, bondage and human trafficking were not exclusive to coastal southern

74 75

Wei, Wu, and Lu, Qingdai nubi zhidu, 51. Liu Caibang 劉采邦 et al., comp., [Tongzhi] Changsha xianzhi [同治] 長沙縣志 (1871), 19:34b–35a.

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China.76 Beijing, situated 1,500 miles north of Guangdong province and about 900 miles northeast of Wuhan, was also a center of human trafficking. The Shunzhi era (1645–61) archives, for example, record the prosecution in Beijing of one Pi Si who had trafficked more than 100 persons. Pi, a notorious broker, was only one link in an extensive commodity chain that traded people from all over the empire, including Lanzhou in Gansu province, Kaiping in Guangdong, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, and Jinhua and Ningbo prefectures in Zhejiang province, as well as from around the capital city.77 The passage of time did nothing to ameliorate this situation; in 1684, the Kangxi emperor expressed his concern about the proliferation of traffickers’ “dens” (yaozi, a term also used for brothels) in Beijing where criminals congregated and “activities related to kidnapping never stopped.”78 In such places, people abducted or lured by the false promise of employment were tied up, beaten, kept captive, and exhibited to potential buyers.79 Similar practices are also reported in the devastated province of Shanxi after its conquest by the Qing, as well as in the lower Yangzi80 and the empire’s southwestern reaches. Sichuan province, home of the so-called “Sichuan traffickers” (Chuanfan), was yet another important center of human trafficking. In 1802, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820), worried by the situation in Sichuan, sent a secret edict to the province’s governor-general, a Manchu bannerman named Leboo (Chinese: Lebao, 1740–1819): Rumors say that since the autumn or winter of last year, scoundrels named “indigenous panthers” have appeared in northern and eastern Sichuan. Groups of several tens kidnap women and girls, gag them with pieces of cloth, tie them up, and carry them away in bags. They call it “opening 76

James L. Watson, “Chattel Slavery in Chinese Peasant Society: A Comparative Analysis,” Ethnology 15, no. 4 (1976): 361. For recent studies on trafficking and bondage in late QingRepublican Beijing, see Ransmeier, Sold People, and Zhang Xiuli 張秀麗, Minguo Beijing binü wenti yanjiu 民國北京婢女問題研究 (Beijing: Beijing Shifan daxue chubanshe, 2016). 77 Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan 中國第一歷史檔案館, ed., Qingdai dang’an shiliao congbian 清代檔案史料叢編, vol. 10, 108. See also: Qiao Suling 喬素玲, “Qingdai daji guaimai funü fanzui zhi kaocha 清代打擊拐賣婦女犯罪之考察,” Zhongguo shehui jingji shi yanjiu 3 (2002): 67. 78 Qing Shengzu Ren huangdi (Kangxi) shilu 清聖祖仁皇帝康熙實錄 (Taipei: Huawen shuju, 1970), juan 116, 213. 79 Kang, Yong, Qian shiqi chengxiang renmin fankang douzheng ziliao 康雍乾時期城鄉人 民反抗鬥爭資料 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), vol. 1, 370–71. 80 1681 memorial by censor Xie Zhaochang ( js. 1667), reproduced in: Wei, Wu and Lu, Qingdai nubi zhidu, 53.

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the hall” (kaitang).81 From the rivers of Sichuan, they transport [their victims] on boats sailing to Hubei for selling. At the [controlled] passages, the [officials’] retainers and runners receive money to grant them safe passage. […] Sub-prefects and district magistrates know about it but keep silent and do not interfere. […] You shall immediately investigate in secret and establish the truth. If there are only one or two instances, quickly identify, apprehend, and punish the responsible officials according to the law. If there are many involved, do not let the difficulties stop you. Do what is necessary and use the military if you must. The evil must be entirely eradicated. If not, it will resurge in other forms.82 According to the emperor, the victims, who were mostly women, were transported eastward along the Yangzi River to Hubei where the youngest were sold as prostitutes, while those who were older were transported to Jiangxi to provide bonded labor for the production of the world-famous porcelains of Jingdezhen.83 His account demonstrates that the river route from Sichuan to the lower Yangzi was already a major avenue of human trafficking a century before William Cornaby and the Chinese scholar Xu Ke (1869–1928) noted its importance. The Yangzi’s middle and upper courses, between Chongqing and Huangzhou, were particularly dangerous places for female travelers.84 While the emperor’s edict suggests that Sichuan traffickers exported people abducted in the province, there is evidence that the neighboring province of Guizhou, south of Sichuan, was actually their major source of supply. A Daoguang era (1820–50) source reported that, “With few mountains and little fields, [Guizhou] populations live in dire conditions. Women are not trained to the needlework and have little means of livelihood. Hard-pressed people sell them and traffickers from all the provinces travel to buy them by numbers and make profit.”85 In the early nineteenth century, most such transactions took place in the province’s eastern prefectures of Liping, Sizhou, and Maha86 81

“Opening the hall” is a Buddhist term referring to the ceremony held by a newly appointed abbot. 82 Qing Renzong Rui huangdi ( Jiaqing) shilu 清仁宗睿皇帝嘉慶實錄 (Taipei: Huawen shuju, 1970), juan 97, 304. 83 Ibid. 84 Xu Ke 徐珂, Qingbai leichao 清稗類鈔 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984 [1917]), vol. 11, 5380. 85 Qing Xuanzong Cheng huangdi (Daoguang) shilu 清宣宗成皇帝乾隆實錄 (Taipei: Huawen shuju, 1970), juan 50, 887. 86 Sources also mention places in central and northern Guizhou, and on the edges of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. See: Wei, Wu, and Lu, Qingdai nubi zhidu, 53; Zhang Zhongkui 張中奎, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai lüci buzhi de

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where bands of local traffickers operated from dens and caves, controlled river passages, and exported human merchandise not only to Sichuan, but also directly to Hunan and Jiangxi. The scale of this activity is suggested by the case of one Miao Zongyang who headed a network of 60 persons and had been involved himself in at least 120 kidnappings.87 That human trafficking in Guizhou remained a major source of concern for imperial authorities between the early eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century is underscored by the fact that most of the sub-statutes in Article 275 of the Qing penal code, which dealt with kidnapping and slave trading, concerned Sichuan traffickers’ trading people from Guizhou. The first such regulation was promulgated in 1727.88 Although the text does not provide much information about the practices that these traffickers used, it testifies to the perceived gravity of the situation and reveals a pragmatic approach on the part of the central government: As for people from other provinces who buy sons and daughters of the poor in Guizhou, those are required to report to the local official so that they stamp and authorize the transaction. One person is not permitted to buy and take to another province [more than] three persons. Each subprefecture and district will establish an official broker. When buying or selling a man or a woman, one will rely on the official broker who will check the provenience, decide the price and establish a contract mentioning the name, address, and date of birth of the boy or girl before it is certified by the official. […] If a contract is not signed by the official broker or if a transaction concerns more than three persons, [the culprits] will be prosecuted [according to the law on] trafficking.89 The text also prescribes sanctions against officials and brokers who fail to discharge their duties or collude with the traffickers. While this sub-statute did not alter the kidnapping statute’s existing provisions, it expanded what constituted “trafficking” in Guizhou to include any yuanyin 論清代前期貴州苗疆人口販賣屢禁不止的原因,” Zhongnan minzu daxue xuebao 29, no. 2 (2009): 73; Qi Rui 祁睿, “Yongzheng nianjian de Yun-Gui-Chuan diqu renkou fanmai 雍正年間雲貴川地區人口販賣與整飭研究,” MA thesis, Northwest University for Nationalities, 2012, 15. 87 Qing Renzong Rui huangdi shilu, juan 254, 432–433; juan 337, 448. Zhang, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai,” 73. 88 Sub-statute 275.5: Xue, Duli cunyi, vol. 4, 730. A similar proposal had been submitted by Gao Qizhuo in 1724. See Zhang, “Entre loi des Miao et loi sur les Miao,” 93–94. 89 Xue, Duli cunyi, vol. 4, 730.

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transaction (no matter how a person had been acquired, by whom he/she had been sold, or their destination) that had not been first sanctioned by local authorities, or that involved selling more than three persons at a time beyond the province’s borders. The 1727 sub-statute also points to the fact that Sichuan traffickers in Guizhou dealt mostly in indigenous Miao people who often themselves supplied these traffickers with human merchandise. Miao boys and girls were available in large numbers in Guizhou not only to professional traffickers, but also to itinerant salesmen who, in addition to selling commodities such as horses and foodstuffs, bought and sold a few Miao slaves to make an additional profit.90 Memorials by provincial officials such as that written by Gao Qizhuo in the 1720s described this activity: The price of people is higher in Sichuan. Sichuan traffickers rely on Guizhou scoundrels who themselves rely on the various Miao (tribes) to capture and kidnap people. […] Every time the Miao sell one person to local scoundrels, they receive four or five ounces. When reselling to Sichuan traffickers, local scoundrels receive more than ten ounces per person. And when the traffickers enter Sichuan, they receive more than twenty ounces per person.91 Recent scholarship points to the spectacular depopulation of Sichuan as a result of the natural disasters, famines, and warfare that plagued the province from the late Ming period to the end of the Three Feudatories revolt in the early 1720s as a major reason for Guizhou’s attractiveness to Sichuan traffickers.92 Sichuan’s rapid repopulation at the end of the seventeenth century suggests, however, that demographic factors alone cannot explain why human trafficking persisted in the province well into the nineteenth century.93 Numerous memorials and edicts, together with sub-statutes that consolidated existing legislation against traffickers and increased punishments for those convicted of engaging in this activity, attest as much. For example, a 1738 sub-statute that 90 91 92 93

See Ortai’s 1729 memorial, reproduced in: Zhang, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai,” 73. Imperial edict quoted after Zhang, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai,” 72. Ibid. See also Zhang, “Entre loi des Miao et loi sur les Miao,” 90–91. By the 1690s, the provincial authorities reported that “the population of the province […] had surpassed Ming levels” (Thomas Buoye, Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 154–55). See also: Ding Guangling 丁光 玲, Qingchao qianqi liumin ancha zhengce yanjiu 清朝前期流民安插政策研究 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 2006), 168–73.

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elaborated on already existing laws on abduction and the forced sale of people kidnapped and stored in “caves” (yao)94 mandated immediate decapitation of those in Guizhou who guided and/or concealed Sichuan traffickers, and who abducted, kept captive, and sold people.95 Nine years later, another substatute imposed immediate decapitation and exposure of the head on “roving rascals” from other provinces who went to isolated villages to kill their Miao (and other) inhabitants, abduct their wives and children, and sell them.96 The same sub-statute also extended the Guizhou regulations to the neighboring provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, an act which suggests that this problem did not afflict only Guizhou and Miao populations and, moreover, that measures against human trafficking in southwestern China during this period were relatively ineffective.97 If demography contributed to the development of this traffic in Guizhou Miao populations, other variables may explain its persistence over time. Some historians have identified Guizhou’s mountainous terrain and lack of arable land, its endemic poverty, and its “backward” economy as contributing issues.98 Others have pointed to the corruptibility of the officials sent to what were seen as the empire’s inhospitable margins, and to “cultural” influences, especially the racial antipathy of the Han-Chinese and Manchus for the southwestern “barbarians” whom, as a Guizhou provincial examiner noted in 1736, they oppressed, tyrannized, and “treated like dogs and horses.”99 The accelerated “opening up” of the Miao borderlands that began during the Yongzheng era (1723–35) also played a major role in the development of human trafficking. The policy known as “replacing the native chieftaincies with the circulating officials” (gaitu guiliu) increased contacts and opened a relatively isolated region to greater numbers of merchants and adventurers capable of exploiting a situation in which local traditions of plundering villages, conducting vendettas, and ransoming kidnapped persons meant that men, women, and children were often viewed as little more than commodities to be exploited.100 94 95 96 97

Sub-statutes 275.2, 275.3: Xue, Duli cunyi, vol. 4, 727–29. Sub-statute 275.6: Ibid, 730. Sub-statute 275.8: Ibid, 731. This is also suggested by a 1727 imperial edict ordering the governors of Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, and Sichuan to control the major routes in search for traffickers. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan 中國第一歷史檔案館, ed., Yongzheng chao hanwen yuzhi huibian 雍正朝漢文諭旨匯編 (Guilin: Guangxi Shifan daxue chubanshe, 1999), vol. 10, juan 6, 94–95. 98 Qi, “Yongzheng nianjian de Yun-Gui-Chuan diqu renkou fanmai,” 13–14. 99 Zhang, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai,” 74–75. 100 Zhou Xiangqing 周相卿, “Qingdai Qian dongnan xinpi Miaojiang. Liuting diqu de falü kongzhi 清代黔東南新辟苗疆. 六廳地區的法律控制,” Faxue yanjiu 6 (2003): 150–51;

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Warfare also supplied the market with human merchandise and undermined the central government’s efforts against human trafficking. In the late 1730s, for instance, Qing armies enslaved massive numbers of the relatives of “Miao rebels” who were sold to Sichuan traffickers at prices fixed by the local authorities.101 4

Conclusion

Historian David Faure observed recently that long-distance trade linked China’s southwestern regions not only to the empire’s center, but also to Southeast and Central Asia.102 As the sources discussed above reveal, complex, sprawling human trafficking networks that reached from one end of the empire to the other were an integral component of this long-distance trade. These sources demonstrate, moreover, that this traffic was not something that began only with Europeans’ arrival on China’s southern shores early in the sixteenth century, nor was it limited to remote areas inhabited by “uncivilized” indigenous populations. They likewise reveal that if Japanese, Indian, and African slaves were present in Macao during the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were not the only ones to import foreign slaves into China. In 1738, for example, Lin Luodao, a merchant from the southern island of Hainan, was convicted of having imported many illicitly purchased males and females from Annam (modern Vietnam). His case was regarded as representative enough to lead to the promulgation the following year of a new sub-statute prohibiting the trafficking of “overseas barbarians” by “subjects from the interior.”103 If these documents provide us with a new sense of the scale and dynamics of human trafficking in Ming and Qing China, our understanding of this phenomenon nevertheless remains sketchy at best. Much remains to be done to move beyond the macro-narrative that can be drawn from these kinds of administrative accounts. Doing so will require searching out and making innovative use of hitherto ignored colonial sources such as cargo manifests, customs, court, and ecclesiastical records, censuses, and chronicles. As recent Qi, “Yongzheng nianjian de Yun-Gui-Chuan diqu renkou fanmai,” 18–21. On gaitu guiliu 改土歸流 policy, see Ding, Qingchao qianqi liumin ancha zhengce yanjiu, 133–38. 101 Zhang, “Lun Qingdai qianqi Guizhou Miaojiang renkou fanmai,” 73–74. 102 David Faure and Ts’ui-p’ing Ho, Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 1. 103 Qing Gaozong Chun huangdi (Qianlong) shilu 清高宗純皇帝乾隆實錄 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1970), juan 70, 120. Sub-statute 275.11: Xue, Duli cunyi, vol. 4, 732.

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scholarship on Portuguese and Dutch slave trading in Southeast Asia attests, such materials can shed new light on various aspects of the European trade in Asian slaves before the nineteenth century.104 Doing so will also require a systematic exploration of the vast body of documentation that exists in China, beginning with the thousands of volumes of local gazetteers, the extensive imperial “veritable record,” and the numerous central and local judicial records. Such a task will require employing the methods used by those working in the digital humanities to gain a clearer picture of the numbers of slaves trafficked, trafficking routes and networks, size and operation of slave markets, and this activity’s local and regional economic impact. Such information will, in turn, allow historians to make effective use of contracts, genealogies, administrative archives, and private chronicles to reconstruct the history of slaving in China in ever greater detail. Equally important is the need to situate human trafficking in late imperial China in more fully developed regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. The necessity of doing so is illustrated by the fact that Chinese slaves acquired at Macau reached Portuguese Goa and Mozambique105 as well as the French-controlled island of Mauritius in the southwestern Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century.106 Guangdong not only shipped enslaved Chinese overseas, but also exported slaves from its coastal areas to inland regions while receiving the same via long-distance networks originating in Guangxi, and probably beyond. That the province also exported indentured laborers to Southeast Asia beginning in the eighteenth century raises important questions about the extent to which and the ways in which the Chinese slave and other migrant labor trades were intertwined during the nineteenth century, if not before.107 The fact that the majority of those trafficked in late imperial China, 104 See, for example: Matthias van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek. De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azië onder de VOC (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2015); da Silva Ehalt, “Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery”; Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 105 Boxer, Fidalgos, 223–25, 238. 106 Marina Carter, “A Servile Minority in a Sugar Island: Malay and Chinese Slaves in Mauritius,” in Jacques Weber, ed., Le monde créole: Peuplement, sociétés et condition humaine, XVIIe–XXe siècles (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005), 257–71. 107 On the interconnectedness of the slave, convict, and indentured labor trades in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Indian Ocean, see Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 3. On Chinese labor migration to Southeast Asia before the mid-nineteenth century, see Craig A. Lockard, “Chinese Migration and Settlement in Southeast Asia before 1850: Making Fields from the Sea,” History Compass 9, no. 11 (2013): 765–81. On indentured Chinese laborers and the origins of the nineteenth-century indentured labor system,

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like the majority of slaves trafficked elsewhere in Asia and the Indian Ocean world, were women and children likewise highlights the need to examine slavery and slave trading in China in more fully developed comparative contexts,108 especially since the sale, commodification, or enslavement of human beings were commonly shared features of early modern Asian societies. Only when we do so will we begin to appreciate the global significance of slavery in late imperial China. see Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the PostEmancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014): 328–48. 108 For recent scholarship on women and child slaves, see: Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, 2 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007–08); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Children in Slavery through the Ages (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

Chapter 7

Korea: A Slave Society Christopher Lovins Our state’s slave law is ancient, and the scholar-officials depend on [slaves] to survive … Slaves are the hands and feet of the literati. Inspector-General Yang Sŏng-ji (1468)1

…

In fact, it is in the oriental state of Korea that we find one of the most extraordinary cases of economic dependence on slaves among all peoples and all periods. Large-scale slavery flourished there for over a thousand years up to the nineteenth century. For several centuries the service population was proportionately higher than the one in the U.S. South at its peak of dependence on slavery in the nineteenth century. Orlando Patterson (1982)2

∵ This chapter has two goals. The first is to provide an overview of slavery in Korea from the early Koryŏ (935–1392) to late Chosŏn period (1392–1910). This overview will consider how Korean slavery was similar to and different from that elsewhere in East Asia, especially China and Japan, and ascertain whether it is proper to call pre-modern Korea a slave society. The second is to determine how slavery in Korea can deepen our understanding of slavery elsewhere in the world. The need to do so reflects the fact that a status system based on perceived differences in morality led Koreans to enslave other Koreans and their descendants on a massive scale. Perhaps uniquely in world history, slavers during the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties not only preferred to enslave women and 1 我國家奴婢之法。其來尙矣。而士大夫倚以爲生者也。 … 奴婢士之手足。 The Veritable Record of King Sejo’s Reign 世祖實錄 1468.6.18. 2 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), viii.

© Christopher Lovins, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_009

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men who were ethnically, linguistically, and culturally indistinguishable from themselves, but also did so to such an extent that they became heavily dependent upon their compatriots’ forced labor. 1

The Origins and Characteristics of Korean Slavery

Hereditary slavery had a long history in Korea. Although records before the Koryŏ period are scarce, slavery probably existed during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE) and clearly existed during the Late Silla (668–935) period.3 Slavery was also a prominent feature of Korean society; slaves comprised approximately 30 percent of the peninsula’s population from at least the eleventh to the eighteenth century. While Korea’s sumptuary laws did not bar commoners from owning slaves, few probably did so before the eighteenth-century commercial boom that witnessed an increase in the number of wealthy commoners and a drop in the real price of slaves. This boom was stimulated by a number of factors. The population rebounded after the devastation of the Imjin War (1592–98), which entailed two Japanese invasions of the Korean peninsula, Manchu invasions in 1627 and 1637, and a disastrous famine in 1695. Korea experienced two centuries of unbroken peace after the Manchu invasions during which the requirement that peasants had to serve on active military duty was replaced by a grain tax which freed peasants from manning garrisons and allowed them to devote their energies to more productive labor. In 1750, King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–76) equalized military taxes further by reducing the tax burden on commoners and imposing an additional tax on the upper class. The gradual implementation during the seventeenth century of the taedong taxation system also helped to transform Korea’s social and economic landscape. The taedong system replaced a cumbersome and costly internal tribute system that had required areas to deliver specific tribute items, many of which were not produced locally and had to be obtained elsewhere at enormous expense, to the capital for tabulation and redistribution. By introducing a proportional grain tax that included greater taxation of wealthy landlords, the taedong system eliminated much of the graft and corruption that characterized the tribute system and lowered the cost of doing business for merchants. An increasingly cash-based economy in turn forced the government to obtain the copper needed to mint coins from both domestic sources and through trade with Japan. The state was also forced to legalize the 3 Cho Bup-jong 조법종, “Silla wanggwŏn kwa nobije 신라 왕권과 노비제 [Royal Power and the Slave System in Silla],” Silla munhwa 신라문화 22 (2003): 164.

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extensive illicit trade that had expanded during the eighteenth century by ending its trade monopolies in 1791.4 Before this eighteenth-century commercial expansion, only nobles could afford to keep slaves. The yangban nobility’s place atop the social pyramid was guaranteed by their extensive Confucian education, prestigious family lineages, and vast landed estates. While government officials routinely decried both the voluntary and involuntary enslavement of commoners by wealthy landowners, the institution of hereditary slavery itself was not challenged until the latter half of the Chosŏn kingdom. Reformers bemoaned the state’s loss of private slaves’ labor since they were exempt from both military service and corvée labor and taxes. The crisis of the Imjin War began the long, slow process of reducing the size of Korea’s enormous slave population which began to decline rapidly during the eighteenth century.5 Slavery in Korea began originally as a form of state-sanctioned punishment which subsequently developed into a system of domestic and agricultural servitude.6 William Shaw has written that “Chinese criminal law was of major, perhaps even overwhelming importance in the administration of traditional Korean justice,”7 and such was also the case with slavery. As in China, slaves’ essential humanity was recognized in Korea, arguably more so than in any other region in East Asia. This acknowledgement of slaves as people was no doubt stimulated by the lack of any linguistic, ethnic, or regional differences between slaves and their masters. Slaves were near the bottom of the social and moral hierarchies that dominated traditional Korea, but they remained as much a part of those hierarchies as their masters; they were not outsiders. As in China, Korean slaves were distinct from convict laborers and those forced into military service. Treason and rebellion, for example, were punished by executing the offender and enslaving his wife and children, while lesser crimes 4 James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 227–28, 769–814, 854–76. For an in-depth discussion of the equalization of the military tax, see pages 550–68 of the same volume. 5 Hong Sŭng-gi 홍승기, Koryŏ kwijok sahoe wa nobi 고려 귀족사회와 노비 [Koryŏ Slavery and Aristocratic Society] (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1983); Ellen Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1978. 6 Chŏn Hyŏng-t’aek 전형택, “Han’guk nobi ŭi chonjae yangt’ae 한국노비의 존재 양태 [Aspects of the Existence of Korean Slaves],” in Yŏksa hakhoe 역사 학회, Nobi, nongno, noye: yesongmin ŭi pigyosa 노비ㆍ농노ㆍ노예: 예송민의 비교사 [Slave, Serf, Servant: A Comparison of Subservient Classes] (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1998), 300. 7 William Shaw, “Traditional Korean Law and Its Relation to China,” in Jerome Alan Cohen, R. Randle Edwards, and Fu-mei Chang Chen, eds. Essays on China’s Legal Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 303.

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might be punished with an extended period (typically three years) of military service or banishment. The state’s desperate need for manpower to fend off invading Japanese armies during the Imjin War forced King Sŏnjo (r. 1567–1608) to incorporate massive numbers of slaves into the army, an act that created new opportunities for many of these enslaved individuals, especially those who fought bravely on the battlefield, to acquire their freedom. Manumission for such bravery was nothing new in Korea. During King Ch’ungjŏng’s reign (1349–51), public slaves who fought bravely against Japanese pirates could choose either manumission or a cash payment as a reward for doing so.8 The scale of the crisis during the Imjin War resulted in the use of this practice and other more innovative methods to ensure that slave soldiers fought bravely, including permitting slaves to take the military examinations and be manumitted if they passed,9 and manumitting men who took a certain number of enemy heads. Slaves also served with commoners in the newly established Army of Bundled Fireteams (sog’o’gun). Military service had the added benefit of establishing the precedent for levying the military cloth tax on slaves, albeit at a lower rate than commoners paid, when that tax was introduced during the eighteenth century.10 Korean slaves can be categorized according to their owners and their tasks. The first such distinction was between government-owned or public (kong) slaves and private (sa) slaves owned primarily by the aristocracy. Public slaves originated as criminals (especially during the Koryŏ dynasty) or prisoners of war (mostly during the preceding Three Kingdoms and Late Silla eras), although by the late Koryŏ period most slaves had inherited their status rather being enslaved by either of these methods. Public slaves served as domestic servants for officials or royal princes, as low-level clerks in the state bureaucracy, and as tenant workers on state land. Tenant slaves were effectively small independent farmers whose labor was not expected to be a major source of state revenue, but rather to offset the cost of maintaining other public slaves.11 The payment they owed the state was fixed by law, which was adhered to until at least the sixteenth century. Public slaves worked only between the ages of 15 and 59. Privately owned slaves were distinguished on the basis of where they lived and their duties. Domestic slaves were those who either lived in their master’s household and performed a wide variety of household tasks or worked land 8 9 10 11

Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 41. Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 227–28. As many as 30,000 may have done so. Ibid, 228, 258. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 43.

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near the household under his direct supervision. Nonresident slaves lived and worked on land owned by their master but apart from his household and direct supervision. Privately held slaves either sold themselves originally into slavery because of poverty or were forced into servitude by rich and powerful families where their status and that of their children became hereditary. Unlike their public counterparts, there were no limits on how long private slaves worked. Before the twelfth century, most private slaves served as domestic servants in aristocratic households. However, with the Koryŏ aristocracy’s acquisition of large landed estates during and after the twelfth century, most private slaves worked as agricultural laborers.12 Although outnumbered by their agricultural counterparts, the value of household slaves’ domestic labor to the Korean elite cannot be overestimated.13 As James Palais has noted, the yangban argued for the maintenance of slavery because “the children of the aristocrats were so pampered by their slaves who did all the household labor that they would have to undergo almost total reeducation to ordinary household tasks” if the institution were abolished.14 Aristocrats were so dependent on their domestic slaves that without them they could not prepare food, heat their houses in winter, or navigate the roads outside their homes.15 Slaves also served as their master’s agents capable of entering into both legal and informal agreements on their master’s behalf; their ability to do so was so entrenched that the tax official’s slave, who collected oppressive taxes from villagers for his master, was a stock character in stories near the end of the Koryŏ period.16 As economic development expanded in the eighteenth century, some yangban were able to circumvent the taboo against aristocratic involvement in commercial activity by using their slaves as proxies in such activity.17 Slaves truly were the “hands and feet” of the nobles, so much so that their continued subjugation, at least at the household level, had to be maintained even as they became an economic burden to their masters during the nineteenth century. In addition to the state and aristocracy, Buddhist temples also held large numbers of slaves during the Koryŏ period; the state seized 80,000 such 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid, 48–49. Kichung Kim 김기중, “Unheard Voices: The Life of the Nobi in O Hwi-mun’s Swaemirok,” Korean Studies 27 (2003): 111. Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 229. Kim, “Unheard Voices,” 114–15. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 51. Martina Deuchler, “Social and Economic Developments in Eighteenth-Century Korea,” in Anthony Reid, ed., The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 309.

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bondmen shortly after the establishment of the Chosŏn kingdom. Individual monks could also own slaves who were categorized separately from those held by the temple, but these personal slaves were not numerous enough to attract government attention.18 Most temple slaves farmed the temple’s lands, but they were also involved in metalwork, manufacturing handicrafts, cooking food for the monks, sewing and weaving, and selling products produced by the temple. As a result of state restrictions on Buddhism and the subsequent seizure of temple slaves after the advent of the Chosŏn dynasty, temples ceased being major slaveholders by the middle of the fifteenth century. A law handed down by the possibly mythical Jizi (K. Kija), a member of the Shang court who came to Korea when that Chinese kingdom fell in the eleventh century BCE, provided the legal basis for slavery in Korea. The Book of Han reports that Jizi went to Chosŏn, called “Old Chosŏn” by modern scholars to distinguish it from the early modern state of the same name. Until the Late Silla period, captured soldiers and refugees fleeing distant wars, who may have been ethnically and culturally distinct from Koreans, were probably the most common source of slaves in ancient Korea.19 By the eleventh century, however, the cultural and political forces that bound Koryŏ into a truly unified polity meant that slaves had become indistinguishable from their masters ethnically, culturally, or linguistically. The scale of slavery may also have increased to as much as 40 percent of the total population by the late Koryŏ period. Apart from its scale and enslavement of ethnically and culturally similar people, slavery in Korea functioned much as it did in China where slavery was more about social order than property, even though slaves were transferred to descendants and relatives together with other possessions. Although the eminent Sinologist E.G. Pulleybank included the term “chattel slavery” in the title of his article on slavery in China, he noted that Chinese slavery is better understood by appreciating that slaves were classified on the basis of their being “base” (ch’ŏn) people, that is, by their place in the bottom of the social hierarchy rather than on their being treated as property per se.20 Pamela Crossley in turn has stated bluntly that “chattel slavery was not a part of imperial China’s history.” More specifically, she argues that, “[i]n early imperial times, men typically listed their wives and children as property (as women frequently listed their slaves), to be distributed after death along with their lands, animals, and buildings.” As such, slaves in China were distinguished 18 19 20

Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 46–47. Cho Bup-jong, “Silla wanggwŏn kwa nobije,” 168–69. E.G. Pulleyblank, “The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, no. 2 (1958): 213–14.

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more as people who were totally under another’s control and “legally invisible” than as property.21 In both China and Korea, slaves were socially “dead” beings because they were excluded from their master’s family genealogy.22 While James Palais has pointed out that Koreans “used the terminology of chattel property to describe slaves,”23 they also relied on naming practices, legal distinctions, and family relationships to alienate slaves socially and keep them under their master’s control since they were otherwise not outsiders but spoke the same language and followed the same customs of dress, family relationships, and religious beliefs as any other Korean. Orlando Patterson has argued that slavery was “a conditional commutation” of what would otherwise be a death sentence,24 a statement that holds true for Korea where the worst male criminals would be executed while their wives and children, regardless of whether or not they were involved in the crime, escaped death by being enslaved. The extent to which Korean slaves were socially dead is also revealed by the fact that their honor or dignity was not taken into consideration when they were charged with crimes. Such was not the case for commoners whose defense of their dignity or that of their family members was carefully considered when a magistrate determined how their case should be handled.25 In both China and Korea, a master served as the slave’s legal “father,” a status that entailed both social superiority and a certain responsibility to care for the slave. In Koryŏ and probably in Chosŏn as well, a master could be punished for not burying his dead slave properly since he was the legal stand-in for the otherwise fatherless slave.26 Likewise, there were legal protections against killing slaves arbitrarily. In China, slave children had the same protection from filicide as non-slaves, masters had to register private slaves’ disobedience with officials before they could be punished, and masters themselves could be punished for excessive harshness if their slave died as a result of their punishment, although this happened only infrequently. In Korea, slaves could be the subject 21 22 23 24 25 26

Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 187, 191, 211. Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and Robin D.S. Yates, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb No. 247, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 215. Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 212. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5. See, for example, the case of Pak Pong-son who was exonerated because he was defending his father from insult and attack (William Shaw, Legal Norms in a Confucian State [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], case 475). Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 58.

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or object of a lawsuit involving anyone but their masters, and a slave was permitted to petition the king for redress of her master’s punishment for crimes.27 Masters sometimes turned a slave over to the local magistrate or governor for sentencing “according to the law,” even after having punished the slave privately.28 Such practices, which reflected traditional norms in both Korea and China that no one, even a private slave, is ever totally outside state control, differ from those in Japan where cases involving a master or a member of his family killing a slave were considered to be a “private affair” that did not belong in the courts.29 Similarly, the attempted murder of a master by a slave was not included in the general amnesty granted upon the accession of a new king to the throne, just as the attempted murder of a parent by a child, and no slaves were freed as part of that amnesty, excepting only the family members of those serving hard military labor in frontier border districts.30 If there were similarities between Chinese and Korean slavery, there were also some important differences. During the Koryŏ period, the punishment of slaves was markedly less harsh than in China, a state of affairs that probably reflected the relative leniency of Koryŏ legal punishments in general,31 but may also reflect Korean slaves’ closeness to their masters in ethnic and cultural terms. In Han China (206 BCE–220 CE), for example, a runaway slave was tattooed on the face if he was captured before he surrendered himself to authorities. In Koryŏ, however, a slave had to run away three times before being subjected to facial branding; the first two instances of maroonage resulted merely in the slave being returned to his master upon recapture, a practice 27 28 29

30

31

Shaw, “Traditional Korean Law,” 312; Christopher Lovins, An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (New York: State University of New York Press, 2019). Kim, “Untold Stories,” 123. Robin D.S. Yates, “Slavery in Early China: A Socio-cultural Approach,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3, no. 1 (2001): 297; Marinus J. Meijer, “Slavery at the End of the Ch’ing Dynasty,” in Cohen, Edwards, and Chen, Essays on China’s Legal Tradition, 333; Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries),” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 148; Thomas Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 484; Younghoon Rhee 이영훈, “11–16-segi Han’guk ŭi nobi wa Ilbon ŭi ke’nin 11–16 세기 한국의 노비와 일본 의 게닌 [Korean Slaves and Japanese Low People in the 11th–16th Centuries],” Kyŏngje sahak 경제 사학 35 (2004): 21, 27–28. King Yŏnsan (r. 1494–1506) declared this upon his accession, noting that he was required to do so. See Haewon Kang, Lee Goeun, Lyndsey Twining, and Shin Jeongsoo, “An Annotated Translation of Daily Records of King Yeonsangun, Chapter One (the 25th Day to the 29th Day of the 12th Month of 1494),” Review of Korean Studies 20, no. 1 (2017), 206, 209–10. Ellen Salem (as Ellen Salem Unruh), “The Landowning Slave: A Korean Phenomenon,” Korea Journal 16, no. 4 (1976): 30.

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similar to how maroon slaves were treated in Japan.32 Korean slaves were generally punished in the same manner as commoners, a practice that was followed in Han China only when slaves were convicted of the most serious crimes such as treason and murder. For example, in Koryŏ both commoners and slaves could, upon the death of a parent, delay their punishment until after they had completed the proper mourning period, and both received identical sentences for lesser crimes such as killing livestock.33 Punishments meted out to slaves during the early Chosŏn period, on the other hand, were stricter and more closely resembled those in China, in line with the larger social project of bringing Korean law and custom more in line with Chinese models taking place in that period. Walter Scheidel’s observation that forced labor is “more typical of less developed economies in which the state cannot rely on markets to get difficult jobs done”34 helps to explain the similarities in slavery during the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties; Korea’s economy remained less commercially developed than China’s before the twentieth century. While the Chosŏn state was more powerful and centralized than Koryŏ, it proved unable to curb private slavery effectively. An early attempt to cap the number of private slaves was thwarted35 and, until the eighteenth century, the government failed to prevent the children of commoner mothers from being enslaved. The primary difference between slavery in China and Korea – indeed, perhaps the singular most distinctive feature of Korean slavery when compared to any other slaveholding society – was that the enslavement of ethnic Chinese never became large-scale enough to be economically important, while in Korea the slaveholding aristocratic elite were utterly dependent on the labor of enslaved Koreans to work their lands, conduct their business, and complete even basic household tasks such as food preparation.36 Xu Jing, a Chinese official who visited Koryŏ in 1124, remarked on the number of public slaves allocated to officials according to their rank and position to assist them with 32 33 34

35 36

Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, vol. 2, 575; Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 111; Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” 484. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society vol. 2, 575; Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 102–103. Walter Scheidel, “Slavery and Forced Labor in Early China and the Roman World,” in Hyun Jin Kim, Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, and Selim Ferruh Adalı, eds., Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Contact and Exchange between the Graeco-Roman World, Inner Asia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 147. Park Jinhoon 박진훈, “Chosŏn ch’ogi sa’nobi chŏnghanbŏp nonŭi wa kŭ sŏngkyŏk 조선 초기 사노비 정한법 논의와 그 성격 [The Debate Over the Fixed-Limit Law in Early Chosŏn]” Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil 역사와 현실 26 (2006): 309–43. Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 208–70; Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery,” 151.

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their tasks (and to impress people about the state’s wealth and resources) in addition to those they owned privately. These public slaves were, moreover, hereditary slaves who served in this capacity for generations.37 The existence of hereditary slavery helps to explain, if only in part, Korea’s reliance on slave labor. Ethnic Chinese slaves generally did not inherit slave status, and the sons of slave concubines were deemed to be as legitimate as the sons of any other wife.38 Yu Su-wŏn (1694–1755) pointed out that the Jizi’s slavery regulation did not make it hereditary, to no avail.39 The less flexible Korean status system with its emphasis on the lower moral worth of the slave compared to “good people” (yang’in), ensured that virtually all forms of slavery in the country remained hereditary. In Japan, slave status was also hereditary but Japanese slave owners were more interested in enslaving foreign war captives than ethnic Japanese, while the shogunate fought the enslavement of ethnic Japanese by foreign slavers such the Portuguese.40 Both the Koryŏ and Chosŏn states attempted continually to curb the growth in the size of the slave population by enforcing inheritance laws that required children’s status to conform either to that of their father or, more commonly, their mother, but these laws’ ineffectiveness was a recurring source of complaint by reformist officials. The proclamation and successful enforcement of the matrilineal inheritance law (chongmo chong’yangbŏp) in 1731 requiring that children of mixed marriages take their mother’s status has been credited as the driving force behind the marked decline of slavery in the eighteenth century.41 However, this development has also been attributed to other causes. 37 38 39

40 41

Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 37–38. Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” 196. Slavery is established as punishment for theft as part of the Lord of Ji’s eight laws which, according to the Book of Han, he taught the people of Old Chosŏn. The passage reads: 箕 子去之朝鮮。敎其民以禮義。田蠶織作。樂浪朝鮮民犯禁八條。相殺以當時 償殺。相傷以穀償。相盜者男沒入為其家奴。女子為婢。欲自贖者。人五十 萬。 “The Lord of Ji went to [Old] Chosŏn and instructed its people, according to ritual propriety, in agriculture, sericulture, weaving, and manufacturing. He gave the people of [Old] Chosŏn eight laws of forbidden crimes: Killing is repaid with [the killer’s own] death. Causing injury is repaid in grain. One who robs, if a man, is to be confiscated and made a male slave of her [the victim’s] family; if female, to be made a female slave. Those wishing to manumit themselves owe 500,000.” See Ban Gu 班固, Hanshu 漢書 [Book of Han], “Dilizhi” 地理志 [Treatise on the Lay of the Land], https://ctext.org/han-shu/ di-li-zhi. Nelson, “Slavery in Medieval Japan”, 467–72. Kim Kyungran 김경란, “A Study on the Transformation of the Surname System in Late Chosŏn: The Phenomenon of Surname Acquisition by the Nameless Class,” International Journal of Korean History 21, no. 1 (2016): 221–47; Myung Soo Cha 차명수 and Woo Youn Lee 이우연, “Chosŏn hugi nobi kakyŏk ŭi kujo wa sujun, 1678–1889 조선후기 노비 가

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Among these are the commercialization of early modern Korea economic life which meant that recapturing runaway slaves cost more than the value of their labor or that of readily available hired labor.42 During his reign, King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) took additional steps to reduce the size of the slave population with the goal of eventually eliminating hereditary slavery. The king wrote that “the regulations regarding slavery should be swept away and a law establishing hired labor be set up [so that] slavery is limited to individuals and it is not permitted that it be inherited by later generations [一掃奴婢之規。刱行 傭雇之法。限以己身。不許世].” In 1791, he attempted to rectify the rampant discrepancies in the slave registry system43 and suggested that slaves with military experience be permitted to take the military examinations and, if they passed, be placed in special units that enjoyed “commoner” rank, an act that permitted them to put the stigma of slave status behind them. In 1797, Chŏngjo eliminated the distinction between slave and commoner troops in the Military Training Agency (hullyŏn togam), an act that Hiraki Minoru calls an “epochal” moment in the history of Chosŏn slavery.44 Less than a year after his death, an edict promulgated in his ten-year-old son’s name abolished most public slavery. Despite such developments, the absence of mass manumissions to celebrate an auspicious occasion as the ascension of a new ruler attests to the effectiveness of the Korean elite’s strict policing of status boundaries.45 Their effectiveness in doing so is also illustrated by the fact that while slaves could always flee from their masters before the eighteenth century, acts of maroonage were probably rare because they were viewed as a threat to the social order.46 2

Defining Slave Status

How did Korean slave owners perpetuate the massive enslavement of their ethnic brothers and sisters? The philosophical justification for doing so rested on slaves’ perceived lack of moral worth, an evaluation reinforced by a rigid status system. Despite its lesser importance as a source of slaves in Korea, the moral stain attached to criminality and the penal system remained the source 격의 구조와 수준, 1678–1889 [The Structure and Level of Slave Prices in Late Chosŏn, 1678–1889],” Kyŏngjehak yŏn’gu 경제학 연구 58, no. 4 (2010): 105. 42 Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 249–52. 43 The Veritable Record of King Chŏngjo’s Reign 正祖實錄 1791.3.27. 44 Hiraki Minoru, Chosŏn hugi nobije yŏn’gu 조선후기 노비제 연구 [A Study of the Slavery System of Late Chosŏn] (Seoul T’ŭkpyŏlsi: Chisik Sanŏpsa, 1982), 195. 45 Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 89. 46 Ibid, 164.

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of slaves’ debased status.47 As Ellen Salem observes, slaves “possess[ed] a hereditary moral taint” that justified their subservient position, such that slave status “polluted” descent lines, sometimes for several generations. During the Koryŏ dynasty, for example, a candidate for government office had to prove he had no “base” ancestry for the previous eight generations.48 This view was reinforced by the depiction of slaves in official histories. The History of Koryŏ (Koryŏsa), compiled by the new dynasty after it came to power in 1392, is replete with stories, many undoubtedly fictional or improperly attributed, of slaves’ moral turpitude, such as engaging in homosexual relationships with immoral and ineffective kings.49 Korea’s strict status system seems to have operated in ways that permitted slaves to be subjugated socially despite having the same physical appearance, speaking the same language, and otherwise conforming to the same cultural norms as their masters. Status was the key element that separated commoners from slaves who were probably economically no worse off, and at times better off, than commoners.50 The rigidity of Korea’s status system meant that slavery was an even more “closed” system than in China,51 at least until the eighteenth century when cracks began to appear in the system. It was effectively impossible for a slave to become a member of his or her yangban master’s household, and even a woman slave who bore her master an only son and heir could not become his legal wife, even if he manumitted her. In Han China, on the other hand, the state permitted the most senior male slave in his master’s household to inherit the household if the master had no heirs in order to keep the household and its property on the government’s tax rolls.52 The common Chinese practice of adopting a slave boy into an heirless elite family did not exist in Korea where a male relative from a collateral family of “untainted” yangban blood was always preferred over even a concubine’s son, much less a child of slaves. Only if no other heirs were available for adoption could a concubine’s son be designated as his father’s heir and inherit any of his property. In such instances, the sons by commoner concubines, although of considerably 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid, 33–34. Salem, “The Landowning Slave,”30; Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 76. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 23, 93. For example, the tribute that nonresident private slaves owed their masters was less than the tax burden on commoners (Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 59–60, 137). On the distinction between “open” and “closed” slave systems, see James L. Watson, “Slavery as an Institution: Open and Closed Systems,” in James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 9–13. Robin D.S. Yates, “The Changing Status of Slaves in the Qin-Han Transition,” in Yuri Pines et al., eds., Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 215.

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lower status than their yangban fathers, were consistently viewed as superior to those by slave concubines in the law. During the first half of the Chosŏn period, for example, sons by commoner concubines were preferred over those by slave concubines even when the latter were born first or if their mothers had become commoners.53 The Korean status system’s rigidity manifested itself in other ways. Concubines’ sons were not permitted to address their fathers as such or serve in the government as true yangban could. A slave woman who gave birth to a reigning king could not be addressed or titled as queen, even posthumously. These rules stand in stark contrast to those in China where children of a master-slave relationship enjoyed equal standing with those born to a legal wife, and palace ladies became empresses.54 The status system in Korea was so strict that, except for the period of military rule (late twelfth to late thirteenth century) during the Koryŏ dynasty, the country never experienced the recurrent slave revolts that plagued other slave societies. Korean slaves were entrusted with weapons, and by the eighteenth century, slave soldiers may have comprised 30 percent of the army’s manpower, a percentage equal to their share of the total population. As the century progressed and the number of free men serving in the military dropped precipitously, slaves accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of soldiers.55 Slaves were no more likely, and in fact were less likely, to rebel than the peasants were, so thoroughly a part of the larger society were they. Rather than outsiders struggling to break free of the constraints imposed on them by a foreign society, Korean nobi were members of the same ethno-cultural community, albeit of low status. Eight major slave revolts took place during the century of military rule of Koryŏ, when the status system was in flux due to the military’s usurpation of the king and his officials, but these were the only slave revolts in the eight hundred plus years of Korean slavery. This weakening of status barriers in the Koryŏ dynasty’s military period and the attendant increased opportunities for social mobility contributed to those rebellions, and slaves were prominent leaders of the coup d’état that eventually eliminated the ruling Ch’oe military house. However, it was only during the period when Koryŏ was controlled by the Mongols (1270–1360), when the country’s traditional status system was at its weakest, that some slaves and children of slaves became prominent military officials. The re-imposition of strict status distinctions by the Chosŏn kingdom permanently ended such social mobility. Aristocrats’ 53 54 55

Martina Deuchler, “‘Heaven Does Not Discriminate’: A Study of Secondary Sons in Chosŏn Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies 6 (1988–89): 126–33. Meijer, “Ch’ing Dynasty,” 333. Chŏn Hyŏng-t’aek, “Han’guk nobi,” 295; Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 232.

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offspring by slave concubines lost their noble status and could hope, at best, to be accorded commoner status. While royal statute excluded princes of the blood from this loss of status during the Koryŏ period, the stigma of slave status afflicted even Yŏngjo, the longest-reigning king in Korean history (52 years), who spent his reign living under the pall cast by his mother’s status as a palace slave water carrier. Even when the Mongols ruled Korea, however, the Korean elite refused the Mongols’ demand that they adopt the Mongol custom of giving commoner status to children of commoner-slave marriages, successfully asserting that the existing Korean custom of enslaving children of such marriages must be maintained.56 This overweening concern with family background and heredity also helps to explain why Korean slaves could own property and pass that property on to their heirs. Orlando Patterson rejects Ellen Salem’s claim that slaves in Koryŏ could do so even though at the end of that period slaves had accumulated so much property that the government saw fit in 1376 to institute a new tax on their landholdings.57 He argues more specifically that many commoners fell into slavery during the Mongol period, and so their claims to property ownership were only formal claims that “meant nothing” in practice.58 That Korean law enshrined slaves’ ability to inherit property clearly refutes Patterson’s assertion. The Grand Code for Administering the State (Kyŏngguk taejŏn), compiled during the Chosŏn period but containing many provisions of Koryŏ law, stated that a deceased slave’s property went to his or her heirs, unless there were none, in which case it reverted to the state in the case of public slaves and to the master in the case of private slaves.59 This provision reflected the overwhelming concern in Korea about the importance of familial relationships. Slaves were regarded as both property and people, and since their basic humanity could not be totally ignored, they could not be treated in the same way as other forms of chattel property. This has led some authors to emphasize the relative humaneness of Korean slavery compared to other slave societies such as the antebellum South. The importance of familial relationships meant that a master’s status as the slave’s legal “father” obliged him to care for slaves when they were ill, ensure that they were adequately fed and clothed, and even assume legal responsibility for their death if a slave committed suicide.60 Slave families could be and were broken 56 57 58 59 60

Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 215. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 151. Patterson. Slavery and Social Death, 182–83, 425–26, n. 44. Salem, “The Landowning Slave,” 31. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 58, 103, 106.

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up by sale, but this happened more frequently with household slaves than with nonresident slaves, and was generally discouraged.61 Slave marriage was recognized and even encouraged by masters, and married couples were expected to live as such, even when owned by different masters. Pregnant slave women were exempt from labor for one month before and 50 days after giving birth, and even fathers received 15 days off after the birth to spend time with the newborn.62 Slaves were likewise expected to show filial loyalty to their birth parents. In one case, a slave who overstayed a leave from his master’s household by several months was not punished when he explained he had been attending to his sick mother.63 The master-slave relationship likewise did not interfere with a slave’s obligation to provide for his children in the future. The law did not allow slaves to bequeath their property as they saw fit, but only to the heirs of their body, whom the master would also own. As noted above, a slave’s property reverted to his master, whether a private owner or the state. In short, the master had nothing to lose anything by allowing his slaves to own property since that property never really left his control.64 3

Was Korea a Slave Society?

Were Korean nobi slaves, and was Korea a slave society? Coming to terms with these questions is complicated by the absence of a consensus on how nobi should be translated.65 This lack of consensus mirrors the broader lack of agreement among historians about how the term “slave” can or should be defined. For David Brion Davis, the slave is property.66 For Orlando Patterson, the slave is someone who is socially dead.67 For Jack Goody, “slaves are mainly acquired persons” who are “outsiders, strangers, prisoners of war.”68 For 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68

Chŏn Hyŏng-t’aek. “Han’guk nobi,” 280–81. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 57, 62. Kim, “Unheard Voices,” 127. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 182–86. Kichung Kim, “Unheard Voices,” 109. The term itself is made up of two Chinese characters that each individually mean “slave”: no 奴 which designates a male slave, and pi 婢 which denotes a female slave. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 62. Davis has written two more books exploring what he called in his 1966 work “[t]he inherent contradiction of slavery … in the underlying conception of man as a conveyable possession,” most recently in 2014. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. Jack Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems, 24.

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James L. Watson, slavery has no universal characteristic feature in the societies where it is found, but is “distinguishable from other forms of exploitation in the same society” because the slave is treated as property, her labor is coerced, and she is never accepted into the master’s kin group.69 Suzanne Miers doubts that an all-encompassing definition can be found, and recommends that scholars adopt the term used in the place and time under discussion with a suitable explanation of what that term means.70 The historiography on slavery in Korea reflects this lack of consensus about how to define slave status. In the only comprehensive English-language account of Korean slavery of which I am aware, Bok Rae Kim argues that scholars agree that nobi were slaves through the Koryŏ period, but that this consensus breaks down for the Chosŏn period. According to Kim, “some Korean historians” and “most Western ‘liberal’ historians” treat nobi as slaves, while “most” Korean historians since the 1950s view them as serfs. However, Kim cites only a handful of scholars to substantiate this claim.71 Her article also contains a number of errors about Chosŏn political and status systems that have a direct impact on her claim that nobi were not slaves. She states incorrectly, for example, that the yangban were exempt from taxation when, in fact, the only taxes which they did not have to pay were those associated with military service, and even that was no longer the case in the eighteenth century. She holds that women were also tax exempt, but this is misleading since the Chosŏn dynasty did not collect taxes on individuals but on households and their property. Kim also claims that the marriage of a slave man to a commoner woman resulted in the woman becoming a slave, a claim for which she offers no evidence.72 No source that I know makes such an assertion; marriage in Korea never changed a spouse’s status, whether it be between a noble and a commoner or a commoner and a slave. Kim’s engagement with the question of whether Korean nobi were “socially dead” is equally problematic and often contradictory. She notes that in Chosŏn Korea slaves lacked surnames but claims commoners did as well (a claim 69 70 71

72

Watson, “Slavery as an Institution,” 3, 8–9. Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 1–15. For “some Korean historians,” she mentions only the 1904 work of a Japanese scholar, while for “most Western liberal historians,” she references only James Palais, the foremost political historian of Chosŏn Korea. For the “most Korean historians” since the 1950s, she names only Younghoon Rhee and makes no reference to the work of scholars such as Myung Soo Cha, Hong Sŭng-gi, Kim Hee-Ho, Kim Kyungran, Woo Youn Lee, and Lee JungSoo, all of whom are Korean historians who regard nobi as slaves. Bok Rae Kim 김복래, “Nobi – A Korean System of Slavery,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 153, 156, 160.

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disproved by the voluminous legal records that have survived from this era), and she does not deal with the fact that they were also given derogatory personal names associated with animals, ritual uncleanliness, and impersonal objects. Kim similarly notes that nobi wore their hair in a distinctive manner but fails to examine how this public manifestation of their status constitutes evidence of their being socially dead beings. At the same time, Kim claims that nobi were not socially dead because they “[t]hey worked together, ate at the same table, even from the same bowl, and participated in the same festivals” as other members of society,73 but these are markers of ritual impurity, not social death. Other problematic elements of Kim’s argument include her claim that Chosŏn Korea did not support a large-scale slave market, an assertion based on a study that examined only ten townships near the city of Taegu over a three-year period; the Chosŏn dynasty, we would do well to remember, lasted for 500 years. Kim also notes a sharp decline in the price of a nobi during the eighteenth century due in part to “increasing state restriction over the buying and selling” of these people.74 This argument ignores the fact that the Chosŏn state was constantly strapped for money and would never have enacted such regulations if the number of slaves being traded was insignificant. Two economic historians, Younghoon Rhee and Donghyu Yang, have provided a more recent assessment of nobi status. They argue that nobi in the late Chosŏn period were not slaves because their circumstances differed substantially from those of the men, women, and children in the antebellum American South who were caught up in what they characterize as one of the “last typical models” of slavery.75 Their argument that “slave” is an inappropriate term to describe nobi during this era is problematic on at least two counts. First, given the different ways in which slave status has been defined and the welldocumented diversity of the slave experience in various parts of the globe at different points in time, what exactly is the “typical model” of slavery? As recent scholarship on slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean world demonstrates, definitions of slavery based on slave systems in the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and the antebellum South, are inapplicable in many other parts of the world.76 Secondly, Rhee and Yang, like Kim, fail to engage 73 74 75 76

Kim, “Nobi,” 156–57. Ibid, 156, 159. Younghoon Rhee 이영훈 and Donghyu Yang 양동휴, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery: An Essay in Comparison” Millennial Asia 1, no. 1 (2010): 6. Rhee and Yang do not consider slavery before the Chosŏn period. David Brion Davis, “Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives,” American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 458. Classic works that illustrate this point include: Suzanne

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with, much less refute, previous scholarship on Korean slavery, beginning with James Palais’ argument that nobi were slaves because they could be bought and sold; they simply list differences between the living and working conditions of black slaves in the antebellum South and the nobi and declare victory.77 Kim Hyŏng-in has likewise compared slavery in Korea and the American South, and while he notes a number of differences between them, he also concludes that nobi were slaves.78 Further, Myung Soo Cha and Woo Youn Lee have argued that the condition of antebellum black slaves and nobi were comparable, at least until the eighteenth century when kings Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo adopted anti-slavery policies.79 As Ellen Salem argued convincingly 40 years ago, there can be “no question that the group known as nobi were slaves. Legally, they were property. They could be bought, sold, or given as rewards or gifts. Their status was hereditary. They were subject to institutionalized alienation from the fruits of their labor, although that alienation was not total.”80 However, if there can be little doubt that nobi were slaves, it is also clear that slavery in Korea had its own distinctive features beginning with the fact that nobi status was intricately bound up with a rigid, hierarchical social order governed by notions of an individual’s moral worth. Nonresidential agricultural slaves, who led lives much like those of small landholding commoners, had greater independence than household slaves and more opportunities to acquire property, property that the law guaranteed they could own and pass along to their heirs. Law and cultural norms that placed a high value on filial and familial duty and responsibility afforded slaves at least a measure of protection against arbitrary or capricious treatment by their master. If we acknowledge that Korean nobi were slaves, can we characterize Korea as a “slave society?” The definition of what constituted a slave society, like the definition of slave itself, remains a subject of debate. Historians of slavery elsewhere in the world have often distinguished between societies with slaves and

77 78 79 80

Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Campbell, The Structure of Slavery; Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Ehud Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See also the chapters by Anthony Reid, Jessica Hinchy, and Shawna Herzog in this volume. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi,” 10–13, 23. Kim, Hyong-In. “Slaves’ Legal Status.” Cha and Lee, “Nobi kakyŏk ŭi kujo wa sujun,” 125–26. Salem, “Slavery in Medieval Korea,” 1.

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those in which slaves not only comprise a significant proportion of the total population, but also play a major, if not predominate role, in economic and other aspects of life.81 From the beginning of civilization on the peninsula until the late nineteenth century, Korea was a society based in agriculture. The kings of Chosŏn rewarded supporters by designating them “merit subjects” (kongsin) who received tax-free land grants that belonged to them in perpetuity. Crucially, when merit subjects received land, they also received slaves to work it, illustrating the importance of slave labor. Still, it is less clear in part due to paucity of evidence that Korea was a slave society before the twelfth century. While slaves were at least 10 percent of the population (though it may have been higher) and the agricultural work force was more mixed, the disorder brought on by military rule from 1170 until the Mongol conquest a century later allowed massive private estates to emerge, estates that were worked primarily by slaves. From this point forward, slaves made up about 30 percent of the population and constituted the primary labor force for the aristocracy, especially on agricultural estates close to the master’s home.82 In specific areas, the ratio could be even more skewed. To take one example, in a census of the northern part of the capital, where one would expect a high concentration of aristocrats given its importance to government officials, the population consisted of less than 10 percent yangban and a whopping 70 percent slaves!83 In addition, as noted earlier, slaves were even vital for military service. Even before Koryŏ, prominent men took their slaves with them into battle, and exemplary military service was one of the methods of manumission throughout Korean history. Slaves in late Chosŏn formed as much as 30 percent of the regular army, and they constituted a greater percentage of the army than their share of the general population as the eighteenth century drew to a close. Contemporary Koreans likewise recognized the importance of slavery to the extent that even as they criticized it, they never so much as suggested it be eliminated, only restricted. Yu Hyŏngwŏn (1622–73), for example, wrote that a Korean, in contrast to a Chinese, responded to questions about his wealth by replying “in terms of how many slaves [emphasis added] and how much land

81

82 83

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge. MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998); Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Deuchler. “Social and Economic Developments”, 302. Hochol Lee, “Agricultural as a Generator of Change in Late Chosŏn Korea”, in Reid, The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies, 123.

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he owns. From this one can see how … sick our customs are.”84 Eliminating the ownership of people, then, was as unthinkable to a yangban as ending the ownership of land, for they were equally sources of his wealth. 4

Conclusion

Throughout the Koryŏ and Chosŏn periods, slaves were “a dependable source of manpower,” “a source of wealth through sale, rent, or manumission,” and “a central indication of social status, for without possession of slaves it was difficult to claim yangban standing.”85 During the eighteenth century, however, slavery declined rapidly in Korea. Debt slavery was abolished in 1744, and in the 1770s already existing prohibitions on masters killing their slaves began to be strictly enforced. Most public slaves were manumitted in 1801, and most agricultural private slaves had become effectively free by the early nineteenth century as well. Slavery nevertheless persisted because of its important role in determining yangban status, and was not abolished formally until 1894, and then only under Japanese pressure as part of the Kabo Reforms, Japan’s final pre-annexation attempt to modernize Korea’s government and society. This decline resulted from a combination of factors. The eighteenth century was a period of strong, capable governance under a pair of forceful kings, Yŏngjo (r. 1724–76) and Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), who capitalized on early modern Korea’s “novel proliferation of vernacular texts; more vigorous dissemination of standard dialects and cultural symbols, and an unprecedented intersection between specifically local culture and state power” to expand the state’s reach86 and thereby successfully enforce the matrilineal inheritance law. Economic change also played a key role. The abolition of public slavery occurred because these laborers had become a net drain on government funds. By this point public slaves no longer provided labor for the state but instead paid effectively the same level of tax as commoners, but they continually ran away to escape the shame of slave status; King Chŏngjo received eight separate proposals over a twelve-year period calling for the abolition of public slavery

84 85 86

Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 265. The translation is Palais’ of Yu’s original writing. Milan Hejtmanek, “Devalued Bodies, Revalued Statues: Confucianism and the Plight of Female Slaves in Late Chosŏn Korea,” in Kim Youngmin and Michael J. Pettid, eds., Women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea: New Perspectives (New York: SUNY Press, 2011), 139. Victor Lieberman, “Introduction: Eurasian Variants,” in Victor Lieberman, ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Asia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 14; Deuchler, “Social and Economic Developments,” 305.

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on these grounds, and public slavery was abolished in 1801, less than a year after his death.87 As the population rose from 10 million in 1695 to 13 million in 1732, to 16 million in 1750, and to 18.4 million in 1800, the economy became more commercially developed. This made it more economical for private slaves’ masters to hire a replacement rather than track down a runaway, especially since these masters could expect little assistance from the state in recovering their maroon slaves.88 As noted earlier, the government faced the same problem with its slaves. Work by Lee Jung-Soo and Kim Hee-Ho suggests that as slave productivity declined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave owners’ attempts to use coercion to increase productivity proved to be counterproductive and actually increased the cost of slave labor vis-à-vis free wage labor, a development reflected by the sharp drop in the real price of slaves during this period as demand for their labor collapsed. The real price of a nonresident slave in 1787 was less than 20 percent that of the same slave in 1691, while their productivity (as measured by the amount of rice harvested from land per capita) declined by approximately half over the same period as slave resistance through absenteeism, intentional delays such as slowdowns, and even outright refusal to work made them less reliable and productive than hired workers. Absconding, often after stealing the master’s property, became more the norm than the exception, causing the cost of masters their slaves to rise high enough to offset any expense incurred by hired labor.89 Successful implementation of the matrilineal inheritance law coupled with a rising population also made it less advantageous to try to boost the numbers of one’s private slaves at a time that hired labor was only increasing in abundance. Increasing numbers of slaves likewise became wealthy enough to buy their freedom outright, something that private and public slaves were permitted to do beginning in 1677 and 1718, respectively, just as more yangban were 87 88 89

Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 265. Cha and Lee, “Nobi kakyŏk ŭi kujo wa sujun,” 125; Deuchler, “Social and Economic Developments,” 303. Lee Jung-Soo 이정수 and Kim Hee-Ho 김희호, “Chosŏn hugi nobi’ga pyŏndŭng ŭi wŏnin: Saengsansŏng kwa nobi kwalli piyong ŭl chungsim’ŭro 조선후기 노비가 변등 의 원인: 생산성과 노비권리비용을 중심으로 [Causes of Changes in Slave Prices in Late Chosŏn: Focusing on Productivity and Slave Monitoring Costs],” Chiyŏk kwa yŏksa 23 (2008): 182–86, especially table 3 on p. 185, 191–94; Lee Jung-Soo 이정수 and Kim Hee-Ho 김희호, Chosŏn hugi nobi maemae charyo rŭl t’onghae nobi ŭi sahoi, kyŏngjejŏk sŏngkyŏk kwa nobi’ga ŭi pyŏngdong 조선후기 노비 매매 자료를 통해 노비의 사 회ㆍ경제적 성격과 노비가의 병동 [The Social and Economic Characteristics of Slaves and Slave Prices in Late Chosŏn, Through the Data on Buying and Selling],” Han’guk minjok munhwa 한국 민족 문화 31 (2008): 381–84, 388–93.

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falling into dire financial straits, or bribe government clerks to remove their names from official slave registers.90 Some slaves were in fact wealthier than the struggling yangban as economic prosperity among non-elites, stimulated by the increasing use of fertilizer, the spread of wet-field rice agriculture, and the expansion of trade, led them to challenge barriers to elite membership and emulate the trappings of yangban life.91 Female slaves had always been more valuable than male slaves because of their potential for sexual exploitation, and they became even more highly prized as slavery declined. The earlier propensity for male slaves to be sold at a younger age than their female counterparts also reversed itself.92 By the nineteenth century, the trade in men slaves had all but dried up as most of them became independent small-holders; the remaining slaves were mostly household women kept for sexual purposes and to buttress their masters’ claim to yangban status. Pre-modern Korea was a slave society that, perhaps uniquely in world history, employed a rigid status system based upon a person’s perceived moral worth to keep almost one-third of ethnic Koreans in bondage for almost a thousand years. The overweening emphasis in Korean society and culture on ancestry and filial and familial loyalty ensured that masters did not manumit their slaves in order to secure their children’s economic futures and, in the event they had no heirs of their body, that of collateral family members. This same preoccupation also worked, seemingly paradoxically, to mitigate some of slavery’s harshness by discouraging separation of families, providing mechanisms for slaves to acquire property and leave that property to their descendants, and limiting masters’ cruelty by holding them responsible paternalistically for their slaves’ welfare. How and why did traditional Korean society function in such a way that slavery was both large scale and inwardly directed rather than towards outsiders? This is the most pressing question in the study of Korean slavery. How we explain this rare, if not totally unique, aspect of Korean slavery will tell us much about Korean society and how slavery operated in it in such an unusual way. 90

91 92

Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 249, 257–61; Kyoung Park 박경, “Sokryang munsŏ rŭl t’onghae pon 17-segi Chosŏn Chŏngbu ŭi sanobi t’ongje yangsang ŭi pyŏnhwa 속량 문서를 통 해본 17 세기 조선 정부의 사노비 통제 양상의 변화 [Changes in the Chosŏn Government’s Control of Private Slaves in the 17th Century],” Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil 역사와 현실 87 (2013): 403. The law for private slaves was first promulgated in 1655, but its reissuance in 1677 suggests it remained ineffective for more than two decades. Deuchler, “Social and Economic Developments,” 304; Lee, “Agricultural as a Generator,” 103–31. Hejtmanek, “Devalued Bodies,” 142–44; Lee and Kim, “Nobi ŭi sahoi,” 374, 383.

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Perhaps the most promising way to address this question lies in a sustained examination of the operation of status distinctions in pre-modern Korea, an examination that must include careful research on how and why maintaining a rigid status hierarchy was considered to be essential to social stability and prosperity, how aristocratic virtue and worthiness gave them the moral authority to demand and receive perpetual bondage from those beneath them, and how and why slavery could be so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of a society that its abolition was never proposed by even the most radical thinker of any era.

Chapter 8

The Abolition of Slavery, Constitutional Reforms, and Modernity in Late Qing China Bonny Ling 1

Introduction

The Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1912. Whereas the first half of the Qing period was peaceful and prosperous, its latter years were tumultuous. For most of the nineteenth century, the dynasty was beset by both internal and external conflicts. A series of treaties forced the imperial government to cede territorial sovereignty to foreign powers, while domestic rebellions such as the great Taiping uprising (1850–64) wreaked havoc across the country. The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) sought to support the Qing government against foreign incursions but ended disastrously when six European countries, Japan, and the United States formed an alliance to defeat the rebels. The humiliation of this defeat finally compelled the Qing court to recognize that the dynasty’s very survival required that it engage in reform. In 1905, China sent five high-ranking government ministers abroad to study constitutionalism,1 and they returned the following year to recommend this form of government as the best political model for maintaining imperial authority.2 Their recommendation led to the establishment in 1907 of the imperial Committee for Investigating and Drawing up Regulations of Constitutional Government (Xianzhen Biancha Guan), also known as the Imperial Commission on Constitutional Government.3 Over the next five years, this commission, commonly referred to as the Constitutional Commission, issued a number of edicts on constitutional and related matters, including labor bondage and exploitation. The promulgation in January, 1910 of an imperial edict abolishing slavery was an integral part of this attempt to

1 E-Tu Zen Sun, “The Chinese Constitutional Missions of 1905–1906,” Journal of Modern History 24, no. 3 (1952): 251. The ministers visited Japan, England, United States, Germany, and France. 2 Chuzo Ichiko, “Political and Institutional Reform, 1901–11,” in John K. Fairbank and KwangChang Liu, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 389. 3 M.J. Meijer, The Introduction of Modern Criminal Law in China (Batavia: Koninklijke Drukkerij de Unie, 1949), 41.

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establish constitutionalism in China and enhance the country’s legitimacy in the eyes of the wider international community. The Qing government’s collapse two years later invariably raises the question of whether this edict could have been effectively implemented. Given the state of the Qing court circa 1910, it is unlikely that it could have done so in any meaningful way given the dynasty’s preoccupation with its political survival. Indeed, a closer examination of the 1910 edict indicates that the program to abolish what the court identified as slavery was riven with contradictions, and the edict’s legacy accordingly remains more symbolic than substantive. Indeed, many of the edict’s provisions, such as outlawing the buying and selling of human beings and criminalizing the act of selling one’s own children on account of poverty, were not new legal constructions. Such prohibitions already existed in the Qing Code, the comprehensive legal code encompassing both civil and criminal law that formed the Qing legal framework. The problem faced by the Qing court at the turn of the twentieth century was accordingly not the absence of legal provisions criminalizing the buying and selling of human beings, but enforcing the law in the face of powerful social customs that frequently negated the imperial government’s efforts to deter such practices. Even though the problem of slavery attracted high-level attention and the throne eventually endorsed its abolition in 1910, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century should be seen as marking the moribund Qing government’s last effort to address the buying and selling of people within its realm. What made this activity unique was that the discussions culminating in the 1910 edict were conducted in a context in which the overriding imperative was not the actual emancipation of the country’s slaves, but countering China’s negative image elsewhere in the world if the Qing government was seen as condoning slavery. Advocating the abolition of slavery thus served an important function in China’s attempt to be seen as a “modern” and “civilized” country in an age of European imperialism and colonialism. This imperative was not unique in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like China, other countries in Asia and the Middle East clamored to join an international fraternity where membership was based on a normative requirement of acceptability.4 Liliana Obregón Tarazona has argued that the language of civilization “transitioned to formal imperialism” to justify colonization, and it was this challenge of delimiting the bounds of the civilized and uncivilized that characterized international law as a discipline during the late nineteenth

4 See Richard S. Horowitz, “International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History 15, no. 4 (2005): 445–86.

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century.5 Garrit Gong has examined how various non-European countries sought entry into this international order based on European notions of acceptability.6 Particularly for China and Siam, the abolition of slavery became one of the litmus tests of “civilization” to justify their equal participation alongside European powers. Siam, the only state in Southeast Asia not colonized by a European power, adopted this imperative and abolished slavery by royal decree in 1905 after a gradual process of emancipation.7 Two petitions submitted to the Qing throne about the same time as the Siamese decree became the basis for early twentieth-century Chinese abolitionism that culminated in the 1910 imperial edict abolishing slavery. The dynasty’s overthrow two years later made China’s experience with abolition under the Qing short and fleeting. While scholars have studied various aspects of slavery in China,8 only a few studies have focused specifically on the legal abolition of slavery at the end of the Qing era. These include a law review article and translation of the imperial edict published in the American Journal of International Law in 1910,9 Marinus J. Meijer’s analysis of the proposed legal 5 Liliana Obregón Tarazona, “The Civilized and the Uncivilized,” in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 917–39. 6 Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 7 For a general discussion of Siam’s abolitionism under the modernization program instituted during the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), see David Feeny, “The Demise of Corvée and Slavery in Thailand, 1782–1913,” in Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 93–99. On Siam’s slavery in its comparative regional context, see Kerry Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804,” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 163–85. 8 E.g., James L. Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs,” in James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 223–50; Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries),” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 143–54; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in Eltis and Engerman, Cambridge World History, 186–213; Johanna S. Ransmeier, Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. See also Harriet Zurndorfer and Claude Chevaleyre in this volume. 9 E.T. Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery in the Chinese Empire,” American Journal of International Law 4, no. 4 (1910): 794–805; “Official Documents: Report to the Throne of the Imperial Chinese Commission on Constitutional Government Recommending the Abolition of Slavery, Together with the Imperial Rescript Approving the Report and Ten Regulations for its Enforcement,” American Journal of International Law, Supplement: Official Documents 4, no. 4 (1910): 359–73 (hereafter Report to the Throne).

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reforms that led to the 1910 imperial edict,10 and Claude Chevaleyre’s consideration of slave status in late imperial China.11 Scholars of international legal studies have sought in recent years to reframe the history of international law by moving away from the field’s preoccupation with Western European and Christian perspectives to consider how other legal traditions have interacted with and made use of international law.12 Understanding how China engaged with international law in the twentieth century, therefore, must begin with the country’s desire to join the international community of nations as an equal. Addressing the question of how the international, i.e., Western, legal concept of “slavery” was adopted to fit Chinese realities is at the heart of such an undertaking. We may note, for example, that the two petitions submitted to the Qing throne labelled certain customary exploitative practices of women and children in familial settings as “slavery” decades before the United Nations adopted the 1956 Supplementary Slavery Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (the “1956 Supplementary Slavery Convention”) which enshrined the prohibition of female and child exploitation in international law.13 Whether or not the decision by some Qing officials to label such customary practices as slavery was a product of foresight or merely a fortuitous happenstance, their decision highlights how, through its abolitionist endeavors, the late Qing state interpreted and subscribed to international norms of acceptability even as it struggled unsuccessfully to modernize and ward off decline during the last years of its existence. 2

Modernity and Constitutional Reform

The idea of “modernity” was central to the late Qing reform program. Reformminded Qing officials, influenced by Japan’s successful experience with 10 11

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Marinus J. Meijer, “Slavery at the End of the Ch’ing Dynasty,” in Jerome Alan Cohen, R. Randle Edwards, and Fu-mei Chang Chen, eds., Essays on China’s Legal Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 327–58. Claude Chevaleyre, “The Abolition of Slavery and the Status of Slaves in Late Imperial China,” in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 57–82. See: Fassbender and Peters, The Oxford Handbook; Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo Inter­ national Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On slavery and international law, see Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003).

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modernization that began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868,14 believed that China’s “self-strengthening” must entail more than just a superficial adaption of Western institutions and technologies, and that reforms needed to be substantial and wide-ranging. On 11 June 1898, Emperor Guangxu promulgated his first reform edict which covered a wide range of concerns in government, politics, economics, the military, and education, but the optimism that accompanied the issuance of his degree was short-lived.15 These reforms lasted only 100 days before a conservative palace coup d’état in September, 1898. Despite this reform initiative’s brevity, the recognition that China needed to change did not disappear. The need for urgent institutional and political reform resurfaced after the Boxer Rebellion and became a “re-dedication to reform” with a heavy emphasis on China’s modernization, a process in which constitutionalism figured prominently.16 The five ministers sent abroad in December, 1905 to study foreign models of government returned the following year to recommend constitutionalism as the best way to maintain imperial authority.17 Sending these ministers was highly symbolic of the government’s intent to modernize. The reforms proposed after their return had wider ideological, social, and political implications because they entailed a clash between the forces of tradition and those of modernity. Historian Tze-ki Hon described this dichotomy in early twentiethcentury China: “Understood as the totality of the Chinese imperial system, tradition must make way for modernity because it is not only a remnant of the past but also a stumbling block for modernization … Embedded in the teleology is the concept of linear progression, which assumes that the present must supersede the past and the best is yet to come.”18 The reform movement involved a sustained effort to import foreign models and configure them to fit Chinese realities. This was done for two purposes, the first of which was to legitimize continued Qing rule at a time of growing 14 15

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For a comparison of late Qing reforms with Meiji Japan, see Shiping Hua, “The Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Late Qing Reform (1898) Revisited: Strategies and Philosophies,” East Asia 21, no. 3 (2004): 3–22. Ssu-Yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey 1839–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 175. For a detailed discussion of the emperor’s failed reforms, see Luke S. K. Kwong, “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 663–95. Roger R. Thompson, “The Lessons of Defeat: Transforming the Qing State after the Boxer War,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2003): 769. Ichiko, “Political and Institutional Reform,” 389. Tze-ki Hon, Revolution as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China’s Path to Modernity, 1905– 1911 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–2.

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internal dissent. The second served a more utilitarian purpose, namely to make China appear to be a modern country in the eyes of other nations.19 As historian Xiaoqun Xu has argued, “[T]he modern world was a club, to which only countries that had modernized could belong.”20 A key component of this transformation from the traditional to the modern was the imperial court’s vigorous efforts to amend Qing laws and practices. 3

Changing Perspectives on International Law

This shift from tradition to modernity was reflected in the late Qing government’s approach to international law. China’s traditional world view had been that the country was the center of civilization surrounded by lesser-developed cultures. Chinese diplomacy, therefore, was predicated on a belief in the country’s cultural superiority rather than a Westphalian model of interstate relations amongst equal powers. In this conceptualization of the world, there was no one equal in status to the emperor, a state of affairs that led historian ChiHua Tang to argue that “there was no international law in the East Asian world [because] [t]he relationship between China and other countries was regulated by Chinese ritual.”21 However, Chinese perspectives began to shift in the midnineteenth century when the Qing court started to view international law as a diplomatic tool that could be used in negotiations with foreign powers. One of the earliest acts of the Zongli Yamen, the central government department established in 1861 to handle foreign affairs, was to translate Henry Wheaton’s seminal work, Elements of International Law,22 into Chinese (1864). Despite such activities, international law as perceived by the Qing bureaucracy did not supplant the state-sanctioned Confucian ideology that viewed social interactions and China’s external relations as a series of hierarchical relationships. Shin Kawashima has described how the Qing court viewed the instrumentality of international law at this time: [T]he Qing Dynasty did not think that it was obliged to obey the Wanguo Gongfa [Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law]. The translation of the Wanguo Gongfa was based on the principle of gaining the upper 19 20 21 22

Ibid, 1. Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China 1901–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2. Chi-Hua Tang, “China-Europe,” in Fassbender and Peters, The Oxford Handbook, 701–02. Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the Science (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836).

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hand over the West by using the tools of the West, and indeed, ‘controlling foreign countries by using other foreign countries (yiyi zhiyi).’ This did not mean using Western tools as China’s guiding principles, or changing China by using other foreign countries.23 However, as calls for China’s modernization increased, domestic interpretations of the country’s position in the international order began to change largely because the notion of being equal to other states improved the government’s negotiating status after a series of humiliating military defeats by Western powers during the nineteenth century, defeats that had compelled China to cede sovereignty over parts of its territory. By the early 1900s, the use of international law was central to China’s campaign to recover its sovereignty as an equal member of a global community of civilized nations.24 The formal abolition of slavery in China in 1910 must be understood in this context of the imperial government’s adaptation and use of international law to achieve this goal. 4

Of Slavery, Bondage, and Abolition

The movement to abolish slavery took definitive shape during the 1780s when abolitionists in Britain sought to end the transatlantic slave trade and officials of the British East India Company banned the exportation of slaves from India into the wider Indian Ocean world.25 At the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15, participating countries issued a declaration denouncing the slave trade “as repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.”26 Following the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and that of other European powers during succeeding decades, abolitionists concentrated on ending slavery in the British (1834), French (1848), and other European colonial empires, while the 23 24 25

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Shin Kawashima, “China,” in Fassbender and Peters, The Oxford Handbook, 462. Chi-Hua Tang, “China-Europe,” 705. On abolitionism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Indian Ocean world, see: Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 179–220. See also: Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight, eds., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Hideaki Suzuki, ed., Abolitions as a Global Experience (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2015). “Act, No. XV. Declaration of the Powers, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, of the 8th February 1815,” in The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, Volume 32, 1 February–6 March 1816 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1816), 200.

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United States did so in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, did so in 1888. Because it did not participate in the African or Indian slave trades, China was largely absent from this movement. During the Qing dynasty’s last decade, however, the issue of abolishing slavery in China was raised by two high-level Qing officials. In two separate petitions to the throne in 1906 and 1909, these officials referenced the global anti-slavery movement and described customary labor practices in China as akin to those associated with the transatlantic slave trade. These abolitionist sentiments illustrated the growing influence of international law and diplomacy during the late Qing period. Foremost in this discussion was the idea that slavery was antithetical to modernity; therefore, to condone slavery was to run counter to the practice expected in the fraternity of civilized nations. The issue of slavery and its abolition was first raised in a memorial to the throne in March 1906 from Governor-General Zhou Fu, a high-ranking official who had governed three affluent provinces along the Yangtze River. Zhou Fu was born around 1836, in the province of Anhui and served as a Qing official in various capacities during a long career in government service.27 In 1861, Zhou met the famed Qing politician and diplomat Li Hongzhang. Zhou became one of Li’s assistants, travelled with him to quell the Taiping rebellion, and rose through the bureaucracy at Li’s commendation.28 In February 1909, another official, Wu Weiping, took up the same cause and petitioned the emperor to outlaw slavery in China. Wu was born in 1848 and became a scholar ( jinshi) of the second rank of the second rank after passing the imperial civil service examinations in 1895.29 From 1908 to 1909, Wu served as censor in Shaanxi where he sought to deter official malfeasance.30 There is no evidence that Zhou and Wu ever met. Soon after submitting his memorial, Zhou retired from public service while Wu continued to serve in the imperial bureaucracy until the Qing collapse in 1911–12.

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“Academia Sinica Biographical Database Entry: Zhou Fu,” The Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, accessed 2 March 2017, http://archive.ihp.sinica.edu.tw. Zhou Jingliang, “Zhou Fu Shengping Luli Jianbiao [A Biographical Summary of Zhou Fu],” in Zhou Jingliang and Meng Fanzhi, eds., Zengzu Zhou Fu – Cong Li Hongzhang Mufu Dao Guozhi Gancheng [Great-Grandfather Zhou Fu: From Military Strategist to Li Hongzhang to Champion of the Nation] (Sanxi: San Jin Publishing House, 2015), viii. “Academia Sinica Biographical Database Entry: Wu Weibing,” The Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, accessed 2 March 2017, http://archive.ihp.sinica.edu.tw. Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 87.

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The Qing court’s support for the abolition of slavery in China must be viewed through the prism of Zhou and Wu’s memorials. Although both memorials dealt with the same subject, their justification for abolishing slavery differed. Zhou’s memorial began with a traditional argument based on Confucian morality that, because a ruler holds the Mandate of Heaven, he must exercise benevolence.31 The idea of the Mandate of Heaven dictated that a legitimate ruler practiced moral righteousness, which would be reflected in the harmonious relationship between Heaven and Earth as exemplified by good harvests and the absence of natural disasters that could threaten peace and prosperity.32 The Governor-General argued more specifically that the practice of buying and selling individuals violated this harmonious relationship between Heaven and Earth and beseeched the throne to demonstrate benevolence by abolishing such practices. To buttress his argument, Zhou held that the practice of selling and buying people was unknown during the three classical dynasties (2205–256 BCE) and only emerged during the waning years of the third of these dynasties, the Zhou (1046–256 BCE). Whether historically accurate or not, his invoking the Zhou dynasty’s decline was clearly meant to remind the throne that such practices should not be associated with a benevolent ruler and a prosperous reign. The extent to which Confucian morality and the concept of the Mandate of Heaven underpinned Zhou’s argument is revealed mostly tellingly in his statement that “It is not the characteristic of a prosperous and benevolent rule to discriminate against the weak and those marginalized [in society], [to the point that they are not respected for] their intrinsic status as human beings.”33 Zhou also sought to use a normative framework of state practice to justify the abolition of slavery by advancing the premise that slavery was no longer accepted by the community of nations. In so doing, he drew a clear distinction between civilized and barbaric countries, a distinction consistent with the belief in the West at the time that non-Western countries must meet a certain standard of “civilization” to claim membership in the wider international

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Reproduction of Governor-General Zhou Fu’s memorial of 1906 found in “Zhouque Shengong Quanji [Complete Collection of Zhouque Shengong],” in Shen Yunlong, ed., Modern China Historical Data Series, vol. 9 (Taipei: Wenhai Publishing House, 1967), 467–73. On the Mandate of Heaven (t’ien-ming), see Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, comps., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. LV, Records of Civilization Sources and Studies, Introduction to Oriental Civilizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 190–98. English translation by the author.

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community.34 Zhou stated this belief unequivocally: “[F]oreign nations look upon those that tolerate slavery as barbarous peoples.”35 He continued that Western nations “join in hunting men that buy and sell human beings and punish them, thereby … bringing the whole earth to recognize as a binding international law the obligation to protect men in the enjoyment of liberty,”36 and cited two examples to illustrate the moral opprobrium of slavery. The first of these was the British experience with abolition where, he noted in an obvious reference to the 1833 Act of Parliament that abolished slavery in much of the British Empire and compensated slave owners for their lost property, the government “spent tens of millions of taels [silver “dollars”] in freeing slaves throughout the whole empire.”37 The Governor-General also lauded the United States by citing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and noting that “report of her justice was spread abroad and other nations followed the example set.”38 What is most significant about Zhou’s invocation of these two examples was that it reflected a fundamental change in state ideology about how to conduct international diplomacy. By invoking international censure as a reason for China to abolish slavery, Zhou and other reform-minded Qing officials used the language of international law to advocate for China’s rightful place in the international order. This argument undoubtedly also served a domestic purpose since the use of international law and diplomacy based on the principle that states were equal was part of the government’s campaign to recover its sovereignty after decades of ceding jurisdiction over certain of its territories to foreign powers. Unlike Zhou, Censor Wu argued in 1909 for the abolition of slavery primarily on the basis that such exploitative labor practices were fundamentally incompatible with constitutionalism.39 His petition began with a direct reference to the government’s wider political reforms:

34 See Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization.’; Obregón Tarazona, “The Civilized and the Uncivilized.” 35 Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 795. 36 Report to the Throne, 360. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Reproduction of Censor Wu Weiping’s memorial of February 1909 found in “First Year of the Reign of Xuantong, 16th Day of the First Month; Document number 175011),” in Qingdai gongzhong dang zouzhe ji junjichu dang zhejian quanwen yingxiang ziliaoku [Qing Palace and Grand Council Archives Database of the Archives of the National Palace Museum, Taipei], accessed 4 March 2016.

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Heaven and earth have a heart of compassion for living creatures, and the ancient emperors and kings held humane regard for the people to be the foundation of good government. To-day [sic] we are about to establish a constitutional regime throughout the Empire … It is inconsistent with good government that the poor and unfortunate, though innocent of crime, should be bought and sold and allowed to sink into the degradation of slavery, to be oppressed and cruelly ill treated and [be treated with no human regard].40 This emphasis on constitutional reform rested on two main arguments, the first of which was that constitutionalism obligated the government to treat all citizens equally: “There is no principle of favoritism [or biased treatment] in constitutional law.” He argued further that since constitutionalism was the result of a deliberate attempt by the imperial government based on other countries’ experiences, China had to take into account that no other country allowed the practice of buying and selling slaves to continue within its territory. Like Zhou, Wu took note of anti-slavery efforts in both Great Britain and the United States. He observed, for example, that not one member of the British Parliament had voted against the use of a huge sum of public money to compensate former slave owners affected by emancipation of their slaves. Wu likewise discussed President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, observing that it was an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that had effectively eradicated slavery and won Lincoln the respect that placed him on a par with George Washington in the mind of the American people. Although these two memorials were written only three years apart, the differences between them reflected the changing political climate in China by 1909. When Zhou submitted his memorial in 1906, the issue of China’s constitutionalism still lacked a concrete timetable even though it was already “one of the foremost topics of public opinion and debate within government circles.”41 His memorial reflected this political reality; it conceptualized reforms not in terms of constitutionalism but in terms of revising domestic laws, a fact 40 Report to the Throne, 360–61. The original English translation by the American Journal of International Law used the phrase “denied all human rights” for the three-character phrase “wuren li” used by Wu. However, the original Chinese phrase was not an invocation of individual rights and entitlements. The translation by the author in brackets is a closer reflection of the original meaning that the plight of the downtrodden was frequently overlooked. 41 Daniel Bays, China Enters the Twentieth Century: Chang Chih-tung and the Issues of a New Age, 1895–1909 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978), 127.

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underscored by his memorial being sent to the imperial commission, headed by the prominent legal scholar Shen Jiaben, tasked with revising laws where it lingered until Censor Wu submitted his memorial. As the Qing court came to terms with the depth of the reforms needed to placate domestic discontent, the imperative for constitutionalism grew more urgent. In 1907, an imperial edict instructed provincial officials to prepare promptly for the convocation of provincial assemblies and plan for other assemblies at lower administrative levels.42 This edict was followed immediately by another which proclaimed the throne’s nine-year plan to implement a constitutional system.43 In 1909, the year that Wu submitted his memorial, a new emperor, Xuantong, ascended to the throne. That the new emperor was a three-year old boy whose father governed in his name as regent only increased the degree of political uncertainty in the country. Because both Zhou and Wu’s memorials dealt with the same issue, the Constitutional Commission considered them jointly and agreed that slavery would undermine the goal of constitutionalism and threaten the government’s legitimacy in the eyes of other countries.44 After consulting with Shen Jiaben’s commission, the Constitutional Commission proposed ten regulations to abolish slavery in China which the throne approved in January 1910 in an imperial rescript.45 These regulations’ impact, however, was ambiguous because while the Constitutional Commission identified what it considered to be “slavery” in China, it also dismissed certain customary labor practices as irrelevant and failed to engage seriously with the issue of how these regulations were to be implemented. 5

Slavery and Chinese Realities

Qing society was highly hierarchical and strictly organized according to ethnicity, occupation, and status. Central to this society was the system of eight banners, each of which represented a military division that was also a unit

42 43 44 45

Ibid, 204. Ibid, 205. Report to the Throne, 361–62. “Xianzheng bianchaguan zou huiyi jinge maimai renkou jiuxi bianfa zhe [Constitutional Commission’s Submission on Proposed Measures to Prohibit Customary Practices of the Buying and Selling of Human Beings],” in Qingmo Minchu Xianzheng Shiliao Jikan, vol. 3 [A Collection of Historical Materials from the Late Qing and Early Republican Periods] (Beijing: Beijing Library Press, 2006), 1–19.

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of residence and economic production for soldiers and their dependents.46 Outside the banner system, specific occupations were associated with commoners deemed to be of “good” standing; these included scholars at the top of the social hierarchy, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants.47 These “good” people stood in stark contrast to “mean” people, such as musicians, actors, prostitutes, and some very low-level local government employees, whose hereditary occupations were associated with moral depravity.48 Most scholars and Marxist historians outside of China believe that the country never had a highly developed, large-scale system of slavery comparable to that found in many parts of the Atlantic world apart from certain periods when the institution was one of “more than marginal significance.”49 Historian Clarence Martin Wilbur identified the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-25 CE) as one of these periods,50 while Wang Yi-t’ung focused on slaves and similar groups of servile laborers found in the northern dynasties between 386 and 618 CE.51 Certainly by the early twentieth-century, slavery as understood in the West had no equivalent in China, and the challenge facing abolitionists in China at this time was mainly to root out customary practices of exploitation in the private sphere. Sinologist Angela Schottenhammer has argued that scholars need to pay closer attention to the specific forms and characteristics of slavery in late-imperial China, including recognizing that servitude in private households was the dominant form of slavery during this time.52 Like Schottenhammer, Marinus Meijer distinguishes between public and private systems of slavery during the Qing period. He notes that practices of public slavery, whereby enslavement was a form of collective punishment for family members of those convicted of heinous crimes or banished to serve soldiers on the frontier as slaves, were no longer allowed by the twentieth century in the Qing Code’s criminal provisions.53 He also notes that most forms of private slavery involving the sale of a person were already 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 15. John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 19. Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 117. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery,” Annual Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 412. Clarence Martin Wilbur, Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty, 206 B.C–A.D. 25, vol. 34, Anthropological Series (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1943). Wang Yi-t’ung, “Slaves and Other Comparable Social Groups during the Northern Dynasties (386–618),” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 16, nos. 3–4 (1953): 293–364. Schottenhammer, “Slaves,” 148–49. Meijer, “Slavery,” 338.

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prohibited, the only exceptions being the sale of a slave born into slavery and that of an individual with a “good” standing who had sold himself or herself into servitude.54 Article 275 of the Qing Code, which dealt with public disorder and theft, established the offense of “kidnapping persons and selling the person kidnapped.” The article’s first sub-article prescribed the penalties associated with this offense in detail: Anyone who devises tricks and entices and gets hold of honourable persons (to make slaves of them), or who kidnaps and sells honourable persons (to others) as slaves, will … be sentenced to 100 strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to 3000 li … If, because (those kidnapped and sold do not [willingly] follow along), there is injury (among the kidnapped) persons, then [the offender] is punished with strangulation … If someone is killed, then the sentence is beheading.55 Because Article 275 primarily dealt with the kidnapping and sale of persons into domestic households and the breaching of familial relationships that such acts inevitably entailed, the article assigned penal punishment on the basis of the relationship between the offender and the victim: If one kidnaps and sells his son or son’s son to be a slave, the penalty is 80 strokes of the heavy bamboo. If it is a younger brother or sister, brother’s child [zhi], brother’s son’s son [zhi sun], daughter’s son, one’s own concubine, or the wife of a son or son’s son, then the penalty is 80 strokes of the heavy bamboo and penal servitude of two years … If it is the child of the father’s brother who is younger than the kidnapper, or the children or son’s children of the father’s brother’s sons, then the penalty is 90 strokes of the heavy bamboo and penal servitude of two and a half years.56 54 55

56

Ibid, 331. William C. Jones, Tianquan Cheng, and Yongling Jiang, trans., The Great Qing Code (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 257–58. The italics within parentheses and square brackets are as cited and used by the translators to denote, respectively, the original interlinear commentary in Chinese and the explanatory material in English. For reference, 3000 li is approximately 1,200 miles. Ibid, art. 275(5). These are original parentheses and brackets as cited. For the first part of Article 275(5), an earlier English translation is perhaps clearer: “Any person who sells his children or grand-children against their consent, shall be punished with 80 blows. Any person who in like manner sells his younger brother or sister, his nephew or niece, his own inferior wife, or the principal wife of his son, or his grandson, shall be punished with 80 blows, and two years banishment.” See George Thomas Staunton, trans., Ta Tsing Leu Lee; Being the Fundamental Laws, and a Selection from the Supplementary Statutes,

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The Qing Code also dealt with other aspects of slavery in China, including practices such as enslavement as punishment (Article 294) and the punishment of slaves who insulted their former households (Article 331). While these articles might suggest that slavery was commonplace in Qing society, many historians argue that slaves were not a significant feature in local economic life.57 The explanation for these articles’ presence in the code is to be found in the differences between Manchu (the ethnicity of the Qing ruling class whose ancestral homeland was Manchuria in northeast China) and Chinese society and the Qing throne’s inclination to be sensitive to Chinese sentiments by calling for slaves to be treated properly and regulating their conversion to individuals of “good” standing.58 Qing society at the turn of the twentieth century was certainly different from that which had existed during the earlier Ming dynasty, with “many of the old distinctions in society [having] either fallen completely into disuse or … become greatly diminished in practice.”59 In this context, the 1910 imperial proclamation abolishing slavery offered few substantive changes to existing conditions. Forms of private slavery persisted not as a matter of law, but because of compassion for the indigent for whom the sale of their wives or children was an accepted survival strategy. Qing courts generally recognized that the poor often had few other options. In an 1828 case involving a woman who had been sold into slavery, the imperial government’s Board of Punishment commented that, “If the parents … sell a [grown-up] son or daughter … it must be because they have such difficulty surviving that they have no choice. Their situation calls for sympathy.”60 The abolition of slavery in China in 1910 thus dealt with customary practices different from those in other countries. The Constitutional Commission’s report on slavery in China identified three groups of individuals whose complete emancipation was particularly challenging because they involved customary labor systems that turned on the thorny axis of the differences between the socio-cultural practices of the minority Manchu and those of the ethnic Chinese majority. The first two groups reflected specific Manchu practices of bondage: the baoyi (or pao’i), bondsmen of the Manchu eight-banner system of military and social organization,61 of the Penal Code of China (London: T. Cadell and W. Davis, 1810; rpt. Taipei: Ch’eng-wen Publishing Company, 1966), 292. 57 Meijer, “Slavery,” 338. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Philip C.C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 168. 61 Baoyi was also sometimes transliterated as ‘pao-i’; see, for example, Meijer, “Slavery,” 343.

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and the bonded servants and servile field workers of Manchu households. The third group, which received the Commission’s greatest attention, consisted of women or young girls sold to serve in both Manchu and Chinese households. The question of whether baoyi were slaves remains as much a subject of debate in contemporary studies of Qing history and society as it did in the Constitutional Commission.62 As historian Qi Mei-qin notes, there were various baoyi-related terms, such as aha, baoyi aha or baoyi niyalma, which underscored the complexity of Qing social hierarchy.63 Qi argues that these various terms denote subtle differences in household and social status and that confusion surrounding these terms has obfuscated what these different categories meant.64 What is clear is that the Commission viewed the baoyi largely as bonded individuals attached to aristocratic Manchu households. Its report was suffused with rhetorical sympathy for the baoyi and debunked the idea that they were slaves “in the ordinary sense” because they were not barred from taking the civil examinations, which accorded those who passed the exam with a degree of social mobility, or holding public office.65 With respect to Manchu bonded servants and field workers, the report likewise noted that “for several decades the custom of presenting slaves to meritorious officials has been discontinued, and for a long time there have been no reports of men surrendering themselves into slavery nor of slaves that have been bought under deeds of sale.”66 In his detailed examination of official titles in imperial China, Charles Hucker noted that many of the Qing Imperial Household Department’s staff came from among the baoyi.67 Hucker’s observation that these individuals were “owned by the Emperor and played many of the governmental roles that eunuchs played in other eras”68 is not inconsistent with Meijer’s assertion that many baoyi were titled officials and “had lived for many generations in the palaces of the [Manchu] princes and administered their estates.”69 The confusion over the baoyi’s status stems from the fact that, while many undoubtedly enjoyed a high social status and were not regarded as ordinary servants, this 62

See Qi Mei-qin and Cui Can, “The Status of Booi Reconsidered,” The Qing History Journal 1 (2013): 117–28. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid, 127. 65 Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 798; Report to the Throne, 362. 66 Report to the Throne, 363. 67 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, 84. In a later entry (369), Hucker described the pao-i as “‘slave[s]’…[who] did many menial tasks.” 68 Ibid. 69 Meijer, “Slavery,” 344.

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was probably not universally the case. In addition to baoyi, the Commission mentioned that some high-ranking Manchu households had bonded servants and servile field workers who were usually acquired by gift, self-sale, or purchase. Unless manumitted, these individuals’ servile status could be inherited by their descendants.70 Many bonded field workers were tied to their ancestral land because their forebears had voluntarily surrendered to the Manchus during their conquest of China when such an affiliation would have afforded them some measure of protection.71 The third category of enslaved individuals identified by the Constitutional Commission were mostly women sold into domestic service in Manchu and Chinese households. Unlike the baoyi and bonded servants/field workers, the practice of trafficking women for this purpose was not endemic to Manchu society. The Commission noted that this practice was nevertheless widespread: “Even though the tradition of selling individuals has long ceased, the practice of selling female servants persists. Indeed, this practice is not confined to the families of the Manchu or Han Chinese aristocracy or officialdom, for even families of modest means [can afford to purchase such women to the point that] there is hardly any family without such a female servant.”72 Although the Commission’s report did not refer to this practice by a specific name, using instead terms such as “servant girl” (binü) or “sold servants” (yubi), it was describing the institution widely referred to in English as muitsai. In the muit­ sai system, young girls were transferred by their parents or guardians to families in exchange for money.73 As the Commission appreciated, extreme poverty was the usual raison d’être for these sales: “The constantly recurring famines drive the starving poor to the employment of such measures, both to save the lives of their children and to lighten their own burdens.”74 Although a muitsai was responsible for common domestic chores, her position in the household was marginally higher than that of a regular servant.75 70 Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 118. 71 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 29. 72 English translation by the author. A reproduction of the Commission’s report can also be found in Da Qing Fagui Daquan [Collection of Qing Law and Regulations] vol. 3, (Beijing: Zhengxue Publishing House, 1972), 1671–77. For Shen’s analysis, see Shen Jiaben, Lidai Xingfa Kao [Criminal Law of the Past Dynasties], vol. 4 (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company Press, 1985), 2037, 2045. 73 Although muitsai literally means “little younger sister” in Cantonese, its actual meaning is more accurately reflected by the term “maid servant”; see Watson, “Transactions in People,” 223, 241. 74 Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 802. 75 George Maxwell, Slavery: The Mui Tsai System (Geneva: League of Nations Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery, 1935), 1 [Document C.159.M.113.1935.VI].

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While a muitsai typically did not receive wages, it was expected that she would be clothed, fed, and, in general, “regarded as a member, although a humble member, of the family into which she had been taken.”76 Such arrangements were considered initially to be “a charitable system [that] enabl[ed] poor families to assure the welfare of their daughters by selling them to rich households, who would provide for them while they were young and find them suitable husbands when they grew up.”77 Originally, a muitsai would be taken in by a neighboring family, so that she was not completely severed from her own family whose proximity would also deter maltreatment.78 However, changes in Chinese society brought about by the greater ease of transport and significant rural-to-urban migration during the late nineteenth century made it difficult for many families to remain in contact with and monitor the well-being of the daughters they had sold.79 These developments, coupled with their young age, made muitsai extremely vulnerable to a wide array of abuses. Many first-hand accounts of former muit­ sai attest to their maltreatment. In December, 1906, the year of Zhou’s petition to the throne, Shanghai’s Shen Bao newspaper reported a case of extreme cruelty that a young female servant, aged 14, had endured at the hands of a woman named Wu Sunshi. The girl, referred to only as Chun Lan, had been sold four years earlier to Wu who was cohabiting with a man named Li Siming. Li reported that Wu routinely punished Chun Lan with severe physical violence by beating her or searing her hands with a hot metal rod. Chun Lan’s cries were so pitiful that Li could no longer tolerate the abuse; after another incident of physical abuse that left Chun Lan with a head injury and feet bound with a heavy metal chain, Li brought the girl to a charity home.80 Such cases of maltreatment were not unusual. A survey of news reports in the year of Censor Wu’s petition revealed many incidents of girl servants running away or committing suicide.81 76 77

78 79 80 81

“The Mui Tsai System in China, Hong Kong, and Malaya,” International Labour Review 34 (1936): 665. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, “Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System: Submission, Servitude, Escape and Collusion,” in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 1994), 1, 11. “The Mui Tsai System in China,” 665. Maxwell, Slavery, 2. “Lingnue Binu [Extreme Abuse of a Female Maidservant],” Shen Bao, 16 December 1906, Shen Bao Digital Archive. See, for example, the following stories in the Shen Bao newspaper accessed through the Shen Bao Digital Archive: “Ying Zujie [News from the British Concession],” 29 April 1909; “Binu Jianshe Tusi zhi Kelian [Attempted Suicide of a Female Maidservant Who Severed Her Own Tongue Warrants Our Pity],” 1 December 1909; “Lingnue Binu zhi Dushou

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Because of the abuse to which muitsai were frequently subjected, this institution became the focus of a high-profile campaign by Western abolitionists during the 1920s which equated the muitsai arrangement with slavery.82 The Commission’s report devoted much more attention to the subject of female domestic servants than it did to the baoyi and bonded servants/field workers. Westerners were quick to note this disparity; in 1910, one Western scholar noted that, “The report shows less consideration for the interests of Chinese than for those of Manchu slave-holders [due to the fact that the] slaves of the Chinese [who are mainly female] are all to be set free without exception.”83 As Marinus Meijer has suggested, this disproportionate emphasis on female domestic servants in the Commission’s report could reflect what one legal scholar has described as the “delicate aspects” politics of modernization in early twentieth-century Qing China where severe criticism of traditional Manchu customs risked undermining support among Manchu elites for the dynasty’s broader reform program.84 6

Emancipation and Reform

The 1910 imperial edict that abolished slavery in China was a verbatim restatement of the Constitutional Commission’s recommendations which were based on the memorials submitted by Governor-General Zhou and Censor Wu. The Commission proposed ten regulations, beginning with a complete prohibition on “the purchase and sale of human beings, whether as wives or concubines, sons or grandsons, or male and female slaves” and a requirement that “any violation of such law be made a punishable offense.”85 Other regulations dealt with the Commission’s most significant proposal, namely for the bonded servants of Manchu banner families and the children of indigent families in domestic households to be paid wages, thereby transforming such relationships into one of legal employment rather than ownership of the person in question. Hereditary slaves in Chinese households, although few in number, were likewise to be considered as hired servants if they choose to remain in service (Regulation 6), the household employing such servants would be responsible (as was already commonly expected) for arranging a maid servant’s [Malicious Intent Behind a Case of Extreme Cruelties against a Female Maidservant],” 18 December 1909. 82 Jaschok and Miers, Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System, 11. 83 Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 802. 84 Meijer, Introduction of Modern Criminal Law, 46. 85 Report to the Throne, 367.

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marriage (Regulation 7), and there was to be no legal prohibition of intermarriages between hired servants and other free persons (Regulation 9). The edict also formally expunged all references to slaves from the Qing legal code. Although these regulations changed bondmen and -women’s legal status, the extent to which they did so varied. In the case of bonded girl servants, for instance, the Commission proposed that they serve as hired servants until the age of 25 with “such payment for their services as may be agreed upon [be] received in advance.”86 By comparison, no such age limit was proposed for the bonded servants and field workers in Manchu households; the Commission argued against fixing a specific age for their emancipation on the grounds that the Manchu aristocracy was reluctant to do so because of the value of their agricultural labor and the “great embarrassment [which] might result” from such an emancipation.87 In short, bonded laborers in Manchu households were still required to remain indefinitely with their masters despite the move to formalize their status as wage laborers,88 a proposal that reflected the difficulties that the Commission faced when it tackled Manchu bonded labor practices. The move to cap the age for bonded child servants was also not without its contradictions since masters had paid these children’s natal family in advance for their service. To safeguard against the ill-treatment of child bonded servants, the Commission proposed that they could be redeemed if their natural families returned a proportional amount of the money they had received. This proposal was, however, highly unrealistic and impractical. Most impoverished families who had been compelled to “hire” out their children would not have had sufficient funds to redeem them. Although well-intentioned, this proposal was a largely symbolic measure to deal with instances when children were maltreated. When viewed in its totality, the 1910 imperial edict proposed few concrete changes that dramatically improved everyday life for those considered to be “slaves” in China. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, many of the legal changes proclaimed in this edict were not new legal constructions. The Qing government had, for example, long viewed practices such as the sale of young boys to families to ensure that the family had a male heir and young girls as child-brides89 as negative social mores which it had sought to control with 86 87 88 89

Ibid, 369. Ibid, 370. Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 801. Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1980), 1–10, 108–12.

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strict criminal provisions and sanctions such as those in Article 275 that governed the kidnapping and sale of persons. The problem facing the Constitutional Commission was not that there was no precedent to ban the sale of persons, but how to interpret and enforce the law in the face of powerful social customs that limited the government’s ability to limit the exploitation of bonded laborers. Doing so required the Constitutional Commission to come to terms with the issue of how to deal with customary labor practices in a way that could be used to justify China’s membership among the community of civilized nations. The Commission approached this issue by firstly pointing out in its report that existing Qing law had never intended for individuals and their descendants to be held in perpetual bondage.90 Secondly, it highlighted that exploitative labor practices in China were different from chattel slavery in the West and thus required solutions different from the kind of outright emancipation that had occurred in European colonial empires and the United States. In an attempt to tread this narrow path between abolishing slavery to demonstrate the country’s modernity and dealing with this problem in ways other than outright emancipation, the Commission proposed measures that highlighted the contradictions between the language of reform on the one hand and concrete, enforceable change on the other. Its report dealt harshly with Chinese families who had bonded servants, but less so with Manchu households that also had such servants. While the report made lofty proclamations about reform, it shied away from the question of how to implement and enforce these reforms in a consistent manner. Despite its limitations, the report was nevertheless significant because it entailed an examination of customary labor practices in late Qing China, an examination that provided the backdrop for similar discussions that took place some 45 years later about the 1956 Supplementary Slavery Convention. 7

Conclusion

The 1910 edict abolishing slavery in China had little immediate impact. Promulgated shortly before the Qing dynasty’s fall in 1912, the edict never had an opportunity to take effect. Given the contradictions and inconsistencies in the regulations it announced, it is unclear whether it would have ever had a major impact on social and economic life in early twentieth-century China. However, if the edict’s content was problematic, its symbolic value was significant. One 90 Report to the Throne, 368–69.

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Western scholar, writing in the same year that imperial emancipation was proclaimed, opined that while the extent of these reforms’ impact was unclear, the edict represented “a charter of liberty to myriads of the down-trodden and oppressed [in China], and will mark for them the upward turning of the way toward freedom and enlightenment.”91 More recently, a Chinese legal historian expressed a similar sentiment, describing the edict as “eliminating the final vestiges of legitimacy for the traditional institutions of slavery in China.”92 Because the Republican government that replaced the Qing continued the program of legal reform that had begun during the late nineteenth century, these late Qing discussions about slavery and its abolition influenced domestic and foreign policy in China well into the mid-twentieth century. Reforms under the Republican government were regarded not merely as important to the new regime’s survival, but also as an intrinsic part of its political agenda in which “[l]egal reform and judicial independence was pursued at the highest level of government.”93 Especially prominent among the reforms during this era were those guaranteeing the full equality of all persons, and gender equality in particular. The 1910 imperial edict was accordingly an important antecedent to government policy during the Republican period.94 Four decades after its promulgation, the exploitation inherent in customary practices of child labor, such as the muitsai, were the subject of active discussion during the drafting of the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery.95 One of the striking features of the discussions about abolishing slavery in China was the failure of Qing reformers to pay any attention to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese recruited to work as contractual laborers in postemancipation Southeast Asia and the Americas.96 British abolitionists feared 91 92 93 94 95 96

Williams, “The Abolition of Slavery,” 794. Zhou Yong-kun, “The End of the Slavery System in China and Its Significance,” Northern Legal Science 3 (2010): 142. Translation of the quotation is by the author. Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 29. For an overview of the diverse, domestic opinions on gender equality and China’s modernization during the Republican period, see Hua R. Lan and Vanessa L. Fong, eds., Women in Republican China: A Sourcebook, Pt. 4 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe 1999). Jean Allain, The Slavery Conventions: The Travaux Préparatoires of the 1926 League of Nations Convention and the 1956 United Nations Convention (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008), 295, 304–22, 326–49. On Chinese migration overseas, see: Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Chinese Diaspora in the Western Indian Ocean (Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien/Mission Catholique Chinoise, 1985); Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). For an overview of the nineteenth- and

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that these indentured laborers would fall victim to “a new system of slavery,” a paradigm that continues to dominate indentured labor studies.97 While the indentured system provided the most prima facie evidence of China’s connection to the global trade in “forced” labor, the Constitutional Commission’s report made no reference to these men or the conditions under which they lived and worked. This omission is all that much more mystifying given the Qing court’s diplomatic activity during the mid-nineteenth century to end this system of labor recruitment, activity that culminated in 1874 with the successful closure of Macao as a port from which these laborers boarded ships bound for other parts of the world. That the Commission’s report contained numerous references to what it regarded as outdated slavery practices but neglected the plight of these Chinese emigrants makes their failure to refer to these laborers all that much more glaring. The most likely explanation for their doing so was the Qing government’s preoccupation with retaining power, a preoccupation that ensured that emigration and exploitation of Chinese outside the country was not a high political priority. Zhou Fu and Wu Weiping’s petitions and the 1910 imperial edict comprise a brief chapter in the history of abolition, a history which was global in scope and involved not only states located far beyond the Atlantic world, but also the transnational flow of ideas about society and law. This movement of ideas is readily apparent in Zhou and Wu’s petitions, both of which were clearly

97

early twentieth-century indentured labor trades, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the origins of the modern indentured labor system, which began with the arrival of Chinese laborers in Trinidad in 1806, see Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014), 328–48; Richard B. Allen, “New Perspectives on the Origins of the ‘New System of Slavery’,” in Maurits Hassankhan, Hans Ramdoedh, and Lomarsh Roopnarine, eds., The Legacy of Indian Indenture: Historical and Contemporary Aspects of Migration and Diaspora (New Delhi: Manohar, 2016), 37–61. Major studies of Chinese laborers in the Americas include: Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); Moon-Ho Jong, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Arnold J. Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847–1874 (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2008). See Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830– 1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974; 2nd ed., London: Hansib, 1993). On indentured Chinese as “neo-slaves,” see Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neoslavery?,” Contributions in Black Studies 12 (1994): 38–54. On the problems with the Tinkerian paradigm, see Richard B. Allen, “Re-conceptualizing the ‘New System of Slavery’,” Man in India 92, no. 2 (2012): 225–45.

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influenced by British and United States abolitionism and used these examples to support their argument for abolitionism and constitutional reform in late Qing China. A striking feature of this narrative is that this discussion about abolishing slavery in China apparently neither involved nor was directed at neighboring Asian states, a not unexpected turn of events given China’s history of basing its diplomacy on a belief in its own cultural superiority and having other states pay tribute.98 While we know little about the extent to which the Qing court was aware of abolitionism in neighboring countries, the fact that Zhou and Wu’s petitions and the Constitutional Commission’s report made no mention of Siam’s formal abolition of slavery in 1905 suggests even if late Qing officials were aware of such developments, they deemed them to be irrelevant to their discussions about modernization and constitutionalism. Siam’s absence from this Qing abolitionist discourse highlights another issue in the history of international law, namely that the Asian states aspiring to become an integral part of the new international legal order that emerged during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries did so in isolation from one another.99 Abolitionism in China during the last decade of Qing rule was clearly intended to affirm China’s standing as an “acceptable” member of the community of “civilized” nations in the face of the existential threat posed by imperialism and colonialism. Whether this was the only, or at least the principal, motivating factor behind late Qing abolitionism is, however, less clear. It is difficult to conclude that Zhou, Wu, and other reformers were not also genuinely moved by the desperate plight of the marginalized in Chinese society, for instance as seen in the humanitarian sentiments given legal expression in the late Qing in support of the abolition of capital punishment by dismemberment. When viewed in this context, the British and United States examples of abolition can be seen as providing “powerful ammunition in further advancing … an indigenous argument.”100 These developments in late Qing China also speak to other issues in global slavery studies. In the first instance, they highlight the unsuitability of Atlanticinspired definitions of slavery in discussions about the nature and dynamics of 98

On the role of the tribute system in China’s traditional foreign relations with its neighbors, see John King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan, “The Tributary System as International Society in Theory and Practice,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 5, no. 1 (2012): 3–36. 99 Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 99–101. 100 Thompson, “Lessons of Defeat,” 773. See also Jérôme Bourgon, “Abolishing ‘Cruel Punish­ ments’: A Reappraisal of the Chinese Roots and Long-term Efficiency of the Xinzheng Legal Reforms,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2003): 851–62.

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slavery in China and elsewhere in Asia. It is clear that different forms of servitude existed in Asia, many of which do not neatly fall into the paradigm of the slave as chattel property that dominated European abolitionist discourse and continues to influence slavery studies in general.101 The tensions between local realities and this paradigm are revealed in the need for late Qing officials to grapple with how they could translate “slavery” as it was understood in the West into the local context. The internal inconsistencies in the Constitutional Commission’s report on slavery attest to the difficulties of doing so. While the report acknowledged that slavery existed in China and called for swift imperial action to deal with this problem, its approach to emancipation was predicated on the argument that certain groups of slaves in China were not really “slaves.” Secondly, it is important to appreciate that late Qing abolitionism was a precursor of extensive legal reforms under the Republican government to establish the full legal equality of persons in China. These reforms led in turn to China acceding in 1937 to the 1926 Slavery Convention and then participating in the drafting of the 1956 Supplementary Slavery Convention which sought to identify practices, such as the exploitation of women and children in the private sphere, similar in effect to that of chattel slavery.102 In effect, the 1956 convention addressed customary practices of labor exploitation that Zhou and other late Qing reformers had struggled to fit into the chattel slave paradigm. Although the People’s Republic of China withdrew from these conventions in 1971,103 China’s involvement in them as a state party before 1971 is a noteworthy chapter in the global history of slavery because of what it reveals about the ways in which the impetus provided by modernization and international law influenced abolitionism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asia.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and thanks her colleagues at the University of Zurich’s Centre for Human Rights Studies and Prof. Dr. Christine Kaufmann at the Faculty of Law for their support. The author is also grateful for insightful discussions on global slavery studies with Richard B. Allen and for his invaluable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. 101 See Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, 1–15. 102 Allain, The Slavery Conventions, 295, 304–22, 326–49. 103 Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations, UN General Assembly Res. 2758 (XXVI), UN GAOR, 26th Sess., U.N. Doc. A/8429 (1971).

Part 3 Slavery, Servitude, and European Colonialism

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Chapter 9

Slaves, Weavers, and the Peopling of East India Company Colonies, 1660–1730 Michael D. Bennett Throughout the seventeenth century the directors of the English East India Company (EIC) were preoccupied with increasing the population of their Asian settlements which they frequently referred to as “colonies” or “plantations.”1 This was partly because a growing population was seen as a marker of colonial success in the early modern period, but also because having a large populace provided the company with economic benefits such as increased revenue from taxation.2 One strategy the company used to people these establishments was to transport laborers to where they were needed. Slaves, unskilled Asian workers known commonly as “coolies,” and weavers were valued by the company both for their labor and their role in growing the population of nascent English colonies in the South Atlantic, India, and Southeast Asia. Like its Portuguese, Dutch, and French rivals, the company often resorted to coercive methods to supply its establishments with needed labor. The EIC imported slaves to areas where there was not already an easily accessible source of cheap labor, shipping thousands of West African, Malagasy, Indian, and Southeast Asian slaves to settlements scattered from St. Helena to Java and Sumatra.3 However, the company also differed from other Europeans in its pioneering effort to use humane methods to recruit and manage those workers it described initially

1 E.g., India Office Records, British Library, London: E/3/90, f. 154, London to Fort St. George, 29 February 1683/84; E/3/87, f. 92, London to Surat, 25 August 1668. All archival references in this chapter are from these records unless otherwise specified. See also Phillip J. Stern, “Soldier and Citizen in the Seventeenth-Century English East India Company,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, nos. 1–2 (2011): 83–104. The company was known commonly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the British East India Company. 2 For the company’s efforts to improve taxation revenue by increasing the population of Bombay, see E/3/90, f. 128, London to Bombay, 16 November 1683. See also: Philip J. Stern, “‘A Politie of Civill & Military Power’: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 253–83. 3 Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 27–62.

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as “black servants.”4 Commercial considerations underpinned this distinctive approach to labor. The company’s directors feared that enslaving members of local communities would anger their trading partners in West Africa and India, and thereby jeopardize future cross-cultural exchange. At the EIC’s settlements on the Indian subcontinent slavery was a less important institution because the company could tap into pre-existing networks of migrant labor to satisfy their demand for skilled and unskilled workers. New policies were developed by the company to encourage the voluntary immigration of landless laborers to Bombay (Mumbai) in the late 1660s and 1670s. Generous food allowances and the provision of raw materials were offered to entice weavers and coolies to relocate to the island. These policies were first formulated to aid in “peopling” Bombay, but were later implemented at Madras (Chennai), Calcutta (Kolkata), and Cuddalore. Attracting skilled weavers to settle in capital cities had been crucial to the process of state formation in India for centuries.5 It is probable, therefore, that the company was seeking to replicate this process at Bombay in the late seventeenth century. By settling skilled and unskilled laborers among their English employees, the company hoped to consolidate their political authority over Bombay, bolster tax revenue, and increase their control of the textile industry in western India in order to secure a commercial advantage over their rivals and satisfy the voracious demand for calicos in British markets. Although the Court of Directors in London stressed the importance of lenient labor policies in its letters to company officials in India and elsewhere,6 their overseas employees often did not implement these orders effectively. Their failure to do so not only remained a continuing source of frustration and an impediment to the company’s attempts to carve out a profitable

4 The company’s treatment of the Indian Lascars (sailors) in its employ is an illustrative case in point. See: Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Michael H. Fisher, “Working across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857,” in Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History [International Review of Social History, supplement 14] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–45. 5 Douglas E. Haynes and Tirthankar Roy, “Conceiving Mobility: Weavers’ Migrations in Precolonial and Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, no. 1 (1999): 40, 48. 6 E.g. Richard B. Allen, “Slavery in a Remote but Global Place: The British East India Company and Bencoolen, 1685–1825,” Historia Social y de la Educación/Social and Education History [Spain] 7, no. 2 (2018): 151–76.

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commercial empire, but also suggests that there were significant differences in how company directors in London and Englishmen living in Asia approached the issue of unfree labor. Studying the forms of labor used by the EIC from a broad perspective enables us to make comparisons with England’s Atlantic empire. As P.J. Marshall and Philip Stern have observed, India was part of a single imperial entity which shared commonalities with the Atlantic world as well as differences.7 The EIC’s use of forced labor was no exception as the company drew on both Atlantic and Asian precedents when conceptualizing their labor regimes.

Map 9.1

British East India Company and India

7 P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Phillip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 693–712. See also H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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Slavery, Servitude, and the East India Company

The forced labor systems conceptualized by the EIC’s directors during the 1660s and 1670s differed from the patterns of African slavery that had come to dominate the English Caribbean. The directors saw non-European populations as essential to the survival and prosperity of their nascent colonies in the Indian Ocean, and envisioned their black workers becoming Christianized planters who would eventually possess rights and liberties similar to those held by English subjects. This view is best illustrated by the fact that, until the early 1680s, the small numbers of Guinean, Malagasy, and South Asian slaves that the company acquired were almost always referred to as “black” or “Negro servants” subject to the company’s protection and capable of being manumitted after converting to Protestantism. This distinctive attitude first emerged when the EIC controlled the monopoly over English commerce on the West African coast between 1657 and 1663.8 The forced labor of Africans at Fort Cormantine on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) contributed to the company’s efforts to integrate the African and East Indian trades during the mid-seventeenth century. The Court emphasized that the small numbers of laborers sent from Fort Cormantine to settlements such as St. Helena and Madras should enter the company’s service “voluntarily.” In 1659, for example, they instructed Captain George Swanley, commander of the Truro, to procure 10 men and women “such as are lusty and of the younger sort” from the Guinea coast and carry them to St. Helena. However, the captain was permitted to do so only if he found people “willing to leave their countries and saile along without compulsion or inforcement.”9 The labor policies developed by the EIC on the West African coast were shaped by local circumstances and commercial considerations. The prevalence of debilitating tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever and the “greate mortality” this caused prevented large numbers of Englishmen from living and working in Guinea.10 This meant that maintaining friendly and reciprocal relationships with neighboring kingdoms was crucial for facilitating cross-cultural exchange. Reports that there was a misunderstanding between English and West African merchants in 1659, for instance, caused the company to stress that “no factor … should give any offence to the king or his people.”11 The company directors’ emphasis on the “voluntary” nature 8 9 10 11

On the Company’s presence in West Africa see: Margaret Makepeace, “English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1668: An Analysis of the East India Company Archive,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 237–84. E/3/85, ff. 228–31, London to Fort Cormantine, 23 June 1659. E/3/27, f. 42, Fort Cormantine to London, 4 July 1661. E/3/25, f. 283, Wyamba to London, 26 February 1659.

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of acquiring laborers at Fort Cormantine was an extension of such efforts to maintain amicable relations with local trading partners. Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that any of the West Africans Captain Swanley encountered at Fort Cormantine would have decided to enter slavery and leave their homeland of their own accord. Concern about the threat that the illegal practices of independent slave traders posed to the company’s gold trade at Fort Cormantine led the directors to prohibit English slave exports from West Africa in 1660. However, the company’s directive to “totally forebear the buying and selling of negroes” applied only to West Africa, and did not reflect the policies it adopted in the Indian Ocean.12 Throughout the 1660s and 1670s, company settlements in the South Atlantic and Asia were regularly supplied with “blacks” from India13 who, the directors ordered, were to be treated humanely on board company ships pursuant to regulations first established for West Africa. In 1668, for instance, company governor William Thompson ordered that four “young Gentues [Hindus] or Arracans [Arakanese] and their wives” were to be “sent out as servants” from Bengal to St. Helena. He noted that the company was “very desirous to make tryall of them, supposing they may bee more usefull and ingenious than those people which come from Guinea.” Commanders of company ships were instructed accordingly to provide these men and women with a “fitting” cabin during their voyage and ensure that no violence “or any act to give discontent to the natives” was to be committed when procuring these laborers so they would “willingly embrace” the company’s service when they reached their destination.14 The reasons why the directors believed that Indians would willingly become slaves remain less than clear, but may reflect an awareness that it was not uncommon for impoverished peasants to sell their dependents or themselves into slavery or enter into other forms of servitude during periods of famine.15 In 1672, for instance, the company stated that the dearth of food in Bengal meant that it would have been “a great kindness” to send “one or two blacks from thence on every ship for our Island of St. Helena.”16 The company’s ban on sending “any persons to St. Helena against their wills” was restated in December 1676, when it emerged that an Indian man had been brought forcibly to the island from Madras. Fears about the potentially dire repercussions 12 13 14 15 16

E/3/85, ff. 348–51, London to Fort Cormantine, 30 November 1660. E/3/87, f. 175, London to St. Helena, 9 March 1669. E/3/87, f. 102, London to St. Helena, 27 November 1668. Marcus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 142; Allen, European Slave Trading, 12, 77, 123–24. E/3/88, f. 5, London to Fort St. George, 9 August 1672.

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for the company’s trade if his complaint “that wee send away the natives” should reach India prompted the Court to remind officials at Fort St. George that it was against company policy “to buy any blacks and to transport them from their wives and children without their own consents.”17 The demand for Indian and African laborers on St. Helena was closely linked to the company’s attempt to encourage the cultivation of foodstuffs and agricultural commodities on this strategically located island in the South Atlantic which quickly became an important “refreshment” stop for ships journeying between Europe and India after the company colonized it in 1659.18 To this end, in 1671, Company agents at Surat were instructed to send indigo seeds to St. Helena, along with “a person skilful in the sowing of it and bringing it to perfection.”19 By 1673, the company was experimenting with growing a variety of tropical commodities on the island, including sugar cane, tobacco, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and cocoa.20 The company’s failure to induce British colonists to settle on the island mandated that the only way to guarantee “due improvement” of this company “plantation” required recourse to “Company negroes and servants in planting.”21 St. Helena was not the only company possession to receive slaves. High mortality rates among African workers at the English factory at Bantam (Banten) in western Java forced the company to transport “20 lusty negroes” on every vessel sailing there in 1672. Unlike St. Helena, where black servants were expected to serve mostly as agricultural laborers, those in Southeast Asia were to perform “such work and labour as is fitting” in an Asian port town’s commercial environment and perhaps also on experimental nutmeg plantations.22 As contemporary documents occasionally attest, shipping such workers to St. Helena and Bantam was viewed not only as an important source of cheap labor, but also as a way to people settlements that were vulnerable to attack by the company’s European and Asian rivals and difficult to reinforce militarily. In June 1671, for example, company officials in London welcomed the arrival of slaves on St. Helena from the Cape 17 18

19 20 21 22

E/3/88, f. 180, London to Fort St. George, 15 December 1676. On St. Helena’s strategic importance, see: Philip J. Stern, “Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-State: The Case of St. Helena, 1673–1709,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, no. 1 (2007): 1–23; John McAleer, “Looking East: St. Helena, the South Atlantic and Britain’s Indian Ocean World,” Atlantic Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 78–98. E/3/87, f. 162, London to Surat, 16 February 1669/70. E/3/88, f. 43, Commission and Instructions to the Governor and Council of St. Helena, 19 December 1673, and f. 68, London to Bantam, 13 October 1674. E/3/88, f. 70, London to St. Helena, 18 December 1674. E/3/87, f. 58, London to Fort St George, 24 January 1667/68; E/3/87, f. 69, London to Bantam, 24 January 1667/68; E/3/87, f. 208, London to Bantam, 18 January 1670/71.

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Verde Islands with relief since it meant that the islanders were now in a “better posture to defend yourselves in case you should be attacked by an enemy.”23 Although the majority of these early “black servants” worked on plantations, an institution synonymous with exploitation and brutality, the EIC emphasized that the African and East Indian laborers sent to St. Helena, Bantam, and Bombay during the 1660s and 1670s were to be treated “like men and women and not as slaves.”24 In December 1670, for example, the company’s directors ordered that African and Asian servants on St. Helena were to be “catechised and instructed in the principles of the Christian religion” and learn from the good example of English planters.25 Once the 82 black servants living on the island in the late 1670s had demonstrated their knowledge of the Christian faith and been baptized, they would be required to serve the company for no more than seven years, after which they could become “free planters” and enjoy the same social and economic privileges as English landowners.26 Bantam received similar instructions in January 1671.27 Black servants’ servitude was of even shorter duration at Bombay where the 100 such individuals owned by the company in the mid-1670s were emancipated after their conversion to Christianity and only three years of service, whereupon they became permanent residents who enjoyed equal social status with the settlement’s English residents.28 The fragmentary and widely scattered information on company slaves in the archival record makes it difficult to determine to what extent local officials enforced these directives to treat their “black servants” humanely. An early, isolated example of their willingness to do so dates to the mid-1670s when an African servant on St. Helena and his family were granted their freedom as a reward for supporting the island’s English inhabitants during its brief occupation by the Dutch in 1673. Sir Richard Munden, who led the force that relieved the island, redeemed this “negro” from a Portuguese to whom he had been sold while the island had been occupied; it was also ordered that this man should receive land and two cows “as a reward of his service and the encouragement of faithfulness.”29 That there were efforts to instruct black servants on St. Helena 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

E/3/87, f. 228, London to St. Helena, 23 June 1671. E/3/87, f. 208, London to Bantam, 18 January 1670/71. Ibid. For the number of black servants on St. Helena in the late 1670s, see B/35, f. 183, Minutes of the Court of Directors, 19 Jan 1679. For the instructions sent to St. Helena, see E/3/87, ff. 202–03, London to St. Helena, 9 December 1670; E/3/88, f. 44, London to St. Helena, 19 December 1673; E/3/88, ff. 287–88, London to St. Helena, 15 March 1677/78. E/3/87, f. 208, London to Bantam, 18 January 1670/71. E/3/88, f. 207, London to Surat, 7 March 1676/77. E/3/88, f. 44, Commission and Instructions to the Governor and Council of St. Helena, 19 December 1673.

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“in the principals and fundamentals of the Christian Religion” is demonstrated by John Baxter’s appointment to teach at the public school in 1678; Baxter catechized both the “black” and “English” children living on the island.30 However, limited evidence from Bencoolen (Benkulen, Bengkulu) in Sumatra, dating mostly from the 1710s, indicates that although company officials asserted that they sought to comply with the Court’s directives to treat their slaves well, the living and working conditions of these enslaved men, women, and children often left much to be desired.31 This reality suggests that the company’s directors in London may have had a different approach to recruiting and managing forced labor than did their overseas employees. 2

Conceptualizing Forced Labor Regimes

The reasons why the EIC viewed their slaves as “servants” rather than slaves during the 1660s and 1670s remain unclear. The company’s directors were undoubtedly familiar with the practices and customs associated with apprenticeship in Britain and indentured labor in the Atlantic colonies. The terms of service in the contracts that brought tens of thousands of indentured laborers from the British Isles to the Americas during the seventeenth century were similar to those they envisioned for their black servants. These contracts usually entailed white servants agreeing to work for a period of three to seven years after which they could become independent planters in their own right.32 There are isolated cases in the early history of the Virginia colony of “negroes” being described as indentured servants, one of whom eventually became free and owned “black servants” himself. The widespread belief that people of African descent were inferior to Europeans meant, however, that contracts of indenture with black members of colonial society in the English Atlantic world were very unusual.33 The lenient forced labor system envisioned by the company’s directors in the 1660s and 1670s must, therefore, have drawn its inspiration from other sources. A key to understanding their perspective may lie in the fact that 30 31 32 33

British Library, EAP524/1/3/1, ff. 14–15, St. Helena Council, 2 September 1678. Allen, “A Remote but Global Place,” 159–61. Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 62–64. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso Press, 1997), 228, 240; T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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agreements between masters and indentured servants, unlike those the company envisioned with its black servants, contained no provisions linking an individual’s conversion to Christianity with his or her manumission. As others have noted, religion was an important marker of belonging in the early modern period through which unfree members of colonial society could publicly proclaim their adherence to English cultural norms and eligibility for the same rights as free planters.34 Before the systematic codification of laws governing slavery in England’s Atlantic colonies that began during the 1660s curtailed black colonists’ independence,35 planters and slaves in North America and the Caribbean sometimes viewed conversion to Christianity as a justification for manumission. In 1644, for instance, Captain William Jackson required that the husband and wife in a family of African slaves who he brought to Bermuda had to serve him for only seven years, while their young son could be freed after 30 years’ service if he was able to “make a reasonable profession of the Christian Faith.”36 Although there had been a general aversion in England since the Norman Conquest to enslaving other Christians and the Church of England expected colonists to convert their slaves to Protestantism, there was considerable uncertainty over the morality and practicality of doing so and then keeping these men and women in a subjugated condition. This uncertainty was compounded by the fact that there was no precedent in English law that black slaves on overseas plantations should be manumitted once they were baptized.37 In this socio-legal context, the company’s directors may have come to view religious conversion as a basis for early manumission on the basis of ideas that Robert Hunt articulated in 1650 as part of his plan to establish a plantation on the island of Assada (Nosy Bé) off the northwest coast of Madagascar. Hunt’s pamphlet, The Island of Assada, was part of a body of literature published between 1635 and 1650 that promoted English colonization in the Indian Ocean. His tract stands out from other such proposals, however, because it includes the first written statement about how a population of Asian and 34 35 36 37

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 42. Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429–58. Quoted in Virginia Bernhard, “Beyond the Chesapeake: The Contrasting Status of Blacks in Bermuda, 1616–1663,” Journal of Southern History 54, no. 4 (1988): 557. H.R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 337; Katharine Gerbner, “The Ultimate Sin: Christianising Slaves in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 59–61.

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African free planters could be used to develop profitable English colonies in this part of the globe.38 An integral feature of Hunt’s vision was his belief that fostering the development of an ethnically diverse colony on Assada would encourage considerable trade to England’s benefit. He argued that Batavia and Goa had become important commercial centers in the Indian Ocean in part because the Dutch and Portuguese had “20 times their number of strangers live amongst them and under their Government.” Hunt believed that Assada’s prosperity would be guaranteed if the colony attracted “men from Arabia, Madagascar, Africa, and India to Plant, some to be free men, others servants.” These planters and servants, he continued, would be “bred up in the knowledge of God” because it required only “one English man [to] governe ten of those Nations.”39 Not unsurprisingly, the attempt to establish a permanent settlement on the island failed in the face of disease and warfare with indigenous communities.40 Despite this failure, the company’s efforts during the 1660s and 1670s to populate their settlements in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean with black servants and Christianized Asian and African free planters echoed Hunt’s plans for the Assada plantation. The company’s policies may also have been inspired by their knowledge of other slave systems which explicitly linked conversion to Christianity with manumission. Company personnel encountered Portuguese slaveholding practices during their visits to Lisbon, the Cape Verde Islands, West Central Africa, Mozambique, Goa, and Rio de Janeiro. The archival record demonstrates that the company purchased slaves from Portuguese merchants in the Cape Verde Islands, as in 1670 when Captain Thomas Harman of the Unicorne was instructed to stop at St. Jago (Santiago), one of the archipelago’s largest islands, en route to India to purchase 24 men and women “Negroes” to be carried to St. Helena.41 Slaves purchased at Portuguese colonies were valued highly for their agricultural skills.42 The English also sometimes harbored slaves who had 38

Robert Hunt, The island of Assada, neere Madagascar impartially defined: being a succint, yet plenary discription of the situation, fertility and people therein inhabiting. Clearely demonstrating to the adventurer or planter, the right way for disposing his adventure to his most commodious advantage; advising people of all degrees, from the highest to the lowest, how suddainly raise their estate and fortunes (London: Printed for Nicholas Bourne, 1650). 39 Hunt, The island of Assada, 4. 40 For further information on this colony, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 209–15; Edmond J. Smith, “‘Canaanising Madagascar’: Africa in English Imperial Imagination, 1635–1650,” Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 277–98. 41 E/3/87, ff. 202–03, London to St. Helena, 9 December 1670. 42 E.g., E/3/86, f. 154, Instructions to Captain Samuel Higginson of the ship American, 25 September 1663.

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deserted Portuguese settlements in India.43 Given its familiarity with slavery in the Portuguese empire, the EIC may have modelled its policies towards its black servants in part on Iberian precedents such as the Siete Partidas, a statutory code compiled in thirteenth-century Spain, which regarded conversion to Christianity as an important first step towards manumission and stipulated that pious slaves could be freed with their master’s consent.44 Forms of “conditional manumission” based on Roman law were also common in medieval Portugal where informal agreements between Christian masters and enslaved conversos opened the door to manumission in exchange for a specified term of service which usually lasted for nine to twelve years.45 There is some evidence that the company’s policy toward its black servants may have also reflected an awareness of slaveholding and manumission practices in the Muslim world, especially in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Slave laws and manumission practices in Muslim societies in early modern South Asia were not unlike those that the company adopted in its own settlements. Margaret Hunt has noted that enslavement in the Islamic world was often a temporary state and could be an avenue for social mobility because slaves were allowed to petition Muslim courts for their freedom after five to seven years of servitude.46 Ehud R. Toledano has observed that “manumitting slaves after a number of years, usually seven to ten, was regarded as a meritorious act” in the Muslim community.47 The company’s steadily expanding commercial and diplomatic contacts in India as the seventeenth century progressed undoubtedly exposed its employees to such Indo-Muslim practices. By the late 1670s, however, various developments compelled the company to reconsider its approach to labor management at some of its settlements. The company’s directors were seeking new ways to refund the £60,000 they had spent on maintaining a permanent presence on St. Helena. The island was a strategically important location for resupplying company vessels making the arduous journey to Asia but, unlike their commercial outposts in the 43 E/3/98, f. 291, Letter to Charles Boone President of Bombay, 5 April 1715. 44 William D. Phillips, Jr., “Manumission in Metropolitan Spain and the Canaries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 38–39. 45 Francois Soyer, “Muslim Slaves and Freedmen in Medieval Portugal,” Al-Qantara 18, no. 2 (2007): 497. 46 Margaret R. Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Longman Pearson, 2010), 16–18. 47 Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 90–91. See also William Gervase ClarenceSmith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Indian Ocean, St. Helena did not bring the company any profit through trade.48 The transition towards more brutal treatment of slaves began in 1683, when the company directed its employees on St. Helena to use the Barbados sugar industry as a model for how their settlement could be populated with English planters and become profitable.49 Officials at Bencoolen, founded in 1685, were ordered in 1687 to model their socio-economic system on that of Dutchcontrolled Batavia.50 The disruptive behaviour of black servants also played a part in convincing the company’s directors to adopt more severe labor management methods. A flurry of murders, an increased incidence of maroonage, and rumours about widespread slave rebellion led St. Helena’s governor and council to introduce new laws restricting the freedom of the island’s black inhabitants. After a slave named Sattoe was tried for attempted murder in November 1679, there were growing fears on the island that its black inhabitants were planning an uprising, which caused new laws to be instituted preventing “blacks” from moving freely about the island without a ticket of leave.51 Incidents such as these caused the company to order planters on St. Helena to emulate the “rigours of the Barbados discipline” for managing slaves in 1684.52 Over a period of approximately ten years, the company moved away from a system in which coerced African and Asian laborers were viewed as “servants” worthy of certain concessions to a more severe regime in which they were referred to exclusively as “slaves” and subjected to much more severe forms of punishment.53 This transition, which occurred several decades after a similar attitudinal shift in English colonies in the Caribbean and North America, undoubtedly reflected the directors’ decision to rely upon forms of forced labor that had proved to be economically successful in the Americas and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The extent to which the company director’s attitudes towards St. Helena’s black population had changed is revealed by a 48 49 50 51 52 53

Stephen Royle, The Company’s Island: St. Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2007), 26. E.g., E/3/90, f. 108, London to St. Helena, 15 August 1683; E/3/90, f. 178, London to St. Helena, 5 April 1684. G/35/2, f. 120, London to Bencoolen, 3 August 1687; G/35/2, f. 80, Elihu Yale to Benjamin Bloome, 8 September 1687; E/3/92, f. 61, London to Bencoolen, 19 December 1690; E/3/92, f. 298, London to Bencoolen, 23 July 1697. British Library, EAP524/1/3/1, ff. 67–72, 82–83, St. Helena Councils, 3 November 1679 and 22 December 1679 respectively. See also: E/3/89, f. 123, London to St. Helena, 24 March 1679/80. E/3/90, f. 178, London to St. Helena, 5 April 1684. Michael D. Bennett, “The East India Company, Transnational Interactions, and the Formation of Forced Labour Regimes, 1635–1730,” (MA Thesis, University of Kent, 2016), 57–61.

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1725 order which stressed how all “enfranchised blacks” who had been freed should be forced to “leave the Island by the first shipping” because of fears that they might “tamper with” or “corrupt” the company’s slaves.54 A few years later, Agnes, “a free black wench”, and her children by the white planter Francis Funge were returned to bondage for a term of 15 years after Agnes threatened to leave the island, generating unease that Funge may lose the “benefit of their labour.”55 This era also witnessed the company beginning to mount large-scale slaving ventures to Madagascar and elsewhere to sustain sizeable slave populations at St. Helena and Bencoolen who labored on experimental sugar, indigo, and tobacco plantations and performed other tasks.56 The company placed particular emphasis on training some of these slaves, especially those from Madagascar, who were deemed to be more ingenious and industrious than those from India and Southeast Asia, to perform skilled work such as carpentry and bricklaying, while officials also became increasingly reliant on armed slaves to protect isolated settlements.57 Although the level of violence to which company slaves were subject increased during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Court of Directors still maintained a benevolent attitude towards these laborers. In 1713, for example, the Court pressed factors on Bencoolen to remember that their 189 slave laborers were “men and women though slaves” and were therefore “to be used humanely according to their circumstances and not treated as bad or worse than brutes.”58 The Court repeated similar admonitions to officials at Bencoolen and St. Helena during the 1730s and 1750s.59 At the same time, however, forms of labor different from those used on St. Helena and in Sumatra were being developed at Bombay in response to the company’s efforts to develop that settlement into the most important port city in western India. At the heart of this strategy was recruiting and managing coolies and weavers from elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent. 54 55

E/3/102, f. 251, London to St Helena, 12 February 1725. G/32/8, St. Helena Consultation, 15 December 1730. N.B. St. Helena and Bombay consultation records (the G/32 and G/3 series, respectively) sometimes lack accurate folio numbering. 56 Allen, European Slave Trading, 33–35, 224–27. 57 Bennett, “The East India Company,” esp. chaps. 2, 3; Allen, “A Remote but Global Place.” On slavery at Bencoolen, see also: Frenise A. Logan, “The British East India Company and African Slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687–1792,” Journal of Negro History 41, no. 4 (1956): 339–48; John Bastin, ed., The British in West Sumatra, 1685–1825 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965). 58 E/3/98, f. 14, London to Bencoolen, 20 March 1712/13. 59 Allen, European Slave Trading, 50; Allen, “A Remote but Global Place.”

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Coolies, Weavers, and Peopling Bombay

Exerting control over western India’s dynamic migrant labor markets of artisans and landless peasants was central to the company’s efforts to develop a well-populated, secure, and stable commercial entrepôt at Bombay. Faced with the “continual oppressions of the Moors [the Mughals] upon the English” as the seventeenth century drew to a close, the company’s directors considered moving the center of their western Indian operations from Surat to Bombay.60 The directors hoped that if they could consolidate their position at Bombay, they would be able to exert more effective control over textile production and minimize the negative impact that the escalating political insecurity on the mainland might have on trade.61 In June 1703, the Court informed Bombay’s governor, Sir John Gayer, of its decision “to make Bombay the principal residence for trade as well as power on your side of India” as soon as possible.62 Achieving this goal meant that the company needed to relocate large numbers of laborers from elsewhere in India to Bombay. These workers included landless coolies, who engaged “in all sorts of laborious trades and business belonging to sea or shore,” for which they were poorly paid; the manual laborers who loaded and unloaded ships, for example, earned only 2½–3 pence a day, a wage too small to support their families.63 In July 1675, the Bombay council briefly debated purchasing 100 slaves from the Malabar Coast for the use of the island’s merchants. Unlike at St. Helena and Bencoolen, the ready availability of highly mobile landless laborers from nearby parts of the subcontinent meant that it was far easier, and perhaps even cheaper, for the council to raise coolies’ wages to encourage more workers to relocate to Bombay than to import slaves over long distances.64 Weavers who made fine cloths for the company were paid more handsomely than coolies because of their knowledge of a skilled trade.65 In the late seventeenth century, the company commonly used written contracts, which gave weavers cash advances before they finished fashioning their wares, as a way to exercise greater control over textile production. Doing so helped to ensure that orders for cloth were filled on time, and that weavers could not migrate elsewhere without first satisfying their obligations

60 61 62 63 64 65

E/3/95, f. 67 and f. 70, London to Bombay, 4 June 1703. E/3/95, f. 2, London to Bombay, 24 September 1702. E/3/93, f. 326, Letter to General Sir John Gayer, 8 June 1703. G/3/1.4, f. 53, Bombay Consultation, 3 June 1673; G/3/1.5, ff. 18–19, Bombay Consultation, 7 March 1673; E/3/98, ff. 294–95, Letter to Charles Boone President of Bombay, 5 April 1715. G/3/2, Bombay Consultation, 19 July 1675. G/3/1.1, ff. 28, 40–41, Bombay Consultations, 9 June 1669 and 22 July 1669, respectively.

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to the company.66 However, it would not be accurate to suggest that Indian weavers were subject to an “Asian version of Anglo-American indentured servitude” during this period.67 Advance contracts benefited weavers by giving them an assured income that guaranteed that they could support their families and purchase the raw materials they needed. Moreover, various historians have convincingly shown that in the decades before the EIC gained political ascendancy in India, the demand for skilled labor and competition for their wares ensured that weavers in Bengal, Gujarat, and along the Coromandel Coast enjoyed a powerful bargaining position in their dealings with the company. Their mobility and the ever-present threat that they could emigrate if treated poorly or offered better prices elsewhere further enhanced their power.68 The same dynamic existed in late seventeenth-century Bombay. Between 1668 and 1730, the company’s directors sent a flurry of dispatches to Bombay instructing local officials to “invite and encourage useful hands to settle with you” in order to raise revenues and improve the settlement’s security.69 However, attracting coolies and weavers to Bombay was not as simple as the directors might have hoped given the city’s proximity to the powerful and wealthy Mughal Empire and competition with the Portuguese for access to and control of regional labor markets. These markets consisted of 66 67 68

69

K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 253–62. L.H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 170–71. Hameeda Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers: Impact of the Conflict between the Revenue and Commercial Interests of the East India Company, 1750–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 16, no. 3 (1979): 323–45; S. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India 1750–1790,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, no. 3 (1980): 257–81; C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7; Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Unsettled: Mobility and Protest in the Madras Region, 1750–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, no. 4 (December 1998): 381–404; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India,” Past and Present 158, no. 1 (1998): 79–109; Haynes and Roy, “Conceiving Mobility,” 35–67; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lakshmi Subramanian, “The Political Economy of Textiles in Western India: Weavers, Merchants and the Transition to a Colonial Economy” in Giorgio Riello, Tirthankar Roy, and Om Prakash, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 253–80; Karuna Dietrich Wielenga, “Repertoires of Resistance: The Handloom Weavers of South India, C.1800–1960,” International Review of Social History 61, no. 3 (2016): 423–58. E/3/95, f. 204, London to Bombay, 12 January 1704/5.

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interconnected migrant labor networks that facilitated the frequent movement of workers between English and Portuguese settlements and other Indian port towns.70 The price of grain and the availability of staple foodstuffs had a strong influence on where workers chose to settle. These geopolitical and economic realities gave Indian peasants and skilled laborers a significant amount of power in their dealings with Europeans, and were a regular source of diplomatic disputes between the English and the Portuguese. The Court’s instructions to advance the process of “cultivating our Island of Bombay,” increase its “Manufacturyes,” and keep “all the handicrafts people you can invite thither fully employed” underpinned attempts to encourage Indian weavers and painters in Chaul, a Portuguese fortress town 60 km south of Bombay, to relocate to Bombay.71 In 1699, for example, the Court advised Bombay how the weavers from Chaul should be engaged in the production of fine silk fabrics and cotton calicos.72 Two years later, the directors underscored the importance of attracting workers to their settlements when they suggested that experience demonstrated that providing regular employment for landless Indian men and women would ensure that the number of inhabitants at Bombay could multiply “from one to hundreds” in the space of two or three decades, and consequently augment the company’s taxation revenue.73 An important component of the company’s strategy to attract workers to Bombay was to distinguish themselves and their labor policies from the island’s previous Portuguese rulers. When, for example, Alvaro Peres de Tavora, a prominent Indo-Portuguese inhabitant of Bombay, requested permission on 22 January 1672 to use coolies to fish the waters off nearby Mazagon (an island north of Bombay), the governor-in-council emphasized that he was to “use the said coolies with kindness and not to offer those violent and tyrannical practices as his predecessors for many [years] have done.” The council ultimately approved his request a week later, but only after he had brought the coolies 70

71 72 73

On migrant labor networks elsewhere in India, see Ahuja, “Labour Unsettled”; Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 793–826; Ravi Ahuja, “‘Opening up the Country’? Patterns of Circulation and Politics of Communication in Early Colonial Orissa,” Studies in History 20, no. 1 (2004): 74–130; Ian J. Kerr, “On the Move: Circulating Labor in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India,” in Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History [International Review of Social History, Supplement 14] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 85–109. E/3/93, f. 284, London to Bombay, 25 April 1700. E/3/93, f. 80, London to Bombay, 17 March 1698/99. E/3/93, f. 214, London to Bombay, 11 April 1701. Similar observations were made in later years, e.g. E/3/95, f. 205, London to Bombay, 12 January 1705; E/3/97, f. 115, London to Bombay, 17 April 1711.

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before it to confirm that their being employed by the town’s Indo-Portuguese residents would not cause any “discontent” within their community.74 The council’s actions reflected the fact that the company’s directors had previously informed Bombay that the “business of the coolies of Mazagon” was one of great concern since the company did not want to divest themselves “of a royalty or privilege” over their workers’ lives and labor.75 Subsequent developments involving these “fishing coolies” underscore the company’s attempts to attract and retain needed labor in the face of competition from rival European powers. These coolies were forced to seek refuge on the Portuguese-controlled island of Salsette when the Indian warlord Sidi Yakut Khan laid siege to Bombay in 1689. This was part of a larger migration of merchants, brokers, weavers, coolies, servants, slaves, and deserting English soldiers off the island following Yaku Khan’s invasion.76 In 1700, the governorin-council reported that these laborers were sending “frequent applications to us to procure their liberty” after the Portuguese had prevented them from returning to Bombay. The coolies and their families were eventually able to escape back to Bombay, and immediately petitioned the governor for a loan of 1,940 xeraphins to re-establish their fishing business, which was granted.77 The company’s desire to demonstrate their “moderate government” by offering Indian laborers financial aid in times of need became significant in the years immediately following Yakut Khan’s occupation of Bombay Island. The widows of coolies and “topasses” (Indo-Portuguese soldiers) killed during the siege were granted a total of 120 xeraphins in 1690 for their relief, while the company quickly granted the petitions of the Mazagon coolies Antonio Tigre and Bastian requesting that they be restored to the estates they possessed before the conflict.78 The government also loaned Muslim coolies, known colloquially as “Marsh Mareys,” who had just recently arrived from Salsette, the 74

75 76

77 78

G/3/1.4, f. 16, Bombay Consultation, 22 January 1672; G/3/1.4, f. 18, Bombay Consultation, 29 January 1672. For more on Alvaro Peres de Tavora and his management of the fishing coolies of Bombay, see National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, CO 77/14, f. 13; CO 77/49, f. 103. E/3/89, f. 111, Letter to Surat, 19 March 1679/70. Margaret R. Hunt, “The 1689 Mughal Siege of East India Company Bombay: Crisis and Historical Erasure,” History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 151. See also Margaret R. Hunt and Phillip J. Stern, eds., The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016). G/3/5, Bombay Consultation, 22 July 1700. One xeraphin is equivalent to between 1s 6d and 1s 8d. G/3/2, Bombay Consultation, 6 May 1690; G/3/4, Bombay Consultation, 3 October 1694. For another example of the company granting financial aid to the widows of coolies on

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sum of 300 xeraphins to repair their boats and purchase iron harpoons for their fishery. The company’s concern that this loan might not be repaid within 12 months led the governor-in-council to order their overseer to “cause them all to bee bound one for another least any of them at any time should return to the Portugueze Country.”79 Intense commercial competition with the Portuguese and the Mughals and the company’s political weakness in western India during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that if it was to attract the merchants, brokers, artificers, and coolies it wanted to settle at Bombay, the company had to use lenient techniques to manage the indigenous population under its control. Almost immediately after it took control of Bombay in 1668, the company’s directors instructed the settlement’s factors to levy moderate duties on the goods traded by Indian merchants and to treat local communities with “civillity and kindnesse.” The company’s commitment to encourage “the natives that are there and invite others to come thither” was demonstrated in other ways. For example, the company brought supplies of cotton to the island and offered to “disburse monies for the erecting of loomes” to enable skilled Indian artisans to make “such callicoes as they are capeable off.”80 Such measures were relatively successful and, by July 1669, 55 weavers and a loom maker from Surat resided permanently on the island.81 Instructions during the mid-1670s to advance money to weavers from Rajapur to encourage them to settle at Bombay likewise demonstrates how population management was central to the company’s plans “to enlarge the trade of that Island.”82 Landless laborers also benefitted from the company’s efforts to attract and mobilize labor in Bombay. In 1673, the governor-in-council established “privileges and immunitys for [the] encouraging of those persons which come from the neighbouring places to inhabit on this island.”83 To this end, the company paid to construct ten houses as a way to encourage others “to build houses on

79 80 81 82 83

Bombay, this time after their husbands’ death during a disastrous typhoon, see G/3/5, Bombay Consultations, 5 April 1703 and 27 September 1703. G/3/5, Bombay Consultation, 22 July 1700. E/3/87, f. 75, London to Surat, 27 March 1667/68; E/3/87, ff. 114–115, London to Surat, 10 March 1668/69; E/3/87, f. 158, London to Surat, 16 February 1669/7; E/3/87, f. 185, London to Surat, 11 August 1670. G/3/1.1, f. 28 & ff. 40–41, Bombay Consultations, 9 June 1669 and 22 July 1669, respectively. E/3/88, f. 133, London to Surat, 8 March 1675/6. See also E/3/89, f. 110, London to Surat 19 March 1679/70. G/3/1.4, f. 88, Bombay Consultation, 19 September 1673.

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this island and to invite the inhabitants to live here.”84 That same year, John Child and Godfrey Williams ordered that workmen and laborers’ pay should be raised following coolies’ complaints that the cost of rice was “soo deare” that they could not live on such a small amount of money. The company hoped that by raising laborers’ wages, it could “winn the neighbouring people to come and live with us,” thereby making it possible to complete public works sooner.85 Ensuring adequate food supplies and monopolizing the supply of raw cotton and silk were key features of the company’s policy to entice weavers and coolies to relocate to Bombay from surrounding Portuguese settlements and elsewhere in western India, and thereby consolidate greater control over the regional textile industry. Famine and lesser “food shortages” were a common feature of life in early modern India, and the availability of staple foodstuffs had a strong influence on migration patterns and individuals’ decisions to enter into bondage or sign advance contracts.86 The limited availability of fertile land on Bombay Island made it necessary to import large stores of rice from Mangalore and timber from nearby Portuguese settlements to sustain the textile industry, which raised the cost of living for poor laborers by more than ½ pence a day.87 The need to import food was further exacerbated by the sea’s continual flooding of the productive land that did exist on the island.88 Such imports were expensive but essential if the company was to be successful in its ongoing project to transfer the center of English power and trade in western India from Surat to the small and disease-ridden island of Bombay. A steady supply of the raw materials such as cotton and silk needed to produce textiles was also an important consideration for weavers when choosing a permanent 84

85 86

87 88

G/3/1.5, f. 80, Bombay Consultation, 26 August 1674. Building houses for laborers seems to have been a common strategy used by the company at Bombay. In November 1694, for example, the company financed the construction of houses for seven weavers’ families who had recently relocated to Bombay from the coastal town of Carwar (Karwar) in southern India (G/3/4, Bombay Consultation, 8 November 1694). G/3/1.5, ff. 18–19, Bombay Consultation, 7 March 1673. E.g., Anthony Disney, “Famine and Famine Relief in Portuguese India in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Studia [Portugal] 49 (1989): 255–81; H.V. Balkundi, “Famines and Droughts in the Indian Subcontinent During the 5th Century BC to 18th Century AD,” Asian Agri-History 2, no. 4 (1998): 305–15; Richard M. Eaton, “Introduction,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 5–6. E/3/93, f. 80, London to Bombay, 17 March 1698/99; G/3/1.5, ff. 18–19, Bombay Consultation, 7 March 1673. E/3/95, f. 68, London to Bombay, 4 June 1703; G/3/5, [no folio numbers], Bombay Consultation, 22 February 1702/03; G/3/3, Bombay Consultation, 23 November 1685.

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residence. The company was acutely aware that having “sufficient provisions always at hand” was the best way to “encourage those poor labouring people to reside and continue” at Bombay.89 The policy of providing artisans and laborers with food and raw materials formulated by the company for Bombay in the late 1660s and early 1670s was subsequently applied elsewhere in India.90 In 1698, for example, the company instructed Fort St. George’s president and council to stockpile rice during the “cheap season of the year” for the use of both Madras’ English garrison and its local population in times of dearth, by which means they hoped to induce great numbers of impoverished weavers, washers, and painters to immigrate to the town from surrounding areas.91 Almost identical directions were sent to Fort St. David (Tegnapatam) that same year.92 Two years later, the company’s directors suggested that weavers could be enticed to live in Calcutta and produce calicos by supplying them with “yarn or thread,” a loom for weaving cotton cloth, and access to the company’s storehouses of grain.93 Although the company’s directors sought to promulgate humane labor policies, officials at Bombay were apparently not always willing to implement and enforce such policies. In 1715, for instance, the Court was disturbed by reports it received that ill-usage had led large numbers of people to leave the island which reduced the number of laboring families from 1,000 to just 150–200 Indian men and boys. Examples of how the laboring poor had been maltreated included a report that Domingo de Souza, the overseer, had pretended that he had no money to pay coolies for their work.94 Such exploitative practices seem to have been commonplace at Bombay despite the company’s orders to “let nobody insult or abuse” their laborers.95 Five years earlier, in 1710, Sir Nicholas Waite had lodged a similar complaint, noting that the marine purser took onetenth of lascars’ monthly wages for his personal gain while the settlement’s

89

90 91 92 93 94 95

E/3/93, f. 284, London to Bombay, 25 April 1700; E/3/90, ff. 165–166, London to Surat, 7 April 1684; G/3/3, Letter from Deputy Governor of Bombay to the General and Council of Surat, 2 April 1695; G/3/3, Bombay Consultation, 19 June 1685; G/3/3, Letter from Deputy Governor of Bombay to the General and Council of Surat, 8 September 1685; G/3/4, Bombay Consultation, 27 March 1695. E.g. E/3/90, f. 132, London to Surat, 16 November 1683. E/3/93, f. 4, Instructions to President Pitt and Council at Fort St. George, 26 January 1697/8. Similar directions were sent in subsequent years: E/3/96, f. 115, London to Fort St. George, 7 April 1708; E/3/96, ff. 219–21, London to Fort St. George, 4 February 1709. E/3/93, ff. 10–13, London to Fort St. David, 26 January 1697/8. E/3/93, f. 190, London to Bengal, 29 November 1700. E/3/98, ff. 294–95, Letter to Charles Boone President of Bombay, 5 April 1715. E/3/100, f. 308, London to Bombay, 26 April 1721.

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master of works had done likewise from the coolies who worked on repairing the town’s fortifications. In the wake of such disclosures, the Court resolved that if there were ever 1,000 coolies on the island again, they would enrich “the place by their usefulness … so that even the trade of the place and building of ships would find the benefit of them.”96 Such statements suggest that the distinctions between slavery and other forms of forced labor in British Asia remained less than clear even during the early eighteenth century. This demonstrates, once again, that there were differences between the company’s directors in London and their employees in India over the nature of forced labor. Attitudes about how to manage laborers in the Indian Ocean world were multifaceted, and even varied within the company itself. Coolies’ inherently “servile” status in the eyes of some, if not many, of Bombay’s English residents is perhaps best illustrated by what happened when 22 coolies assigned to row General William Phipps to a neighboring island turned up late to do so; instead of accepting that their tardiness was a simple mistake, Phipps ordered them all to be “cruelly whipt.”97 Much like in late eighteenth-century Madras, where coolies working in the docks were whipped regularly, the violent treatment of these coolies at Bombay demonstrates that though this form of labor was waged, there still existed a highly unequal relationship between the company and its laborers.98 The coolies refused to accept this harsh treatment from General Phipps and decided to leave Bombay with their families the next day and seek more favorable employment elsewhere.99 Landless laborers in India frequently used the threat of emigration as a bargaining method to secure improved wages and working conditions from employers. Such threats were often effective because, as this episode proves, it was common for coolies to remove their whole families at a moment’s notice, a decision which demonstrates that the company’s directors were wise to encourage their employees to treat their Indian workers humanely.100

96

E/3/96, f. 366, London to Bombay, 24 March 1709/10. For other examples of the mistreatment of coolies at Bombay, see: G/3/2, Bombay Consultation, 10 April 1680. 97 E/3/98, ff. 294–95, Letter to Charles Boone President of Bombay, 5 April 1715. 98 Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context”: 808–09. 99 E/3/98, ff. 294–95, Letter to Charles Boone President of Bombay, 5 April 1715. 100 Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context”: 796. For other examples of coolies running away from Bombay and its surrounding islands, or threatening to do so, see: G/3/2, Bombay Consultation, 19 March 1674/5; G/3/4, Bombay Consultation, 4 September 1695; G/3/18, Bombay Consultation, 13 September 1703.

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Conclusion

The archival record reveals that the EIC implemented a range of policies to secure the work force it needed during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Central to the Court of Directors’ approach to labor management was a commitment to voluntary recruitment and humane treatment that manifested itself in various ways such as allowing black “servants” to acquire their freedom and become free planters, and ensuring the availability of adequate food supplies to attract Indian coolies and weavers to settle in Bombay. These distinctive policies reflected the company’s commercial aims to maintain positive trading relations with indigenous kingdoms, and their desire to exert greater control over the production of textiles and the trade of western India more generally. The EIC’s directors believed that African and Indian laborers benefitted the company’s settlements and, by implication, its economic interests. The fragmentary and sometimes opaque nature of surviving documentation makes it difficult to determine the extent to which company employees implemented the director’s “humanitarian” vision of labor management. There seems to have been major discrepancies between the company director’s perception of the best way to recruit and manage labor, and the views and practices of Englishmen living in Asia. There can be little doubt, however, that the company’s attempts to treat slaves and other laborers compassionately reflected its determination to expedite the peopling of its remote and vulnerable colonies and thereby sustain its commercial interests and relationships in South Asia and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean world. These policies deepen our understanding of slavery and forced labor in Asia in several ways, beginning with the fact that slavery and other forms of unfree labor have received short shrift in studies of the EIC.101 To date, there 101 E.g., Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia; John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: Harper Collins, 1991); Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto Press, 2006); Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Emily Erickson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Rupali Mishra, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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has been no comprehensive study of labor in the EIC world during the early modern period which situates slaves, coolies, and artisans at company settlements across the Indian Ocean in a single analytic framework. Ravi Ahuja’s work is pioneering in its comprehensive exploration of the forms of labor the company used in eighteenth-century Madras, but he has not extended this analysis to other regions in India or Southeast Asia administered by the EIC.102 Our knowledge of the company’s slaving practices was limited to a handful of studies that focused mostly on Bencoolen103 until the publication in 2014 of Richard Allen’s study on European slave trading in the Indian Ocean which included extensive research on the company’s trafficking in chattel labor.104 Anna Winterbottom has also contributed to this literature, arguing in several recent publications that slaves were valued by the EIC for their role in facilitating transfers of useful knowledge.105 The history of unfree labor at English settlements other than St. Helena and Bencoolen, however, remains almost non-existent.106 We can no longer ignore this topic not only on its own account, but also because it bears directly on our understanding of slavery at Danish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese establishments elsewhere in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world. Although we know, for example, that Danish, Dutch, and French factories at places such as Chandernagore, Pondichéry, Pulicat, Serampore, and Yanam exported Indian slaves to the Mascarenes and Southeast Asia, we know nothing about slavery in these settlements. Slavery in European, and especially Dutch, establishments in Indonesia 102 Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context”; Ahuja, “Labour Unsettled.” 103 Logan, “The British East India Company”; H.R.C. Wright, “Raffles and the Slave Trade at Batavia in 1812,” The Historical Journal 3, no. 2 (1960): 184–91; Virginia Bever Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26, no. 4 (1969): 548–77; U.C. Wickremeratne, “The English East India Company and Society in the Maritime Provinces of Ceylon 1796–1802,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1972): 139–55; Makepeace, “English Traders”; Robert J. Young, “Slaves, Coolies and Bondsmen. A Study of Assisted Migration in Response to Emerging English Shipping Networks in the Indian Ocean, 1685–1776,” The Indian Ocean Review 2, no. 3 (1989): 23–26; Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, “East India Company in Sumatra: CrossCultural Interactions,” African and Asian Studies 8, no. 3 (2009): 204–21. 104 Allen, European Slave Trading, esp. 27–62. 105 Anna Winterbottom, “From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660–1720,” in Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia, eds., Maritime History as Global History (St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2011), 95–124; Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), chap. 6. 106 Indrani Chatterjee, “Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 21.

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has been characterized as essentially “domestic” and “urban.”107 However, the EIC’s policies towards its black “servants” on St. Helena during the 1660s and 1670s and its use of slaves as plantation laborers at Bantam and Bencoolen, together with the Dutch reliance on thousands of slaves to work their nutmeg and clove plantations in the Moluccas, demonstrate that the European experience with slave labor in Asia was more varied than has hitherto been appreciated. If future research is to develop a global history of labor at seventeenth-century English colonies, then it will need to embrace this complexity and situate the forms of unfree labor used at the company’s Asian settlements in Asia in broader contexts. Studying coolies and weavers at early British Bombay increases our rather limited knowledge of the forms of labor that the EIC deployed in India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most studies have heretofore focused on the company’s activities at Madras and Bengal108 with Gujarat and Bombay remaining underrepresented in this historiography.109 The experiences of Bombay’s coolies and weavers share many similarities with those of their counterparts elsewhere in India during this period. These laborers and artisans, although sometimes poorly treated, exercised considerable power in their interactions with the company because of market forces and their mobility. The EIC developed specific policies, such as access to the company’s granaries and providing the raw materials that weavers needed, to encourage coolies and weavers to relocate to Bombay from elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent. These policies were probably derivative from the practices used by Indian rulers, and were later replicated at Madras, Calcutta, and Cuddalore. The concessionary and benevolent strategies that the company developed for its weavers and coolies in seventeenth-century Bombay do not support Prasannan Parthasarathi’s assertion that the EIC’s policies represented a sharp break from previous political practice in India. While his argument that the company increased its disciplinary authority over weavers as it consolidated 107 Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 14–18. 108 For South India and Madras, see Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company”; Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy; Ahuja, “Labour Relations.” For Bengal, see Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 109 The only exceptions are Subramanian, “The Political Economy of Textiles”; Maxine Berg, “Craft and Small Scale Production in the Global Economy: Gujarat and Kachchh in the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Centuries,” Itinerario 37, no. 2 (2013): 23–45.

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political power during the late eighteenth century is broadly correct,110 the company’s directors did not adopt a coercive attitude towards Indian laborers and artisans during earlier periods, at least at Bombay. Growing Bombay’s population was an important part of the company’s wider efforts to transfer their seat of political power from Surat to Bombay and to shift the locus of commercial exchange in western India accordingly. The company had achieved this goal by the late eighteenth century.111 What proved to be less successful was the company’s project to develop Bombay as a textile manufacturing center. Their distance from the cotton-growing regions of Gujarat hindered the ability of weavers living in Bombay to secure regular supplies of needed raw materials and equipment such as yarn and looms.112 Bombay did, however, become an important entrepôt for the re-export of Gujarati cotton to markets in southern China after 1760.113 Exploring the EIC’s use of unfree labor also invites us to question whether comparisons can be made with other European overseas trading companies. In recent years historians have become interested in analyzing the history of the corporation from a comparative and transnational perspective.114 It is widely known that overseas trading companies moved unfree laborers around during the early modern period,115 but less attention has been given to how many of these same companies also sought to gain commercial and strategic advantages by deploying laborers on plantations and in skilled occupations. Simon Newman, for instance, has argued that in addition to participating in the transatlantic slave trade, the Royal African Company used “castle slaves” to support its business activities on the Gold Coast during the seventeenth 110 Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy, chap. 5. 111 Pamela Nightingale, Trade and Empire in Western India 1784–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 22–23. 112 Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, 260. 113 H. V. Bowen, “British Exports of Raw Cotton from India to China during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Giorgio Riello, Tirthankar Roy, and Om Prakash, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 115–38. 114 William A. Pettigrew, “Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth-Century English History,” Itinerario 39, no. 3 (2015): 487–501; William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers, eds., The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 115 E.g. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Allen, European Slave Trading; Michael D. Bennett, “Migration”, in Pettigrew and Veevers, The Corporation as a Protagonist, 68–95.

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and eighteenth centuries.116 This chapter has suggested that the EIC did something similar. By contributing to the peopling of company colonies, providing company employees with useful knowledge, and performing both menial and skilled work, slaves, coolies, and weavers played a role in constructing the company-state described by Philip Stern.117 It would be interesting to see whether other trading companies, such as the Levant Company, deployed labor in a comparable way. Perhaps future studies will determine if a distinctly corporate form of labor management existed during the early modern period, or even whether European trading companies’ exploitation of forced laborers contributed to the growth of global capitalism.118 At a minimum, this expanding body of historical research demonstrates that the exploitation of unfree labor by corporations, which has become a topical issue in recent years,119 has a longer history than previously supposed, reaching as it does back to the initial stages of European global expansion. The company’s policies towards its chattel and indigenous work forces raises another important question: to what extent and in what ways did different religious, philosophical, and other traditions or perspectives shape these policies and, by implication, English attitudes toward slavery and other forced labor systems not only during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but also potentially into the early nineteenth century as well? The company’s preference for Malagasy slaves, for example, reflected a belief that they were more “ingenious” and industrious than Indian and Southeast Asian slaves,120 characterizations that raise the question of whether the company’s policy toward its “black servants” during the 1660s and 1670s also reflected such sentiments. As others have noted, the company’s tradition of treating its workers, chattel and otherwise, humanely continued throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.121 There is good reason accordingly to suspect that the company’s early labor management policies were shaped by various traditions 116 Newman, A New World of Labor, chap. 6. 117 Stern, The Company-State. 118 Ralph A. Austen, “Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations,” Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 139–77. 119 See, for example, “Risk Averse? Company reporting on raw material and sector-specific risks under the Transparency in Supply Chains Clause in the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015” (CORE [Corporate Responsibility] Coalition, 2017, https//:globalinitiative.net/risk-aversecompany-reporting-on-raw-material-and-sector-specific-risks-under-the-transparencyin-supply-chains-clause-in-the-uk-modern-slavery-act-2015/). The report’s findings suggest that multinational corporations are at risk of supporting forced child labor and human trafficking through their efforts to source raw materials in a cost-effective manner. 120 Allen, European Slave Trading, 37. 121 Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism; Fisher, “Working Across the Seas”; Allen, European Slave Trading, 179–220.

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including the models formulated by English colonial theorists, familiarity with the practices associated with Iberian slaveholding, and an awareness of slavery in the Muslim world. We would do well to remember that the company’s directors and personnel were enmeshed in a web of socio-cultural and economic relationships that stretched not only eastward from London to Madagascar, India, Southeast Asia, and China and back again, but also westward across the Atlantic as their familiarity with developments on Barbados indicates. We must remember as well that the EIC also dealt regularly with the Portuguese Estado da Índia, the Dutch East India Company, and the French Compagnie des Indes, interactions that highlight the need to explore the multi-faceted ways in which slave trading networks and other free and forced labor systems in the European colonial world in Asia overlapped and were intertwined with one another. Future research might explore the ways in which the company described the variety of peoples they used as forced laborers in greater detail to provide new insights into how English ideas of racial difference were formulated. Previous studies concerned with these kinds of questions have been framed primarily within an Atlantic context,122 and examining English attitudes towards the diverse populations which make up the Indian Ocean world would deepen our understanding of this important topic. The need to examine the EIC’s labor management policies in more fully developed contexts is also mandated by the fact that implementation of these policies varied through time and space. The suggestion that the directors’ adoption of more rigid notions of “slave” status during the 1680s reflected, at least to some extent, their concern about controlling expenses raises important questions about the economics of the European experience with slavery in colonial Asia, including proposals in 1786 and 1800 to manumit company slaves at Bencoolen and St. Helena, respectively, and even to abolish slavery throughout the company’s territories in India itself.123 Underpinning these proposals was a belief not only in the superiority, i.e., cost effectiveness, of “free” labor, but also that such endeavors were very much in keeping with the need to follow the company’s longstanding commitment to heed what company personnel in late-eighteenth century London and India would readily characterize as the “dictates of humanity.” 122 E.g. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 229–52. 123 Allen, European Slave Trading, 183–93.

Chapter 10

Slavery, Conflict, and Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines Stephanie Mawson On 31 May 1638, a military triumph was held in the city of Manila to celebrate Governor Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera’s return from his successful campaigns against the Moros1 of Mindanao and Jolo, a small island in the Sulu Sea. The procession was led by nearly 200 slaves captured on Jolo who were followed by a contingent of Philippine Christians who had been enslaved during earlier Moro raids and liberated by the governor’s troops. At the end of the procession marched 22 children aged between six and twelve. Dressed in red taffeta, the children carried the banners and standards of the Moros defeated at Jolo. The children entered the cathedral in pairs where they were received by members of the royal audiencia,2 ecclesiastic and secular councils, and the religious orders. They were ordered to take their seats by the main altar and received “a lesson in religious humility” which concluded with the singing of the Te Deum Laudamus, a hymn usually sung on occasions of public rejoicing. At the end of the ceremony, the children were distributed among the city’s religious orders which took them as slaves and displayed their banners in their churches as trophies of the victory over the Moros. The remaining slaves captured on Jolo were sold in the public market to raise money to pay the soldiers who had fought in the expedition.3 Two decades later, one of the 22 slave children who took part in this spectacle sat languishing in the royal gaol in the Spanish city of Seville. Now in his mid-twenties, Pedro de Mendoza had been captured during the siege of Jolo when he was just six years old. Raised in Manila in the house of a noble woman, Doña Maria de Francia, he was taken by Hurtado de Corcuera as his slave and personal servant after her death. When Hurtado de Corcuera returned to Spain 1 The Spanish used the term “Moro” to refer to anyone who was Muslim. In this chapter, the term refers to the slave raiding polities on the islands of Mindanao, Jolo, and Borneo. 2 The seat of government within Spain’s colonial jurisdictions responsible for overseeing the colony, enacting royal decrees and performing judicial functions. 3 Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI): Audiencia de Filipinas (hereafter Filipinas), Legajo 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 97; Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter AHN): Colección Documentos de Indias (hereafter CDI), Leg. 26, Núm. 74; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 74, Núm. 122.

© Stephanie Mawson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_012

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after completing his service in the Philippines, Mendoza travelled with him and served in his household along with a number of other Moro slaves seized at Jolo. He eventually ran away and took to a life of crime and vagabondage in Andalucia’s infamous picaresque underworld, committing acts of robbery while intending to return to his homeland. He was first apprehended in Córdoba, where he was sentenced to be whipped and sent to the galleys. But Mendoza escaped once more and made his way to Seville where he was apprehended as a fugitive slave. His captors considered sentencing him to perpetual service in the galleys, but decided instead to brand him on the face to indicate his slave status and ensure he could not continue to run away, and then sent him back to Hurtado de Corcuera. Outraged by his treatment and desperate to return to the Philippines, Mendoza formally petitioned the king to manumit him on the grounds that enslaving the natives of the Indies was illegal according to Spanish law.4 Although we do not know the ultimate outcome of his bid for freedom, Pedro de Mendoza’s story provides a vantage point from which to understand the complexities of slavery and unfree labor in the seventeenth-century Philippines. His story lies at the intersection of both European and Southeast Asian forms of slavery. Crucially, while Mendoza was treated as chattel property by his European captors, he came from a society that practiced its own forms of slavery. As elsewhere in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, social structure on Jolo was based on varying degrees of vassalage, indebtedness, and servitude;5 it was, moreover, a slave-raiding society that actively engaged in capturing and enslaving neighboring islanders.6 These captives were either integrated into the local community, usually as agricultural labourers, or sold as chattel to other slaving societies such as the Bruneian sultanate, and sometimes to the 4 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 4, Núm. 40. 5 Laura Lee Junker, Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chief­ doms (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 131–37; William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1994), 177–78; James Francis Warren, “The Structure of Slavery in the Sulu Zone in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 111–28; James Francis Warren, “Ransom, Escape and Debt Repayment in the Sulu Zone, 1750–1898,” in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 87–101. 6 William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1991), 48–57; Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1973); Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 170; Robert J. Antony, “Turbulent Waters: Sea Raiding in Early Modern South East Asia,” Mariner’s Mirror 99, no. 1 (2013): 33–34.

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Portuguese.7 After the Spanish arrived in the Philippine archipelago in 1565, societies like Jolo used slave raiding as a powerful tool to challenge Spanish imperial ambitions in the region.8 Their raids ultimately led to the expedition of reprisal that resulted in Mendoza’s capture in 1638 by an army that included 3,000 indigenous Filipinos who were themselves unfree participants in constructing Spain’s Asian empire.9 Mendoza’s story thus demonstrates not only that complex forms of slavery and un-freedom existed in the seventeenth-century Philippines, but also that slavery was both a weapon and a battleground in the ongoing contest between the Spanish and their Southeast Asian counterparts over who wielded power and authority in the archipelago. The complexities of slavery and servitude in the early modern Philippines has left a confused legacy in Philippine historiography. This confusion stems partly from the terminology used in Spanish records which remain our principal source of information about this period. Spanish officials consistently used the terms esclavos (“slave”) and esclavitud (“slavery”) to refer to a wide variety of pre-colonial forms of bondage and vassalage,10 a practice that has led historians to assume that the “esclavos” referred to in these documents were chattel property when, in fact, they usually were not.11 To complicate matters further, chattel slavery did exist in the Spanish Philippines, but these slaves were mostly imported from outside the archipelago, especially Portuguese India.12 The search for slave markets in the Philippines by historians influenced by Atlantic histories of slavery has overshadowed the much more common experience of debt bondage among Philippine communities which structured not only pre-Hispanic social relations but also the formation of the colonial 7

Slaves could also be ransomed, as many early Spanish descriptions of Moro slave raiding make clear. See Archivo Romanum Societatus Iesu (hereafter ARSI): Phil. 10, fols. 125r–v, Letter from Gregorio Lopez, 10 December 1603; ARSI: Phil. 10, fols. 159r–88v, Copia de una del padre Melchor Hurtado escrita al Padre Gregorio Lopez Vice Provincial de Philipinas dandole quenta de su captiverio, October 1604; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 17. 8 Majul, Muslims in the Philippines. 9 Stephanie Mawson, “Philippine Indios in the Service of Empire: Indigenous Soldiers and Contingent Loyalty, 1600–1700,” Ethnohistory 63, no. 2 (2016): 381–413. 10 William Henry Scott, “Oripun and Alipin in the Sixteenth Century Philippines,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 138–55; Junker, Raiding, Trading, 131. 11 José S. Arcilla, S.J., “Sueldo” and “Bayad”: Essays on Philippine Lifestyle (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008). 12 Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 49–61; Déborah Oropeza Keresey, “La esclavitud asiática en el virreinato de la Nueva España,” Historia Mexicana 61, no. 1 (2011): 17–29; Tatiana Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 31, no. 1 (2008): 19–38.

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economy.13 This kind of servitude cannot readily be understood in an Atlantic framework. Debt bondage left no transaction records that allow us to quantify its scale. It remains embedded in an ethnographic record left by Spanish missionaries and other officials,14 although a growing body of work by historical archaeologists has shed additional light on these pre-colonial relationships.15 For these reasons, historians like John Leddy Phelan and William Henry Scott have preferred to use the term “debt-servitude” to differentiate slave categories that included “debt peons, bondsmen, and other kinds of dependents” from chattel slavery.16 Recognizing the multiplicity of unfree relationships in the Philippines allows us to move beyond a simplistic dichotomy between “pre-European” and “colonial” forms of slavery or unfree labour towards a more holistic understanding of the nature and dynamics of servitude in Asia. Previous research on Philippine debt-servitude has focussed on understanding pre-Hispanic 13

Recent histories that have sought to uncover a slave trade between the Philippines and New Spain include: Seijas, Asian Slaves; Oropeza Keresey, “La esclavitud asiática,” 17–29; Andrés Reséndez, “An Early Abolitionist Crusade,” Ethnohistory 64, no.1 (2017), 19–40. 14 Francisco Ignacio Alcina, Historia de las Islas e Indios Visayas del Padre Alcina. 1668, ed. by María Luisa Martín-Merás and María Dolores Higueras (Madrid: Instituto Histórico de Marina, 1974); Pedro Chirino, S.J., Relación de las Islas Filipinas, trans. by Ramón Echevarria (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1969), 363–64; Antonio de Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan and China at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry E.J. Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Cambridge Library Collection, Web. 02 August 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9780511707803, 298–300; ‘Boxer Codex,’ The Lilly Library Digital Collections, http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/ digital/collections/items/ show/93; Miguel de Loarca, “Relación de las Yslas Filipinas,” in Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, trans. & eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803: Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and Religious Conditions of Those Islands from Their Earliest Relations with European Nations to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (hereafter B&R] (Cleveland, Ohio: A.H. Clark, 1903–09), vol. 5, 136–44; Juan de Plasencia, “Customs of the Tagalogs,” B&R, vol. 7, 164–76; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 2, Núm. 16; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 34, Núm. 8; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 18; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 21; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18A, Ramo 2, Núm. 9. 15 Junker, Raiding, Trading, 131–43; Laura Lee Junker, “Warrior Burials and the Nature of Warfare in Prehispanic Philippine Chiefdoms,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 27, no. 1–2 (1999): 24–58; Laura Lee Junker, “Archaeological Excavations at the 12th–16th Century Settlement of Tanjay, Negros Oriental: The Burial Evidence for Social StatusSymbolism, Head-Taking and Interpolity Raiding,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 21, no. 1 (1993): 39–82. 16 Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 3. See also John Leddy Phelan, “Free Versus Compulsory Labor: Mexico and the Philippines 1540–1648,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1, no. 2 (1959): 197.

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customs and practices; however, these pre-Hispanic relationships also had a significant impact on social, economic, and political formations during the colonial period.17 Thus, historians’ work on the role of debt-servitude and slavery in pre-colonial Southeast Asian societies remains integral to understanding slavery in the later colonial period as well.18 1

Slavery in the Philippines

Although Pedro de Mendoza was enslaved at a very young age, he was born into a society familiar with the practice of slavery. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, seventeenth-century Jolo was a society in which most agricultural, manual, and domestic labor was performed by slaves, and islanders relied on the regular raiding of other coastal communities to maintain this labor force. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jolo emerged at the head of the Sulu sultanate, the largest and most notorious slave raiding power in maritime Southeast Asia which imported an estimated 200,000–300,000 slaves between 1780 and 17

18

The connection between pre-colonial and colonial systems of labour has not always been obvious in the existing historiography. For example, debt-servitude remains absent from Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera’s Encomienda, tributo y trabajo en Filipinas (1570–1608) (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 1995). Other historians have assumed simplistically that the existence of pre-colonial forms of debt-servitude “predisposed” Philippine communities to later colonial forms of unfree labour, without seeking to explore how the transition between the two took place. See James S. Cummins and Nicholas P. Cushner, “Labor in the Colonial Philippines: The Discurso Parenetico of Gomez de Espinosa,” Philippine Studies 22, nos. 1–2 (1974): 118–20; Nicholas P. Cushner, Spain in the Philippines: From Conquest to Revolution (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1971), 102. Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency; Antony, “Turbulent Waters,” 23–38; Bryce Beemer, “Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave-Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand,” The Historian 71, no. 3 (2009): 481–506; Peter Boomgaard, “Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910,” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 83–96; Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries),” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 143–54; Bok-rae Kim, “Debt Slaves in Old Korea,” in Campbell and Stanziani, Bonded Labour and Debt, 165–72; Yoko Matsui, “The Debt-Servitude of Prostitutes in Japan during the Edo Period, 1600– 1868,” in Campbell and Stanziani, Bonded Labour and Debt, 173–186; Hans Hägerdal, “The Slaves of Timor: Life and Death on the Fringes of Early Colonial Society,” Itinerario 34, no. 2 (2010): 19–44; Rila Mukherjee, “Mobility in the Bay of Bengal World: Medieval Raiders, Traders, States and the Slaves,” Indian Historical Review 36, no. 1 (2009): 109–29; Joseph MacKay, “Pirate Nations: Maritime Pirates as Escape Societies in Late Imperial China,” Social Science History 37, no. 4 (2013), 551–73; Seijas, Asian Slaves; Reid, ‘“Closed” and “Open” Slave Systems,” 156–181.

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Map 10.1

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Spanish Philippines

1880.19 Although Sulu slave raiding occurred on a smaller scale during the early seventeenth century, these raids were still devastating to coastal communities of the Philippine archipelago, particularly in the Visayan Islands (Bohol, Cebu, Leyte, Negros, Panay, Samar) and the Bicol Peninsula. Spanish chroniclers viewed the slave raiding activities of the Sulus of Jolo and their counterparts in Borneo and Mindanao as part of the predatory behavior of Muslim polities against innocent Christian communities.20 19

20

James Warren, “The Iranun and Balangingi Slaving Voyage: Middle Passages in the Sulu Zone,” in Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 66. Francisco Combes, Historia de las islas de Mindanao, Jolo y sus adyacentes. Progresos de la religión y armas catolicas. Compuesto por el padre Francisco Combes, de la compañía de Iesus, Cathedratico de Prima de Theologia en su Colegio y Universidad de a la Ciudad de Manila (Madrid: Por los herederos de Pablo de Val, 1667); José Montero y Vidal, Historia de la piratería malayo-mahometana en Mindanao, Jolo y Borneo, (Madrid: M. Tello, 1888); Francisco Colin, Labor evangélica, ministerios apostólicos de los obreros de la compañía de Iesus, fundación y progressos de su provincia en las islas filipinas. Historiados por el padre Francisco Colin, provincial de la misma compañía, calificador del santo oficio y su comisario en la governacion de Samboanga y su distrito, 4 vols. (Madrid: Por Ioseph Fernandez de

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At the same time, these chroniclers appeared largely unaware that raiding was a common form of warfare in the Philippines and throughout maritime Southeast Asia. Slave raiders exploited the physical geography of island archipelagos and annual monsoonal cycles to conduct raids across a vast expanse of maritime Southeast Asia and even coastal China and Japan.21 As early as the thirteenth century, the Philippine archipelago was known as a region where “piracy” flourished. Chinese sources described “painted” or “tattooed” raiders who sailed in bamboo rafts lashed together and carried javelins with iron tips attached to very long ropes that allowed them to recover the weapon easily after it had been thrown.22 According to these sources, these raiders attacked Fujian province where they raped and slaughtered villagers while in pursuit of iron.23 Although these raiders’ exact provenance is unknown, they most likely came from the Visayas.24 Communities that engaged in long-distance maritime raiding were not the only ones where different types of slavery coexisted. There is evidence that slavery through capture was utilised in upland communities both as part of ritual headhunting practices and as a way of increasing the labor supply.25 As in other parts of Southeast Asia, slave raiding in the Philippines was also a means for local chiefs to expand their social prestige, power, and wealth.26 Those captured during slave raids served multiple functions in the pre-colonial Philippines; they increased the local productive labor force, thereby

21 22 23 24 25 26

Buendia, 1668); P. Pedro Murillo Velarde, Historia de la provincia de Philipinas de la com­ pañía de Jesús, que comprehende los progresos de esta provincia desde el año de 1616 hasta el de 1716 (Manila: Imprenta de la Compañía de Jesús, 1749); Ethan P. Hawkley, “Reviving the Reconquista in Southeast Asia: Moros and the Making of the Philippines, 1565–1662,” Journal of World History 25, nos. 2–3 (2014): 285–310; Francisco Mallari, S.J., “Muslim Raids in Bicol, 1580–1792,” Philippine Studies 34, no. 3 (1986): 257–86; Thomas J. O’Shaughnessy, “Philippine Islam and the Society of Jesus,” Philippine Studies 4, no. 2 (1956): 215–39; Najeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905); Najeeb M. Saleeby, The History of Sulu (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1908); Luis Camara Dery, The Kris in Philippine History: A Study of the Impact of Moro Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1571–1896 (Quezon City: L. Camara Dery, 1997); Carlos Martínez-Valverde, “Sobre la guerra contra moros, en Filipinas, en el siglo XVI y en el XVII: Expediciones de don Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera a Mindanao y a Jolo,” Revista de Historia Militar 29, Núm. 59 (1985): 9–56. Antony, ‘Turbulent Waters,’ 23–24. Junker, “Archaeological Excavations,” 65–66; Junker, “Warrior Burials,” 32–33. Efren B. Isorena, “The Visayan Raiders of the China Coast, 1174–1190 AD,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 32, no. 2 (2004): 73–74. Ibid, 73–95. Domingo Perez, O.P. “Relation of the Zambals [1680],” B&R, vol. 47, 310–11; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 51; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 19, Ramo 7, Núm. 100. Junker, “Warrior Burials,” 24–58.

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contributing to greater agricultural, manufacturing, and trading surpluses, while the raids themselves served as a mechanism whereby island communities competed for trade.27 In a region that possessed an abundance of productive land, gaining control over labor became the principal means of determining status and power.28 Slave raids were a typical form of warfare aimed at controlling labor resources rather than acquiring territory. The captives seized during these raids were frequently integrated into their captors’ society where their social status rested on their skills as laborers.29 While raiding was an important part of the political, economic, and military landscape of the Philippines, capture was not the most common form of enslavement in the archipelago. As in many other parts of Southeast Asia, the social structure of Philippine communities was based on complex forms of debt bondage and mutual obligation, which, like raiding, served to increase the labor supply controlled by local elites. The existence of debt-servitude and slave-like relationships meant that pre-Hispanic Philippine communities (barangays) were hierarchically structured. Most contemporary sources describe these barangays as having three tiers composed of elites (datus), freemen (maharlikas or timawas), and slaves or bondsmen (alipins or oripuns).30 Alipins made up the vast majority of the population. Some early Spanish observers noted that there could be considerable differences in the nature of bondage among alipins depending on whether they were the victims of financial debt-bondage, criminal punishment, or captives of war. Some contemporary sources even argued that systems of slavery were so complex and varied across the archipelago that they defied categorisation or explanation.31 Nonetheless, William Henry Scott attempted to simplify these complexities by noting two basic distinctions between alipins namamahay (individuals who retained their right to land but donated a portion of their labor to a master) and alipins sa gigilid (individuals who were wholly enslaved and lived and served permanently in their master’s household, without the freedom to harvest their 27 28

Ibid, 30–31. Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 8: Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems,” 157; Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines; Junker, “Warrior Burials,” 24. 29 Beemer, “Southeast Asian Slavery,” 486. 30 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 34, Núm. 8; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 2, Núm. 16: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 15; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 18; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 21; “Boxer Codex,” The Lilly Library Digital Collections http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/digital/ collections/items/show/93; Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas, 363–64; Fray Juan Francisco de San Antonio, Crónicas de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno, translated by Don Pedro Picornell, (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1977): 161. 31 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 24, Ramo 5,Núm. 28.

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own land). Regardless of the nature of indebtedness and servitude among alipins, the ruling datu elite derived their power and social prestige from their ownership of slaves. While both maharlikas and alipins could also hold slaves, the power of the datus lay in their control over labor within their communities and their ability to conduct war against neighboring communities in a bid to extend their control over labor.32 The existence and function of these pre-Hispanic forms of debt-servitude was a source of great curiosity to many late sixteenth-century Spanish observers. Slavery often figured prominently in their ethnographic descriptions and chronicles which included numerous reports and accounts about the provenance of Philippine slaves.33 One of the earliest such accounts came from Governor Guido de Lavezaris who was asked by the king in 1573 to provide information on the types of slaves in the Philippines. Lavezaris noted that debt slavery appeared to have multiple, complex origins, many of which he and other Spanish observers found difficult to fathom. Debts leading to slavery often accrued for various reasons which ranged from small-scale theft to more serious crimes, to contravening important socio-cultural conventions, or not taking due notice of a particular datu. In the case of a serious crime such as murder, adultery or poisoning, not only were the persons who committed the crime enslaved, but so too were their children, brothers, parents, relatives and any slaves they might have. If a child was orphaned, they were typically made a slave of the family that took them in as payment for providing care and sustenance.34 Slave status in the Philippines thus existed along a continuum that ranged from the kind of servitude experienced by those captured during slave raids 32

Scott, “Oripun and Alipin,” 138–55. See also: Junker, Raiding, Trading, 120–43; Álvarez, “Los Señores del Barangay,” 367; Ana María Prieto Lucena, El contacto hispano-indígena en Filipinas según la historiografía de los siglos XVI y XVII (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1989), 334–38; John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 15, 20–22; Phelan, ‘Free Versus Compulsory Labor,” 197–200; Rosario Mendoza Cortes, Pangasinan, 1572–1800 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1974), 30; Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 70–71; Rosario Mendoza Cortes, Celestina Puyal Boncan, and Ricardo Trota Jose, The Filipino Saga: History as Social Change (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2000), 39–40; H. De la Costa, S.J., Readings in Philippine History (Manila: Bookmark, 1965), 4–5. 33 Alcina, Historia de las Islas e Indios Visayas; Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas, 363–64; Morga, The Philippine Islands, 298–300; Miguel de Loarca, “Relación de las Yslas Filipinas,” B&R, vol. 5, 136–44; Juan de Plasencia, “Customs of the Tagalogs,” B&R, vol. 7, 164–76; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 2, Núm. 16; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 34, Núm. 8; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 18; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 21; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18A, Ramo 2, Núm. 9. 34 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 2, Núm. 16; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 34, Núm. 8.

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and alipins sa gigilid to relationships of bondage and mutual obligation that are closer to European forms of serfdom. Anthony Reid has argued that this situation reflects the archipelago’s transitional state between an “open” slave society, where slaves were integrated into the dominant community, and a “closed” slave society in which slaves remained excluded from that community.35 The social structure of Philippine communities was able to accommodate slaves as both insiders and outsiders. The archaeological record supports these conclusions and suggests how this may have occurred. Laura Lee Junker describes the pre-Hispanic Philippines as highly decentralised, characterised by small polities that cycled rapidly between political consolidation and disintegration. Within these polities, power was typically established through networks of personal loyalty and mutual obligation rather than the control of territory. Labor was essential in this system since a datu’s power rested on his or her ability to extract resources from followers, usually in the form of agricultural products or labor, raiding expeditions, or construction work.36 The Philippines also experienced increased militarisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leading to higher rates of raiding and competitive warfare between communities looking to expand their control over a servile labor force.37 Thus, both capture- and commodified-slavery became more common alongside established social structures based on debt and mutual obligation. Archaeological evidence reveals that slaves captured in raiding were sometimes executed during a “mass death event” and buried with datus as a way to highlight a datu’s status; these slaves were most likely taken from enemy populations during slave raids.38 Following the arrival of the Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century, slave raiding practices were confined largely to the Philippine archipelago’s southern reaches for various reasons beginning with the fact that the Spanish discouraged retaliatory slave raiding in the areas they brought under their control. This policy was directed at Visayan communities in particular, which were forbidden from engaging in customary maritime warfare against other slave raiding societies.39 Thus, in the seventeenth century, slave raiding was conducted principally by communities operating outside of Spanish control, notably the 35 36 37 38 39

Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems,” 163–64. Junker, Raiding, Trading, 123. Junker, “Warrior Burials,” 43–48 Ibid, 24–58; Junker, “Archaeological Excavations,” 65–66. Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 52–54; H. De la Costa, S.J., The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 282–85, 311–12, 322–23; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 116–22; Camara Dery, The Kris in Philippine History, 15–16; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 82. See also: Norman G. Owen,

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Maguindanaos and Caragans of Mindanao, the Sulus of Jolo, Borneans, and the Camucones, nomadic seafarers who were said to come from the island of Palawan but were mostly likely of Sama-Bajau ethnicity.40 At the same time, polities in the archipelago’s southern reaches were better connected to Indian Ocean trading networks, primarily via their links with Borneo and Ternate, both of which were involved in long-distance trade at the beginning of the seventeenth century.41 This connection may have propelled the need for increasing numbers of slaves in these societies, both as laborers and as tradable commodities, as Warren has argued was the case for the Sulu sultanate during the late eighteenth century.42 Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean after the sixteenth century may have similarly driven an increasing demand for slaves, particularly in Borneo where Portuguese traders were known to purchase slaves.43 2

Slave Raiding and the Contestation of Empire

Slave raiding was clearly used as a tactic by communities in the southern Philippines to resist European empires. Raiding increased in response to the aggressive expansionism of the Spanish. Shortly after establishing Manila in 1571, Spanish officials harbored plans to expand rapidly into Southeast Asia with the goal of taking over the lucrative spice trade.44 To achieve this objective, they first had to conquer the Muslim polities in the southern part of the Prosperity Without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 24–25. 40 Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 45. 41 Shinzo Hayase, Mindanao Ethnohistory Beyond Nations: Maguindanao, Sangir, and Bagobo Societies in East Maritime Southeast Asia (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003), 21–25; Charles Corn, The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade (New York: Kodansha International, 1997); R.A. Donkin, Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003). 42 James Francis Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding, and the Birth of Ethnicity, (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002). 43 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 29; Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade,” 19–38; Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 27–29. 44 In the 1570s, Governor Sande developed a plan to invade China which he believed could be conquered easily in much the same manner as the Aztecs had been defeated in Tenochtitlán, with just a handful of Spanish conquistadors. See: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 35; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18A, Ramo 3, Núm. 19; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18A, Ramo 6, Núm. 36: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 6, Núm. 60: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 7,

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archipelago. Expeditions to conquer these states were launched in 1578–79 against Borneo, Jolo, and Mindanao,45 in 1584–85 against the Maluku Islands,46 in 1596 and again in 1597–98 against Mindanao,47 in 1602 against Jolo,48 and in 1603 and 1606 against the Maluku Islands.49 With the exception of the conquest of the Maluku Islands in 1606, these invasions were failures. Moro polities responded by increasing their raids with the intention of destabilising Spanish settlements in the region. These forays occurred almost every year between 1599 and 1637 and sometimes, as in 1603, several times a year, resulting in the capture of thousands of captives including a number of Spanish missionaries.50 These raids destabilised Spanish attempts to colonize the

45

46 47

48 49

50

Núm. 79: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 5, Núm. 45; Manel Ollé, La impresa de China: De la armada invencible al galeón de Manila (Barcelona: Acantilado, 2002). AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 29; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 29, Núm. 29; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 29, Núm. 29: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 30: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 31; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 34; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 35; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 3, Núm. 36; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 150; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 83, 110–11; Graham Saunders, A History of Brunei (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 54–56. AGI: Patronato, Leg. 46, Ramo 18; AGI: Patronato, Leg. 25, Ramo 24; Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 136–39. AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 6, Núm. 51; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 6, Núm. 53; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 9, Núm. 162; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 7, Núm. 56; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 7, Núm. 57; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 150–51, 276–79; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 8, Núm. 119: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 7, Núm. 60; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 7, Núm. 56; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 7, Núm. 57; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 9, Núm. 162; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18B, Ramo 8, Núm. 99; Combes, Historia de las islas de Mindanao, 80–84; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 113–15; Martínez-Valverde, “Sobre la guerra contra moros,” 16–17. AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 19, Ramo 3, Núm. 32; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 279–80; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 117. AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 3; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 115; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 9; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 23: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 29: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 1, Núm. 82; Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, Conquista de las Islas Malucas (Madrid: Alonso Martin, 1609); Andaya, The World of Maluku, 140–41; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 305. AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 44; ARSI: Phil. 10, fols. 159r–88v: Copia de una del padre Melchor Hurtado escrita al Padre Gregorio Lopez Vice Provincial de Philipinas dandole quenta de su captiverio, October 1604; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 19, Ramo 4, Núm. 73; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 74, Núm. 47; ARSI: Phil. 10, fols. 125r–v: Letter from Gregorio Lopez, 10 December 1603; ARSI: Phil 14, fol. 41; ARSI: Phil 10, fols. 235r–v; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 20, Ramo 1, Núm. 6; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 60, Núm. 10; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 308. For a list of slave raids that took place in the Philippines between 1595 and 1793, see Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), Appendix B, 271–76.

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Visayas and Camarines as the inhabitants of newly established Spanish coastal settlements fled into these islands’ interior.51 Some of these raids were also designed to damage Spanish naval power, as was the case with two Sulu raids against Spanish shipyards in 1617 and 1627.52 The first half of the seventeenth century was a period of political consolidation among the Maguindanaos and Sulus which came to be defined by the rise of the powerful Maguindanao leader, Cachil Kudarat. Unlike previous Moro leaders, Kudarat was intent on forging lasting alliances across the region to oppose Spanish expansion into the southern archipelago.53 The Spanish struggled to respond effectively to these Maguindanao and Sulu raids. Attempts to conquer these polities were largely abandoned after 1606. Spanish governors instead tried to check raiding by building armadas to patrol the waters around the Visayas. As with their earlier attempts to conquer Moro polities, these measures failed since Spanish naval capacity was weak and competed poorly with the much lighter and faster slave raider vessels.54 Raiding continued unabated for nearly four decades until Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera secured royal permission to mount a military expedition against the Moros.55 During 1637 and 1638, he marched against the Moro leaders of Mindanao and Jolo with some of the largest armies the Spanish fielded in the Philippines during the seventeenth century.56 In Mindanao, an army of 250 Spanish and 3,000 indigenous soldiers attacked and captured the fort where Cachil Kudarat and his followers had established themselves. Although Kudarat and most of his followers escaped capture, Hurtado de Corcuera returned to his base at Zamboanga in western Mindanao and proclaimed victory over the Maguindanaos. He then sent his army to exact pledges of vassalage and tribute 51 De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 282. 52 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 30, Núm. 12; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 38, Núm. 12; Real Academic de la Historia [hereafter RAH]: 9/2667, Doc. 40: Sucesos de las islas Philipinas desde Agosto de 1627 hasta Junio de 1628; RAH: 9/3657, Doc. 12: Relación del estado de las islas Philipinas y otros reinos y provincias circunvecinas desde el mes de Julio de 1627 hasta el de 1628; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 126. 53 Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 128. 54 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 6, Núm. 85; AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 1, Núm. 8; AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 21, Ramo 7, Núm. 23; Martínez-Valverde, “Sobre la guerra contra moros,” 18. 55 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 76. 56 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 82; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 97; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 233; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 74; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 224: AHN, CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 70; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 384–89; José Eugenio Borao Mateo, “Filipinos in the Spanish Colonial Army during the Dutch Wars (1600–1648),” in Isaac Donoso, ed., More Hispanic than We Admit: Insights in Philippine Cultural History (Quezon City: Vibal Foundation, 2008), 75.

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from Moro communities across the island. A Spanish armada containing more than 1,000 mostly indigenous soldiers sailed along the island’s coast burning towns and crops and killing 70 or more Maguindanaos before they reached the Spanish fort in Caraga on the island’s northeast coast.57 Emboldened by his successes, Hurtado de Corcuera set sail the following year for Jolo with an army of 500 Spanish and 3,000 indigenous soldiers. For three months, this army laid siege to the mountain fort of the Sulus of Jolo, eventually forcing the Sulu leadership to surrender or face starvation. Yet, even as they began the process of surrender, the majority of Sulus managed to flee the Spanish stockades, evading punishment and conquest.58 Although both of these military interventions ended with the flight and escape of the Moro leadership, Hurtado de Corcuera was hailed a hero from Manila to Madrid and his victories were broadcast across the empire in triumphant published accounts.59 The City of Manila asserted that he had saved the archipelago from “the greatest pirates that we have in these islands” who had “conducted considerable raids” and had “profaned temples, altars and sacred vessels …[and] captured such a sum of missionaries and Spaniards.”60 While this narrative of successful military conquest has proved enduring in some later historiographies,61 in reality Spanish control over the southern archipelago was fleeting thanks to lasting resistance by both the Maguindanaos and Sulus. By 1644, all of the gains made in these “conquests” had been reversed and 57 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 82. 58 AGI: Filipinas, Leg., 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 97; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 233; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 74. 59 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 224; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 70; ARSI: Phil. 11, fols. 178r–220v: “Relación de las gloriosas victorias que en mar y tierra han tenido las armas de nuestro invictissimo rey y monarca Felippe IIII, el Grande, en las Islas Filipinas, contro los mahometanos de la gran Isla de Mindanao, y su Rey Cachil Corrralat.” AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 233; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 4, Folios 119v–120r. 60 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 233. 61 For example, Horacio de la Costa dubbed Hurtado de Corcuera “the last Conquistador.” See: De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 373–398. See also: Martínez-Valverde, “Sobre la guerra contra moros,” 9–56; Hawkley, “Reviving the Reconquista in Southeast Asia,” 285–310. Isaac Donoso Jiménez has noted that the conquest of Mindanao also generated a number of literary responses that helped to solidify the event within Philippine national consciousness (“El Islam en Filipinas (Siglos X–XIX),” PhD thesis, Universidad de Alicante, 2011, 480–81). See also: Mellie Leandicho Lopez, A Handbook of Philippine Folklore (Quezon City: The University of the Philippine Press, 2006), 272; David Thomas and John Chesworth, eds., Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 2, South and East Asia, Africa and the Americas (1600–1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 341–42; Vicente Barrantes, Guerras piráticas de Filipinas contra mindanaos y joloanos (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1878), 311–22.

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hostilities had resumed. The rise of the Moro leader Cachil Kudarat effectively countered Spanish power in the region, forcing the new Spanish governor in Manila, Diego Fajardo, to negotiate a peace treaty that recognised Kudarat’s sovereignty over most of Mindanao.62 Even this was not enough to curb Moro hostilities to Spanish pretensions in the region, and slave raiding resumed during the 1650s.63 These raids ceased only in 1663 when the Spanish finally withdrew completely from their outposts in Ternate in the Maluku islands, Zamboanga and Iligan in Mindanao, and the Calamianes in modern-day Palawan in the face of Cachil Kudarat’s powerful sultanate.64 The loss of these territories was a significant blow to Spanish imperial ambitions in the region. Although they would continue to expand their possessions westward into Micronesia during coming decades, the Spanish never regained control over these southern regions. This withdrawal represented the greatest territorial contraction that the Spanish suffered in the Philippines, and attests to the power of slave raiding communities in counteracting colonial expansion. Speaking of his decision to withdraw from these outposts, Governor Manrique de Lara emphasised that the threat posed by raiders of Mindanao and Jolo had brought them almost to the brink of war; withdrawal from the southern archipelago was essential for the establishment of peace in the region.65 3

Debt-Servitude in the Spanish Philippines

The actions of slave raiding polities like the Sulus and Maguindanaos were devastating to Spanish colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia. Yet, this was not the only way in which indigenous forms of slavery shaped and curtailed the extent of Spanish colonial control in the archipelago. While waging war with their slave raiding neighbors, the Spanish also had to contend with the existing institution of debt-servitude which was prevalent within those parts of 62 Murillo Velarde, Historia de la provincia de Philipinas de la Compañía de Jesús, 239– 248; Combes, Historia de las islas de Mindanao, 375–382; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 436–37. 63 Combes, Historia de las islas de Mindanao, 432–39, 471–503; Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 156–157; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 441–43. 64 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 39; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 3, Núm. 42; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 3, Núm. 50; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 34; AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 30. 65 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 38; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 39; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 6, Fols. 129r–131r.

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the archipelago nominally under colonial rule. Across the empire, indigenous elites and other intermediaries were essential to the imposition of colonial rule, and especially the introduction of colonial labor and tribute regimes.66 In the Philippines, this reliance on indigenous elites was particularly pronounced because of the very small number of Spaniards in the archipelago during the first century of colonial rule.67 Without some degree of cooperation from local 66

67

Michel R. Oudijk and Matthew Restall, “Mesoamerican Conquistadors in the Sixteenth Century,” in Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 30–33. Laura E. Matthew, “Whose Conquest? Nahua, Zapoteca, and Mixteca Allies in the Conquest of Central Mexico,” in Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors, 102–26; Ida Altman, “Conquest, Coercion, and Collaboration: Indian Allies and the Campaigns in Nueva Galicia,” in Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors, 145–74; John F. Chuchiak, “Forgotten Allies: The Origins and Role of Native Mesoamerican Auxiliaries and Indios Conquistadores in the Conquest of Yucatan, 1526–1550,” in Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors, 175–225; Yanna Yannakakis, “The Indios Conquistadores of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte: From Indian Conquerors to Local Indians,” in Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors, 227–53; Bret Blosser, “‘By the Force of Their Lives and the Spilling of Blood’: Flechero Service and Political Leverage on a Nueva Galicia Frontier,” in Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors, 289–316; Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 158–72; Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44–63; Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall, “Black Soldiers, Native Soldiers: Meanings of Military Service in the Spanish American Colonies,” in Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 29–30; Susana Matallana Paláez, “Yanaconas: Indios conquistadores y colonizadores del Nuevo reino de Granada, Siglo XVI,” Fronteras de la Historia 18, no. 2 (2013), 21–45; José Eugenio Borao Mateo, “Contextualising the Pampangos (and Gagayano) Soldiers in the Spanish Fortress in Taiwan (1626–1642),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 70, no. 2 (2013), 582. The number of Spanish vecinos (legal permanent residents) in the Philippines fluctuated between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, falling as low as 30 in 1655 and never exceeding 350. A total of 2,472 passengers crossed the Pacific from the Americas to the Philippines during the seventeenth century, the great majority (c. 2,000) of whom were missionaries. An average of 156 soldiers were also sent to the Philippines each year, with the Spanish military presence in the islands averaging around 2,000 each year during the course of the century. By contrast, the most recent estimates put the indigenous population of the Philippines at 1.6 million, excluding the provinces in Mindanao. See Stephanie Mawson, “Convicts or Conquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific,” Past and Present 232, no. 1 (2016): 87–125; Antonio García-Abásolo, “Population Movements in the Spanish Pacific during the 17th Century: Travellers from Spain to the Philippines,” Revista Española del Pacífico 19–20 (2006–07): 145–49; Juan Mesquida Oliver, “La población de Manila y las capellanías de misas de los Españoles: Libro de registros, 1642–1672,” Revista de Indias 70, no. 249 (2010): 471; Inmaculada Alva Rodríguez, Vida municipal en Manila (siglos XVI–XVII) (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1997), 30–31; Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 251; Linda A. Newson, “Conquest, Pestilence and

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elites, the Spanish would have struggled to found new settlements, convert local populations to Christianity, and even feed themselves or defend the colony. The Spanish also depended on native allies in a majority of the military engagements they waged in the Philippines.68 This dependence on indigenous elites entailed reliance on existing social institutions, including debt-servitude, witnessed most clearly in the evolution of colonial labor and tribute regimes. These regimes were intended to be voluntary and free of exploitation; however, in practice they both mirrored and exacerbated the role that debt played in Philippine communities. While the co-option of forced labour regimes dependent on debt-servitude was necessary for the survival of the Spanish outpost in the Philippines, it also sowed the seeds of widespread rebellion and thus destabilised colonial rule. In addition to paying tribute, Philippine indios were expected to labor for the Crown under two distinct labor regimes. The repartimiento was a labor draft which supplied labor for key colonial undertakings, especially shipbuilding and the military. The bandala was a form of requisitioning supplies in which communities were obliged to contribute agricultural surpluses to colonial warehouses in Manila.69 Theoretically, laborers under the repartimiento system were to be paid daily wages, while agricultural products were supposed to be purchased at fair and transparent prices. However, neither of these happened in practice. Local corruption combined with chronic shortages of currency and severe debts held by the Manila treasury meant that few, if any, indigenous laborers were ever paid for their service. In 1620, for example, the Franciscan Fray Pedro de San Pablo accused royal officials of grossly exploiting indigenous communities during labor levies and keeping the vast majority of laborers’ pay for themselves.70 The Manila treasury was also plagued by severe financial problems. Records reveal that the Crown was Demographic Collapse in the Early Spanish Philippines,” Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 1 (2006): 7. 68 Mawson, “Philippine Indios,” 381–413: Borao Mateo, “Filipinos in the Spanish Colonial Army,” 74–93; Borao Mateo, “Contextualising the Pampangos,” 581–605. 69 Luis Alonso Álvarez, “Repartimientos y economía en las islas filipinas bajo dominio español, 1565–1815,” in Margarita Menegus, ed., El repartimiento forzoso de mercancías en México, Perú y Filipinas (México, D.F: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora Centre de Estudios sobre la Universidad, UNAM, 2000), 170–215; Phelan, “Free Versus Compulsory Labor,” 189–201; Cummins and Cushner, “Labor in the Colonial Philippines,” 117–203; Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 28–30; Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines, 93–104; Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 101–26; William J. McCarthy, “The Yards at Cavite: Shipbuilding in the Early Colonial Philippines,” International Journal of Maritime History 7, no. 2 (1995):149–62. 70 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 80, Núm. 41.

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constantly in debt to indigenous communities.71 The magnitude of this debt is suggested by attorney Juan de Bolivar y Cruz warning the colonial treasury in 1658 that he believed the debt owed to Pampangan laborers in central Luzon alone equalled 300,000 pesos.72 This failure to pay wages to local communities meant that these same communities were unable to pay their tribute in currency which led, in turn, to indios becoming indebted to their local encomenderos.73 Not surprisingly, Spanish officials were far more concerned about lost tribute than they were about paying what they owed to indigenous laborers. Many tax collectors beat and whipped indios to force them to pay their tribute and, when such measures failed, imprisoned or fined them which only increased the amount of their debt. In 1691, a number of indigenous leaders from Cagayan province commented wryly on this situation when they noted that “even though they murder us and tear us to pieces, it is impossible for most of us to pay [the tribute], because no one can give what they do not have.”74 Many Philippine indios consequently found themselves indebted to the colonial state, an obligation that could only be paid off through labor tribute.75 Doing so usually took the form of engaging in personal services for local officials (including datus), military officers, and religious orders. In remote provinces such as Cagayan in northern Luzon, indios were forced to abandon their families and fields and serve in the houses of Spanish officials for years at a time.76 Most communities were also forced to provide agricultural labor as well as cartage and hauling goods to support Spanish secular and religious officials. Both of these situations so closely resembled alipin namamahay and ali­ pin sa gigilid that it is hard to see where pre-existing debt-bondage ended and the new colonial order began. Indeed, some indios actually sold themselves

71 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 85, Núm. 30; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 28. 72 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 50. See also De la Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 56–57. 73 The encomienda system was used by Spain to divide indigenous populations into distinct tributary groups; in return for pledging their vassalage to the Spanish King, indigenous were supposed to receive military protection and religious instruction. Encomenderos were individuals responsible for providing this protection, while also personally benefiting from the collection of tribute. 74 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 83, Núm. 52. 75 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 81, Núm. 109; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 30; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 28; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 29; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 18; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 85, Núm. 25; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 43; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 85, Núm. 30; Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 117–18. 76 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 83, Núm. 52.

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into slavery to other indios in an attempt to help alleviate their obligations to the colonial state.77 Although the Spanish colonial labor regimes were similar to traditional Southeast Asian forms of servitude and obligation, communities did not automatically accept them.78 Many Philippine communities resisted the imposition of these regimes through rebellion, desertion, and fugitivism. In 1649, for example, rebellion spread across the Visayas in response to a particularly onerous labor draft that would have entailed sending thousands of Visayans to the shipyards of Cavite and the forests of Pampanga as part of a major shipbuilding project. The rebellion began on Samar, one of the eastern-most Philippine islands. A datu named Sumoroy, who was serving as the castellan of the Spanish fort, emerged as a leader amongst the indios of Palapag in northern Samar. Upon hearing that he would be among those sent to the shipyards at Cavite, Sumoroy mobilised other disaffected indios in Palapag and led a group of rebels who murdered a Jesuit priest and sacked and burned the church. The uprising spread following his actions, and other churches across the province were also torched. The rebels soon retreated into the mountains where they established a fortified position. Meanwhile, the rebellion spread across the Visayas to Camarines, Masbate, Cebú, Caraga, Iligan, northern Mindanao, and Leyte.79 One Spanish chronicler observed that the “wretched” indios of the Visayas were “maintaining their liberty” in defiance of Spanish authority.80 The most famous seventeenth-century rebellion took place in 1660 in the central Luzon province of Pampanga. Because of their proximity to Manila, Pampangans dominated every aspect of indigenous labor in the region; they provided the largest quantities of rice under the bandala system, cut most of the wood and provided laborers for the shipyards in Cavite and elsewhere as part of the repartimiento system, and enlisted in large numbers in the military.81 The Pampanga uprising, which one historian has described as a “milestone in the history of Philippine rebellion,”82 was clearly a violent reaction to the exploitation to which indigenous communities were subject 77 78 79

Hernando de los Rios Coronel, “Reforms Needed in the Filipinas,” B&R, vol. 18, 284–85. Cummins and Cushner, “Labor in the Colonial Philippines,” 117–20. “Insurrections by Filipinos in the Seventeenth Century,” B&R, vol. 38, 101–28: De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 411–13: Fernando Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión indígena en Filipinas durante los primeros cien años de soberanía española (1565–1665),” in Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico. Legazpi, vol. 2 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, S.A., 2004), 89–90. 80 “Insurrections by Filipinos,” 101. 81 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 193, Núm. 22. 82 Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión,” 92.

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under colonial labor and tribute systems. The rebellion was considered to be particularly destabilising because it occurred in an area considered to be the heartland of indigenous loyalty to Spanish authority. Authorities in Manila acted quickly to pacify the rebels in an attempt to prevent the rebellion from spreading to neighboring provinces. Governor Manrique de Lara acknowledged the rampant exploitation that Pampangans suffered under the bandala and repartimiento systems.83 After a tense stand-off with a contingent of Spanish soldiers, the rebels agreed to the concessions that the governor offered – including the payment of wages owed – and the province of Pampanga went back to work. The rebellion that broke out in the neighboring province of Pangasinan immediately after the Pampangan insurrection ended, on the other hand, raised more radical demands. The rebels sought the complete overthrow of Spanish authority in northern Luzon and beyond. The insurrection spread northwards from Pangasinan to the provinces of Ilocos and Cagayan “through the hidden passage of the intercourse between villages,”84 and required a more sustained and violent military intervention before order was restored in these provinces.85 Elsewhere, indigenous communities deserted Spanish towns and retreated into the highlands across the breadth of the archipelago. This was most notable in the Cordillera region and the neighbouring lowland province of Cagayan in northern Luzon. Resistance to Spanish occupation remained a constant threat. Early attempts by soldiers and missionaries to settle Cagayan were met by fierce and widespread rebellions in 1575, 1589, and 1598, which resulted in considerable loss of life amongst Spanish soldiers and missionaries.86 Localised rebellions continued to occur during the early seventeenth century 83 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 34. 84 “Insurrections by Filipinos,” 162. 85 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 34; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 30; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 9, Ramo 2, Núm. 29; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 32, Núm. 2; “Insurrections by Filipinos,” 140–180; RAH: 9/2668, Doc. 42: Anuas de las islas Philipinas: Del Estado de las islas desde el año 658 hasta el de 661; ARSI: Phil. 12, fols. 13r–14v: Relación breve de lo sucedido en las islas Filipinas y otras adyacentes desde el octubre del año 1660 hasta el mes de junio del año de 1662. See also: Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión indígena,” 92–96; Cortes, Pangasinan, 145–168; Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City: Tala Publishing Services, 1975), 90–95; De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 483; Cortes, Puyal Boncan, Trota Jose, The Filipino Saga, 77–81. 86 AGI: Patronato Real, Leg. 25, Ramo 44; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 7, Núm. 67; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 33; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 6, Ramo 9, Núm. 161; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 329, Libro 1, fols. 50v–51v; Pedro V. Salgado, Cagayan Valley and the Eastern Cordillera, 1581–1898 (Quezon City: Rex Commercial, 2002), 99–107; Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión,” 76–77; Felix M. Keesing, The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 173–76.

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(1605, 1607, 1615, 1621, 1625, and 1639) in response to ongoing missionary attempts to force the indigenous population into Spanish-controlled towns where they would be subjected to colonial tribute and labor regimes.87 The most significant of these rebellions in Cagayan occurred in 1621. What began as a local revolt spread quickly and resulted in the Spanish losing control over large swathes of Cagayan for half a century.88 The Dominican missionary Fray Melchor Manzano estimated that more than 8,000 indios fled into the mountains during this rebellion.89 Rebellions were thus a corollary of the exploitation and abuse which accompanied the imposition of Spanish rule. This resistance helped to shape the nature and extent of Spanish power across the Philippines. While the Spanish sought to co-opt pre-existing social structures to impose their authority over local communities, they also found that these same traditions were used against them to diminish and destabilise colonisation efforts across the archipelago. Spanish authority was thus caught in a double-bind: they found themselves completely reliant on indigenous systems of debt, servitude and obligation, while also needing to challenge these same structures in order to establish and maintain their rule. 4

Philippine Slavery and Imperial Reformers

Not all Spanish colonists were happy with this reliance on debt-servitude. Throughout the century, dissent was registered by both religious and secular officials who made reference to existing imperial policies restricting the use of indigenous labour. Indigenous slavery had been abolished by the Spanish Crown as early as 1526, while the New Laws of 1542 required all indigenous labour to

87 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 76, Núm. 55; Fr. Diego Aduarte, Tomo Primero de la Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Japon, y China, de la sagrada orden de predicadores (Zaragoza: Por Domingo Gascon, Insançon, Impressor del Santo Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia, 1693), 315–18, 413–18, 490–94, 550–56; Baltasar de Santa Cruz, Tomo Segundo de la Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Japon, y China del Sagrado Orden de Predicadores (Zaragoza: Por Pasqual Bueno, Impressor Reyno, 1693), 18–21; Fr. Julian Malumbres, O.P., Historia de Cagayan (Manila: Tip. Linotype de Santo Tomás, 1918), 28; Salgado, Cagayan Valley, 107–16, 160–499; Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión indígena,” 80. 88 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 85, Núm. 57: AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 7, Ramo 5, Núm. 67: Aduarte, Tomo Primero de la Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario, 490–94. 89 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 340, Libro 3, Fols. 406r–v; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 80, Núm. 133.

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be freely contracted and fairly remunerated.90 While numerous royal decrees were issued re-asserting these fundamental principles in the Philippines,91 the widespread existence of indigenous forms of debt-servitude made their implementation problematic. In the 1580s, missionaries campaigned for the gradual phasing out of all forms of indigenous slavery,92 but their proposal was never enacted due to fears that the indigenous elites would rebel and abandon their alliance with the Spanish.93 These efforts were renewed in the 1650s by a group of secular reformers led by Don Salvador Gómez de Espinosa y Estrada, who published a damning report on the widespread exploitation of indigenous labourers by Spanish officials and missionaries.94 Gómez de Espinosa argued that the natural freedom of indigenous subjects was protected by the Catholic faith and that no subject of the Spanish Crown should therefore be forced to perform any service against their will.95 Nevertheless, by the mid-seventeenth 90

William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 11, 85–152; Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, “¿Esclavitud o liberación? El fracaso de las actitudes esclavistas de los conquistadores de Filipinas,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 20 (1994): 61–63; Nancy E. Van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 3, 216–30; Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 18–26; Seijas, Asian Slaves, 215–21. Reséndez, “An Early Abolitionist Crusade,” 20. 91 1585: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 339, Libro 1, Fols. 325v–326r. 1594: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 339, Libro 2, Fol. 65r. 1608: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 340, Libro 3, Fols. 26r–26v; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 340, Libro 3, Fols. 28v–30r. 1609: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 329, Libro 2, Fols. 83r–85r. 1639: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 4, Fols. 122v–123r. 1656: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 5, Fols. 87v–88v. 1660: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 5, Fols. 190r–192r; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 5, Fols. 192r–194r; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 341, Libro 6, Fols. 261v–262r. 1662: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 330, Libro 6, Fols. 23v–44r. 1677: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 341, Libro 7, Fols. 246r–255v. 1679: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 331, Libro 7, Fols. 276r–277r. 1696: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 331, Libro 9, Fol. 209r. 1697: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 332, Libro 10, Fols. 26r–26v. 92 AGI: Escribanía, Leg. 403; A.H. De la Costa, “Church and State in the Philippines during the Administration of Bishop Salazar, 1581–1594,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 30, no. 3 (1950): 314–35; Hidalgo Nuchera, “¿Esclavitud o liberación?” 61–74; Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 18–26; Francisco Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, “Las órdenes mendicantes en Filipinas: agustinos, franciscanos, dominicos y recoletos,” in Leoncio Cabrero, ed., España y el Pacífico: Legazpi, vol. 2 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2004), 258–59; Pedro Borges Morán, “Aspectos Característicos de La Evangelización de Filipinas,” in Cabrero, España Y El Pacífico, 09–310; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 20, Ramo 4, Núm. 31; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 18; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 84, Núm. 21; Seijas, Asian Slaves, 241. 93 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 18A, Ramo 3, Núm. 12. Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 21–26. 94 Salvador Gómez de Espinosa, Discurso Parenético (1657), reprinted in Cummins and Cushner, “Labor in the Colonial Philippines,” 148–203. See also: AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 51; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 43. 95 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 51.

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century the Philippines relied so heavily on the exploitation of indigenous forms of debt-servitude that Gómez de Espinosa’s tract was considered highly seditious. His condemnation of the religious orders earned him censure from the inquisition and most of the copies of his report were gathered together and burned.96 The controversy surrounding indigenous slavery in the Philippines finally prompted Charles II to issue a decree on 12 June 1679 to settle this issue once and for all. The decree “determined by general law that there was no cause or any pretext to make slaves of the native indios of the Western Indies and the islands adjacent; but that they must be treated as vassals of His Majesty and so as to enlarge his Crown.” The decree particularly condemned the ongoing enslavement of captives of war by Spaniards in diverse imperial frontier areas such as Chile and the Philippines and concluded by stating that “all that currently live in slavery and their children should be with effect free.”97 In the case of the Philippines, this decree directly confronted the pre-Hispanic institution of debt-servitude that existed in the islands and, by extension, the delicate and unstable balance of Spanish reliance on this form of slavery because of their alliance with indigenous elites. Implementing the decree became accordingly highly contentious. When the members of the audiencia in Manila received the decree in December 1681, they “took it in their hands, kissed it and placed it over their heads, saying that they did and would obey it as a letter of their King and Lord.”98 Yet by September 1682, the audiencia resolved to suspend the decree indefinitely and immediately re-enslave all those who had been freed since its promulgation. The audiencia reported that during the brief period when the decree had been in force, it had been flooded by petitions for freedom, the majority of which presumably came from indios seeking emancipation from other indios. The audiencia beseeched the king to recognise that the Philippines were unique in the Spanish empire and that “these islands should not be considered the same as the rest of the kingdoms and provinces of the Americas, where the slaves are negros and mulattos or pure indios: because in these islands there is such a diversity of nations that it is not easy to comprehend all of them and impossible to record them.”99 Faced with the wavering 96 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 22, Ramo 9, Núm. 51; Cummins and Cushner, “Labor in the Colonial Philippines,” 137–145. 97 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 24, Ramo 5, Núm. 28; Reséndez, “An Early Abolitionist Crusade,” 19–40; Walter Hanisch Espíndola, S.J., “Esclavitud y libertad de los indios de Chile, 1608–1696,” Historia 16 (1981): 5–65. 98 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 24, Ramo 5, Núm. 28. 99 Ibid.

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loyalty of their slave-holding indigenous allies and the prospect of losing the war against the slave-raiding Moros in the archipelago’s southern reaches, local Spanish officials saw no other option than to disobey the king’s orders. The objections that officials in Manila raised to this abolition of slavery highlight both how the Philippines’ economy depended on slavery as well as the tenuous control the Spanish had over the archipelago. Unsurprisingly, fear of rebellion and fugitivism loomed large as explanations for the need to maintain the status quo.100 In a region where rebellion was common, maintaining the loyalty of local datus was of paramount importance. The Spanish worried that freeing their slaves would shatter the power and authority of the datus, encouraging the subservient alipins to rebel and join the already plentiful fugitive communities in the highlands. There was little to suggest why the datus themselves would remain loyal to the Spanish regime. Without the datus, the whole infrastructure of Spanish power – their capacity to collect tribute, to impose labour drafts and to convert local communities – would crumble. Many Spanish officials genuinely believed that, without the existing structures of debt-servitude, the Spanish would be unable to muster sufficient labour to support the colony. Put simply, indigenous communities would refuse to produce surplus agricultural labour to feed the Spanish population, leaving missionaries and soldiers alike in a situation of shortages and hunger. Beyond this, labour in the forests and shipyards would cease, since the labour drafts relied so wholeheartedly on the coercion and obligation of debt-bondage. The problem of widespread fugitivism was also raised in the context of slave emancipation. For some years prior to the 1679 decree, the Spanish had mustered armies composed mostly of indigenous soldiers to engage in armed incursions against fugitive communities that had formed in the highlands of provinces such as Camarines. Fugitives captured during these expeditions were enslaved for a period of ten years.101 This practice was seen as an effective way to “civilise” indios who had fled from Spanish control, as it brought them under the auspices of the Catholic Church and forced them to engage in “productive” service. The City of Manila also argued that slavery played a central role in curbing incest, adultery, highway robbery, and theft, all of which were viewed as natural consequences of the “idleness” that purportedly characterized uncontrolled indigenous communities. City officials likewise considered the majority of indios to be inherently “disloyal by nature” and felt that granting them liberty would invariably cause “some kind of disturbance.”102 More 100 Ibid; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 12, Ramo 1, Núm. 8; AGI, Filipinas, Leg. 25, Ramo 1, Num. 46. 101 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 12, Ramo 1, Núm. 8. 102 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 24, Ramo 5, Núm. 28

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importantly, however, the possibility of taking captives of slaves was the main method that Spanish officials had for convincing datus and the populations that they commanded to join these military expeditions in the first place. Without this incentive, even loyal indios refused to participate in Spanish aims and refused to provide evidence about where the fugitive communities were, leaving Spanish officials incapable of retaliating or controlling these rebellious highland populations. As Fray Andrés Gonzalez noted, without such incursions, upland communities swelled in size as indios fled Spanish towns in a bid to live free from the labor demands of the colonial state.103 Most disconcerting of all to the Spanish was the possibility of communities rebelling entirely and joining forces with the Moros of Mindanao and Jolo. Communities located at a distance from Manila were particularly at risk, especially in the Visayas and the eastern part of Mindanao, where the Spanish presence was limited and historic and cultural connections with the Moros were retained. Despite Hurtado de Corcuera’s claimed victories against the Moros in 1637 and 1638, the Spanish never effectively challenged the strength of these southern Muslim communities. Besieged on all sides, the fear of a Moro alliance with the rebellious and discontent populations of the Spanish Philippines represented the ultimate threat of the complete overthrow of empire by an organised indigenous resistance. The abolition of slavery was thus a doubleedged sword. By denying indigenous elites their customary right to continue to hold slaves, the decree shook the motivation of these elites to remain allied to the Spanish. At the same time, in removing the just war argument behind enslavement, the Spanish lost their ability to take Moros as slaves and, by extension, their retaliatory capacity against these communities. They would no longer be able to compete as equal partners in an ongoing Southeast Asian struggle for power and the control of labour. Slavery was thus an integral part of Spanish domination in the region, just as it was also a part of the indigenous resistance to empire. In 1692, in an almost unprecedented move, the Council of the Indies upheld the Manila audiencia’s decision to suspend the 1679 decree. On 8 August 1692, the king issued a new decree which called for a gradual reform of indigenous slavery. This decree recognised the right of Philippine indios to continue to practice debt-servitude while abolishing their right to transfer debt-slaves to other individuals by loan, sale, or inheritance. Additionally, no new slaves were to be recognised after the decree’s publication, and slave status could no longer be passed on to a debt-slave’s children or other descendants.104 Most historians view this decree 103 AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 12, Ramo 1, Núm. 8. 104 Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 61.

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as initiating a slow, but steady decline in indigenous forms of slavery in the Philippines. By challenging the transferability and hereditary nature of debtservitude, the decree initiated a transformation of the political economy of labor.105 Yet, in making these concessions, the Council of the Indies effectively re-legitimized slavery in the Philippines. Acknowledging the tenuous nature of Spanish power in the region, the new decree no longer disrupted the political economic foundations of unfree labour in the Spanish East Indies, allowing datus, missionaries and royal officials alike to continue to exploit pre-existing regimes of forced labour via debt and obligation to extend Spanish power and authority in the archipelago. 5

Conclusion

Pedro de Mendoza’s personal enslavement began on the battlefield in Jolo in 1638, when Hurtado de Corcuera laid siege to the Sulu fortifications in an attempt to starve the Sulus into surrendering. Suddenly, after three months, the siege ended. A messenger was sent down from the fort to surrender and request permission for the occupants of the fort to be allowed to come down from the mountain. Over the next three days thousands of Sulus streamed into the Spanish camps, while Hurtado de Corcuera negotiated the terms of peace with their ruler. Yet, despite their leader’s actions, few of the Sulus were really willing to surrender and become vassals to the Spanish King. Within the stockades of the Spanish camp, disturbances broke out between Spanish soldiers and the refugees from the mountain fort amidst a torrential tropical storm that blew across the island. In the confusion, the majority of the Sulus turned and fled from the Spanish, disappearing into the forests and leaving behind all of their possessions. Amongst the debris left behind were a number of infants and small children abandoned by their parents in their haste to flee the Spanish army. The children were gathered up by the missionaries accompanying the Spanish army and taken back to Manila.106 Pedro de Mendoza was one of these abandoned children, and thus began his enslavement and a personal journey that would take him across three continents. Pedro de Mendoza was treated by his captives as chattel. He was trafficked across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, branded on the face, and returned to his master despite his protestations of being a free indigenous subject of empire. 105 Ibid, 58–64: Seijas, Asian Slaves, 244–45. 106 AGI: Filipinas, Leg., 8, Ramo 3, Núm. 97; AGI: Filipinas, Leg. 27, Núm. 233; AHN: CDI, Leg. 26, Núm. 74.

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Yet, in many ways this experience of chattel slavery in the Philippines is exceptional. While Spaniards in Manila did own slaves, most of these slaves were from other parts of Asia, brought to Manila by Portuguese slave traders.107 The majority of unfree labourers in the archipelago were not chattel slaves owned by Spaniards, but persons experiencing varying degrees of debt bondage to other Philippine indios. This fact alone has significant implications for our understanding of how slavery operated in the Philippines; at the same time, it shaped the social and economic landscape of the colonial Philippines in multiple important ways. A focus on chattel slavery has sometimes led historians to focus on the economic relationships behind slavery, leading them to ask questions about the relationships between slave and master, the economic function that slaves filled within societies, and to see slavery in particular as an instrument of power, coercion, and control. While all of these elements form an essential part of understanding slavery, it is also important to consider slavery as a driving force within social historical processes. In many Philippine communities, different types of servitude influenced all aspects of social organisation, including labour relationships, hierarchies of power and authority, and community social cohesion. It was both a weapon of warfare and way of organising the economy. When European interests were added to this framework, slavery also became a means of contesting colonial control. Pre-colonial economies of debt and slavery profoundly shaped the nature of conflict and colonisation in the Philippines in a number of important ways. Firstly, slave raiding was an established tactic of maritime warfare in the region that was used successfully to limit Spanish imperial ambitions. Pedro de Mendoza would never have experienced chattel slavery at the hands of the Spanish had his community not actively resisted colonisation by conducting slave raids against Spanish settlements. Indeed, the action of the slave raiding polities in the southern archipelago were among the most serious threats that the Spanish faced in the Philippines. Secondly, Philippine social relations based on debt-servitude became the foundation of colonial labour regimes, allowing Spanish officials to co-opt native allies through existing power relationships. However, these same relationships became contested ground within communities overburdened by the pressures of new colonial tribute and labor regimes. Pedro de Mendoza’s own story of escape, vagabondage, and criminality in Andalucia’s criminal 107 Seijas, Asian Slaves, 49–61; Oropeza Keresey, “La esclavitud asiática,” 17–29; Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade,” 19–38.

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underworld shows the way in which individuals could resist their servitude. In the Philippines, this resistance was reflected on a wide scale across communities who turned to rebellion to resist labor drafts or abandoned Spanish settlements and fled into the mountains in the hundreds of thousands. Finally, the interdependence between the colonial economy and existing forms of debt and slavery made the implementation of imperial law virtually impossible on this distant colonial frontier. When Pedro de Mendoza petitioned the King for manumission, he called upon more than a century of theological debate and imperial law to make the case that he was a free subject of the Crown. These empire-wide debates reverberated in the Philippines throughout the seventeenth century with both secular and religious figures challenging the legality of European as well as indigenous forms of slavery. Ultimately, the Spanish relied so heavily on pre-colonial economies of servitude in the Philippines that the enactment of royal decrees seeking to limit or abolish slavery proved to be incompatible with the economic and political foundations upon which the colonial state rested. Spanish colonisation in the Philippines was thus shaped by the multiple challenges that slavery posed to colonial rule. At the same time, the story of Pedro de Mendoza reminds us that even in the face of a seemingly irreversible Spanish conquest, indigenous people were never passive participants in empire and that rebellion and contestation were everyday realities on empire’s frontier.

Chapter 11

Pearling and Slavery in the Sulu Zone, 1882–1884: The Letters and Diary of Thomas Henry Haynes James Francis Warren The papers of Thomas Henry Haynes, an English merchant adventurer and pearler, provide a unique snapshot of slavery in Southeast Asia’s Sulu Zone during the late nineteenth century.1 Because they include discussions about financial investments in the Sulu Archipelago, pearling expeditions, and slavery in the Sulu Zone, his letters and diary, written between 1882 and 1884, afford a rare opportunity to examine the web of commercial, financial, political, and other relationships that linked the Sulu islands, Singapore, northwestern Australia, and London during the 1880s. His papers also include five documents from Sulu Sultan Mohammed Badarrudin II that deal specifically with slavery and Haynes’s right to procure labor throughout the archipelago, and a valedictory letter to Haynes from the sultan’s mother. These papers, hitherto ignored by historians, provide an opening from which to examine the factors that influenced slavery and pearling in the late nineteenth-century Sulu Zone, a region in which an age-old extractive industry dependent on slave labor became increasingly subject to the pressures of economic globalization and European imperialism. Haynes’s search for pearls and pearl shell and the slave labor needed to extract these commodities illustrates how the production, circulation, and consumption of pearls and pearl shell within and beyond the Sulu Zone was contested in various parts of the late nineteenth-century Indo-Pacific world when different cultures and economies encountered one another. Haynes’s correspondence reveals more specifically how financial structures, markets, and trade within a “borderless” world which stretched from the pearl banks of the Sulu seas to Bond Street in London were shaped by continuous negotiation between a multiplicity of local, regional, and global actors. His letters and diary also throw light on slave supply and 1 The Sulu Zone encompassed the Sulu Archipelago, parts of the southwest coast of Mindanao, the northeast coast of Borneo, and reached the edge of the Sangir lands to the east. See James Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 2nd ed. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007).

© James Francis Warren, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_013

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use, debt bondage, manumission, mistreatment and resistance in a MalayMuslim slave-owning society with an open kinship system in the Sulu Zone. There are few rounded portraits of life within the interstices of particular slave cultures in Southeast Asia, but these late nineteenth-century letters provide a rare glimpse of the fate of some Southeast Asian slaves and contract labourers entangled in the political economy of the Sulu Sultanate as pearl divers who left their villages and homes to work at Hayne’s behest in distant offshore fisheries in eastern Indonesia and northwest Australia as part of a complex, fluid and multi-faceted labour system. 1

Setting the Stage

The establishment of a permanent slave trade in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sulu Zone was closely linked to Europe’s increasing commercial intrusion into China during the late eighteenth century. The European demand for locally-produced commodities such as pearls and pearl shell that could be exchanged for Chinese tea, porcelain, and other export goods spurred the Sulu Sultanate’s rapid expansion after 1780, an expansion that linked Jolo (the sultanate’s most important island), Canton, and London in a series of interdependent economic relationships.2 From Maimbung, their capital on the Jolo coast, the Sulu sultans made use of socio-cultural and economic institutions and practices typical of many pre-colonial Southeast Asian trading states to produce the commodities that could supply the Chinese market. These practices and institutions included warfare and slavery, and the sultanate’s ability to secure a steady supply of slaves to collect marine commodities for the Canton market made it one of the most strategically important commercial crossroads in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia.3 Its success in creating and reproducing the material and social conditions for recruiting and exploiting slaves, an estimated 200,000–300,000 of whom reached Sulu between 1770

2 Tomas de Comyn, State of the Philippines in 1810, Being an Historical Statistical and Descriptive Account of the Interesting Portions of the Indian Archipelago, trans. with notes and preliminary discourse by William Walton (Manila: Filipiniana Book Guild, 1969), 123–24; Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898; James Francis Warren, The Global Economy and the Sulu Zone: Connections, Commodities and Culture (Amsterdam: VU University Press/CASA, 1998; Philippine ed., Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2000). 3 James Francis Warren, “The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy and the Historical Imagination: Problematizing Global-Local Interconnections and Interdependencies,” South­ east Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (1997): 177–222, esp. 186–89.

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and 1870, was such that the sultanate acquired a distinctive predatory character in European eyes as a “pirate and slave state.”4 Thomas Henry Haynes’s involvement with the Sulu Zone began in 1882 when he left Britain for Australia on a pearling expedition for Edwin Streeter of Bond Street, a London jeweller who also exploited ruby mines in Burma and masterminded expeditions to seek diamonds in South Africa, sapphires in Montana, and emeralds in Egypt. Haynes hoped that his expedition would allow him to enrich himself and return to England in style.5 On 16 July 1882, he sailed in the brig Laughing Wave from Cossack in northwest Australia for Singapore. In Singapore, he was introduced to Sulu Sultan Muhammad Badarrudin II by Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, the Straits Settlements’ colonial secretary. The sultan invited Haynes to come with him to Sulu following his return from Mecca, which Haynes did. In Sulu, Haynes lived among the local Taosug and Samal peoples, compiled a dictionary of the Taosug language, and built a base of operations from which he mounted pearling expeditions. In October 1884 he left Sulu on the schooner Sree pas Sair with 50 Taosug and Samal divers for Macassar (Makassar) and northwest Australia. The following April, on his way back to Sulu to return the divers per the agreement he had made with the sultan, he had a tragic mishap that prevented him from reaching Sulu himself. The divers returned to Sulu on a Singapore steamer and Haynes later returned to England. Although he never visited Sulu again, he retained a life-long interest in the islands. The pearl fisheries which drew Haynes to Southeast Asia were the focal point of life in much of the Sulu Zone. Pearling was immensely important to the archipelago’s Taosug aristocrats, their slaves, and the “sea people” (Samal Bajau Laut) who sailed its waters.6 When Haynes arrived in 1882, the Taosug claimed jurisdiction over the entire archipelago from the straits south of Mindanao to Borneo, and from an indeterminate line in the South China Sea west of Palawan to a similarly indeterminate line in the Pacific east of the Sulu islands.7

4 Warren, The Global Economy, 32. 5 Ifor Ball Powell Collection (hereafter IBPC), School of Oriental and African Studies, London: MS. 26/1/6-File 7, Ifor B. Powell to Amy Schuck Fexer, 31 August 1933. On Edwin Streeter, see Patrick Streeter, Streeter of Bond Street: A Victorian Jeweller (Harlow, UK: The Matching Press, 1993). 6 Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 67–74. 7 US National Archives and Record Administration, War Department, File 642, July 19, 1902, Major O.J. Sweet, “Report: Pearl Fisheries in Philippines.”

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Sulu Archipelago

The Scottish hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple’s account of Taosug trade and society is the best early description of the political economy of Sulu’s pearl fisheries. Dalrymple, who visited the archipelago during the early 1760s, was amazed by the extent of Sulu’s pearl banks which were 20 miles wide in some places: “These guts [the intricate and narrow channels] are the most valuable pearl fisheries in the world; and they seasonally attracted a swarm of Taosug and Samal-speaking chiefs, their kindred and slaves.”8 At the time of Haynes’s venture more than a century later, the pearling zone in the Sulu and Celebes seas encompassed an area of approximately 18,200 square miles. The island of Siasi southwest of Jolo, where thousands of people dived for pearls each year, was the strategic center of the Sulu pearling industry. Samal-speaking peoples also dived for pearls and pearl shell in the waters of the Tawi-Tawi group further southwest of Jolo.9 Pearling was an uncertain and labor-intensive business. Most molluscs secrete mother-of-pearl but few produce pearls, and thousands of molluscs

8 Alexander Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 2 vols. (London: George Biggs Publisher, 1808), vol. 2, 525. 9 Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 72.

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could be opened without finding a single pearl.10 The Chinese considered pearls from the Sulu Zone to be more beautiful and valuable than those found in the Persian Gulf. According to Islamic law and custom, the sultan claimed ownership of all pearls and pearl shell in the archipelago’s waters, a claim recognized by the various groups which paid for the privilege of diving for pearls and mother-of-pearl and gave or sold all pearls of a certain size or value to the sultan. Slave divers who found a very large pearl were entitled to their freedom, and usually received some form of compensation when they delivered pearls to their masters.11 During the nineteenth century, the power and prosperity of the Taosug aristocracy depended on the labor of the slaves who dived for pearls and pearl shell and crewed the fleets that raided for slaves.12 As Haynes quickly learned upon arriving in Sulu where slaves engaged in every conceivable maritime, agricultural, and artisanal occupation, control over people and their labor was the key to power, wealth, and prestige. Since Haynes needed skilled divers to open up the pearl fisheries of eastern Indonesia and northwestern Australia, slavery was critically important to him. His search for pearls and shell to trade for imported goods, especially textiles, tobacco, and firearms, affected the allocation of slaves and dependent labor in various areas in the zone because it was the trained banyaga (slave) divers that he sought.13 During his dealings with the Taosug, Haynes and the German mariner and trader, Captain Herman Leopold Schück, were the only Europeans outside the Spanish settlement on Jolo who resided in the Sulu Archipelago. England and Germany had not yet acknowledged Spanish sovereignty over the archipelago, and both nations recognized the sultan as an independent ruler. An increasing Spanish presence in the islands, together with the sultan’s relative isolation and his friendship and business relationship with Schück, all contributed to Haynes’s initial influence among the Taosug and Samal. 2

Haynes’s Correspondence

Haynes’s letters and diary offer insights into how slavery in the Sulu Zone operated and the interdependent webs of kinship, business, and other relationships that tied pearls, pearl shell, and slave divers together with regional labor 10

Alexander Dalrymple, “Account of some natural curiosities at Sooloo,” in An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean, vol. 1 (London: J. Nourse Publisher, 1770), 13–14. 11 Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 74. 12 Ibid, 147–211. 13 Ibid, 204–09; Warren, “The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy,” 201–02.

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migration, the environment, global markets and consumption patterns, and international politics. His correspondence, which ranged from brief jottings and short notes to lengthy letters, and diary were written in various locales including Schück’s cocoa plantation at Lukut Lapas on Jolo Island, the Hotel L’Europe in Singapore, and his pearling schooner, the Sree pas Sair. Haynes reached Singapore from northwestern Australia at the end of July 1882. Upon his arrival, Haynes called on the governor of the Straits Settlements and subsequently received a letter from the colonial secretary recommending him to the sultan of Sulu who was in the city en route to Mecca for the Hajj. He wrote immediately to the sultan asking for an interview, and visited the sultan the same evening to ask for permission to work the Sulu pearl fisheries, explaining that his London-backed company would find the necessary capital. The sultan replied that he was prepared to grant him a concession to do so and help him obtain the slave divers he would need in return for a share of the profits. During this meeting, the sultan’s secretary emphasized that the sultan claimed all large pearls that were found, and that any merchant caught dealing in them would have his goods confiscated. Haynes agreed to this provision, and emphasized that a successful concession had to be based on not allowing other foreigners to fish for pearls in Sulu waters.14 The sultan encouraged Haynes to visit Sulu, adding he would guarantee his safety there. In his diary, Haynes queried whether the sultan actually had the power to grant such a concession without the agreement of the Spanish. Three days later, on 31 August 1882, he had a second interview with the sultan, who stated emphatically that the Spanish had no claim or rights over the pearl fisheries.15 Haynes then went to London to organize matters with Edwin Streeter. He returned to Singapore on 18 November 1882 and was told that the sultan was returning to Sulu from Mecca. Through a friend, he obtained a Chinese boy as a servant who could speak some English and Malay.16 After what he described as an awful trip to Sulu because of the monsoon weather, Haynes, together with the sultan and his entourage, arrived at Maimbung, the sultanate’s capital, on 31 January 1883 on board the S.S. Hong Ann. Haynes was accompanied during the voyage by Edward Schück whose father, Herman Leopold Schück, had established a trading station and cacao and coffee plantation at Lukut Lapas.17 Schück père owned almost 300 slaves who he had settled on 14 15 16 17

IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 3, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 31 August 1882. Ibid. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 21 January 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 7, Amy Schuck Fexer to Ifor B. Powell, 4 November 1933. Schück was born in Brieg, near Breslau, on 3 April 1835. His travels around the globe allowed him to accumulate enough money to buy his own boat, the Caesar, and trade in the China Seas during the 1850s. He also traded in the Philippines and befriended the sultan of Sulu who

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his plantation. Although these slaves eventually earned their freedom, they remained loyal to the captain and served as his armed retainers. Haynes instantly recognised the value of such a system of bondage and dependency to the success of his pearling scheme.18 Following his arrival at Maimbung, the sultan directed people to bring pearls to Haynes, who was organising a pearling expedition, to sell.19 In a letter dated 20 March 1883, Haynes noted that he wanted to see Sulu pearl diving first-hand. He did not doubt that fine pearls and mother-of-pearl existed in the Sulu Zone, but was unsure how to obtain the best of them. He did know that he would need to have a good steam launch and a sailing boat, keep a warehouse and stores at Maimbung, and be willing to trade a wide range of goods.20 In the same letter he mentions the sultan’s promise to concede 2,000 acres of sugar land to him. He also knew that he could not establish a plantation until he had arranged his first order of business, namely pearling. He had done nothing to do so because of the developing conflict between the Taosug and Spanish over control of the archipelago. He closed the letter by stating that, “I am going to the [Spanish] Governor tomorrow to ask definitely if they intend fighting as my [pearl] fishing expedition is ready to start if there is no trouble. The Spaniards can only fight afloat, they can do nothing ashore.”21 Haynes’s pearling scheme progressed slowly in such an unsettled political environment. A pearling expedition of over 400 men from the village of Parang on Jolo scheduled for March 1883 did not sail as planned because of the onset of the Taosug-Spanish conflict. In a letter written in mid-June 1883, he noted that the sultan showed him a few pearls and had given him two “chops” or passes to trade among the islands in the zone. He also mentioned that the sultan owed him several hundred dollars for the purchase of 200 breach-loading rifles and other smuggled goods brought from Singapore in violation of the Sulu-Spanish the treaty of 1878 which the Spanish interpreted as making the sultanate into a Spanish protectorate.22 Haynes had been told explicitly by he supplied with firearms and rice during the Spanish naval blockade of Sulu in 1871. Captured by the Spanish and accused of smuggling arms, he was freed and compensated for his losses after the German kaiser intervened. The Sulu sultan give him a grant of land and 100 slaves, after which other people asked him to purchase them as slaves. Schück died on board his ship from food poisoning in 1887. 18 Ibid. 19 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 4, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 3 February 1883. 20 In May 1883, Haynes purchased the P&O Company’s pilot steam launch Growler as well as 1,200 pounds of trade goods (IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Haynes, 11 May 1883). 21 IBFC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to his mother, 25 February 1883. 22 IBFC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to his mother, 18 June 1883.

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Thomas Haynes’s Pearling Activity

the Spanish governor of Jolo that he could not import firearms,23 and he realised that the Spanish could punish him for importing arms into Sulu. His increasing apprehension over this matter was to prove correct.24 3

The Dynamics of Pearling

The boundaries between various aspects of Taosug and European culture, practice, and belief were permeable in the late nineteenth-century Sulu Zone. Sulu was the site of complex cultural exchanges associated with the pearl and pearl-shell trade that highlighted the ways in which cultural differences became increasingly blurred.25 Ideas about fashion, work, property, value, class and authority were changed by the relation between particular commodities and “Zone” life. Silk jackets, colourful handkerchiefs, cotton shorts, cutlery, porcelain, opium, and guns all came into widespread use at the time of Hayne’s visit and, as instruments of “modernity,” inaugurated changes in the material 23 IBFC: MS. 26/1/6-File 4, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 25 March 1883. 24 Ibid. 25 Warren, The Global Economy and the Sulu Zone, 25.

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culture and social behaviour of the late-nineteenth century Sulu Sultanate. The impact of these unanticipated processes of trade and exchange became apparent in daily choices over such things as appropriate use of language and speech, fashion, interior decoration, and food and eating habits. Haynes and the Chinese resident in Jolo recognised the importance of stratification symbols to the Sulu aristocracy and brought luxuries from Europe, Singapore, and China, such as Waterford crystal, bone china, silk cloth, and porcelain, as well as opium and firearms to trading enclaves in the Zone. Consequently, the Sulu sultan and leading aristocrats had their own stores of wine, chocolate, brandy, and cigars and served European guests on Chinese porcelain. Haynes realised that securing his economic interests required him to adopt a Taosug lifestyle and speak the Taosug language, and he took up what Jean Comaroff calls a “revolution in habits” to ensure that his pearl divers adhered to the traditional discipline of slave labor. He appreciated that political authority was communicated symbolically among the Taosug through clothing and royal regalia, and that wearing high-status clothing was important to normalizing social relations with a dependent work force.26 In a letter dated 12 August 1883 in which he described a trip to Secuban, an island 20 miles southeast of Tawi-Tawi, in the company of Herman Schück, Datu Puyo (a chief of royal descent), royal officials, and others to procure pearl divers and slaves, he noted the need to dress in high fashion in this remote Samal settlement: We were very well received owing to Datu Puyo’s presence and the sultan’s chop. This place is known as one of the old piratical haunts and a most suitable place for such work as no ship can get near them. The village chiefs are a most ruffianly looking lot and all are armed with very fine krisses. You would have laughed to see us. Schuck in a pair of purple loose silk trousers and red silk coat. Myself in gold coloured silk trousers, bare footed, and flannel shirted with a batik handkerchief for a turban. If I flatter myself we looked quite distinguished. The people insist on taking us for the descendants of the cheribs (serifs) who came to Sooloo to convert them to Mohammedanism and would have it that I was the greatgrandson of Isaac.27

26

Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 80; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 27 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 12 August 1883.

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Six months later, Haynes referred again to this sartorial practice that was necessary to cement his ties with local elements: “Just off again in the Hong Ann for Sooloo for a couple of months of pigsty and misery. Am not even taking a coat this time but going to live native fashion.”28 Slavery was common in Sulu, and a man slave could be bought for $20 when Haynes arrived in the archipelago.29 As he understood only too well, access to and control of a reliable supply of cheap, skilled labor was crucial to his pearling venture, and this economic necessity required him to temporarily set aside his own moral judgment about the evils of slavery. His willingness to do so is revealed in a letter to Edwin Streeter on 15 October 1883 in which he introduced his slave boy for the first time: I and Abdul Wahab the treasurer and Abdul Rahman my slave boy are engaged at intervals in completing a Sooloo dictionary and very hard work it is. Your English ideas will doubtless receive a shock at my evident penchant for slaves but your idea of the status of a slave here is probably very erroneous. Abdul Rahman originally came and asked me to buy him to save him from a master who was claiming him and would probably have made his life a torment to him. I did so for 30 dollars and the lad has to follow me about and do what I want. He is perfectly happy with plenty of clothes and food and tobacco and not much work yet.30 Haynes had quickly grasped that slavery was the key institution at the heart of the political economy and societal order among the Taosug and Samal, and appears to have had an abiding interest in explaining the differences between Taosug slavery and conventional views of the institution in the West: After due fulfilment of their duties you could hardly detect any social difference between freemen and slaves, and their lot is far better than that of the white man when once he had signed a ship’s articles. The lad (Abdul Rahman) can dive five fathoms and is quite willing to go in the schooner to Australia … He knows he will get little. I prepare to pay the slaves I have bought 2 cents for every oyster they bring up and at the end of four years to free them; by that time they will probably have nearly 100 dollars each perhaps a great deal more and such a change from an otherwise inevitable fate of slavery and poverty for life they can get by no other 28 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 10 January 1884. 29 Ibid. 30 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to Edwin Streeter, 5 October 1883.

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means. Therefore see with a little tact it is not impossible to procure the emancipation of slaves without any sudden changes such as proclamations which infuriate their legal owners and leave the slaves in poverty. Whether I get my full number or not I don’t know – the sultan is aiming to see me tonight to have a bichara (discussion) on the subject.31 Haynes also noted the link between drought and slavery, observing in August 1883 that the failure of the rice crop “for want of rain” had dire consequences for the Samal in the southern part of the zone: “In a short time the Tawi-Tawi people will be selling their wives and children even for rice. My rice cost [me] 2.50 per picul and in Tawi-Tawi the current price is 14 dollars and will be a good deal higher.”32 It was against this backdrop that Haynes reached Laminusa on the west side of Siasi early in June 1883 armed with a letter bearing the sultan’s seal that commanded the island’s inhabitants to assist him.33 At Laminusa, he found the large (40 × 52 feet) house built by Herman Schück, which he had purchased from the captain for $200, still standing. He rebuilt the house further north on another reef where he also erected a pier at which a steamer could moor in three fathoms of water.34 Having established himself at Laminusa, Haynes, with the sultan’s document in hand, went searching for slave divers. At Parang, he learned that datus (chiefs) rarely sold their own followers but trafficked in slaves given to them as payment for debts or by the Balangingi Samal, the saltwater slavers of the Sulu Zone.35 Haynes tried out five young boys as divers, some of whom expressed a willingness to go with him, but nothing came of this endeavor when the datu left him empty-handed on the beach. A month later, Haynes obtained another document from the sultan authorizing him to recruit men and boys for a period of four years on the condition that he could not take away any who were reluctant to go.36 He returned to Parang where he managed to get four “fine lads” who he described as “just the sort of fellows I want.” He also obtained the services of three men at a regular wage of 47 pence a month, and a slave boy originally from Singapore. Haynes was confident that if these divers were pleased with their working conditions, he would be able to obtain far more of them for future voyages: “My name 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to Edwin Streeter, 26 August 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 6, Official letter of the Sultan of Sulu, June 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to his mother, 18 June 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 20 November 1883. Warren, The Sulu Zone 1768–1898, 206.

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being on the chop as boss – it will be always my name they look to … and the way I shall want it will be that I always have a staff of divers – for Australia or elsewhere. I shall buy no one except young men able to go down 15 fathoms … If you go into a foreign country you must imagine that country’s customs and adopt your work to them.” He added that Sulu men “become fixtures to you as long as you remain in country. You have to buy them wives and feed them and they will work for you in return, and they never transfer their allegiance.”37 Haynes’s belief that he was doing nothing wrong was confirmed the morning before the vessel carrying these eight divers left for Macassar and the Moluccas en route for northwest Australia. The Sulu men went ashore with a five-month advance in wages and returned to the ship less than two hours later when, as Haynes noted, they could have easily absconded but had not done so.38 After leaving Sulu in November 1883, Hayne’s state-of-the-art pearling schooner, the Sree pas Sair, put in at Solor in the Lesser Sundas where the ship’s captain, Edward Chippindall, recruited 59 divers. Thereafter, according to Haynes, the eight Sulu divers were inclined to quarrel with the Solor men but nevertheless had “to do like the rest.”39 Near present day Darwin, Australia, the schooner’s crew created a sensation when they fished 107 pairs of pearl shell in two hours “under the noses of the townspeople.” However, beri-beri broke out among the Solor divers and Chippindall had to take them back home, paying them off at Kupang in Portuguese Timor. The Sree pas Sair then left for Singapore with the eight Sulu divers still on board, calling at Surabaya on the way to be refitted before sailing on 21 August 1884 for Sulu with Haynes on board. He hoped to fish for pearls along the way, but the trip’s main purpose was to return the eight Sulu divers to their homeland.40 Haynes quickly learned that working Sulu’s pearl fisheries was a seasonal enterprise regulated by the rhythms of the monsoon. There were normally two collecting periods: from mid-September to mid-December, and from February to May. However, in some locales, such as Tawi-Tawi where the surrounding islands and reefs created a sheltered “inland sea,” pearling occurred yearround.41 The slave divers who worked the pearling beds could cost more than 100 Straits dollars each, but suitable men and boys could often be found for 40 to 60 dollars.42 Taosug datus and their kindred organized pearling expeditions 37 38 39 40 41 42

IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas Haynes to his mother, 18 June 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 28 November 1883. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to Edwin Streeter, 31 March 1884. Ibid. Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, vol. 2, 504. Edwin W. Streeter, Pearls and Pearling Life (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), 133–34.

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which often involved hundreds of small boats and lasted for several months.43 As Alexander Dalrymple had observed in 1763, divers were invariably young and exceptionally fit: The divers never use any expedient to facilitate their continuing underwater, but drawing up their breath in the hollow of their hands; and even this is scarce ever practised by professional divers, who commonly go down in the depth of seven or eight to twelve to fifteen fathoms: but though a few can dive in twenty fathoms, that is too great a depth for the fishery. They swim to the bottom, tumbling when they first plunge into the water, and then making long strokes, get out of sight in three or four. They rise a considerable distance from the place where they go down, but this distance is much accidental, from the direction they go along the bottom, their fortune in fishing shells, and the time the diver continues under water; they generally remain from one to two minutes, but in warm sunshine they can stay, perhaps longer.44 More than a century later, Haynes likewise acknowledged the Samal divers’ prowess: “The main divers are Sulu and Tawi-Tawi men – [the] best coming from Parang and Secuban Island – average time under water one minute to eighty seconds. On one occasion a diver remained under water for two and a half minutes.” Although the greatest depth that Haynes recorded these divers reaching was 17.5 fathoms (105 feet), he believed that Sulu divers could reach 20 fathoms (120 feet)45 and were the best pearl divers in the world.46 According to Dalrymple, two or three experienced divers could procure 40–50 and sometimes as many as 100 shells a day.47 Pearl diving was difficult and dangerous work. Divers faced hazards such as having their vision impaired and death from the sharks and giant stingrays which infested the waters of the Sulu Zone; the reluctance of Samal Laut divers to exploit some of Sulu’s richest pearl banks stemmed in no small measures from their fear of sharks.48 Divers used a knife to dislodge shells which were 43 44 45 46 47 48

Warren, The Sulu Zone 1768–1898, 72. Dalrymple, “Account of some natural curiosities at Sooloo,” 11–12. IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 28 November 1883. Streeter, Pearls and Pearling Life, 138. Dalrymple, “Account of some natural curiosities at Sooloo,” 3. J. Hunt, “Some particulars relating to Sulo in the Archipelago of Felicia,” in J.H. Moor, ed., Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries: Being a Collection of papers Relating to Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, Nias, the Philippine Islands, Sulu, Siam, Cochin China, Malayan Peninsula, etc. (London: Cass, 1967), 59.

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placed in a basket and sent to the surface. The greatest depth at which a slave diver could work was 20 fathoms, but the risks and limited returns of working at such a depth meant that the shell beds exploited by Haynes’s divers were normally 10–15 fathoms deep. Men who dived in these shallower waters could work for up to an hour without respite and needed only 15–20 minutes out of the water to rest before making further dives. In good pearling grounds, such as those around Siasi, a diver could collect enough shell in five or six dives to support a family for a month.49 4

The Destruction of Laminusa

There were no apparent ecological constraints on Haynes’s pearling enterprise. When a pearl bed was scoured clean or deemed a financial risk, Haynes simply moved his schooner to another place where his pearling operations could flourish. What he had not anticipated, however, was the risk of an assault on his base at Laminusa by a hostile intruder. Despite the assurances he received from the Spanish governor of Jolo, Haynes could not realistically expect his pearling scheme to survive for long in a region teetering on the brink of war in an era of Spanish colonial expansionism. His trading post was small, his funds were limited, and, most importantly, the Spanish disapproved of his commercial connections with the sultan of Sulu. Haynes’s pearling operations in the Sulu Zone came to an abrupt end when the Spanish colonial government set out to enforce its claims to Sulu after Mohammed Badarrudin II died without leaving a male heir. During the subsequent war over succession to the sultan’s throne, the Spanish attacked and destroyed Haynes’s base of operations early in January 1884.50 He spent most of February and early March in Laminusa disposing of his remaining property amid the wreckage of his dreams. Doing so entailed spending ten days in a prahu traveling to Maimbung where a Taosug datu purchased the property in question. The datu, who had supplied the boat, six slaves, and a Chinese overseer to transport the property to Maimbung, told Haynes when he did so that “They are all my slaves – you can do what you like with them – beat them as much as you like only don’t shoot them.”51 On his last day in Maimbung, Haynes interviewed the sultana about his wrecked house. He felt that it was

49 Streeter, Pearls and Pearling Life, 139. 50 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Thomas H. Haynes to Edwin Streeter, 31 March 1884. 51 Ibid.

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her scheming and the subsequent dynastic war of succession that had led to his misfortune. He also purchased some fine pearls from the new sultan, sold him some British sovereigns, and then boarded the schooner to discuss the details of his impending voyage to northwest Australia. His final diary entry before leaving Sulu reads: “Exhibiting my art in disposing of all surplus stock, as the linen drapers say. Then comes a Chinaman hand up who owes me money and is trying to raise the wind in horses, men, cash, goods, anything in fact to avoid a little bit of paper going into the Spaniards hands and settle after I am gone.”52 Although his dreams of controlling a pearling business that reached from Laminusa to Macassar and far-flung places such as Broome in northwest Australia lay in tatters, Haynes remained in Sulu where he worked in various capacities while George Streeter signed up 21 Taosug and Samal divers for another voyage to northern Australia.53 The Sree pas Sair, commanded by Chippindall, returned to Singapore from a successful cruise to northern Australia in April 1885. Haynes took charge of the schooner and sailed for Sulu to return the Taosug and Samal divers, while Chippindall remained in port to recruit new divers and Streeter went to Japan in search of additional divers. Strong currents kept the Sree pas Sair from making much headway on its return voyage to Sulu, and it was on the evening of 27 April 1885 that Haynes nearly lost his life when one of the slave divers, whom he had confined to one of the pearling boats on deck in manacles, ran “amok” and attacked several others on board. It is unclear whether the slave wanted his freedom or was revolting against the way he had been treated, but he managed, despite being handcuffed, to attack Haynes who was sleeping on deck, striking him repeatedly on the head. Temporarily blinded and unable to do anything, even eat, Haynes turned back to Makassar where he spent several months recuperating at a Dutch friend’s home. The other pearl divers who had been on the schooner were repatriated to Sulu by steamer via Singapore. Following Haynes’s departure from Laminusa, Chinese merchants with connections in Singapore quickly took over the pearl trade at the new sultan’s behest.54 Haynes, however, remained bitten by the “pearl bug” and after recovering from his injuries, travelled to northern Australia where, over the next decade, he, together with George Streeter, helped to establish the multi-cultural frontier town of Broome as the hub of the northwestern coast’s pearling

52 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 20 February 1884. 53 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Diary of Thomas H. Hayes, 11 December 1884. 54 Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898, 127–34.

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industry.55 In 1902, he proceeded to the Montebello Islands, off the northwestern Australian coast, to breed pearl oysters. In 1911, a hurricane destroyed his homestead, oyster ponds, buildings, and boats. Between 1918 and 1920, he engaged in various speculative business ventures, all of which failed. Three years later, worn out and ill, he retired to the English countryside where he remained until his death in 1927.56 5

Conclusion

Thomas Henry Haynes’s letters and diary reveal that the search for slave and contract labour was contested in various areas of the Indo-Pacific world whenever two or more cultures and economies with their respective institutions and underlying organisations encountered one another, whether in the waters of the Sulu Zone, eastern Indonesia, or northwestern Australia. Haynes’s correspondence enables us to map his connections with various peoples and places, as well as the production, circulation and consumption of pearls and pearl shell across the seas of the Zone, and beyond. The interconnectedness of these two maritime commodities on the one hand, and slaves, textiles, opium, and firearms on the other, signifies how the structure and function of money, markets and cross-cultural trade were determined by their continuous negotiation within the Sulu Sultanate’s “borderless world.” Haynes was a man of his times, and his letters speak to a period during the nineteenth century (1860s–1880s) when “innovations with a worldwide impact came thick and fast, and many processes running independently of one another seem[ed] to converge.”57 His sojourn in Sulu demonstrated that it was still possible for a man like himself to “change the name of villages and to bequeath one’s name to geography,”58 a point that he appreciated when he 55

Joseph Christensen, “‘A Patch of the Orient in Australia’: Broome on the Margin of the Indo-Pacific, 1883–1939,” in Kenneth R. Hall, Rila Mukherjee, and Suchandra Ghosh, eds., Subversive Sovereigns Across the Seas: Identity and Spatiality in Indian Ocean Ports-of-Trade (Kolkata: The Asiatic Society 2018), 286–306. On the historical archaeology of pearling in northwestern Australia, see Alistair Paterson, “Historical Archaeology of Pearling in the Indian Ocean: Through the Lens of North West Australia,” in Krish Seetah, ed., Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 171–203. 56 IBPC: MS. 26/1/6-File 2, Mrs. R. Haynes to Ifor Powell, 16 August 1929. 57 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), xvi. 58 Alfred Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 61.

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described his occupation as “explorer” on his daughter’s wedding certificate.59 However, his correspondence and diary also reveal his awareness that the Taosug and Samal communities among which he lived were being transformed by the complex interplay between indigenous socio-cultural institutions and practices, the demands of a globalized economy made manifest in his own and Herman Schück’s activities, and the imperatives of European imperialism. His letters make clear, for example, that the sultan of Sulu used his ability to grant access to land, dependent labor, and natural resources to men such as Haynes and Schück as part of his strategy to maintain his autonomy in the face of Spanish expansionism. Unfortunately for Haynes, Mohammed Badarrudin II’s death and the subsequent struggle between competing royal lineages for the throne, a struggle in which the Spanish exacerbated existing rivalries, led to war shortly after he arrived in Sulu, a war which not only destroyed his pearling business, but also brought about significant changes in the political economy of pearling in the sultanate. As Haynes was also aware, slavery was an integral component of the globalization process that was reshaping the world during the mid-1880s, a process that entailed the transformation of indigenous social, economic, cultural, and political relationships as a result of the intrusion of Western technology and commercial institutions.60 In his letters, he viewed slavery in the Sulu sultanate in light of major developments at a critical point in the region’s history. To Haynes, the sultanate’s history between the 1860s and 1880s demonstrated the need to forge links between Western economic and cultural systems, social mechanisms, technology, and institutions on the one hand, and the world of smaller and more localised smaller communities in the Sulu Zone on the other.61 The movements of dependent people such as slaves and pearl divers in the Sulu Zone during the mid-1880s illustrates this restructuring local socioeconomic relationships in an increasingly globalized world, a restructuring in which Haynes himself played a role. At the heart of this restructuring was the dis-embedding of people, in this case slaves and pearl divers, from their local contexts of interaction who became “global” beings while living and working under contract, only to become “local” beings again at the end of their 59

Debbie Cameron, “A Pearl Fisher from Cheetham Hill – The Big Friday Find,” Manchester Central Library Archives, 21 February 2014, https://manchesterarchiveplus.wordpress. com/2014/02/21a-pearl-fisher-from-cheetham-hill-the-big-Friday-find/ (accessed 8 May 2017). 60 Warren, The Global Economy and the Sulu Zone, 53–54. 61 Ibid.

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contract.62 This dis-embedding process is a crucial area for future research in Southeast Asian slavery studies. As Haynes’s correspondence reveals, that slave divers in the pearl fisheries of the Sulu Zone and elsewhere became the means to pay off trade debts in London underscores how slavery itself could be a far more flexible and adaptable institution than has commonly been assumed. 62

Thomas Hyland Eriksen, Globalization: The Key Concepts (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 21.

Chapter 12

Slavery through Missionary Lenses: Timor in the Nineteenth Century Hans Hägerdal The islands east of Bali seldom figure in books on Indonesian history. Apart from events such as the bloody imposition of the Dutch spice monopoly during the seventeenth century and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, the societies of Nusa Tenggara (part of the Lesser Sundas) and Maluku (the Moluccas) have tended to be the preserve of anthropologists rather than historians. This lack of historical interest reflects, in part, the limitations of the archival record. Most societies in the so-called “Great East” did not leave many written documents,1 and reconstructing their history requires the use of other colonial-era sources, some of which, such as those generated by colonial officials, can be problematic in various ways. Among these sources is the large but hitherto largely untapped body of correspondence in which Reformed Christian missionaries described, often in considerable detail, their experiences with the peoples and cultures of the East Indies. Their letters and reports provide an important vantage point from which to glean a better understand slavery in the eastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago during the nineteenth century and how this institution may be contextualised. Slavery and slave trading have long been conspicuous elements of social, economic, and political life in the Indian Ocean world.2 In eastern Indonesia, statelessness and/or political fragmentation made the peoples living on islands such as Flores, Timor, Sumba, and Papua vulnerable to slave raiders from near and far.3 Over the centuries, the Makassarese, Ceramese, Endenese, Portuguese, and Dutch carried hundreds of thousands of slaves away from the region. The deep distrust of foreigners generated by this activity was apparent 1 The Great East is a geographical term often used for the islands between Java and Papua. 2 E.g., James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981); Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). 3 Roy Ellen, On the Edge of the Banda Zone (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003). © Hans Hägerdal, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_014

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when the French explorer François Péron visited Timor in 1801 and made the acquaintance of Cornelis, a bright young man of the Helong tribe. Péron proposed that Cornelis accompany him back to Europe, but Cornelis refused to go because he feared he would be enslaved: I merely tried to convince him that slavery did not exist in France; but since he was aware that the Dutch, the Portuguese, the English and the Spaniards (who are better known in these regions) all possess slaves, he quite naturally concluded that the French must have them, too; and since, with the exception of Batavia, they [the Timorese] are ignorant of the countries to which those from Timor and the neighbouring islands are sent; since they know only that they are taken far, far away ( jauh, jauh), they are generally convinced that some are transported to Europe, where they are used for the hardest and deadliest work … I have thought it important to recount in full this interesting episode, because it offers proof of the intelligence of these peoples and of the poor opinion that they hold of Europeans.4 Fear of slave raiders prompted many Timorese to avoid the island’s coast and construct their hamlets and villages on steep hills and ridges in the interior. Slavery was a well-established institution in Southeast Asia long before Europeans arrived during the early sixteenth century, and continued to flourish following their arrival. Europeans carried captive Timorese, for instance, to such diverse places as India, Macau, Batavia, and the nutmeg perken (plantations) of Banda. The island of Sumba was particularly susceptible to slave raiding because it lacked organized polities and was not protected by stronger powers. As enslavement on Bali declined in the early nineteenth century,5 raiders turned their attention to areas further east with the result that numerous slaves were taken by the Endenese from Sumba, Flores, and other islands in the region.6

4 François Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, 2 vols. (Adelaide: The Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2016), vol. 1, 127. 5 On slavery in Bali, see A. van der Kraan, “Bali: Slavery and Slave Trade,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 315–40. 6 Rodney Needham, Sumba and the Slave Trade (Monash, Australia: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1983). For a general discussion about slavery in the Timor before the nineteenth century, see Hans Hägerdal, “The Slaves of Timor: Life and Death on the Fringes of Early Colonial Society,” Itinerario 34, no. 2 (2010): 19–44. On the East Timorese situation, see Douglas Kammen, “Master-Slave, Traitor-Nationalist, Opportunist-Oppressed: Political Metaphors in East Timor,” Indonesia 76 (2003): 69–86.

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Map 12.1

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Eastern Indonesian Archipelago

As others have observed, slave status in Southeast Asia was complex and variable. Timor is an illustrative case in point. The Portuguese ethnographer Ruy Cinatti noted that the distinction between enslaved prisoners of war (lutuhum) and persons purchased as slaves (atan) existed in Portuguese Timor into the early twentieth century.7 A report from 1811 says that numerous Timorese slaves gained their freedom and might even represent their master’s clan if his family died out.8 While large numbers of Timorese slaves reached various parts of the Indian Ocean world, many of those enslaved because of warfare, debt, judicial proceedings, or their birth remained on the island with local masters or the Chinese or Europeans who resided in the area. The limited demographic data at our disposal hints as the scale of slavery in nineteenth-century Timor. In 1824, a visitor to Kupang, the island’s Dutch administrative center, estimated that the town’s 1,000 households owned 1,200 slaves.9 Thirty-two years later, Dili in East Timor had 1,491 Christian inhabitants, 556 (37.3 percent) of whom 7 Kammen, “Master-Slave,” 74. 8 Affonso de Castro, As possessões portuguezas na Oceania (Lisboan: Imprensa Nacional, 1867), 201. 9 Nationaal Archief, The Hague: Coll. Schneither, J. Kruseman, “Timor” (1824), 131.

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were slaves.10 Although the government of the Dutch East Indies abolished slave trading in 1818 and slavery itself in 1860,11 these measures did not end the acquisition or use of unfree labor, since the laws applied initially only to lands under direct rule. An 1836 report observed that local rulers reduced Timorese who did not pay their judicial fines to slave status, and that slaves were bartered for sandalwood and beeswax without Dutch intervention because slaves frequently did not speak Malay and were deemed to be “too stupid” to challenge their masters.12 However, slavery began to disappear gradually during the nineteenth century from places subject to European jurisdiction because of low reproduction rates among slave populations, increasing pressure from abolitionist circles, and growing colonial supervision. Historians of slavery and bonded labor in Southeast Asia have frequently distinguished between “open” and “closed” systems of slavery. Slaves in “open” systems tended to be incorporated into a familial household where the enslaved individual’s “unfree” status (or that of his/her offspring) became increasingly blurred or vanished over time. In “closed” systems, on the other hand, the legal and often racialized social distinctions between free and slave remained intact and slaves are treated as chattel to be bought and sold at will, practices commonly associated with slave status in the Atlantic or European-controlled areas in Asia.13 Recent scholarship has argued that these two systems, although seemingly distinct from one another, were, in fact, closely bound up with one other, were not contingent on locality or ethnicity, and coexisted.14 Research on labor systems in the wider Indian Ocean world likewise indicates that slave status in Southeast Asia should be conceptualized in terms of degrees of bondedness rather than absolute legal distinctions between slave and free.15 10 11

12 13 14

15

Kammen, “Master-Slave,” 74. Gerrit J. Knaap, “Slavery and the Dutch in Southeast Asia,” in Gert Oostindie, ed., Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 198–201; Peter Boomgaard, “Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 83–96. Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (hereafter ANRI Timor): 70, General Report, 1836. Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in Campbell, The Structure of Slavery, xv–xviii. Matthias van Rossum, “Vervloekte goudzugt. De VOC, slavenhandel en slavernij in Azië,” TSEG/ Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 12, no. 4 (2015): 29–32. The great mixture between types of slavery in Dutch colonial milieus is emphasized in Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 46–51. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 215.

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Letters and Microhistory

The voices of enslaved Asians are rare in the archival record and even when they can be heard, tend to be muted. For that reason, it is essential for scholars researching slavery to identify new non-official sources that highlight daily forms of interaction on a micro level. The nineteenth century witnessed the production of texts which describe indigenous social, cultural, and economic life in Southeast Asia in the kind of detail rarely found in the correspondence and reports generated by Dutch or Portuguese colonial officials. The letters and reports written by European missionaries stationed in Southeast Asia in particular provide an opportunity to examine the workings of indigenous slave systems in greater detail. While historians have examined missionaries’ role in abolitionist movements around the world, missionaries’ everyday engagement with various forms of slavery has been less studied. The considerable body of literature on Dutch missionaries, for example, has focused mostly on the development of congregations, often from a confessional perspective.16 The Timor Residency, which encompassed Flores, Sumba, Timor, and a number of smaller nearby islands, is one area that offers possibilities for fresh analysis. The Protestant Dutch Reformed Church established a mission at Kupang in 1819, while Catholic missionaries established themselves in the region after 1859.17 The large number of letters and reports that missionaries such as Geerloff Heijmering, who served as preacher in Kupang from 1832 to 1859, sent to The Netherlands with some regularity are important sources of information about slavery in nineteenth-century Timor, and especially about the contradictions that often characterized missionary life in the Dutch colonial East Indies.18 This enormous body of correspondence, now preserved in the Utrechts Archief, is significant because it permits us to employ the kind of micro-historical approach that can highlight individual historical actors and the nuanced processes of which they were part, and to problematize phenomena which may be difficult to study at a macro-historical level.19 Although slavery in Southeast 16 17 18 19

An overview of research on missionary activities in Netherlands East India can be found in Jan Sihar Aritonang and Karel Steenbrink, A History of Christianity in Indonesia (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Hans Hägerdal, “The Native as Exemplum: Missionary Writings and Colonial Complexities in Eastern Indonesia, 1819–1860,” Itinerario 37, no. 2 (2013): 73, 88. Chris de Jong, “Een Opwekker op Timor: De tragische geschiedenis van Geerlof Heijmering (1792–1867),” (2014), http://www.cgfdejong.nl/Heijmering.pdf (accessed 9 May 2017). Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson, “What is Microhistory?” History News Network (2006), http:// historynewsnetwork.org/article/23720 (accessed 9 May 2017).

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Asia has been the subject of major studies,20 research on slaves in individualized or local settings remains in its infancy. The promise inherent in such an approach is apparent in Eric Jones’s work on wives, slaves, and concubines in the Dutch East Indies.21 It is with these thoughts in mind that this chapter examines how slavery on Timor was perceived and understood by Europeans during the nineteenth century. This century witnessed fundamental changes in European colonial policies towards indigenous peoples and Western perceptions of the nonWestern world. Ideas of a racial hierarchy were strengthened and ideologized, and Western technological progress underlined the mental divisions between European and indigenous society.22 The nineteenth-century Timorese case study raises three questions in particular which are relevant to developing a better understanding of colonial contact zones: How were images of slavery incorporated into the ideas of piety, civilization, and progress that missionaries constructed? How did such images oscillate between notions of “otherness” of race and culture and “sameness” of faith or human condition? Lastly, do these images tell us anything about slavery in the Timor Residency that we do not already know, especially about the distinction between “open” and “closed” forms of slavery in this part of the Indonesian archipelago? 2

Piety, Society, Power, and Slaves

The Protestant missionary societies that flourished in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards espoused a pietism that emphasized individual salvation and were not always on good terms with state power. The Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG, or Dutch Missionary Society), founded in 1797, is a classic case in point.23 The NZG, based in Rotterdam, prepared young Dutchmen and occasionally young Germans to be missionaries and dispatched them to different parts of the world, but mostly to Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia, especially those areas where Islam was not well established. One such area was the Timor Residency where missionaries settled initially at Kupang and on the small but densely populated island 20 21 22 23

E.g., Warren, The Sulu Zone; Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency; Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History. Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Aritonang and Steenbrink, A History of Christianity, 139.

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of Rote (Roti) west of Timor in the Lesser Sundas, and later on the islands of Savu, Sumba, and Alor. After the delineation of the border between Dutch and Portuguese possessions in the Indonesian archipelago in 1859, Roman Catholic missionaries from The Netherlands established themselves in central Timor, east Flores, and parts of Sumba and the Solor Islands.24 These missionaries’ relationship with the colonial regime was an ambivalent one. On the one hand, their position depended on the stability of the colonial state which meant that they could not engage in activities which pitted the church against that state. On the other hand, pietistic missionaries often advocated theological positions which challenged, at least implicitly, the power and position of colonial authorities. Missionary frustration with the colonial order was compounded further by the limited role that religion played in white colonial society.25 This sense of frustration was made manifest in missionary attitudes towards slavery which was a highly visible feature of life in the areas where they settled. Europeans’ acceptance of slavery was almost universal before the late eighteenth century, and missionary societies focused initially on Christianizing enslaved men and women.26 However, the growth of abolitionism in countries such as Denmark, Britain, and France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries prompted many missionaries to associate themselves with this movement. White colonists in the British Caribbean, for example, regarded the Methodist missionaries in their midst as hostile to slavery while local free colored and slave populations viewed them as sympathetic to abolition.27 British abolitionism influenced the NZG’s founder, J. Th. van der Kemp, who also had experience preaching in South Africa’s slave society,28 and abolitionist sentiments permeated missionary activity in Asia as well as the Americas during the nineteenth century. The missionaries who reached Timor during the nineteenth century became a small but vocal part of the “Indische” community of Europeans and Eurasians that existed in Dutch colonial cities, towns, and other establishments. In this community, racialism and cultural chauvinism overlapped with an adaptation to local ways of life.29 Indigenous populations were expected to 24 25 26 27 28 29

Ladis Naisaban, Sejarah gereja katolik Pulau Timor dan sekitarnya: Tahun, 1556–2013 (Jakarta: Lapopp, 2013), 86–87. C. Fasseur, Indischgasten (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997), 69. Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 19. Ibid, 85. Aritonang and Steenbrink, A History of Christianity, 139. A juridical system of racial classification similar to South African apartheid developed in the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth century, especially after 1854. See Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 215.

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follow their own legal traditions which, in territories subject to indirect Dutch rule, included forms of hereditary bonded labor.30 Slavery was widespread in Kupang when the first NZG personnel arrived there in 1819.31 Christian and Chinese families used slaves as domestic/household and agricultural workers as well as vendors in local markets. Timorese slaves were categorized as either “registered” or “unregistered.” The registered slaves were under Dutch jurisdiction while the unregistered belonged to regents, who headed local polities, and aristocrats, and were subject to local customary regulations (adat).32 The low cost of slaves before the colonial government began to suppress the slave trade after 1818 meant that the Chinese community in particular owned a large number of slaves.33 Other major slave owners included J.A. Hazaart, the Dutch Resident in Kupang during much of the early nineteenth century (1810–12, 1814–18, 1819–32), a fact that enhanced his status locally.34 An 1824 report provides some information about how slaves were treated in Kupang, noting, for example, that masters could punish their slaves with no more than 25 lashes of the rattan, and that Hazaart had ordered at least one female slave to be freed because of mistreatment. The girl in question had had her hands tied together, been beaten, and driven naked from her master’s house because she had failed to sell all of the foodstuffs she had been ordered to sell.35 Under such circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the earliest missionaries to settle in Kupang had few qualms about acquiring slaves for their own households. Geerloff Heijmering, one of the most prominent of these servants of God, commented on the ethnically mixed Eurasian family related to the Timorese raja of Amfoan into which he married: I had for a long time been looking for a wife in Kupang, who would also care for these beings; for I did not yet at all think of marrying the eldest daughter of [the late missionary] Le Bruyn, since she was too young for me. But since I could not find anyone in Kupang who was proper for me, and whom I considered suitable for my person and position, I decided to ask my present wife if she wanted to marry me with the consent of her family and the agents of the orphanage. The plan was acclaimed by 30

C. Fasseur, “Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia, in Robert Cribb, ed., The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880–1942 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994), 35–36. 31 The town housed some 7,000–8,000 inhabitants in the mid-nineteenth century. 32 ANRI Timor: 51, Report, 1834. 33 ANRI Timor: 68, General report, 1834. 34 ANRI Timor: 71, General report, 1837. 35 See n. 9.

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all the decent and thoughtful persons in Kupang. My marriage feast was also proceeding quite cordially; and thus I had actually a family of significance. For apart from my wife’s sister and two brothers living in the house under my supervision, I was now also given their serfs [lijfeigenen], for whose food and cloths I must care. For 25 [guilders] per month I must obtain food daily.36 Although Heijmering’s objections to the people he described interchangeably as serfs and slaves had more to do with the financial obligations of maintaining them than their status as unfree laborers, he was quick to point out that some of his colleagues had few, if any, moral scruples about slavery. Heijmering reported, for example, that G.H. Nordhoff, a fellow NZG missionary on Rote, meddled in a local legal dispute which resulted in one of the island’s rajas, Mauk Amalo of Termanu, enslaving an entire clan of 57 people. The grateful raja bestowed four of these slaves on Nordhoff who apparently accepted them with any further ado.37 Heijmering’s tacit acceptance of unfree labor in Kupang and castigation of a colleague for doing the same on Rote illustrates the ambivalent attitudes that were an integral part of the missionary encounter with Indonesian realities. While the missionaries who settled on Timor and neighboring islands never seem to have questioned the notions of white supremacy that prevailed in nineteenth-century European thought, their attitude toward the colonial state was much more complex. Many of their letters are filled with critical and even hateful remarks about colonial authorities.38 Some of these comments reflected their concern that colonial officials were insufficiently enthusiastic about the missionary project, a lack of enthusiasm that prompted NZG missionary Mattheus Teffer to go so far as to write disdainfully about “Mohammedan-loving Residents.”39 This hostility was also fuelled by the abuse colonial authorities inflicted on indigenous populations, abuse in which the mistreatment of slaves played a role. Heijmering, a severe critic of a long line of colonial residents, had little praise, for example, for Baron van Lijnden (1849–51) who established the first border between the Dutch and Portuguese controlled areas of Timor:

36

Utrechts Archief (hereafter UA): Heijmering, “Brieven aan een vriend,” Raad voor de Zending 1102–1: 1404. All translations from the Dutch are mine. 37 Ibid. 38 Aritonang and Steenbrink, A History of Christianity, 159–60. 39 UA: Raad voor de Zending, 1102–1: 1411, M. Teffer, letter, 2 January 1884.

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Somewhat later, someone came to him and accused a couple of slave boys who, in the entourage of a certain Chinese, rode their horses somewhat hard and frightened the person’s wife. And now, not only did the boys receive a number of strokes with the rattan standing before a ladder, but also the innocent Chinese who was therefore grabbed from his peaceful promenade. His defence was not heeded! I would gladly have abstained from mentioning the abovementioned demeaning and unjust punishments, which were necessarily the result of a Draconian governance …40 Heijmering’s emphasis on Van Lijnden’s despicable treatment of defenceless delinquents from the lowest rung of society was consistent with his belief in the immorality of many colonial officials, a belief reinforced in another passage in the same letter in which he attacked the extent of the Resident’s intimacy with slaves. More specifically, he asserted that Van Lijnden had taken a slave woman, known for her loose morals, as a concubine and had also lived with a Christian woman whom he reputedly leased to an Arab for 40 guilders.41 This attack, in which slaves were depicted as both pitiful beings subjected to excessive punishment and the unfortunate objects of immoral exploitation, reflected, at least in part, Heijmering’s distaste for Van Lijnden’s indifference to religion; like several other Residents, Van Lijnden was a less than enthusiastic supporter of the missionary endeavor.42 However much they might disapprove of slavery, missionaries were sometimes keen to use the institution to further their own ends even after slavery was formally abolished in the Dutch East Indies. D.K. Wielenga’s account of the Dutch Mennonite (Zendingsvereeniging) mission on Sumba, in which he scrutinized the activities of his predecessor, Johan Jacob van Alphen, is an illustrative case in point. Van Alphen arrived on the island, where hereditary slavery was rife and warfare between local clans was a regular feature of life, in 1881 with a controleur (colonial district administrator) to spread the word of God among its inhabitants. Van Alphen realized immediately that his best chance to survive physically was to stay with the small colony of Savunese at Melolo in the eastern part of the island since the Sumbanese held the Savunese and Endenese in much higher regard than they did Europeans. That the partly Christianized Savunese also kept slaves was apparently of little concern to 40 UA: Raad voor de Zending 1102–1: 1403, G. Heijmering, letter, 14 February 1851. 41 UA: Raad voor de Zending 1102–1: 1403, G. Heijmering, letter, 14 February 1851. 42 It is interesting to compare Heijmering’s negative view with that of another NZG Brother, C.G. Schot, who praised the late Resident as helpful and nice to everyone but sadly lacking in religious belief (UA: Raad voor de Zending, 1102–1: 1410, C.G. Schot, letter, 31 January 1853).

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him.43 Soon after arriving on Sumba, he visited his NZG colleague Mattheus Teffer on Savu. Teffer opined that Sumba was large enough for both missionary societies, whereupon the men divided the island into two spheres of influence, with the NZG ministering to the Savunese community on the island while the native Sumbanese became the responsibility of the Mennonites.44 Local realities, however, soon interrupted this plan. The disorder that existed on most of Sumba meant that it was impossible for Van Alphen to live in an ethnic Sumbanese village, and he ended up in a hut near the seashore among Christian Savunese with whom he was technically not supposed to associate. Teffer believed that Van Alphen’s lack of success among the Sumbanese stemmed from his inflexible adherence to Christian practice and belief. Desperate to succeed, Van Alphen came up with the idea of buying slave children and raising them as missionary janissaries of sorts. However, his superiors quickly quashed his plan since it would give the Sumbanese the idea that missionaries considered slave trading as legitimate. Shortly thereafter, Van Alphen’s wife and new-born child died and he left Sumba in 1883, disappointed and sorrowful.45 Missionaries scrutinized and admonished not only colonial officials, Euro­ pean settlers, and their fellow missionaries, but also indigenous chiefs who they often blamed for failing to help proselytize local populations. Both missionaries and colonial authorities considered the leaders of the numerous small vassal states (zelfbesturende landschappen) that dotted the East Indies as backward, lethargic, and barbarous. These attitudes are illustrated by the peculiar position that NZG missionaries enjoyed on Savu, a small island between Sumba and Timor. The island was divided into five small polities administrated by a hierarchy of rajas (mone paji), executive regents ( fettors), local chiefs (temugu) and councils of priests. Since there was virtually no colonial administration on Savu until the early twentieth century, NZG missionaries depended on the cooperation of local rajas and their families, some of whom they succeeded in baptizing after 1870.46 Under such circumstances, they grudgingly noted the prevalence of slavery on the island long after the institution had been formally abolished in

43 44 45 46

D.K. Wielenga, Soemba (s̕-Gravenhage, The Netherlands: Algemeene boekhandel voor inwendige- en uitwendige zending, 1926), 92–93, 133. Ibid, 97–99. Ibid, 99; Aritonang and Steenbrink, A History of Christianity, 320. J.J. Fox, Harvest of the Palm: Ecological Change in Eastern Indonesia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

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1860.47 Their need to do so was mandated by the structure of Savunese society which was organized both genealogically and by a division into various “estates” or social classes. The missionary J.K. Wijngaarden, writing in the early 1890s, distinguished between three such estates: douae with anak douae (rajas and princes); dou moneaha (free people); and dou énnu (slaves). Wijngaarden noted people had previously been enslaved for minor offenses such as stealing a prince’s chicken or impolite behavior toward the raja and his family, and that despite official discouragement of slavery, the rajas of Liae and Mesara still refused to manumit their slaves. He also noted that slaves were treated less harshly than had hitherto been the case.48 Wijngaarden’s observations echoed those of another NZG missionary, Mattheus Teffer, some 15 years earlier. Teffer believed that Savu’s past had been a “horrible” one because scores of people had been killed or reduced to “serfs” who had been sold to other islands for profit. Teffer was also convinced that the introduction of Christianity had led to a steady improvement in people’s lives: “And indeed, those who previously so gladly let their neighbour’s blood – who thought themselves so lucky on their raids, and without hesitation either murdered their fellow descendants of Ngara Rai [a distant ancestor] or sold them as slaves – they have quite calmed down.”49 Other missionaries also reported on slavery on late-nineteenth Savu. In 1899, J.H. Letteboer, one of Wijngaarden’s successors, described the activities of Jonathan Doko, the Christian heir-apparent to the throne of the petty kingdom of Seba on the island’s north coast, in some detail. Letteboer reported that Doko had asked a commoner named Liwe Heo to help him work in the sawahs (wet rice fields). When the work was finished, Liwe Heo asked to return home, but was instead informed that he would be enslaved for reasons which remain unclear. He tried to escape, but was captured by Doko and tied up, after which he received 150 blows with the rattan, his body was nipped with glowing tongs, and he was finally hung upside down over a smoking fire. He died two days later. Shortly thereafter, Doko mistreated another man and confined him in a building. The man’s sister sneaked into the building at night and cut the ropes binding him. The man then crept into Doko’s house where he stabbed the sleeping crown prince with a knife, wounding but not killing him.

47

While the law of 1860 applied to directly governed areas, slavery was discouraged and successively abolished in the indirectly ruled territories. 48 UA: Raad voor de Zending, 1102–1: 1415, J.K. Wijngaarden, letter, 3 February 1891. 49 UA: Raad voor de Zending, 1102–1: 1411, M. Teffer, letter, 8 February 1875.

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The assailant was taken into custody by the posthouder but his subsequent fate remains unknown.50 Letterboer’s account says much about missionary attitudes toward indigenous societies and cultures. While their views were not entirely negative, it is clear that they regarded local princes (raja mudas), whom they often characterized as capricious and rapacious, as obstacles to their efforts to change native institutions to achieve what they deemed to be a “well-ordered” society. If Wijngaarden, Teffer, Letteboer, and the other missionaries stationed on Savu stopped short of calling openly for greater Dutch control over the island, their never-ending critique of indigenous institutions and accounts of the abuses to which slaves were subject definitely points in that direction.51 3

Abolitionism

Pious Christians figured prominently in Dutch abolitionism which developed more slowly than in Britain and France.52 In 1842, liberal and Protestant abolitionists submitted a petition to state authorities calling for the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies, a petition which the government ignored. Seven years later, Wolter Robert van Hoëvell published a series of articles in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië, the widely-read magazine which he founded, that called for abolition of slave labour.53 However, Dutch abolitionists focused more on conditions in Surinam than in the East Indies, and the drive to emancipate slaves was impeded by fears of black unrest should emancipation occur too quickly.54 When slavery was finally abolished in the East Indies in 1860, the act covered only those territories under direct Dutch rule, and was not even universally honoured there.55 50 UA: Raad voor de Zending, 1102–1: 1444, J.H. Letteboer, report, 29 December 1899. 51 The Dutch implemented indirect rule over the island during the 1910s when the Raja of Seba was put in charge of all Savu. See Anonymous, The Savunese (Indonesia): The Struggle for the Survival of Their Ethnic Culture and Religion (Jakarta: Rai Hawu Foundation, n.d.), 5–10. 52 P.C. Emmer, De Nederlandse slavenhandel 1500–1850 (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2000). 53 Born into the nobility and trained in the Dutch Reformed Church, Van Hoëvell spent 11 years in the Dutch East Indies where he became a critic of Dutch colonialism. Following his return to the Netherlands, he served in the national parliament from 1849 to 1862, and was a member of the State Council from 1862 until his death in 1879. 54 Wim van den Doel, Zo ver de wereld strekt (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2011), 81. 55 G.F.E. Gonggryp, Geïllustreerde encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië (AmsterdamSoerabaja: Graauw’s, 1934), 1303–04.

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The proclamation of slave emancipation in Kupang coincided with the appointment of Isaac Esser, a fervent Christian propagandist, as acting Resident. Esser’s career paralleled that of the famous critic of colonial abuses, the atheist Eduard Douwes Dekker.56 Assigned in 1861 to head the Timor Residency, Esser saw himself as an official-cum-missionary and sought accordingly “to adapt the laws according to God’s words.”57 His private correspondence and the reports he authored as a colonial official reveal that he regarded Timor as stagnant and its people “deadly poor.” During the two years he served as Resident, he nevertheless worked hard to implement the emancipation decree, displaying an abolitionist fervor which seems to have been lacking among the NZG brethren. In mid-1863, for example, he reported that as the Dutch steamship Sindoro approached the port of Ende on Flores’ south coast, home to a largely Muslim community, all of the women and some of the children fled into the interior, taking their slaves with them. Dutch officials eventually managed to win the confidence of the Endenese chiefs and reach an agreement with the local raja to end slave trading. Esser himself did not expect much from this agreement, in which 18 chiefs had to swear on a copy of the Qu’ran that they would “abstain from and counteract the slave trade” because, he observed, “Ende does not have a monarchical rule or other proper governance, but is internally divided by the grandees in a republic.”58 Esser’s account expresses a common theme in missionary reports in which slavery was closely associated with indigenous “primitivism.” Esser’s son, Isaac, Jr., drawing on his father’s writings, observed that his father’s view of Endenese slavery was colored by what he perceived to be the combined perfidy of Muslims, native rulers, and European colonial officials. This insight may help to explain earlier missionary inaction against, if not complicity in maintaining, local systems of slavery: My father picked up a fight with the Governor-General Sloet van de Beele about the slavery in the Residency. This pervaded all the islands: the slaves formed a fourth estate. The Endenese conducted slave trade in Flores. They especially robbed their wares on Sumba and sold them at 56

W. Dierick, “Samen opgesloten in een heelal. Drie tijdgenoten,” Indische letteren 2 (1987): 179. 57 I. Esser, Straatprediking door J. Esser: Nagelatene bladzijden uit zijnen evangelie-arbeid (Nijmegen: Milborn, 1886), xvi. Among his other activities, Esser started a Christian school on Savu and led prayer meetings. His peers regarded him as a rather fantastic and apocalyptic figure (Aritonang and Steenbrink, A History of Christianity, 303; Fasseur, Indischgasten). 58 ANRI Timor: 105, Maandrapporten van Timor, June-July 1863.

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five slave markets in Sumbawa, Lombok, etc. and even in Singapore. My father related all this to the Government and made clear that the foremost culprit was an Arab in Sumba who kept our flag there, and sheltered under it. Now, a warship was dispatched to Lombok and Sumbawa with an interpreter, who took care that no slave market was encountered, so that the Government opposed the Resident. Esser père then went to Sumba and Ende. In Sumba, he reported the names of 22 men and women slaves belonging to the Arab mentioned above. He found 300 slaves in Ende, and reported the matter to authorities in Surabaya. Governor-General Sloet van den Beele refused, however, to do anything about these matters since the princes on these islands enjoyed self-rule which could not be interfered with. Meanwhile, Esser’s efforts to suppress slavery had become known and mistreated slaves came to Kupang to seek his protection. Four hundred slaves from Ndao, a small island near Rote, for example, reached Kupang where they received a piece of government land near the city. Esser visited them and, according to his son, “these poor beings surrounded him and kissed his hands and feet. It was one of the most moving moments of his life.” Ndao’s regent arrived in Kupang to reclaim these refugees, but subsequently withdrew when Esser challenged him if it was right to reclaim people who had been literally starving.59 4

Slave Agency

Missionary accounts usually describe slaves as rather passive beings and suggest that when they did act on their own, they did so at the explicit encouragement of officials such as Esser. Occasionally, however, the archival record reveals instances of slave agency that put the missionary himself in an awkward situation. Such is the case in Geerloff Heijmering’s unpublished Brieven aan een vriend, a series of autobiographical epistles written in 1840–46 to a probably imaginary friend. Heijmering’s long career was marred by bitter conflicts with his peers which often began as squabbles about money,60 and much of his Brieven is a verbose recounting of real or imagined machinations against him. One of these conflicts occurred in November 1844, and was precipitated by a slave woman:

59 60

Esser, Straatprediking, xx–xxi. de Jong, “Een Opwekker op Timor.”

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Yesterday one of my serfs eloped with the aim of earning a shameful payment. It was around eleven o’clock in the evening. I immediately sent her mother and another girl who knew where she was, in order to call her back. However, when she soon returned without that bad and disobedient ligtekooie [appr. loose woman], I asked the two women to go to sleep, adding that she was again lost and that we may not see her again for some months, as had already been the case with her several times. Believing that my people had gone to sleep, I also went to bed, after I had asked the Lord in my evening prayer that he, among other things, should convert this being, who still sinned in spite of all moral lessons and admonitions, something I had to endure in my house against all reason. [I prayed] that she did not vanish, that is, get lost, since she is the property of my wife’s father … However, while I slept deeply and all was at rest in my place, something happened at the other side of the river … The aforementioned maids, instead of going to bed, had gone to search for the good-for-nothing eloper for the second time. Three house boys of mine went along, and a fourth one who was at a tavern according to his daily custom, was close to the place where the eloped slave was sought, and joined the others when he saw what was going on, half drunk.61 The household to which the female slave had gone was that of the Frenchman Jean Louis la Vicomte who Heijmering described as “a fortune-hunter as cunning and intriguing as one could possibly think among his nation …[who] lived with the military commander De Rochemont, who was also far from a man of moral qualities.” A circus now ensued as Heijmering’s intoxicated slave boy, Ende, discovered that the slave girl’s mother acted as a pimp for her daughter; at least this was how Heijmering understood the situation. He noted that he treated his slaves better than the regulations that governed slavery in the Netherlands East Indies prescribed, but lamented “how alluring is not money and goods that these bad people offer as payment for ill things, paid by Europeans and their servants who provide their masters with the ligtekooijen.” As Ende vigorously scolded the girl’s mother, La Vicomte and De Rochemont awoke in the beds which they shared with temporary mistresses: La Vicomte with a house maid of NZG Brother Hartig, and De Rochemont with a girl from the household of Tielman, a government official. La Vicomte rushed from his bed, asking “Whose people are you?” Ende replied that they were “the people of Mr. Heijmering” and revealed himself to La Vicomte when asked to do so, whereupon La Vicomte 61 UA: Heijmering, ‘Brieven aan een vriend’, Raad voor de Zending 1102–1: 1404.

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said “Very good,” and returned to his room without making, Heijmering complained, “the least effort to investigate if my missing slave may have been kept at his household, which any good man should have done.”62 As Heijmering’s slaves returned to his own house, La Vicomte’s Javanese servant went to the place where the slave girl was hiding and took her to his compound “where he satisfied his filthy lust until dawn.” One of Heijmering’s maids, afraid of the consequences if the slave girl was not found, waited outside the compound. When the Javanese servant helped the slave girl over the compound’s wall, the maid grabbed her immediately and dragged her back to Heijmering’s house. Heijmering praised the maid’s zeal, conducted his morning prayers, admonished the slave girl, and went to work. In the meantime, however, La Vicomte had told the Kupang Resident, S.G.F. Fraenkel, that Heijmering had sent the slaves to his residence where they brandished knives and parangs (a type of machete) in a threatening way. Fraenkel spoke to Heijmering and then interrogated the slaves, all of whom testified that they had gone to La Vicomte’s residence on their own accord and had not threatened La Vicomte. Fraenkel had several of the slaves caned for disturbing the peace and returned them to Heijmering weeping and with bloody buttocks. Ende, deemed the principal “culprit” in this affair, was imprisoned despite Hejmering’s plea that he needed him to tend to his horses, especially since his other slaves were sick with fever after their brutal treatment. The veracity of Heijmering’s rather convoluted story is debatable, all the more so since La Vicomte had made advances towards Louiza Le Bruijn, the young sister of Heijmering’s late wife, who Heijmering married shortly afterwards.63 What is of interest here, however, are European views about slave agency. While some missionaries believed that reforming the human soul took time, Heijmering adopted a stricter position that emphasized the individual’s role in their personal reformation.64 This attitude may explain some of his frustration with his Timorese slaves who succumbed to various temptations – paid sex, strong drink, maroonage – in spite of his just and moral treatment of them. Although there is no indication in his essays that he believed that slavery was “wrong,” he denounced the treatment to which his own slaves were subjected. It is particularly interesting to note that his disapprobation focused more on the Europeans in the story. Not only did they and their servants sleep 62 63 64

Ibid. Ibid. Jean Louis la Vicomte died in Kupang three years later, in October 1847. Europeans often led rather short lives in the Timor Residency because of disease. See Almanak en naamregister van Nederlandsch Indië over 1849 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1850). de Jong, “Een Opwekker op Timor.”

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with slave girls with some regularity, luring the lowest strata of society into prostitution, but they also treated innocent slaves harshly and unfairly in order to wound one of their peers. 5

Conclusion

While missionary letters do not give us a complete picture of the often ambiguous relationship between these men of God and slaves in nineteenth-century Timor, they provide tantalizing new insights into what was happening on the ground in a multi-ethnic society increasingly subject to colonial control. The reluctance of NZG and other missionaries to report on the plight of slaves before 1860 is particularly striking, and may reflect their discomfort over being in a society in which slavery had deep roots and was practised by whites and non-whites alike. However, on those occasions when they did comment on slavery on Timor, they shed light on the ways in which colonial and indigenous structures came into contact and interacted with one another. Their intimate contacts with ethnically mixed populations in the colonial contact zones reveal how hierarchies and power relations worked on a micro-level. European claims of social and cultural precedence were tacitly challenged by the realities of hybridity. The ambiguity of the missionary stance towards slavery demonstrates, as post-colonial theoretician Homi Bhabha reminds us, that we must not conceptualize the boundary between “Western” and “non-Western” contact zones as sharply delineated or static.65 This underlines the point made by recent researchers of Indian Ocean slavery, who tone down distinctions between “European” and “Asian” positions vis-à-vis slavery.66 A micro-historical perspective on such hybridity can be important to understanding colonial processes in the larger Indian Ocean world, including helping to explain the relative tardiness of abolition in the Asian colonies. We may note, for example, that slavery in British India was legally abolished a decade later than in the West Indies, and in the Netherlands East Indies it persisted in some places into the twentieth century. Future research along these lines can deepen our understanding of creolization and local adaptation to practices which were falling out of favour in Europe itself.67

65 66 67

Cecilia Trenter, “And now, imagine she’s white,” in Peter Aronsson, ed., Makten över minnet: Historiekultur i förändring (Lund, Sweden: Studentlitteratur, 2002), 50–62. van Rossum, “‘Vervloekte goudzucht’”, 29–32. Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 17.

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The Protestant missionaries who reached the East Indies did so clothed in a belief in the importance of personal piety and that improving the life of indigenous peoples depended upon their adopting Western, and especially Christian, values. They were quickly enmeshed, however, in socio-cultural systems in which the boundary between European, Eurasian, and indigenous beliefs and practices were often poorly defined and porous. Their interaction and occasionally intermarriage with Dutch burgher and indigenous families exposed them to forms of bondage that did not conform to the “closed” system of commoditized servitude that they knew in the Atlantic world. As Van Lijnden and Heijmering’s family life illustrate, in the Great East they had to come to terms with the more “open” systems of servitude that prevailed in many parts of Southeast Asia. Slavery was thus a reality of life in Southeast Asia for European missionaries during most of the nineteenth century, a reality which they apparently accepted given the general absence of references to abolitionism in their letters before the 1860s. Heijmering, for one, had no qualms about characterizing the slave girl who spent time in La Vicomte’s house as his family’s “property” and attributed her absence from his household as evidence of her lewdness and lack of gratitude for his Christian treatment of his slaves. On the other hand, missionaries also used slavery in general and the mistreatment of slaves in particular as a rhetorical tool to emphasize the lewd behavior of local Europeans, the harsh and despotic features of colonial government, and the abuses to which indigenous peoples were subjected by local aristocrats. In so doing, missionaries sought to demonstrate that colonial and indigenous rulers alike stood in the way of creating their ultimate goal, a true kingdom of God on earth.

Chapter 13

Indebtedness, Socio-cultural Hierarchies, and Unfree Labor on Nineteenth-Century Ceylonese Plantations Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena Slave emancipation in the British Empire in 1834 altered social and economic relationships in Britain’s plantation colonies in ways that had a profound impact not only locally, but also globally. While the British East India Company had occupied parts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1795, the whole of the island came under British administrative control in 1815. Pressure from the colonial office in London to generate local revenue as well as the “laissez-faire” ethos of the period led early governors to stimulate private enterprise in the cultivation of commercial crops. While coffee had been grown in the island on a smallholder basis, its cultivation became particularly lucrative and spread when slavery was abolished in British colonies and preferential tariffs on Jamaican, Dominican, and Guianese coffee entering Britain were removed. As a result, an agricultural economy based on small-holder production was transformed into one dominated by large-scale capitalist plantations. As in other British colonies such as British Guiana and Mauritius,1 the Ceylonese government encouraged the plantation sector’s development by supporting the creation of needed infrastructure, abolishing export duties on key commercial crops, and even providing land to prospective planters at low cost.2 These measures resulted in a “great resort of Europeans to Ceylon” and “a large expenditure by them in the cultivation of coffee and sugar”3 based on the “West India system of cultivation [i.e., plantations].”4 1 See, for example: Alan H. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972); Richard B. Allen, “Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 2 (2008): 151–70. 2 Garret C. Mendis, ed., The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon 1796–1833 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), xi. 3 Sri Lanka National Archives (hereafter SLNA): 4/193, Anstruther to Colonial Secretary of State, 23 November 1840. 4 John Ferguson, Ceylon in 1893 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1893), 64.

© Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_015

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Like their counterparts in other post-emancipation colonies, Ceylon’s planters faced the problem of securing adequate supplies of inexpensive free labor needed to sustain the large-scale cultivation of commercial crops. Sinhalese workers were unavailable in large numbers since the island’s early coffee plantations had not dispossessed peasants of their land and forced them into the wage labor market.5 While the Sinhalese were willing to undertake piece work such as clearing forest land, they refused to engage in the more regular work of coffee cultivation since they continued to earn their living as village agriculturists.6 Under such circumstances, the colony’s planters were compelled to look elsewhere for the labor they needed. They found it among the Tamil-speaking peoples of southern India.7 The labor regimes that emerged in the post-emancipation colonial plantation world have been the subject of considerable scholarly interest.8 Historians have examined how socio-economic, political, and technical changes led plantation production to become increasingly focused on maintaining estates’ profitability, a goal which intensified efforts to minimize labor costs. These efforts led to the development of migrant labor systems that differed in some respects from the slave plantation regimes that had flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but shared other features in common, the most prominent of which was a reliance on forms of coercive labor mobilization and control.9 The institutionalization of many of the repressive features associated with slave plantation production underpins arguments that 5 Lal R. Jayawardena, The Supply of Sinhalese Labour to the Tea Industry in Ceylon (unpub. Cambridge Research Study, 1960) made available to the authors; Lal R. Jayawardena, “The Supply of Sinhalese Labour to Ceylon Plantations (1830–1930): A Study of Imperial Policy in a Peasant Society,” PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1963; Michael W. Roberts, “Indian Estate Labour in Ceylon during the Coffee Period, 1830–1880 [two parts], Indian Economic and Social History Review 3, no. 1 (1966): 1–12, and no. 2: 101–36. 6 Ian van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labour in Sri Lanka: Aspects of the History of Immigration in the 19th Century (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1982), 3. 7 Patrick Peebles, The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (London: Leicester University Press, 2001). 8 E.g., Adamson, Sugar without Slaves; Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco: Modernization without Change, 1840–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); K.O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1994); Rosemarijn Hoefte, In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 9 For an overview of post-emancipation indentured labor, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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post-emancipation indentured laborers became the victims of what Hugh Tinker, echoing nineteenth-century British abolitionists, characterized in his classic 1974 study as a “new system of slavery.”10 The Tinkerian paradigm has not been without its critics.11 More recently, Richard Allen has argued that this paradigm’s dominance in indentured labor historiography has inhibited the development of a fuller understanding of the nature and dynamics of post-emancipation migrant labor systems.12 The need to explore the complexities of post-emancipation overseas Indian labor in greater detail is underscored by Marina Carter’s work on Indian immigrants in Mauritius and elsewhere,13 and by recent scholarship on the role that intermediaries such as sirdars (overseers) played in migrant labor systems in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean world.14 The Ceylonese case study provides an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between slavery and “free” labor in the nineteenth-century global labor diaspora. More specifically, this case study permits us to discern how Ceylon’s planters, with the colonial state’s support, used kanganis (labor contractors) to recruit and manage labor through debt bondage, a topic which indentured labor historians have hitherto ignored. Planters, assisted by the kanganis they employed, also institutionalized socio-cultural hierarchies based on religion, caste, and patriarchy to divide and control their work forces. These strategies and the forms of economic, extra-economic, and physical coercion associated with them resulted in what 10 11

12 13

14

Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974; 2nd ed., London: Hansib, 1993). This phrase is usually associated with a statement by Lord John Russell on 25 February 1840. Bridget Brereton, “The Other Crossing: Asian Migrants in the Caribbean. A Review Essay,” Journal of Caribbean History 28, no. 1 (1994), 99–122; Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–6; Northrup, Indentured Labor, 154. Richard B. Allen, “Re-conceptualizing the ‘New System of Slavery’,” Man in India 92, no. 2 (2012): 225–45. See also Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, “Indian Indenture: Speaking Across the Oceans,” Man in India 92, no. 2 (2012): 195–213. Marina Carter, Lakshmi’s Legacy: The Testimonies of Indian Women in 19th Century Mauritius (Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien, 1994); Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers; Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants in the British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1996). E.g., Tirthankar Roy, “Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 5 (2008): 971–98; Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean Labour Migration,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (2017): 462–84. See also Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164–65, 176–77.

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Ceylonese social reformer and politician Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam (1851–1930) characterized as Ceylon’s “own form of slavery.”15 1

The Industrial Plantation, Compulsion, and Labor Costs

The labor regime on nineteenth-century Ceylonese plantations was the product of what P.P. Courtenay labelled as the “industrial plantation” which operated on the periphery of the rapidly expanding capitalist world economy during the nineteenth century, especially after 1850, and replaced traditional plantations in the former “inner periphery” of tropical America.16 The development of industrial plantations in Asia was facilitated by the “transport revolution” and the emergence of so-called “sterling” companies which raised large amounts of risk or venture capital on the London financial market and expected high rates of return after taking land and labor costs into account.17 These companies dominated the plantation sector in Ceylon, particularly with the development and spread of tea plantations, and frequently turned to agency houses to manage their plantations on a commission basis, a practice which resulted in these firms employing expatriate managers to supervise all aspects of plantation production, including exporting the commodities they produced.18 There were two significant consequences of these changes for the profitability of production. The first was that local planters or management exercised little control over the world market price of the commodities they produced, an economic fact of life which mandated that maintaining a plantation’s profitability rested ultimately on controlling labor costs. The second was that the planter’s remuneration consisted of his annual, relatively modest salary supplemented by a percentage of the plantation’s annual profits which provided a powerful incentive to maximise short-term returns by relying on harsh labour regimes.19 Historians and other scholars have paid considerable attention to the coercive techniques used to acquire and control plantation labor. In his classic study published in 1900, Dutch ethnologist Herman Jeremias Nieboer argued that compulsion was required to procure labor in situations marked by “open 15 16 17 18 19

P. Arunachalam, Speeches and Writings of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam (Colombo: H.W. Cave & Co., 1936), 217. P.P. Courtenay, Plantation Agriculture, 2nd ed. (London: Bell & Hyman, 1980), 76. Ibid, 55–56. Rachel Kurian, “State, Capital and Labour in the Plantation Industry in Sri Lanka 1834– 1984,” PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1989, 89. Ibid, 88–89.

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resources” and “scarce labour.”20 In plantation colonies in the Americas replete with “open resources,” coercion was used to capture, transport, and control millions of slaves from West and West Central Africa. Anthony Reid, drawing on James Watson’s notion of “open” and “closed” slave systems, likewise argued that low population densities fuelled the expansion of slavery in Southeast Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to meet the labor needs of the booming spice trade, one consequence of which was that control over manpower became “the index to power.”21 Reid also argued that while men, women, and children were enslaved for various reasons including inheritance, capture in war, and judicial punishment, debt was the “most fundamental” reason for enslavement in Southeast Asia.22 Slave plantations have been characterized as “enclave units,” “total institutions,” and “instruments of coercion” in which various forms of coercion were used to restrict workers’ mobility and mobilize and manage their labor.23 The abolition of slavery did not bring an end to such practices. Willemina Kloosterboer argues that the need for coercion, including a reliance on debt bondage, vagrancy legislation, and pass laws, continued to exist even in “open resource” post-slave contexts.24 As in earlier centuries, environmental catastrophes such as drought and flood and the famines or lesser “food shortages” that followed in their wake continued to force people to sell their children or themselves into bondage in order to survive.25 Under such circumstances, economically-inspired notions of “choice” and “free” labor are often inapplicable to plantation labor. 20 21 22 23

24 25

H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910). Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 157. Ibid, 159. Eric Wolf, “Specific Aspects of Plantation Systems in the New World: Community SubCultures and Social Class” in Plantation Systems of the New World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of Seminar held in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Washington, DC: Research Institute for the Study of Man and the Pan American Union, 1959), 36. The notion that plantations were essentially enclave units has been used by Caribbeanists including Lloyd Best, George L. Beckford, Norman Girvan, C.Y. Thomas, H.R. Brewster, and Owen Jefferson. For a review of their theories, see Dennis M. Benn, “The Theory of Plantation Economy and Society: A Methodological Critique,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 12, no. 3 (1974): 249–60. Willemina Kloosterboer, Involuntary Labour since the Abolition of Slavery: A Survey of Compulsory Labour Throughout the World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), 191, 206–15. On famine and enslavement in India, see Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 123–24, 183–84.

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Labor recruitment practices in nineteenth-century India underscore this point. Planters used kanganis to recruit workers, often by advancing them oneor two-months’ wages, to accompany these workers to their final destination, and to control them once they reached the plantations on which they worked. This recruitment system, which was seen as compatible with nineteenthcentury laissez-faire ideas about “free” labor, used debt to bond the worker to the plantation. While this system involved workers becoming formally indebted to planters, Gail Omvedt argues that workers were actually trapped in a system of informal debt bondage to kanganis who played a crucial role as mediators between planters and workers.26 According Omvedt, planters preferred this system of informal debt bondage because it supplied them with more workers and provided better control over them: … the labour-contractor took over most of the employers’ functions of control and supervision, and the labour force – often recruited from the same village and family group – worked as a more tightly knit unit. In addition, it appears that the open, widespread recruiting associated with the indenture system could not (at the level of wages paid to the workers) produce sufficient labourers in the way the labour-contractors could through their links with the village areas of recruitment.27 This emphasis on recruiting village and family groups also preserved existing caste and religious distinctions and other socio-cultural conventions. The kanganis who recruited for Ceylonese plantations tended to be “upper caste” while the vast majority of workers they recruited were Parayans, Pallans, and Chakkilians who occupied the lowest runs of the caste hierarchy. In short, planters deliberately used caste as an organising principle to their own advantage.28

26 27 28

Gail Omvedt “Migration in Colonial India: The Articulation of Feudalism and Capitalism by the Colonial State,” Journal of Peasant Studies 17, no. 2 (1980): 192. Ibid, 193. S.C. Balasunderam, A.S. Chandrabose, and P.P. Sivapragasam, “Caste Discrimination among Indian Tamil Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka,” in Kalinga Tudor Silva, P.P. Sivapragasam and Paramsothy Thanges, eds., Casteless or Caste-blind? Dynamics of Concealed Caste Discrimination, Social Exclusion and Protest in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Kumaran Book House, 2009), 80.

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327

Plantations in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

The need to acquire a large, inexpensive work force became a pressing concern for Ceylonese planters and the colonial state during the 1830s, and became even more so when the island’s tea industry’s began to expand during the 1860s. As noted earlier, coffee plantations did not disrupt Sinhalese peasants’ ties to the land and generate a wage labor force that could be used for commercial purposes. Ceylon’s proximity to South India and a tradition in British India of using indigenous laborers on public works projects and in the army prompted Ceylonese planters to look to the subcontinent for the workers they needed.29 South India’s attractiveness was further enhanced by the existence of large numbers of chronically indebted low-caste peasants in the Madras Presidency’s famine-prone districts who “were prepared to undertake plantation work as a means of survival.”30 The systematic recruitment of labor that began during the 1830s was facilitated by Act V of 1843 which legally emancipated slaves in India and created opportunities for recruiters to engage or even kidnap landless laborers, practices which also relieved southern Indian landlords of the need to look after destitute peasants.31 Ceylonese colonial officials were aware of early attempts to use indentured Chinese and Indian laborers on Trinidad, St. Helena, Mauritius, and Ceylon itself.32 In 1828, Governor Edward Barnes hired some 150 indentured workers from South India to develop his plantation, but they deserted within a year.33 A more systematic program of recruitment during the early 1830s resulted in the colony housing 2,432 indentured workers by 1839, and prompted the government to enact legislation that permitted planters to take action against workers who deserted. However, the difficulties of preventing desertions given South India’s proximity resulted in these initial attempts to secure indentured laborers being abandoned.34 29 SLNA: 5/2, North to Hobart, Dispatches, 3 October 1804 and 5 October 1804. 30 Benedicte Hjejle, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 71–126. 31 Kathleen Gough, Rural Society in Southeast India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 119–21. 32 Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the PostEmancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014): 328–48; Allen, European Slave Trading, 197–202. 33 Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 129. 34 Ibid, 129.

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The Ceylonese government, keen to promote plantations and aware that the island’s “great deficit” was a “scarcity of population,”35 enacted Ordinance No. 15 in 1858 for the explicit purpose of “encouraging and improving the immigration of coolies from the south of India.”36 The ordinance created the Immigrant Labour Commission (ILC) which sent an agent to South India to “employ native agents to collect coolies to whom he will make small advances on account of private individuals who may lodge money with the Commission for that purpose, by which means he will be able in a short time to determine if this plan can be permanently adopted.”37 During the coffee plantation sector’s early development, it was common for workers to form themselves into a gang numbering from 25 to 100 persons and select a leader, or kangani, from amongst their ranks to “conduct their journeys, negotiate their engagements, superintend their labour and receive in return a trifling proportion of their pay.”38 However, this “free and unorganised” migration was relatively seasonal and did not generate sufficient or dependable supplies of labour for the plantations. By the 1840s, planters developed a more systematic form of recruitment by using “professional kanganies, who did not make a living as estate labourers anymore but earned their money as professional recruiters and supervisors.”39 The recruitment of workers by providing them with advances developed into what came to be known as the kangani system which became the most important mechanism for supplying Ceylon’s plantations with the labor they needed. The number of Indian workers who reached the island during the nineteenth century remains unknown, but the scale of this migration is suggested by the 1871 census which reported that 193,377 of the colony’s residents had been born in India, and that the plantation labor force numbered 123,565 persons, 115,092 of whom were described as Tamils.40 Overall, approximately 90 percent of the Indians who reached Ceylon’s plantations between 1871 and 1891 came from the Madras Presidency.41

35 SLNA: 4/193, Despatch, Anstruther to Colonial Secretary of State, 23 November 1840. 36 Report of the Immigrant Labour Commission, Colombo, for the half-year ending 30 June 1859. 37 SLNA: 6/2644, Robert Dawson, Secy. of the Immigrant Labour Commission, to Colonial Secretary, 11 August 1859. 38 SLNA: 3/34, Pt. I, Despatch No. 6 (Misc.), Tennent to Grey, 21 April, 1847. 39 Ronald Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 247. 40 Peebles, The Plantation Tamils, 45. 41 Kumar, Land and Caste, 129.

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Advances, Indebtedness, and the Kangani System

Increasing planter reliance on the labour recruiters resulted in the institutionalisation of the so-called “kangani system” of recruitment from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Planters fostered this system’s development as a way to ensure adequate supplies of cheap and disciplined labor by advancing money to the kanganis in their employ to cover the cost of their travel to India and other expenses to recruit workers. Most kanganis returned to their home villages to engage workers from among friends and relatives and frequently advanced money to these new recruits to cover transportation and other expenses on the condition that this advance had to be repaid when they received their wages.42 In some instances, kanganis did not go to India themselves but remitted the money they received for this purpose to relatives who recruited and dispatched workers to Ceylon on their behalf. This system also generated increasing numbers of sub-kanganis,43 which resulted in the system becoming increasingly complex and hierarchical by the 1870s as head kanganis came to exercise control over a number of sub-kanganis in their gangs.44 These advances were key to persuading vulnerable workers, most of whom had experienced famines and feudal exploitation in South India, to leave their village because they provided them with an opportunity to pay off existing debts to landlords and other creditors.45 However, this reliance on advances generated its own nearly “endemic problem of indebtedness.”46 Before they even reached the plantations, workers had become indebted to the kangani and plantation management in order to cover the cost of food, clothing, and travel which ensured that they became, in essence, the kangani’s “servant.”47 Estate managers perpetuated workers’ indebtedness by not paying them regularly. Workers were sometimes paid only every two months, while most estates also deducted the cost of the rice and other essentials provided to workers from their salaries.48 In 1888, Governor Arthur Gordon noted that “a large number [of] planters habitually pay their coolies only four times a year, 42 43

Kurian, “State, Capital, and Labour,” 91. N.E. Majoriebanks and A.R. Marakkayar, Labour Emigration to Ceylon and Malaya (Madras: Government Press, 1917), 2. 44 Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea, 250. 45 Frank Heidemann, 1992, cited in Ronald Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History, (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 250. 46 Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2015), 33. 47 SLNA: PF/24, Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, No. 364, 4 September 1897. 48 Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 43.

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and that they then only pay the wage for the quarter ended three months previously.”49 The 1908 Labour Commission noted that even during the early twentieth century estates often paid wages only every two months, with workers customarily receiving one month’s wages (minus the cost of the rice provided to them) with the kangani receiving the second month’s wages to cover outstanding debts, a practice which increased the opportunities to swindle illiterate workers.50 The kangani’s position as an instrument of labor control was further enhanced by planters acknowledging them as the de facto leader of the estate’s workforce, a position which reinforced his being paid a larger salary than ordinary workers together with “head money” for every laborer who reported for work on a daily basis and other payments for “special duties.”51 Kanganis controlled their gangs in other ways as well. It was not uncommon for head kanganis to operate an estate’s store where laborers purchased the necessities of life at inflated prices, a practice that often resulted in additional indebtedness to the kangani-shopkeeper who loaned workers money at high rates of interest.52 While the net inflow of migrants for estate work increased between 1870 and 192053 as the need for large-scale recruitment disappeared, kanganis continued to function as “headman, patriarch, moneylender and shop-keeper,” capacities that afforded them numerous opportunities to extort, embezzle, and bully workers. A witness appearing before the Labour Commission in 1908 asserted that some kanganis did not tell workers how much money they owed from year to year, a practice which prompted the commissioners to observe that “in many instances the labourer was made the victim of more or less deliberate fraud.”54 Worker mobility was also restricted by the legal requirement that they had to produce a “tundu” or discharge ticket from their employer before they could work for another planter. Planters often intentionally delayed issuing tundus to their workers to prevent them from working elsewhere.55 Kanganis also exploited the tundu for their own benefit, particularly during labour shortages, when their control over their gangs permitted them to demand that a new employer had to pay workers’ outstanding debts to the kangani before his gang 49 SLNA. Pt/12, No. 451 (Immigration), Colombo 6 November 1888. 50 Kumari Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972), 17; Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 47. 51 Majoriebanks and Marakkayar, Labour Emigration, 5. 52 Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labour Movement, 17. 53 Kurian, “State, Capital and Labour,” 104. 54 Sir Hugh Clifford, Report and Proceedings of the Labour Commission (Colombo: Govern­ ment Printer, 1908), 226. 55 Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labour Movement, 18.

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would begin work.56 Although these workers were legally not “slaves,” they and their families nevertheless remained “bonded through ties of indebtedness.”57 The pervasive exploitation to which workers were subject prompted even the Immigrant Labour Commission, which was interested primarily in recruiting labourers, to acknowledge the problems inherent in the kangani system. In 1859, the ILC observed that the kangani system’s “greatest evil” which had a “most prejudicial effect on the supply of labour” were the losses which “the coolly [sic] sustains in the extortion practiced by the Kanganis when making advances to him, or in being compelled to make good the advances received by other coolies who may have died on their way to their place of employment.”58 This situation was compounded further by the fact that kanganis pressed workers’ relatives, either in Ceylon or South India, to assume a deceased or fugitive worker’s debts on the grounds that they had a moral obligation to do so.59 Kanganis also resorted to extra-legal measures, such as detaining the worker’s wife, children, and goods to recover his debt.60 Such actions generated considerable hostility, and antagonism against kanganis became a major rallying point of the first union of plantation workers, the All-Ceylon Indian Estate Labour Federation, founded in 1931.61 Workers resisted this exploitation in various ways, the most public manifestation of which were increasing instances of desertion or “bolting.”62 Ordinance No. 11 of 1865 deemed desertion to be a breach of contract and a criminal offence subject to punishment that included fines and/or imprisonment. The ordinance also permitted police magistrates to allow a deserter to return to his employer rather than be punished. “Bolting” became an important concern for planters, especially from the 1880s onwards, as kanganis used indebtedness to exert greater control over workers, including resorting to extra-legal measures such as detaining wives and children to recover debts.63 Desertion became

56

Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 44, 46; Peebles, The Plantation Tamils, 61. 57 Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 33. 58 Report of the Immigrant Labour Commission, Colombo, for the half-year ending 30 June 1859, cited in Kurian, “State, Capital,” 71. 59 Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 47–48. 60 Ibid, 60. 61 Ibid, 111. 62 On worker resistance in the nineteenth-century plantation world, see Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert, eds., Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993); Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, 55–75. 63 Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 60.

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the main cause of worker arrests by the first decade of the twentieth century, accounting for some 3,500 of 4,409 court cases involving workers in 1915.64 As the incidence of desertion increased, there was growing concern that the advances paid to workers could not be recovered. In 1907, the Planters’ Association noted that kanganis would simply disappear if any action was taken against them and, furthermore, that if a kangani went bankrupt, his gang would simply be “swallowed up in the gangs of his friends and relations” and all of the monies advanced to his workers would be lost.65 Although Ordinance No. 11 of 1865 sought to formalize contracts between employers and workers, colonial authorities acknowledged the extent of kangani involvement in this process. In 1898, the colony’s Attorney General noted that, “In a very large number of cases the kanganis have availed themselves of the provisions of Section II [of the ordinance] for the purpose of recovering a civil debt by a criminal prosecution, and that often a debt which could not be recovered in a civil court owning to its being prescribed.”66 The widespread belief that the colony’s agricultural prosperity depended “largely on the proper control and discipline of the Labourers [emphasis added]” prompted officials to encourage police magistrates to “enforce vigorously provisions whereby the bolters would be reprimanded.”67 Their ability to do so was compromised, however, by the fact that many workers who deserted fled to India. Enforcing warrants for their arrest and extradition required the cooperation of the Government of India which, sensitive to public criticism about the abuse of indentured workers, upheld local magistrates’ refusals to authorize such extraditions.68 An important result of these concerns was the Ceylonese colonial government’s introduction in 1901 of the “tin-ticket,” a token which specified a worker’s name and the estate upon which he worked, as a way to bring migration under closer government supervision. While this measure’s intent was to protect workers from getting into debt and preventing the “embesslement [sic] of advances by the kangani,” workers continued to be “saddled with comparatively large debts.”69 Plantation worker indebtedness and kanganis’ role in perpetuating it continued to elicit comment well into the twentieth century. In 1931, the Agent 64 Majoriebanks and Marakkayar, Labour Emigration, para 43. 65 SLNA: PF/2693, Times of Ceylon, 2 November 1907, Report of a meeting of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon held on November 1, 1907. 66 SLNA: PF/24, Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, No. 364, 4 September 1897 67 SLNA: PF/24, Police Magistrate, Hatton, to Colonial Secretary, No. 20, 11 March 11 1898. 68 SLNA: PF/24, Letter from H. Luson, Deputy Secy. Government of India, to Colonial Secretary, (Colombo), 7 February 1898. 69 Majoriebanks and Marakkayar, Labour Emigration, 39.

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of the Government of India in Ceylon called indebtedness “the most distressing feature of the Indian labourers’ life in Ceylon” and “a most perplexing and seemingly insoluble problem” that haunted workers from birth to death. This problem reflected, as the agent understood, the fact that “The head kangani on the estate naturally wished to keep a hold on his labourers, and in indiscriminately lending money to them, he finds a convenient means of achieving his object.”70 4

Socio-cultural Hierarchies and Multiple Patriarchies

Despite the abolition of slavery in much of the British Empire in 1834, the hierarchical system based on race, color, and gender that characterized life in slave plantation colonies remained in place on Ceylonese plantations. At the top of this socio-economic order was the British planter, known as the periya dorai (big master), who was supported by sinna dorais (small masters, also white and male) and an office staff of Tamils or Eurasians who had an English education.71 Housing reflected these differences; planters lived in relatively palatial bungalows, their assistants in less grand but still luxurious houses, and office staff in cottage-like quarters. Social conventions reinforced this hierarchy by ensuring that there was little, if any, interaction between a periya dorai and his sinna dorais and the estate’s non-European employees. Workers were housed in crowded barrack-like “line-rooms” without adequate water or sanitation. The status of these different groups vis-à-vis one another is graphically illustrated by the fact that a line-room cost only £5 to construct compared to £500 for a superintendent’s bungalow.72 Ceylonese planters exploited caste and religion to reinforce this hierarchical system. Their ability to do so was facilitated by kanganis’ propensity to recruit workers from the same community in which everyone knew the caste and family background of each other. While the extent to which Indians retained their caste identity when they crossed the kali pani (“black water”) to colonies such as Fiji and Mauritius remains a subject of debate,73 caste remained an important socio-cultural marker in nineteenth-century Ceylon. The majority of workers who reached the island from South India belonged to low-status 70 71 72 73

Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 45. Kurian, “State, Capital and Labour,” 99–101. William Sabonadière, The Coffee Planter of Ceylon (Colombo: Mees, J.P. Green and Co., 1866), 65. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, 166–67.

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Sudra (agricultural) castes such as the Vellala, Ambalakara, Ambatta, Kalla, Padiyachi, and Kapen, and various so-called “outcastes” such as the Palla, Parayai, and Chakiliya, known today as Dalits or Adi-Dravidas.74 Head kanganis came usually from higher-status castes and sought to maintain their “superior” status in order to command their gang’s respect and obedience. Workers were frequently divided into groups of men from the same caste who were often related to one another, with each such group being presided over by selera or sub-kanganis usually from the same caste as the workers in their group.75 This structure reinforced the notion that gangs should be organized as a hierarchical “family” in which every worker had a place and owed respect those above him.76 The Ceylon Labour Commission noted that such a system produced the most satisfactory of results since it encouraged workers to settle permanently on estates.77 However, if planters welcomed the creation of such “families,” they also did not hesitate to cultivate divisions among their workers who invariably outnumbered an estate’s managerial personnel by a substantial margin and could threaten its staff with physical harm if they acted together to do so. Caste figured prominently in allocating “line-rooms” to workers so that those of higher caste status did not have to live near, or even look at, the quarters which lower caste workers occupied.78 While some scholars have argued that the differences between low status castes were not as pronounced as in India, there are indications that these distinctions became more important in colonial Ceylon as those belonging to higher castes (re)asserted their status as part of a “Sanskritization” process which entailed individuals and groups consciously adopting “purer” (i.e., less ritually polluting) Hindu practices.79 Endogamy, or marriage within the caste, likewise became increasingly important, while the religious ceremonies and festivals that were often promoted by estate managers also acquired a significant caste dimension as high caste workers 74

Lewis Green, The Planters Book of Caste and Custom (Colombo: Times of Ceylon Co., 1925), chap. 2; S.C. Baladundera, A.S. Chandrabose, and P.P. Sivapragasam, “Caste Discrimination among Indian Tamil Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka,” in Silva, Sivapragasam and Thanges, Caste or Caste-blind?, 79–80. 75 R. Jayaraman, Caste Continuities in Ceylon: A Study of the Social Structure of Three Tea Plantations (Bombay: Popular Prakashan Press, 1975). 76 Clifford, Report and Proceedings. 77 Ceylon Labour Commission, Ceylon Labour Commission Handbook (Colombo: Dodson Press, 1935), 20. 78 Green, The Planter’s Book, chapter on Housing. 79 M.N. Srinivas, “A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization,” Far Eastern Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1956): 481–96.

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refused to eat food cooked by lower caste individuals who were regarded as ritually polluted. 5

Multiple Patriarchies

Historians have frequently ignored the gendered dimensions of migrant indentured labor in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world, in part because men regularly outnumbered women, sometimes by very substantial margins, in such populations well into the early twentieth century. However, as scholarship on pre- and post-emancipation plantation societies in the Caribbean80 and the work of Margaret Jolly, Marina Carter, Patricia Mohammed, Verene A. Shepherd, and others demonstrates,81 a fuller understanding the nature and dynamics of the migrant experience requires due consideration of women’s place and role in plantation colonies’ social and economic life. In Ceylon, the discriminatory norms and practices characteristic of colonial race and gender relations gave birth to a system of “plantation patriarchy” that ensured women’s subordinate socio-economic status.82 This system was reinforced by caste and ethnic prejudices and religious and cultural practices. 80

81

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E.g., Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: James Currey, 1990); Janet H. Momsen, ed., Women and Change in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers/Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: James Currey, 1993); Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers/Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers/Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). See also Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). Margaret Jolly, “The Forgotten Women: A History of Migrant Labour and Gender Relations in Vanuatu,” Oceania 58, no. 2 (1987): 119–39; Carter, Lakshmi’s Legacy; Patricia Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History: The Negotiation of Gender Relations Among Indian Men and Women in Post-Indenture Trinidad Society, 1917–47,” in Verene A. Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, eds., Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (London: James Currey, 1995), 20–47; Verene A. Shepherd, “Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post-Indenture Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica,” in Shepherd, Brereton, and Bailey, Engendering History, 233–57; Shobhita Jain and Rhoda Reddock, eds., Women Plantation Workers (London: Berg, 1998). Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy and Structural Violence: Women Workers in Sri Lanka,” in Lomarsh Roopnarine, Radica Mahase, and

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The net result was a regime which legitimized a gendered division of labor where women workers were consigned to labour-intensive tasks in the fields for which they were paid lower wages and worked longer hours than their male counterparts, while also being responsible for a wide range of domestic chores such as taking care of children, the sick, and the elderly. This system of plantation patriarchy persisted into the early twentieth century, in part because most estate workers had limited opportunities to interact with those who lived outside the borders of the plantation on which they lived and worked. Males dominated all levels of the plantation system. White male planters stood at the apex of a socio-economic hierarchy that the colonial state supported ideologically and bureaucratically. While coffee plantations relied mostly on seasonal male migrant workers, tea plantations sought out female laborers for several reasons, beginning with the fact that female agricultural workers in South India were traditionally paid less than their male counterparts, a practice which allowed Ceylonese planters to lower their labor costs. Secondly, planters believed that recruiting women could incentivize men laborers to remain on estates for longer periods of time. Lastly, the patriarchal norms that prevailed in South India meant that women were seen as more easily controlled than men. Official interest in securing female laborers manifested itself as early as 1859–60 when the ILC’s secretary asked their agent in India to search out more laborers “either on long or short engagements, and who if required would bring their wives and families with them.”83 The agent reported that women were generally employed in “carrying earth from the embankments of tanks and were the more steady and regular labourers.” He thought that a “considerable number” of women might be induced to emigrate if they were assured of a quick passage to the island, and added that he had every reason to believe that the establishment of regular steamship service between southern India and Ceylon would prompt male immigrants to bring “their wives and families and remain for a period instead of returning after a few months’ work.”84 Equally important in his eyes was the fact that women were paid less than men. In 1859, for example, a male worker in Tinnevelly and Madurai received 3 pence per day, while a woman received about 1 penny 3 farthings;85 in Yangan, Maurits S. Hassankhan, eds., Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and its Diaspora: Past and Present (New Delhi: Manohar, 2016), 25–50. 83 SLNA: 6/2144, Dawson to Graham, 6 March 1860. 84 SLNA: 6/2644, Graham to Hansbrow, 24 March 1859. 85 SLNA: 2/2644, Graham to Hansbrow, 24 March 1859.

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wages for men and women were 1 anna 4 pice and 1 anna 1 pice, respectively.86 These wage differentials remained in place over time; in 1869, the ILC noted that planters expected to pay women and youths at a lower rate than ablebodied men.87 Few women migrated to Ceylon as workers during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1843, they comprised only 2.6 per cent of the total plantation labor force.88 W.C. Twynam, the Government Agent of Jaffna, reported that “miserable gangs of coolies” during the 1840s consisted of 50–100 men and one or two women.89 However, the tea industry’s expansion, coupled with high rates of poverty and unemployment in parts of the Madras Presidency, prompted increasing numbers of women to migrate to Ceylon. By 1866, adult females comprised 27 percent of the island’s plantation work force,90 a figure that increased steadily during following decades. By 1917, females accounted for 46.7 percent of the colony’s 440,302 plantation workers.91 These women were incorporated into production units that were historically patriarchal in structure. The planter’s authority was absolute over both males and females who lived and worked on the plantation. Other authority figures on (e.g., sirdars) and off the estates (e.g., recruiters, government officials) were also men who operated in a socio-political environment that reinforced male hegemony and subjected women to harassment, exploitation, and violence. Planters sexually exploited female workers with impunity; as early as 1847, the governor of Ceylon, Lord Torrington, wrote to Lord Grey, Secretary of the State for the Colonies, about the “most objectionable” manner in which coffee planters treated these women.92 British officials and soldiers also exploited female workers sexually which resulted in the practice of sending the children born of these liaisons to Catholic convent schools or the Paynter Home which had been established to “rescue” Eurasian orphans.93 86 SLNA: 2/2644, Graham to Dawson, 20 September 1860. 87 SLNA: 2/2644, Dawson to Graham, 6 March 1869. 88 A.M. Ferguson, Ceylon Handbook and Directory, 1866–1868 (Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd., 1886), 183, Appendix 2. 89 National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew: CO 54/475, Letter to Colonial Secretary, Henry T. Irving in “Correspondence on The Condition of Malabar Coolies in Ceylon,” p. 16, Enclosure No. 8, 30 September 1869.. 90 Estimates based on the analysis the Arrivals and Departures of Plantation Workers between India and Ceylon in Kurian, “State, Capital, and Labour,” 62 (tables 2.2 and 2.2). 91 Majoriebanks and Marakkayar, Labour Emigration, 2–3. 92 SLNA, 5/34.Pt.1, No.19, (misc.) Torrington to Grey. 10 May 1847 93 Kumari Jayawardena, Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia (Colombo: Social Science Association, 2007), 70–71.

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Abuse and violence were integral components of both work and domestic life where women remained under the control of men, be they planters, kanganis, fathers, or husbands.94 Women’s subordinate position was also sanctioned by the Hindu belief that to be born a woman was bad karma or the consequence of wicked deeds committed during a previous life. Women were held to have a duty (dharma) to obey men and respect their social superiors. While the worship of powerful female deities such as Kali, Saraswathi, and Lakshmi and their active involvement in organizing and participation in religious festivals provided women with some measure of solace and psychological support, such beliefs and practices did little to challenge the conviction that their inferior status and condition was immutable. Lower caste individuals were likewise pressed to accept their religiously sanctioned status and fate. Planters reinforced such notions by actively encouraging religion on their estates, including supporting the construction of temples.95 Women’s subordinate status in this socio-economic order was most readily apparent in the division of labor which allocated the most labor intensive and time-consuming field work and domestic chores to them. Foremost among these field tasks was picking the “flush” or immature leaves on tea bushes. Women played a particularly important role in doing so because they were deemed to have the “nimble fingers” and “patience” needed to complete this work successfully. There can be little doubt, however, that cost considerations also figured prominently in this reliance on women pickers. As early as 1839, a planter pointed out that men could not pick tea leaves as inexpensively as women and children who, he noted, did so more steadily and cheaply.96 Picking the “flush” was usually done by gangs of women who were supervised rather strictly by kanganis who were almost invariably men. The kangani’s duties included maintaining the rate at which leaves were picked, maximizing the quantity of good leaf, and supervising weighing the collected “flush.” In addition to fieldwork, women were responsible for a wide range of household chores including cooking, cleaning, caring for children and other family members, and fetching water and firewood, tasks consistent with the traditional gendered division of household labor in India. Women remained subject to male authority in their own households and were expected to cater to the needs of its men (husbands, fathers, and even kanganis on occasion). 94 95 96

For details see, Kurian and Jayawardena, ‘Plantation Patriarchy,” 35–36. Ibid. Report by Rettie of the Spring Valley Estate, reporting on the Uva Estate on 4 July 1893; Spring Valley Estate. Private estate papers examined at the estate during fieldwork in 1982. Our thanks to the estate’s management for making this source available.

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Some women also worked as domestic servants in planters’ homes where they remained vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence. Most women had little time to socialize or engage in activities that would allow them to improve the quality of their lives. Female literacy rates, to cite but one example, remained abysmally low since estate schools, where they existed, focused on educating boys. In 1911, only 1–3 percent of Indian women in the colony’s principal planting districts could read compared to 13–21 percent of Indian males.97 This systematic and long-term denial of their life-chances under “plantation patriarchy” perpetuated structural violence on women workers.98 6

Conclusion

The development of industrial plantations during the nineteenth century and the need to ensure that these capitalist enterprises remained profitable spurred the creation of a migrant labor system based ultimately on worker indebtedness. The coercive relationships inherent in these debt-based regimes were complemented by Ceylonese planters, colonial authorities, and kanganis exploiting class, race, caste, and gender differences to manage and control workers on the island’s plantations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the men and women who entered into written and/or oral contracts to labor on these estates were deemed to be “free” in the eyes of the law since only a free person could enter into such contracts, these workers’ lives were, in many respects, not unlike those led by their predecessors on slave plantations. The extent to which these legally free men and women remained unfree in situations where the colonial state sought to expand labor mobility for estates and theoretically thereby provide indigenous people with an opportunity to improve the quality of their lives is a major paradox of the nineteenth-century plantation world. If the Ceylonese case study demonstrates the need to pay greater attention to the role that debt played in shaping socio-economic relationships in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world, it also highlights the need to situate these systems in more fully developed local and regional contexts. The importance of doing so is highlighted by Benedicte Hjejle’s seminal 1967 article on slavery and agricultural bondage in southern India in which she argued that significant numbers of the migrant workers who reached Ceylon 97 98

E.B. Denham, Ceylon at the Census of 1911: Being the Review of the Results of the Census of 1911 (Colombo: Government Press, 1912), 409. Kurian and Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy.”

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between 1843 and 1873 came from southern India’s praedial slave population.99 Mauritian archival sources confirm that indentured Indians of “slave” caste status reached that plantation colony during the late 1830s.100 We would likewise do well to remember that slavery existed in pre-colonial and early colonial Ceylon,101 a fact that raises important questions about the ways in which these earlier forms of bondage may have shaped the development and operation of the migrant labor system that supplied the island’s coffee and tea plantations with tens of thousands of Indian laborers during the nineteenth century. As historians of slavery in Southeast Asia have long appreciated, the relationship between debt, slavery, and other forms of bonded labor has always been a complex one, and it is incumbent upon historians of post-emancipation plantation labor systems to acknowledge and embrace that complexity. 99 Hjejle, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage.” 100 Allen, European Slave Trading, 140, 195, 293. The individuals in question were Palins and Pulayas. 101 Slavery in Ceylon remains poorly studied. Exceptions include: Nandadeva Wijesekera, “Slavery in Sri Lanka,” Journal of the Sri Lanka Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 18 (1974): 1–22; Chandima S.M. Wickramasinghe, “Coloured Slavery in Ceylon (Sri Lanka),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, new ser., 54 (2008): 159–78; Alicia Schrikker and Kate J. Ekama, “Through the Lens of Slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the Eighteenth Century,” in Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern, eds., Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (London: UCL Press, 2017), 178–93.

Part 4 Reflections

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Chapter 14

Slavery in Asia and Global Slavery Jeff Fynn-Paul 1

The Historiography of Slavery in Asia in Global Perspective

With this volume, it becomes increasingly possible to speak of a “trajectory” in Asian slavery studies. Anthony Reid’s chapter deftly handles some of the grand themes and questions which animate discussions on the problem of historical slavery in Asia, but he perhaps too modestly underestimates the impact that his Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia has had on the field of Asian slavery studies since its publication in 1983.1 There are now some half-dozen volumes which can be ascribed to a (slowly) emerging historiography of Asian slavery. Reid has already discussed some of the earlier pioneering works including those by H.J. Nieboer and Bruno Lasker.2 As he points out, works before circa 1950 tended to be written from the perspective that slavery in Asia was a continuing contemporary social justice problem which required urgent action. Thus, many of these works were written in the tradition of political tracts and pamphlets rather than academic studies per se. This raises another problem for historians, namely that contemporary Asia still contains a high concentration of persons and workers who lead lives of duress. For many of these people, living and working conditions are more precarious, dangerous, and dehumanizing than those of the slaves whose lives are addressed in this volume. It is perhaps for this reason that Richard Allen wisely chose to make 1900 the cut-off point for this collection of essays. Asian slavery before 1900 offers many points of comparison and contrast with modern forms of oppression. But these can easily be obscured by the presentist bias which characterizes much of the literature on forced labor in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Asia. By demonstrating the value of studying slavery in longer-term contexts, historians can provide colleagues from cognate disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and political 1 Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 2 H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910); Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950).

© Jeff Fynn-Paul, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004469655_016

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science – as well as policy makers – with important insights into the nature and dynamics of living and working conditions for laborers in contemporary Asia. The common assertion that millions of men, women, and children are de facto “slaves” in the early twenty-first century underscores the pressing need for such historical insights.3 With this context in mind, I want to focus on some key questions raised by studies of slavery in pre-modern Asia, including those presented in this volume. I do so as a medieval Mediterraneanist with an interest in the global history of slavery. A striking feature of the scholarship on Asian slavery is the similarities which emerge between non-Islamic forms of slavery in Africa and Asia. These similarities suggest that such slave systems should be viewed not as separate and distinct phenomena, but as part of a continuum. I note, for example, that the initial reference point in Asian slavery studies remains Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, published in 1977.4 Coming hard on the heels of this volume was James Watson’s Asian and African Systems of Slavery (1980), followed by Reid’s Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency.5 After this initial burst of scholarship, an entire generation elapsed before the appearance of Gwyn Campbell’s The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia in 2004 and Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton’s Slavery and South Asian History in 2006.6 The present volume thus appears some 15 years after Chatterjee and Eaton’s book but still within the working career of some pioneers such as Reid. All of the works mentioned above are edited volumes, rather than monographs. While works that deal comprehensively with slavery in Asia remain non-existent, the passing years have witnessed the publication of a number of important monographs as well. An enduring classic that continues to inspire many is James Warren’s The Sulu Zone, first published in 1981, which examines slave trading, slavery, and state building during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a Southeast Asian sultanate located between Malaysia

3 E.g., Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Siddarth Kara, Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press. 2017). 4 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). 5 Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 6 Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2004); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

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and the Philippines.7 More recently, Indrani Chatterjee broke new ground in South Asian slavery studies with her Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India, published in 1999.8 Although some of Chatterjee’s other scholarship touches only tangentially on slavery and bondage, she has clearly helped to galvanize the field of South Asian slavery studies, including contributions to this volume.9 Recent important contributions to our understanding of slavery in East Asia include Lúcio de Sousa’s study of the Portuguese slave trade in early modern Japan,10 while Kerry Ward and Pamela Crossley have contributed important essays on slavery in China and Southeast Asia to the Cambridge World History of Slavery.11 Despite such contributions, however, Asia remains seriously under-represented in the global historiography of slavery. That Asianists often view Miers and Kopytoff as a conceptual point of departure for their own work is noteworthy on at least three counts. First, the fact that a book on slavery in Africa held Asianists’ attention for more than a generation attests to the general paucity of studies on slavery in Asia. Secondly, it is interesting that many Asianists continue to see a genuine continuity between Asian and African systems of slavery, even after the passage of several decades. Thirdly, we would do well to remember that anthropologists played a prominent role in the initial burst of scholarly interest in slavery during the 1970s. Because of their interest in social systems and familiarity with working in cross-cultural comparative terms, they were able to lay some important theoretical groundwork that continues to resonate in historical studies of slavery in Asia. One of the most enduring of these concepts is that of “open” and “closed” slave systems which figures prominently in James Watson’s introduction to his book; another is the willingness, pioneered by Suzanne Miers, to 7 8

9 10 11

James Francis Warren. The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 2nd ed. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007). Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Indrani Chatterjee, “Slave-Queen, Waif-Prince: Slavery and Social Capital in Eighteenth-Century India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, no. 2 (1999): 165–86; Indrani Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest for Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Hindustan,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, no. 1 (2000): 53–86. E.g., Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). See Jessica Hinchy’s chapter in this volume. Lúcio de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Kerry Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804,” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 163–85; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in Eltis and Engerman, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, 186–214.

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reject the notion of “freedom” as central to defining slave status and even to reject the category of “slave” itself. Rather than using the terms “slave” and “slavery,” Kopytoff and Miers emphasized the need to focus on the concept of “marginalization.” They suggested that slavery in Africa was akin to what Watson would later call an “open” slave system, insofar as it allowed slaves and their descendants to be integrated into the dominant society after a few generations; they also suggest that African slavery was “mild” because it often involved “rights-in-persons.”12 This form of bondage is difficult to reconcile with the total ownership of a person which is normative in Western and many Islamic conceptions of slavery. Such rightsin-persons were, moreover, often held collectively, making them that much more diffuse. For these reasons, Miers and some of the contributors to Slavery in Africa argued that in place of the English term “slave,” students of slavery should instead rely on local vernacular terms. This idea has enjoyed considerable popularity in Asian slavery studies, given the complex realities of dependency on the ground.13 Other concepts from the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, have not withstood the test of time quite so well. Interest in a “slave mode of production,” to cite an obvious example, now seems to be a theoretical and historiographical dead end despite Jack Goody’s argument about its heuristic value.14 Anthony Reid’s 1983 volume offers a wealth of information that should still be required reading for anyone who wishes to examine slavery in Asia. Reid posits a number of categories and conceptual tools which still seem fundamental to discussing slavery in Asia, and his work may be regarded as something of a locus classicus for many of these concepts. Key ideas that he addresses include the difference between slavery and bondage; the idea of “hierarchies of dependency;” the notion of debt bondage; the difference between war captives, “normal” rural bondage, urban slavery, concubinage, and wife purchasing; corvée labour; and the effects of European institutions on the development of slavery in Asia, particularly during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Gwyn Campbell set about writing the introduction his The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, he found it necessary to remind readers that slavery in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) would not conform to notions of slavery formed from non-Asian slave systems. He had to assume that 12 13 14

Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, 3–84. Anthony Reid argues forcefully against using only vernacular terms for slavery and dependency in his chapter in this volume. Jack Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems, 16–42.

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readers would define IOW slavery in terms associated with chattel labor in the Atlantic world. Knowing too that slavery studies had been heavily influenced by Orlando Patterson’s monumental works, Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), Campbell was keen to state from the outset that “freedom,” as most Anglophones know it, was essentially a foreign concept in the IOW.15 Several authors in this volume draw on the idea that, in most traditional Asian societies, it was not a question of whether one was “free” or “bonded,” but who one was bonded to and for what purpose.16 Other differences that Campbell highlighted include the broad range of occupations performed by slaves in the IOW, the sometimes comfortable or even exalted position slaves occupied vis-à-vis non-enslaved commoners, the often surprising lack of violence in slave relations, the blurred distinction between owned slaves and debt bondspeople, the fact that many people “bonded” themselves as a form of social security in the face of a natural disaster or bad harvest, and, finally, the fact that many slaves in the IOW were not “outsiders” and had not necessarily experienced something akin to Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death.” Campbell also vigorously challenges lingering notions of “productive” versus “non-productive” slave activities and the possibility of a “slave class identity.” On this latter point, he notes rightly that such “class identity” was unlikely to develop given the “open” character of many slave systems in the IOW, and the fact that status in many Asian societies was defined more in personal terms than in legal or socially sanctioned categories. In such a context, the very idea of “class consciousness” seems less likely to develop, and more like an unhelpful Western import. These attributes underpin Campbell’s principal arguments that slavery in the IOW was not like that in the Atlantic, and that this world housed a great variety of slave systems. The net result of his approach, however, can be a sense of what slavery was not, rather than what it was. As Anthony Reid points out in his chapter, this type of “negative definition” continues to bedevil the field of Asian slavery studies and is a particular source of frustration for those who do not specialize in Asian history. This chapter seeks to address this problem by suggesting routes to a more “positive definition” of Asian slave systems. The need to develop such a definition is highlighted by Richard Eaton’s observation in his introductory essay to 15 16

Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). E.g., Reid in this volume citing Michael Aung-Thwin, “Athi, Kyun-Taw, Hpaya-Kyun: Varieties of Commendation and Dependence in Pre-Colonial Burma,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage, 67; Hägerdal in this volume citing Warren, The Sulu Zone, 215.

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Slavery and South Asian History that there is no single story of slavery in South Asia because the last one thousand years have witnessed the appearance of a “remarkable range of types of slavery” in the region.17 Eaton’s rejection of Marxist or Toynbeean explanations of how economic or political growth underpinned the development of slavery in South Asia challenges would-be universal definitions of slavery and dependency based on western concepts such as natal alienation, persons-as-property, coercion, or social death. At the same time, he cautions against regarding slavery in South Asia as something that was uniquely “Oriental” and, by implication in a field dominated by the Atlantic paradigm, ultimately a “marginal” form of servitude. Eaton also notes a tendency among the contributors to his and Chatterjee’s volume to use indigenous terms to describe slave and dependent status along the lines suggested by Miers and Kopytoff. His attempt to summarize the case studies in their collection led him to suggest that slavery should be understood as “the condition of uprooted outsiders, impoverished insiders – or the descendants of either – serving persons or institutions on which they are wholly dependent [original emphasis].”18 As Eaton was aware, the danger of conceptualizing slavery as encompassing anyone who is dependent, or simply just poor, is that, in so doing, the institution of slavery might easily vanish into thin air. He nonetheless asserts that impoverishment as well as capture in warfare were the major means by which individuals became enslaved in South Asia. Many males were used for military purposes, and women were used as media of exchange between elite households. As some of this volume’s chapters indicate, Islamic beliefs about slavery also had a greater impact on non-Muslim slavery in India than elsewhere in Asia. This was perhaps facilitated by the fact that, as Indrani Chatterjee notes, the Portuguese sometimes served as agents for introducing Muslim ideas about slavery into South Asia.19 Despite the presence of these Islamic forms, Chatterjee asserts that slavery in the Indian subcontinent remains largely incompatible with Eurocentric ideas about slave status that rest on conceptualizing slaves-as-property and which draw a sharp dichotomy between slave and free status. She also utilizes postcolonial theory, ultimately derived from Derrida, to emphasize the shifting of boundaries, and the tendency of realities to slip imposed concepts. Once again, while these analyses are indisputably illuminating, they can leave non-specialists frustrated with an ongoing tendency towards “negative definitions” of slavery in Asia. 17 18 19

Eaton, “Introduction,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 1. Ibid, 2. Indrani Chatterjee, “Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 18.

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In light of these comments, it behoves us to ask, “What positive traits have emerged from the historiography of slavery in Asia over the last 40 years?” I want to suggest firstly that Asian and African systems of slavery are broadly similar, especially insofar as they differ from Muslim and Atlantic systems of slavery. Secondly, it is possible to list some characteristic features of these Asian and African systems: – Legal definitions of “slave” status are often imprecise, if not elusive. – There is usually no concept of “free” to contrast with that of “slave.” – Slaves are viewed as dependents under their master’s control. – Masters are usually obliged to care for their slaves in basic ways. – Slaves are part of a highly stratified set of vertical social dependencies. – Slaves are often wives or concubines who were purchased. – Slaves are often described as children, adoptees, or relatives. – Slaves are often regarded as disciples, servants, or tenants. – Slave systems in Asia were frequently “open” although many “closed” systems also existed. – Slavery in Asia was often relatively “mild” although it could be as brutal as systems elsewhere in the globe. – Slaves in Asia were often ethnically indistinguishable from non-slaves. – Slaves in Asia performed most kinds of labor, although in some regions slaves were more often put to specific uses (e.g. military slaves, corvée labourers, domestic servants). – Corvée slaves are sometimes difficult to distinguish from “serfs” who were required to work for specified number of days in a given time period. – Slaves were often captured in war or sold themselves into slavery because of poverty or debt, but some were born as slaves, or kidnapped and sold into bondage. – Some slaves, especially in South Asia, came from what are commonly referred to as “slave” castes. All of the contributions to this volume touch on these characteristic features in one way or another. 2

A Model of Asian Slave Systems in the History of Global Slavery

Given the body of scholarship that now exists on slavery in Asia, I believe that we can begin to situate slavery in Asia more clearly as an integral part of a global framework of slavery and dependency. Doing so provides us with an opportunity to transcend the paradox that a “bewildering variety” of slave systems existed in Asia and Africa, and move beyond definitions of what slavery

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in Asia is not. Inherent in doing so is the need to appreciate that Islamic slavery is very distinct from non-Islamic versions of slavery in Africa and Asia, though in some instances we can discern a hybrid or semi-Islamic mode of slavery. What happens, then, when we combine the features of Asian slave systems listed above, with an expansion of focus that looks at slavery from a global perspective? Can any commonalities be discerned among these various global slave systems that might provide a template for understanding both the parameters of Asian slavery, and its place in a global spectrum of slave systems? I believe that the answer in both instances is yes. Moreover, I believe that Anthony Reid provided us with the key to such a template in his introduction to Slavery, Bondage and Dependency when he discussed some of the striking similarities between slavery in Southeast Asia and slavery in the world of the Hebrew Bible.20 Here, I want to argue that my own concept of an “Imperfect No-Slaving Zone” comes strongly and usefully into play in building such a paradigm.21 According to this concept, slave systems in Africa and Asia share a common thread which differentiates them from both Islamic and Christian (Monotheistic) notions of slavery, namely that Asia never developed a “Perfect” form of what I have elsewhere described as a “No-Slaving Zone.” I appreciate that many may find this terminology troubling since it could be interpreted as implying that Asia “lacked” something that the West or the Islamic world did not. But this is really just an accident of the terminology. Let us clarify by defining a few terms. According to the “Slaving Zones” argument, a ruler who monopolizes violence in a given area usually prohibits his subjects from active slave raiding in the area where he monopolizes violence. We call this a “No-Slaving Zone.” By contrast, rulers often direct slave raiding to particular areas outside of their borders, such as areas ruled by rivals, or areas inhabited by people seen as hereditary enemies. These areas of sanctioned raiding, from which slave stock may be taken, are called “Slaving Zones.” We can take this a step further, by noting that rulers of ancient Mediter­ ranean societies such as the Egyptians, Hebrews, or Hittites, while they discouraged the active raiding or kidnapping of their own subjects, still allowed 20 21

Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage, 3–4. Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” in Damian Alan Pargas and Felicia Roşu, eds., Critical Readings on Global Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 553–87. See also Jeff FynnPaul, “Introduction. Slaving Zones in Global History: The Evolution of a Concept,” in J. Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Brill, 2018), 1–19.

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many paths for their subjects to become slaves, such as poverty, sale by parents, and judicial slavery. We call these places “Imperfect No-Slaving Zones,” to contrast them with the post-Mohammedan Abrahamic societies, where coreligionists were almost entirely exempt from the status of enslavement.22 We call these areas “Perfect No-Slaving Zones.” My purpose in dragging these concepts into the discussion is to note that most African and Asian societies never developed the rather unusual idea that co-religionists could not be enslaved for any reason. Rather, they continued to use the conventions which were current in the pre-Islamic Mediter­ ranean. That meant that while rulers generally proscribed active raiding and kidnapping of their own subjects, due to the obvious political unrest that this would cause, they did not outlaw the economic or judicial slavery of their own subjects. This is a very significant point because it shows how global societies, from Spain to South Africa to China to Australia, long had very similar notions of slavery and dependency, and their relationship to political power, from ancient times through the present, with the single exception of areas that came to be dominated by (post-Mohammedan) Abrahamic faiths. In this light, we should view the slavery of the Atlantic world as highly aberrant in global history, rather than the norm. The routine enslavement of one’s neighbours and countrymen in the majority of societies in global history lead, in turn, to a set of norms which is distinct from those of Monotheistic (and thus, of Atlantic) slavery, and yet these have some common characteristics. Aspects such as the spectrum of bondage, routes into and out of slavery, and the presence of “open” and/or “mild” forms of slavery come to mind. Because it was normative for patriarchs, chiefs, officials and male heads of household to exercise control over their dependents, wives, and family members in most historical societies, it also stands to reason that slave status in these societies is often indistinguishable from that of wives, concubines, tenants, or other dependents. Anthony Reid’s comparison of ancient Hebrew with early modern Southeast Asian slave systems is accordingly very insightful insofar as he had discerned the continuities amongst what I would call a system of “Imperfect No-Slaving Zones”, as they developed over large swathes of time and space across the African-European-Asian supercontinent. I would like to make a further distinction between the “Asiatic” and “Monotheistic” systems of slavery described above. More specifically, the Asiatic variety differs from the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman mode in that, long 22

It is likely that this idea first developed in the Islamic world, and was only adopted by Christianity over the course of the early middle ages.

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before the advent of Islam and the “Perfect No-Slaving Zone,” Graeco-Roman society featured a strong legal and public definition of “slave” versus “free” status. This distinction also made manifest the Graeco-Roman ideal of “freedom.” Orlando Patterson and most other scholars tend to view “freedom” as a Western idea and rightly point to its Graeco-Roman origins. The Graeco-Roman world developed a propensity to sharply define an individual’s legal status, especially in terms of whether they were eligible to vote, serve in assemblies, and participate in other public political activities. This emphasis on determining who was legally a “citizen” helped to sharpen the definition of slave and free status in Greek and Roman society. These Graeco-Roman ideas of “freedom” were then carried over into Islam, giving that society an unusually well-defined notion of “slave” (or “unfree”) versus “non-slave” (and “free”) status. In summary, I would suggest that Afro-Asian slave systems differed from Monotheistic23 slave systems in four related ways: 1) Afro-Asian slave systems were characterized by Imperfect No-Slaving Zones. That is to say that while fellow subjects were generally off limits for forcible raiding or kidnapping, they could be forced into slavery through economic misfortune or judicial punishment. (This was normative in the ancient Mediterranean world as well.) 2) Monotheistic slave modes have more sharply defined notions of slave and non-slave status than is normally found in global societies, including most Asian and African systems of slavery. 3) Monotheistic slave modes have more sharply defined notions of slaves as “property” than those not influenced by Graeco-Roman norms. 4) Monotheistic slave modes accordingly have more developed senses of “freedom,” inherited ultimately from Graeco-Roman law codes, which are non-existent in most parts of Asia and Africa. However, European and Muslim expansion contributed over time to the adoption of more rigorous concepts of “slave” and “freedom” in Asia. 5) To rephrase points 2 through 4 in terms of Asian slavery, we can say that it was part of a much larger global continuum in which clearly defined slave status, slaves-as-property, and the concept of “freedom” were not as important as personal ties of hierarchy and dependency.

23

“Monotheistic” means Islamic and Christian-influenced forms of slavery, after Christianity developed a “Perfect No-Slaving Zone” ideology.

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3

353

Towards a Global History of Afro-Asiatic Systems of Slavery

If we thus distinguish two broad systems of slavery in the world since about 700 CE, which we can describe as Monotheistic and Afro-Asiatic, our next task is discern the major steps in the evolution of these systems over time. The following global trends permit us to better frame the historical development of the Afro-Asiatic systems of slavery: 1) The rise of empires and other organized states. These protected subjects from small-scale slave raiding and created “Imperfect No-Slaving Zones” within the boundaries of each state. 2) The rise of Graeco-Roman notions of “slaves-as-property” and of “freedom,” which were inherited by the Christian and Islamic worlds, but remained foreign to many parts of Asia and Africa until recent times. 3) The creation of “Perfect No-Slaving Zones,” in which co-religionists were not allowed to be enslaved except under unusual circumstances. This happened in the Islamic world by circa 700 CE and in the Christian world by circa 1050 CE. This limitation on the enslavement of co-religionists created a need to import outsiders as slaves and, in the case of Western Christendom, led to the abrogation of slavery altogether circa 1050 CE, as slave supplies ran out. Bereft of viable slave supplies, Western Christendom replaced slavery with serfdom and later, with wage labor.24 4) In Asia, “Imperfect No-Slaving Zones” continued to grow and develop along with the evolution of state power. These systems generally held that fellow countrymen could be enslaved for economic or judicial reasons, and they were often more “mild,” “open,” or less sharply defined than Monotheistic modes, but this was not always the case. They evolved along myriad lines depending on local social norms and organization, cultural and economic path dependencies, and the goals and power of local rulers. 5) Beginning in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Islamic norms were introduced into societies in South and Southeast Asia by conversion, conquest, colonization, diplomatic pressure, or cultural exchange. The interplay between Islamic and existing Asian norms resulted in the creation of a number of unique slave systems, especially in South and Southeast Asia.

24

Again, this process is explained in Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism, and Slavery.”

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6) The Portuguese arrival in Asia early in the sixteenth century led to the introduction and haphazard imposition of European (and sometimes even Islamic) norms of slavery in some parts of Asia. Europeans were also compelled to adapt to existing Asian norms. 7) Beginning in the late eighteenth century, European abolitionism, coupled with modern notions of state building, resulted in the gradual demise of legal forms of enslavement in Asia. 8) Despite the formal abolition of slavery in Asia, forms of “neo-slavery” continue to exist in various Asian societies today. I believe that these trends encapsulate the major points made by the contributors to this volume and other scholars writing on the history of slavery in Asia, and are indicative of a developing consensus. They indicate that the Asiatic system of slavery, characterized above all by its long-term Imperfect No-Slaving Zones, should not be conceptualized in terms of some “unchanging Asia” stereotype. One of the lessons to be learned from this exercise includes an appreciation of how unusual, and how harsh, Western notions of slavery have been for much of global history. Another lesson is that slavery in Asia has developed in a wide variety of ways over the past two millennia or so, and that its development and change over time has been influenced by variables that include indigenous state formation and exposure to Islamic and European notions of slavery. Lastly, while my emphasis here risks homogenizing AfroAsian slavery into a single system, that is not at all the point. Rather, the goal is to acknowledge the wide variety of forms that slavery and dependency could take in Asian societies, while pointing to certain similarities which embed slavery in Asia in the global history of slavery. 4

The Vulnerability Index: Towards a Comparative Global Definition of “Slavery”

As the preceding discussion indicates, many Asianists and Africanists remain uneasy about viewing either “slave” or “slavery” as a single, all-encompassing term or category capable of capturing the complexities that surround social dependency and exploitation. This unease is made manifest in the kinds of questions that students of slavery invariably face: e.g., if a man purchases a wife, should she be considered a slave? Does debt bondage, especially if it is only temporary in nature, really constitute slavery? Are the disciples of a religious master his ‘slaves’ because they are described in these terms? How “mild” were “open” slave systems, especially when compared with “closed” systems?

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How do “mild” systems of slavery compare with serfdom? How should we best understand corvée labour? Economic historians are often more inclined than their socially or politically oriented colleagues to rely on quantification to understand the nature and dynamics of various social phenomena. As an economic historian, I believe it might be useful to try and quantify the degree of exploitation that various types of slaves and other dependent persons have experienced in global history. In the absence of detailed information, even a more general “impression” can nonetheless be tallied, resulting in what one might call a “qualitative quantification.” The idea is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Such methodologies are used for many important global surveys, such as the Gender Inequality Index published by the United Nations Development Programme. After reviewing the variables that this volume’s authors have grappled with, I decided that it might be useful to make a chart which applies some of these variables to different types of slavery or dependency. Taking a modified version of the concept of the “dummy variable” from econometrics,25 I assigned a different numerical value to a given category of dependency: 2 for instances in which a variable applied 70 per cent or more of the time; 1 for instances in which a variable applied 30–70 per cent of the time; and 0 for instances in which a variable did not apply in 70 percent or more of the cases. Naturally, this is going to begin as a subjective exercise, but that is precisely the point: it is hoped that by starting the ball rolling, other researchers will come up with similar indices, based on deeper data sets, so that over time, we might arrive at a more evidence-based set of figures. The result of this exercise is presented in Table 14.1. This table is called a “vulnerability index” because it tallies the liability of a given category of persons to legal discrimination, economic exploitation, and physical abuse. As stated, these categories of abuse and discrimination were taken from the discussions which arose in the chapters of this volume, meaning that it was our authors who set the parameters found in the table. That being said, each of these categories will be familiar to historians of slavery in Asia, and also to historians of global slavery more generally.

25

A dummy variable assigns a value of 0 or 1 to indicate the absence or presence of a categorical effect that may alter the analysis of data. These values can be regarded as numeric stand-ins for qualitative facts in a regression model by sorting data into mutually exclusive categories (e.g., smoker and non-smoker).

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Table 14.1 Vulnerability Index

Characteristic

Legal Status: Called a “slave” Owned by someone Can be sold Subject to forced labour Children automatically slaves No upward mobility Legal sub-total

Atlantic Slave

GraecoRoman Slave

GraecoRoman Wife

Serf

Medieval Wife

2 2 2 2 2 1 11

2 2 2 1 2 0 9

0 0 0 1 0 0 1

0 2 2 1 0 2 7

0 0 0 1 0 0 1

1 1 1 2 5

1 1 1 1 4

1 0 1 0 2

1 0 1 1 3

1 0 0 0 1

Subject to Abuse: Demeaning work Experiences “social death” Extreme dependency Can be forced to work Vulnerable to sexual abuse by master Subject to corporal punishment Discrimination on basis of physical traits Abuse sub-total

2 1 1 2 2 2 2 12

1 1 1 2 2 2 1 10

0 1 1 2 2 2 2 10

2 0 1 2 0 1 1 7

0 1 1 1 2 1 2 8

Total (34 maximum)

26

21

13

17

10

Economic Rights: Not paid for labour Not allowed to marry Cannot own property Cannot bequeath property Economic sub-total

357

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Islamic Islamic Chinese Chinese Indian 19th C. Slave Wife Slave Wife Untouchable Factory Worker

Modern Modern Modern Middle Sex Wage Worker Worker Class

2 2 2 1 1 0 8

0 1 0 1 0 1 3

1 1 2 1 1 1 7

1 2 2 1 0 1 7

0 1 0 1 0 2 4

0 0 0 1 0 1 2

0 0 0 1 0 1 2

0 1 2 2 0 1 6

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1 4

1 0 1 1 3

1 1 1 1 4

1 1 1 1 4

1 0 0 0 1

0 1 0 0 1

0 1 0 0 1

1 2 2 0 5

0 0 0 0 0

1 2 1 1 2 2 1 10

0 1 2 1 2 2 2 10

1 1 1 1 2 2 1 9

0 1 1 1 2 2 2 9

2 1 1 2 1 1 1 9

2 1 2 2 0 1 1 9

2 1 1 1 0 0 1 6

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 14

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1

20

16

19

19

14

12

9

25

1

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Interestingly, although the numbers were inputted into our table with no sense of how they would add up, the index ends up confirming much of what has been suspected about the relative harshness of various types of slavery and slave-like dependency. Atlantic Slavery, for example, scored highest among the various forms of slavery and dependency, with 28 out of a maximum of 34 points. This score helps to confirm that Atlantic slavery was among the harshest forms of dependency to have existed in global history. Any such conclusion may need to be tempered, however, by the fact that this score could also reflect a historiographical bias: Atlantic Slavery still serves as the baseline by which English-speakers tend to judge other forms of slavery and slave-like dependency. The scores computed for Graeco-Roman slavery (21 points), Islamic slavery (20 points), and Chinese slavery (19 points) are, in turn, consistent with assertions that these forms of slavery were less severe than those found in the Atlantic world. The only form of dependency of comparable harshness to Atlantic slavery is modern sex trafficking. This category’s high score (25 points) reflects the fact that most of these victims are already caught up in highly exploitative situations. The data reported in this index also provide interesting comparisons with ostensibly non-slave situations. Modern “middle class” people in the developed world score substantially lower (1 point) on the vulnerability scale than do modern wage laborers (9 points) and nineteenth-century English factory workers (12 points). It is also striking that medieval European serfs scored 17 points, only slightly below Chinese and Islamic slaves. This also indicates the relative “mildness” of these slave systems. The index likewise highlights the importance of gender. It is interesting to note, for instance, that Chinese slaves and Chinese wives scored virtually the same, a finding supported by scholarship on slavery, marriage, and family in the Middle Kingdom. Islamic wives, on the other hand, scored lower (16) than Islamic slaves (20) which highlights women’s ability to claim certain rights under Islamic law that rendered them less legally vulnerable than slaves. Medieval European (burgher) wives, by comparison, scored only a 10 on the index, while Graeco-Roman wives scored a 13. Many will undoubtedly question this index’s heuristic value, and I want to make it clear that I appreciate the problematic nature of the premises upon which it rests and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. Despite this, I believe that focusing on specific categories of vulnerability, and on degrees of vulnerability, together offer a possible way to escape the scholarly shibboleth that slave systems around the globe are too varied to permit meaningful comparison, and that it is impossible to develop a global definition of slavery. To

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be sure, our index will not directly answer a question such as “Do people need to be formally bought and sold in order to be considered slaves?” But what it can do is lend additional support to arguments that those who were formally bought and sold tended to be more vulnerable than people who were not. The average vulnerability score of those who can be sold is 21; the average score of those who could not routinely be sold is, by comparison, only 11. (This excludes the outlier of the modern middle class person, whose score of 1 would make the latter average even lower.) At the global historical level, then, this suggests that people who could be bought and sold were on average about twice as vulnerable to abuse as those dependents who were not routinely sold on a market. These data can also help us to rank major types of exploitation which have been institutionalized during the course of global history. For example, they are extremely useful to scholars of women’s history in determining to what extent simply being a woman in various cultures compared with obvious benchmarks of dependency such as slavery, serfdom or an ‘untouchable’ status. Whereas cross-cultural slavery (including modern trafficked sex workers) score an average of 22, cross-cultural wives score an average of 15. This suggests that simply being a woman (of whatever status) historically made you about two-thirds as vulnerable as being a slave. If we compare this with the average of European serfs and Indian untouchables, we get a score of 15 for each group. This strengthens the idea that simply being a woman in most global societies was not dissimilar to being a serf, an untouchable, or some other low-status caste in global society. As the contributions to this volume illustrate, slavery and cognate forms of labor held millions of Central, South, Southeast, and East Asian people in various states of servitude between the mid-thirteenth and late nineteenth centuries. The magnitude of the Asian experience with slavery underscores that historians can no longer ignore the lessons to be learned from this vast and important part of the globe. Scholarship on slavery in Asia should also challenge us to reassess, if not overhaul, existing narratives about slave and bonded labor in global history, which remain too focused on the Atlantic and Islamic worlds. In sum, Asian history, including the Asian experience of slavery and extreme dependency, played a pivotal role in shaping the contours of global history. In the end, historians write because we hope to elucidate, analyze, and ameliorate the human condition. It is increasingly clear that our ability to achieve these goals requires us to explore beyond Western-derived paradigms of the human experience of slavery and extreme dependency, and grapple with the complexities of how these ideas functioned in Asian societies.

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Index Abbott, Nicholas 58, 69, 71 abolition/abolitionism 8, 11, 77, 79, 83–85, 87, 91, 98, 100–01, 104–06, 201–04, 207–12, 215, 219–21, 224–25, 314–15, 319 Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak 57–58 Aceh 22–23, 38, 42, 44 acharya 54 Act V of 1843 327 adab 71–72 adib 72 adoption 152, 161 Abdul Rahman 293 Abdul Wahab 293 Afghanistan 25 Africa 36, 37, 44, 69 African slaves 13, 15–18, 69, 154, 158, 175, 229, 232–38, 250, 253–54 Agbega 66–67 agency houses 324 Agnes (slave) 241 Ahuja, Ravi 251 Ain-Akbari 57–58 Aju 114 Akbar (emperor) 57, 73 – see also Mughal Empire Akhara 60–61 Al-ataimanam 54 Alans 124 Alexandria 14 Ali, Yar 73 alipins/oripuns 263–64. 279 alipins namamahay 263, 273 alipins sa gigilid 263, 265, 273 All-Ceylon Indian Estate Labour Federation 331 Allen, Richard 251, 343, 100n101, 323 Alor 22, 308 Alphen, Johan Jacob van 311–12 Amboina 22 Ameera (Ameer Bukhsh) 66–67 Americas 236–37, 240 Amfoan, Raja of 309 Andalucía 257, 282 Andaya, Barbara Watson 93–95

Anhui (province) 208 Annals of the Ming Dynasty 155 Angkor 42–43 Annam – see Vietnam Anthology of Yu Chenglong’s Judgements 164 Antioch 117 Arakan/Arakanese slaves 19, 233 Aral Sea 124 Arthashastra 52 Assada (Nosy Bé) 237–38 – see also Madagascar Assam 27, 61, 86 atan 304 Atlantic world 231–34, 236–38, 240, 253–55 Aung-Thwin, Michael 36, 76 Australasia 27 Australia 284–85, 288–89, 293, 295, 298 Austrian Lloyd shipping line 14 Awadh 60, 69–71, 74 Ayudhya 23 Ayurbarwada 121–22 Azizye shipping line 14 bachagana 69, 71–75 – see also khwajasara Badakhstan 25 badhai 62–63, 65, 73 – see also hijra Bahamas 1 Bahu Begum 72 bairagi 50, 61 Balangingi Samal 36, 294 – see also Samal Bali/Balinese 22–23, 42, 302–03 banda (slave) 57 Banda Islands 22, 303 bandang (bondservants) 25, 138–39 banyanga (slave) divers 288 baoyi (pao’i) 215–17, 219 bandala system 272, 274–75 banditry 165, 169 Bangkok 34 Banjarmasin 23 Bantam (Banten) 18, 20, 44, 234–35, 252 Barbados 1, 240, 255 Barnes, Governor Edward 327 Bastian (coolie) 245

420 Batak 22 Batavia (Jakarta) 17, 19, 23, 36–37, 42, 44, 238, 240, 303 Baxter, John 236 Bayly, C.A. 80 Beckles, Hilary McD. 106 Beijing 117, 170 Bencoolen (Benkulen/Bengkulu) 18, 20, 92, 94–95, 236, 240–42, 251–52, 255 Bengal 19, 76, 233, 243, 252 Bennett, Michael 12 Bermuda 237 Bhabha, Homi 319 bhagatiyas 66 bhakt 66 bhugguts 61–62 Bhutan 4 Bibliography of Slavery and World Slavery 1 Bicol Peninsula 261 Black Sea 25 “black servants” – see British East India Company Blussé, Leonard 37 Bohol 261 Bolivar y Cruz, Juan de 273 Bombay (Mumbai) 13, 18, 230, 235, 241–50, 252–53, 286 Borneo 23, 257, 261, 266–67 Botsman, Daniel V. 90–91 Boxer, Charles R. 158–59 Boxer Rebellion 201, 205 Brahmaputra Valley 59 Brazil 1 British East India Company 12–13, 18, 79, 83, 87, 90, 100, 207, 229–55, 321 attitude toward ethnicities 233, 236, 241, 254 attitude toward labor 229–36, 241, 244–48, 250, 252–53, 255 “black servants” 230, 232–41, 250, 252, 254–55 commercial activities at Bombay  241–50, 252–53 interactions with coolies and weavers 230, 245–49, 252–53 labor practices 229–32, 235–36, 241–50, 252–53 preoccupation with population growth 229–30, 234–35, 242–50, 252–54

Index slavery 229–41, 244–48, 250, 252–55 slave trading 229, 232–33, 241, 251, 253, 255 British Guiana (Guyana) 27, 321 Broome (Australia) 298–99 Brook, Timothy 146 Brunei 4 Buddhism 52, 55, 59–60, 65, 73, 75, 182–83 Bugis 23, 42, 47 Bukhara 25 Buksh, Hossein 65 Buksh, Peer 66 Bulandshahr 65 Bundelkhand 60 Burma 4, 9, 27, 36, 44, 75, 286 Buton 22, 42 Bux, Ameer 67–68 Cagayan 273, 275–76 Calamianes 270 Calcutta (Kolkata) 27, 230, 248, 252 Camarines 268, 274, 279 Cambodia 4, 9, 44 Campbell, Gwyn 49, 346–47 Camucones 266 Canton 155, 159, 161, 285 Cape Colony 19, 23 Cape Town 37 Cape Verde 234–35, 238 Caraga 266, 269, 274 Caribbean 1, 27, 39, 77, 86, 93, 106, 232, 237, 240, 308, 335 Carter, Marina 83–84, 323, 325 caste 52–54, 81–82, 85, 96, 323, 326–27, 333–35, 338–40, 359 Cavite 274 Cebu 261, 274 Central Asia 4, 8, 10, 19, 24, 86–88, 119, 129, 175 Ceram 302 Ceylon 1, 6, 9, 17, 19, 27–28, 52, 86, 321–40 Ceylon Labour Commission 334 Chandernagore 20, 251 Charles II 278 Chatterjee, Indrani 52–53, 59, 61, 69, 76, 83–86, 104–05, 244–45, 348 Chattopadhyay, Amal Kumar 82 Chaul 244 chela 50, 54, 56–61, 63–65, 66–69, 71–75 – see also discipleship

Index Chen Wude 159 Cheng Minzheng 141 Chevaleyre, Claude 11, 13, 25, 204 children 50, 52, 57–58, 60, 63–64, 66–67, 71–72, 74, 78, 80–81, 90, 92, 101, 103–06, 121–24, 127, 202, 204, 214–20, 325, 331, 336–38, 344, 356–57 – see also slaves/ slavery in China; slaves/slavery in South Asia Chile 278 China/Chinese 1, 3–4, 10–13, 25–26, 39, 43, 47, 86, 88–90, 96, 101, 103–04, 107, 111–12, 114–24, 127–30, 131–77, 178, 180, 183–87, 189–90, 201–25, 253, 255, 262, 304, 309, 311 – see also Han dynasty; Ming dynasty; Qing dynasty; slaves/ slavery in China; Tang dynasty; Western Han dynasty; Zhou dynasty Chinese laborers/contract labor migration 34–35, 222–23 Chinese legal history 132, 143, 145 Chinggis Khan 113–14, 116, 125, 129 Chippindall, Edward 295, 298 Chŏngjo 188, 195, 197 Chongmo chong’yangbŏp – see matrilineal inheritance law Chongqing (Sichuan province) 171 Chosŏn 178, 180, 183–84, 186–88, 190–91, 193–94, 196 Christianity 232, 235–39 Church of England 237 Cinatti, Ruy 304 Circassians 124, 126 Clarence-Smith, William Gervase 104 Cochin (Kochi) 19 Coelho, Manuel Luiz 159 coffee 321–22, 327–28, 336–37, 340 Comaroff, Jean 292 Compagnie des Indes 229, 251, 255 Comorian slaves 18 concubinage 78, 80–81, 84, 87, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 97, 100, 102–07, 155, 162–64, 351 Confucianism 81, 91, 206, 209 Congress of Vienna 207 Constantinople 14 convict labor 35, 48 coolies 229–30, 241–54 Copeman, Jacob 55–56

421 Cordillera Mountains 275 Córdoba 257 Cornaby, Rev. William 162, 171 Cornelis 303 Coromandel Coast 20, 42 – see also Fort St. David; Fort St. George; Madras; Pondichéry; Pulicat; Tranquebar; Yanam corvée labor 35, 48, 346, 349, 355 Cossack (Australia) 286 Courtenay, P.P. 324 Crawfurd, John 41 Crimean khanate 105 Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 63, 74n128 Crossley, Pamela 131–32, 345 Cuba 1, 27 Cuddalore 230, 252 Cumans 124 Daidu 117–18 – see also Beijing Dalrymple, Alexander 287, 296 Daman 17 Dampier, William 38, 44 Danish East India Company 251 Daoguang 171 Darwin (Australia) 295 Datu Puyo 292 datus 263–65, 273, 279–80, 292 Davis, David Brion 37, 40–41, 45–46 de Souza, Domingo 248 de Tavora, Alvaro Peres 244 debt/debt bondage 6, 56, 60, 65, 67–68, 81, 83, 91, 93–95, 101, 121–22, 323, 325–26, 331–32, 339, 354 – see also slaves/ slavery in China Deccan 42 Delhi Sultanate 18, 21, 25 dianpu 25, 138–40, 143 Dili (Timor) 304 din-i illahi 57 Dingwaney, Manjari 81 discipleship 49–50, 54–69, 73–76 – see also chela; guru relationship to kinship 57–59, 61–62, 65, 67–68, 72–73, 75 relationship to slavery 49–50, 53–54, 56–58, 60–62, 66–69, 71–76 Diu 17

422 Doko, Jonathan 313 domestic slavery 77–78, 80–83, 85, 90, 92–93, 95–97, 100, 105–07 Dongguan (Guangdong province) 154 Dutch East India Company 12, 23, 35, 37, 42, 92–93, 229, 235, 238, 240, 251–52, 255 Dutch East Indies 305, 311, 314, 320 Dutch Reformed Church 302, 306 East Africa 15–16, 69 East Asia 4, 6, 10, 24–25 Eaton, Richard 51–52, 85–86, 344, 347–48 Eden, Jeff 87–88 Egypt 14, 125–26, 286 EIC – see British East India Company Emancipation Edict of the Yongzheng Emperor 145 Ende/Endenese 302–03, 311, 315–16 Ende (slave) 317–18 Endicott, Elizabeth 121 Engels, Friedrich 39 Engerman, Stanley 40, 45 Enrique 37 Erkes, Eduard 151 Esser, Isaac 315–16 Estado da ĺndia 12, 17, 19, 159, 229, 238–39, 243–47, 251, 255 – see also Portugal/ Portuguese eunuchs 50, 53, 62, 64, 56, 66–70, 80, 84, 90, 103–05, 107 Eurasia 8, 119, 129 Eurasians 308–09, 320, 333, 337 Faiz Bakhsh, Muhammad 71, 73 Faizabad 71 Fajardo, Diego 270 Faure, David 175 Fernando, Radin 37 feudalism 39 Fiji 27, 333 Findley, Carter Vaughan 112, 129 Finley, Moses 40, 46 Fiskesjö, Magnus 150 Flores 302–03, 306, 308, 315 Fogel, Robert 40, 45 freedom 33–34, 47–49, 52, 61 Fort Cormantine 232–33

Index Fort St. David (Tegnapatam) 18, 248 Fort St. George 234 – see also Madras Fraenkel, S.G.J. 318 Francia, Maria de 256 Franke, Herbert 116 free(d) populations of color 7 Fu Yiling 140 Fujian (province) 165–66, 262 Funge, Francis 241 Fynn-Paul, Jeff 29 Ganzhou (Jiangxi province) 162 Gao Qizhou 173 Gaspar, David Barry 77 Gayer, Sir John 242 gender 7–8, 55, 62, 64, 69–70, 75, 77–108 Genoa 125 ghulam – see mamluk Gi (also Qi or Ki) Empress 119 Goa 25, 154, 176, 238 Gold Coast (Ghana) 232, 253–54 Golden Horde 124 Gomez de Espinosa y Estrada, Salvador 277–78 Gong, Garret 203 Gonzalez, Fray Andres 280 Goody, Jack 346 Gordon, Governor Arthur 329 gosain 50, 60–61 Gosain, Anupgiri 49, 60 Gosain, Rajendragiri 60 Gosain Umraogiri 60 Great Britain/British 86, 97–102, 207, 210–11, 224 Greeks 126 Grey, Lord 337 Gronewald, Sue 88–89 Gu Yanwu 140 Guadeloupe 1, 27 Guangdong (province) 26, 159–62, 164–67, 170, 176 Guangxi (province) 26, 161, 164–66, 169, 176 Guangxu Emperor 205 Guizhou (province) 171–74 Gujarat 243, 252–53 guru 49–50, 54–58, 61–62, 64–66, 68, 73–75 – see also discipleship

Index Habshis (“Ethiopians”) 15–16, 18, 126 Hägerdal, Hans 12 Hainan 175 Han Deyuan 163, 168 Han China/dynasty 39, 43, 213 Hankou (Hubei province) 162, 168–69, 171 Hanyang (Hubei province) 168 Hangzhou 114 Hansen, Valerie 113 Hao Jing 119 haonu 139–40 harems 80, 87, 90, 97, 100, 104–05, 107 Harris, Joseph E. 2 Hawai’i 27 Haynes, Thomas Henry 284–301 Hazaart, J.A. 309 Heian Japan 39 Heijmering, Geerloff 306, 309–11, 316–18, 320 Henan (province) 161, 163–64, 170 Henthorn, William E. 127 Herzog, Shawna 8 Herat 25 Hinchy, Jessica 5, 69, 84 Hijaz 14 hijra 50, 55, 56n30, 62–68, 73–75 Hindu/Hinduism 63, 66, 81–82, 334 Hine, Darlene Clark 77 Historical Guide to World Slavery 39 historiography 1–3, 8–10, 12, 38–41, 131–32, 150–52, 250–51, 343–49 Ho, Ping-ti 152 Hoëvell, Walter Robert van 314 Hon Tze-ki 205 Hong Ann 289 Hopkins, B.D. 87 Hoskins, Janet 103–04 Hsieh Bao Hua 89, 106 Huang Gai 163 Huang Yuju 155–57 Huangzhou (Hubei province) 165, 171 Hucker, Charles 216 Huguang (province) 169 Huizhou (Anhui province) 10, 131–49 contracts 142–44 dianpu 138–39, 143 economy 137–38

423 free tenants 139 haonu 139–40 landlord-slave relations 138–39 laoren/lizhang 142–44 lineages 137–38 litigation 142–44 population 137 poverty and servitude 139 Qing conquest of 145 ritual and ethos 140–41, 142, 144 slave services to landlords 138, 140–41 slave uprising 144 human trafficking, modern 7 Hunan (province) 168–69, 172 Hungary 117, 124–25 Hunt, Margaret 239 Hunt, Robert 238–39 Huo Yuxia 159 Hurtado de Corcuera, Sebastian 256–69, 280–81 Hjejle, Benedicte 28, 327, 339–40 Ikegama, Aya 55–56 ILC – see Immigrant Labour Commission Iligan 270, 274 Ilocos 275 Imjin War 179–81 Immigrant Labour Commission (ILC) – 328, 331, 336 indentured/contractual labor 6, 13, 26–28, 46, 222–23, 236–37, 243, 321–23, 327, 335 India/Indians 1, 3, 5, 8, 11–12, 18, 22, 39, 42, 43, 50, 52, 54, 56–59, 61, 63, 73–76, 81–86, 96, 229–35, 238–39, 241–55, 319 – see also Indian slaves/slavery; slaves/slavery in South Asia Indian Ocean/Indian Ocean world 2–3, 6, 13, 15, 49, 52, 77–78, 84, 86, 102–04, 150, 176–77, 207–08, 232–33, 237–40, 249–51, 255, 266, 302, 305, 319, 346–47 Indian slaves/slavery 79, 81, 82–86, 88, 92, 96–100, 103, 105, 107, 155, 159, 175, 229, 232–33, 241, 250–51, 254 Indochina 8–9 Indonesia 1, 4, 8, 12, 22–23, 92–95, 99, 103, 251, 285, 288, 299, 302

424 international law 202–04, 206–08, 210, 224–25 Ipsen, Pernille 93 Islam 52, 63, 239 Islamic slavery 82, 84, 88, 97, 103–05 Izmir 14 izzat 66 Jackson, Captain William 237 Jain, Shobhita 86 Jamaica 1, 27, 321 Jambi 23 Jansath 68 Japan/Japanese 1, 4, 10–12, 17, 39, 90–91, 106, 178–79, 181, 185–87, 197, 204–05, 262, 298 Japanese slaves 26, 158, 160, 175 Jaschok, Maria 89 Java/Javanese 18, 22, 41, 44, 46, 229, 234, 318 Jayawardena, Kumari 6, 13 Jesuits 154 Jiangnan 118 Jiangxi (province) 166, 171 jianu 25 Jiaqing Emperor 170–71 Jiaying (Guangdong province) 165 Jingdezhen (Jiangxi province) 137, 171 Jinhua (Zhejiang province) 170 Jinzhou (Liaoning province) 152 Jochi 124–25 Jochid Khanate 125–26 Jolo 256–57, 260–61, 266–67, 269–70, 280–81, 285, 288–90, 292, 297 – see also Sulu/Sulu Sultanate Jolly, Margaret 335 Jones, Eric 37, 95, 106, 307 Junker, Laura Lee 265 Jurchen 111 Kaiping (Guangdong province) 170 Kalb, Emma 69–70, 71n112 Kalimantan 22 kangani 323, 326, 328–34, 338–39 Kangxi Emperor 170 Karaikal 27 Karakorum 117 Kasturi, Malavika 59 Kazakhstan 4, 124

Index Kemp, J. Th. van der 308 Kenya 27 Khan, Darab Ali 71–72 Khan, I’tibar 72 Khan, Jawahir Ali 71–73 Khan, Murdan Ali 72 Khan, Sidi Yakut 245 Khawja Bahol (Khidmatgar Khan) 72 khwajasara 50, 53, 56, 68–75 – see also bachagana; eunuchs Khubilai Khan 114, 119, 121 Khwarazm (Khiva) 25 Kim, Bok-Rae 91 Kievan Rus’ 125 kinship (India) 51, 53, 55–62, 64–65, 67–68, 71–75 – see also discipleship Kipchak Khanate 124 Kipchaks 25, 124–26 Kitan 111, 119 Klein, Martin A. 102 Kloosterboer, Willemina 325 Koguryŏ 120 Kopytoff, Igor 36, 344, 346, 348 Korea 4, 10–11, 25, 41, 90–91, 117–20, 124, 127–28, 178–200 Korean slaves in China 158, 160 Koryŏ 117, 119, 178–79, 181–91, 193–94, 196–97 Kravets, Mayna 105 Kudarat, Cachil 268, 270 kul 104 Kumar, Dharma 82 Kupang 304, 306–07, 309–10, 315–16, 318 Kurian, Rachel 6, 13 Kusuman, K.K. 82 Kyrgyzstan 4 kyun 75–76 La Loubère, Simon de 38 Labour Enquiries of 1876, 1890 34 Lal, Ruby 69 Laminusa 294, 297–98 Lanzhou (Gansu province) 170 Laos 4, 9 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 45 lascars 230n4, 248–49 Lasker, Bruno 1, 39, 80, 343 Laughing Wave 286 Lavezaris, Guido de 264

Index Lavrov, Aleksandr 87–88 Le Bruijn, Louiza 318 Le Bruyn, R. 309 Leboo (Lebao) 170 legal Orientalism 145 Leiden Slavery Studies Association 3 Lesser Sundas 302, 308 Letteboer, J.H. 313–14 Levant Company 254 Levine, Philippa 97 Leyte 261, 274 Li Hongzhang 208 Li Jun 163 Li Tiancheng 163 Lijnden, D.W.J.C., Baron van 310–11, 320 Lim, Janet 89 Lin Luodao 175 Linan 114 Ling, Bonny 12 Liping (Guizhou province) 171 Lisbon 238 Liu Shiqian 163 Liwe Heo 313 Ljungstedt, Anders 158 Lombok 22 London 230–31, 234, 236, 249, 255 Lovejoy, Paul E. 100n101 Lovins, Christopher 11 Lu Shandou 166–67, 169 Lu Xun 47 Lucassen, Jan 34 Luocheng (Guangxi province) 164, 166 Luoyang (Henan province) 163 lutuhum 304 Luzon 273, 275 Macao/Macau 17, 25–26, 154–55, 157–60, 175–76, 223, 303 MacMillan, Margaret 96–98 Madagascar 237–38, 241, 255 – see also Assada Madras (Chennai) 18, 27, 230, 232–33, 248–49, 251–52 Madras Presidency 327–28, 337 Madrid 269 Madura 22 Madurai 336 Magellan, Fernão 37

425 Maguindanaos 266, 268–69 Maha 171 mahants 59 Mahé 20 Mahsuse shipping line 14 Maimbung 285, 289–90, 297–98 Major, Andrea 98, 100 Makassar/Makassarese 23, 36, 42, 44, 302 Makhun 66–67 Malabar Coast 19–20 Malacca 17, 19, 37, 43–44, 159 Malagasy slaves 13, 18, 229, 232, 241, 254 “Malay” slaves 23 Malaya/Malaysia 4, 27, 37, 42, 93–94, 100–01 Malik Ambar 16 Malukus 17, 22, 252, 267, 270, 302 mamluk 18, 72, 125–26 Manchus 152–53, 170, 174, 212–13, 215, 219 – see also Qing China/dynasty Mandano 22 Mangalore 247 Manggarai 22 Manila 34, 159, 256, 266, 269–70, 272, 274, 279–82 Manila galleon 15 Manrique de Lara, Sabiniano 270, 275 mansab 70 Manzano, Fray Melchor 276 Mânzi 119 Mao Yilu 163 marharlikas/timawas 263 Marshall, P.J. 231 Martinez, Julia 105–06 Martinique 1, 27 Marx, Karl 39, 40 Marxism 2, 131, 347–48 Masbate 274 Mascarene Islands 20, 23, 251 – see also Mauritius; Réunion masculinity/men 78–85, 88, 90, 92, 97, 99, 102–03, 105–07 matrilineal inheritance law 187, 197–98 Mauk Amalo 310 Mauritius 20, 26–27, 83, 101–02, 176, 321, 327, 333, 340 Mauryan India 39, 43 Mawson, Stephanie 13

426 May, Timothy 125 Mayotte 27 Mazagon 244–45 McCloy, Rev. Thomas 161–62 McDermott, Joseph 142 Meijer, Marinus J. 203, 213, 216, 219 Meiji Restoration 205 Mendoza, Pedro de 256–58, 260, 281–83 Mennonites 311–12 merdeka 47 Mexico 27 Miers, Suzanne 36, 89, 344–46 Melaka – see Malacca Mentawai Islands 22 Miao 153, 164, 173–75 Miao Zongyang 172 Micronesia 270 Middle East 125–26 Miller, Joseph C. 1 Mindanao 22, 256, 261, 266–70, 274, 280 Ming Code 143 Ming dynasty 5, 10–11, 26, 131, 145–46, 215 Ming Veritable Records 162, 176 Minggong shupan qingming ji (Luminous Collection of Judgments by Illustrious Figures) 133 Mixed Court 161 Mohammed Badarrudin II 284, 286, 289–90, 297, 300 – see also Sulu Sultanate Mohammed, Patricia 335 Moitt, Bernard 101–02 Moluccas – see Malukus monasticism 49–50, 58–62, 65, 67, 73–76 Mongolia 4 Mongols 10, 25, 111–30, 190–91, 196 Montesquieu, Baron de 38 Moors 126 Montebello Islands 299 Morgan, Edmund 46 Mozambican slaves 18 Mozambique 26–27, 159, 176, 238 Mughal Empire/Mughals 57–58, 60, 69–73, 84–85, 104, 239, 241–43, 246 mui tsai/muitsai 10, 89, 217–19, 220, 222 Munden, Sir Richard 235 murid 54 murshid 54

Index Murshidabad 53 mutabanna 58, 72 Muzaffarnagar 67–68 Myanmar – see Burma Nagasaki 17, 26, 37 Nakajima Gakushō 142–43 Nan’an (Jiangxi province) 162 Natal 27 nawab 70, 72 nazir 69 Ndao 316 Nechtman, Tillman 98–99, 106 Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG) 307, 309–10, 312–13, 319 Negros 261 Nepal 4 New Caledonia 27 New Guinea 22 Newman, Simon 253 Nias 22 Nieboer, H.J. 1, 39–41, 324–25, 343 Niemeijer, Hendrik 94–95 Ningbo (Fujian province) 154 Ningbo (Zhejiang province) 170 Niu Sen 164 nobi – see slaves/slavery in Korea Nordhoff, G.H. 310 Nosy Bé 27, 237 nubi – see slaves/slavery in China nupu 25, 138–39 Nusa Tenggara 302 NZG – see Nederlandsch ZendelingGenootschap Obregón Tarazona, Liliana 202 Official Documents Kept at the Mengshui Studio 155, 157 Ögödei Khan 114 Ombilin (Sumatra) 35 Omvedt, Gail 326 opium 291–92, 299 Ordinance No. 11 of 1865 331 Ordinance No. 15 of 1858 328 Ottoman Empire 104, 239 Pacific Ocean 281 paik 61–62

Index Pakistan 4, 69 Palais, James B. 91 Palapag 274 Palawan 266, 270 Palembang 23 Pampangan rebellion 274–75 Pan Jiu 160 Panay 261 panchayat 68 Pang Shangpeng 157 Pangasinan rebellion 275 Panipat 65 Papua 302 paraiyar (“Pariah”/“Untouchable”) 53–54, 66n85, 359 parampara 55 Parthasarathi, Prasannan 252 patriarchy 323, 329–30, 335–36, 338–39 Pasha (or Paquette) of Metz 116–17 Pateman, Carol 83n21 Patnaik, Utsa 81–82 patriarchy 82–83, 88–92. 96, 101, 105, 107 Patterson, Orlando 40–41, 46–47, 347, 352 Paxton, Nancy L. 97–98, 106 Paynter Home 337 Peabody, Sue 102 Pearee 67, 68n98 pearl divers/fisheries 285–86, 288, 292–301 Pearl River estuary 154, 159 Penang 27 People’s Republic of China 11, 225 Pereira, Lanzarote 154 Peres de Andrade, Simon 154 periya dorai 333 Péron, François 303 Persian Gulf 6, 288 Persian slaves 24–25 Peru 27 Phelan, John Leddy 259 Philippines 1, 4, 13, 23, 34, 101, 103, 256–83 – see also slaves/slavery in the Philippines Phipps, General William 249 Pi Si 170 Pinch, William R. 49–50, 56, 60–61 Ping Deyuan 165–66 pir 54, 57, 64n72

427 piracy 158 plantations 77–78, 86, 105, 229, 234–35, 237–38, 241, 252–53, 321–22, 324–33, 336, 339 planters (Ceylon) 322–24, 326–34, 336–39 Pondichéry (Puduchcheri) 20, 26–27, 251 Polo, Marco 122–23, 126 Portugal/Portuguese 85, 90, 101, 154–55, 157–60, 162, 175, 238–39, 255, 258, 266, 282, 302–04, 306, 308, 310, 345, 348, 354 – see also Estado da Índia; slaves/ slavery in China Preserved Manuscripts from Xieshan 159 prostitution 81, 83, 87, 89–91, 93, 95, 102, 105–07, 107n131, 134, 161, 166–68, 171 – see also sex trafficking Pulicat 251 Pulleyblank, Edwin 128 Punjab 65 Qi Mei-qin 216 Qing China/dynasty 11, 26, 201–05, 207–11, 212–14, 215–25 constitutional/political reform 201–02, 204–05, 210–12, 215–22, 224–25 international law and 202, 204, 206–08, 210, 224–25 legal reforms 202, 206, 212, 219–22 memorials to abolish slavery 203–04, 207–09, 211–12, 224 slavery/bondage during 201, 212–17, 218–21 trafficking of women and children 204, 215–18, 220 Qing Code 202, 211–12, 214–15, 217, 219–21 Qu Rimei 155–57 Queensland 27 Raffles, Thomas Stafford 44 Rai, Mahtab 65 Rajapur 246 Ransmeier, Johanna S. 89–90 Records of Surviving Judgements 163 Reddock, Rhoda 86 Reid, Anthony 1, 5, 36–37, 47, 53, 78, 91–92, 265, 325, 343, 346, 350–51 Réunion 20, 27, 42 Riau 22

428 Rio de Janeiro 238 Rizhi lu jishi (Record of Knowledge Gained Day by Day, With Commentaries) 140 Robertson, Claire C. 77, 105, 108 Robinson, Marsha 77, 87, 105 Rome 33, 38, 40 Rose, H.A. 65 Rossabi, Morris 112 Rote (Roti) 308, 310, 314, 316 Rotterdam 307 Royal African Company 253–54 Ruskola, Teemu 145 Russians 126 Said, Edward 97 Saint Domingue 1, 20 Salman, Michael 101 Salsette 245 Sama Bajau 266 Samal 286–88, 292–94, 296, 298, 300 Samar 261, 274 Samoa 27 sampradayas 59 San Pablo, Fray Pedro de 272 sangha 60n45, 75 Sanskritization 334 sanyasi 60 Sarawak 22 sarkars 71 Sattoe (slave) 240 Savu/Savunese 308, 311–14 Schafer, Edward 120 Schottenhammer, Angela 213 Schück, Captain Herman Leopold 288–89, 289n17, 292, 294, 300 Schück, Edward 289 Scott, James 42, 47 Scott, William Henry 101, 259, 263 Seba 313 semuren 119 Sepoy Rebellion 97–99 Serampore 251 serfdom 358–59 Seville 257 sex/sexuality 81–83, 88, 91, 93–94, 96–98, 100, 102–03, 105, 107 sex trafficking 90, 101, 107 – see also prostitution

Index sexual labor 84–89, 92–94, 101, 105, 106 Shaanxi (province) 208 Shahjahanpur 67 Shaivism 50, 55, 57, 59–60, 65, 73, 75 Shandong (province) 170 Shanghai 162–63 Shanxi (province) 166, 170 Shen Jiaben 212 Shepherd, Verene A. 335 Shidebala 121–22 Shin, Kawashima 206–07 shishya 54 Shumway, Rebecca 100n104 Shunzi 170 Siam – see Thailand Siasi Island 287, 294, 297 Sichuan (province) 170–74 Siddis 15, 18 Siete Partidas 239 Silla 120, 179, 181, 183 Singapore 4, 27, 34, 100, 107n131, 284, 286, 289–90, 292, 294–95, 298 Sinhalese 322, 327 sinicization 111, 122, 128 sinna dorai 333 Sino-Portuguese War 155 sirdar 323, 337 Sizhou (Guizhou province) 171 slave society 178, 192–97, 199 slave systems 33, 35, 42–43, 53, 305, 325, 345–47, 349–55 slave trades Asian 11, 13 Bali 23 Barbary Coast/North Africa 14 Black Sea 25 British/British East India Company 18, 20, 229, 232–33, 241, 251, 253, 255 Central Asian 10, 18, 24–25 Chinese 25 – see also slaves/slavery in China Danish 20 Dutch/Dutch East India Company 15, 17, 19, 22–23, 35 East African 15–17 European in Indian Ocean 15 French 15, 20, 26–27 Indian 18–19, 22, 207–08

Index Mascarene 20, 23, 27 Mediterranean 14, 25 Moluccas 22 Ottoman 25 Portuguese 15, 17, 19, 26, 154–55, 157–60 Red Sea 15–16 Sulu 22–23 transatlantic 13, 207–08, 213, 224 trans-Pacific 15 trans-Saharan 15 slaves/slavery in China 36, 44, 80–81, 88–90, 91, 94, 101, 106, 130–77, 207–225 abolition of slavery 201–03, 207–10, 212, 215, 219, 221, 224–25 African slaves in 154, 158, 175 brokers/dealers 158–60, 162, 167–75 buying/selling of 202, 209, 211, 219, 221 children 153–56, 159–70, 172–74, 202, 204, 214–15, 217–20 concubines 155, 162–64 contracts 133–36, 142, 169 debt, enslavement for 154, 163, 168 enslavement by self-sale 134, 139, 166–67, 171 historiography of 131–32, 150–52 Indian slaves in 155, 159, 175 Japanese slaves in 158, 160, 175 kidnapping 155–62, 164–67, 169–70, 172, 174 Korean slaves in 158, 160, 175 law regarding 155–60, 164–68, 171–75 liang (good)/jian (base/mean) people 132, 152, 213–15 nubi 25, 151–54, 166 Portuguese slave trade 153–55, 157–60, 176 prices 161, 173 prostitution/sexual servitude 134, 161, 166–68, 171 slave status 132–33, 150–51, 153 statistics 152–53, 176 trafficking 153–75, 204, 215–18, 220 women 134–35, 153–55, 161–65, 167, 170–72, 174, 204, 217–18, 220 slaves/slavery in Korea 91, 178–200 abolition of slavery 197–98 as property 184, 191–92, 195 decline of 187–88

429 definition of 188–92 hereditary 179–80 laws regarding 180–81, 183–87, 191–92, 194, 198 manumission 181, 189, 196–97 property of 191–92, 195, 199 revolts by 190 status 180, 183–84, 187–91, 192–94, 200 slaves/slavery in South Asia 49–76 children, enslavement of 50, 60, 63, 66–67, 71, 74 discipleship, relationship to 49–50, 53–54, 56–58, 60–62, 66–69, 71–76 enslavement 69, 60, 66, 69 kinship, relationship to 51, 56–58, 60–62, 68, 71–73, 75 master-slave relationships 51–53, 56, 58, 68–70, 76 military slavery 50, 57–58, 60, 70, 73 – see also Habshis sale/transfer of 52, 57, 61, 64, 66, 69 slave status 51–54, 70, 73–74 slaves/slavery in the Philippines 256–83 abolition of 277–81 chattel slavery 257–58, 281–82 debt servitude 258–60, 263–64, 278, 282 indigenous slavery 257, 276–81, 283 Portuguese slave merchants 258, 266, 282 pre-colonial labor systems 263, 265 pre-colonial social status/hierarchies  263–65 rebellions against Spanish 274–76, 279–80, 283 slave raiding/raiders 256–58, 260–66, 265–68, 270, 279–80, 282 slave desertion 274–76, 279–80, 283 Spanish colonial labor regimes 258, 268–69, 272–76, 279 slavery, “Afro-Asiatic” model of 351–53 Slavery Convention of 1926 225 slavery, modern 343–44 slavery, “monotheistic” model of 350–52 “Slaving Zones” 350–54 Sloet van de Beele, L.A.J.W. 315 Smith, Adam 33–34 Smith, Sir Cecil Clementi 286, 298 social death 184, 192–94, 347

430 Song dynasty 111 Song Qi 144 Songjiang (Jiangsu province) 163 Songxian (Henan province) 163 South Africa 308 South Asia 4, 15–16, 51–53, 73, 75–76 – see also Ceylon; India; slaves/slavery in South Asia South China Sea 286 South India 327–29, 331, 333, 336 Southeast Asia 3–4, 19, 22–23, 53, 78, 80–81, 91–96, 101, 103, 107, 176, 229, 234, 240–41, 251, 255, 284–86, 301, 304–07, 325 Southeast Asian slaves 229, 234, 241, 254 Southern Song dynasty 111 Sousa, Lúcio de 345 Souza, George Bryan 159 Spain 256 Sramek, Joseph 98–99 Sree pas Sair 286, 289, 295, 298 Sri Lanka – see Ceylon St. Helena 229, 232–36, 238–42, 251–52, 255, 327 statelessness 42, 47 “sterling” companies 324 Straits Settlements 100–01 Streeter, Edwin 286, 289, 293 Streeter, George 298 Stephen, J.F. 64 Stern, Philip 231, 254 Sufism 54–55, 57, 59, 63, 65, 73 Sukadena 23 Sulawesi 22–23, 43, 46–47 Sultan Firoz Shah Tughluq 18 Sulu Archipelago 22, 36, 261, 266, 268–69, 281, 284, 286–88, 290, 293, 295–96 – see also Sulu Sultanate Sulu Sea 256 Sulu Sultanate 23, 260, 285–86, 288–92, 294, 297–98, 300–01 – see also Mohammed Badarrudin II slaves 284, 288–89, 292–94, 294–95, 298–99 Spanish involvement with 288–91, 297, 300 Sulu Zone 286, 287–88, 290–91, 294, 296–97, 299–301 – see also Sulu Sultanate

Index Sumatra 18, 22, 35, 37, 45–46, 229, 236, 241, 251 Sumba/Sumbanese 302–03, 306, 308, 311–12, 315–16 Sumoroy rebellion 274 Supplementary Slavery Convention of 1956  204, 221–22, 225 Surat 18, 234, 242, 246–47, 253 Suriname 27 Suzhou (Jiangsu province) 162 Syria 117, 125 Taedong taxation system 179 Tahiti 27 Taiping Rebellion 201, 208 Tajikistan/Tajiks 4, 25 Tambora eruption 42 Tamils 322, 326, 333–34 Tan Malaka 39 Tang Chi-Hua 206 Tang China/dynasty 43 Tangut 111 Taosug 286, 288, 290–93, 295, 297–98 – see also Sulu Archipelago; Sulu Sultanate tarikh 71 Tartars 123, 126 Tawi-Tawi 22, 287, 292, 294–96 Taylor, Jean Gelman 92–93, 95 tea 322, 328, 334 Teffer, Mattheus 310, 312–14 Ternate 22, 266, 270 Thailand 4, 9, 23, 38, 44, 203, 224 Thompson, William 233 Three Feudatories revolt 165, 173 Three Kingdoms 179, 181 Tibetans 153 Tigre, Antonio (coolie) 245 Tijian Massacre 161 Timor/Timorese 12, 22, 302–19 Tinker, Hugh 323 Tinnevelly 336 Tobago 27 Toledano, Ehud R. 104, 107, 239 Toraja/Torajans 22–23, 43, 46 Torrington, Lord 337 Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) 20 Transvaal 27 Travels or Description of the World 122–23 Trinidad 27, 327

431

Index Tripoli 14 Truro 232 tundu 330 Turkic slaves 18, 25 Turkmenistan 4 Turks 124, 126 Tuscany 126 Twynam, W.C. 337 Uganda 27 Ulus of Jochi 124 umara 70 Unger, Roberto 146 United States 150, 208, 210–11, 221, 224 Upper Doab 67 Uyghurs (Huihui) 121 Uzbekistan 4 Vaishnavism 50, 54–55, 57, 59, 65, 73 van Madagascar, Lourens 37 van Palembang, Tinong 37 van Sumbawa, Piwtaij 37 Vanuatu 27 Vasco da Gama 12 Vatuk, Sylvia 52 Vaughan, Megan 102 Vicomte, Jean Louis la 317–18, 320 Vietnam 4, 9, 25, 175 Virginia 236 Visayas/Visayans 36, 261–62, 265, 268, 274, 280 Viswanath, Rupa 53 VOC – see Dutch East India Company Vulnerability Index 354–59 wage labor 33–34 Waite, Sir Nicholas 248 Wanbao quanshu (Encyclopedia of Myriad Treasures) 135 Wang Yi-t’ung 127, 213 Wanguo Gongfa (Elements of International Law) 206 Ward, Kerry 37, 345 Warren, James Francis 1, 12, 36, 266, 344 Watson, James L. 1, 42–43, 103, 106, 131, 150, 325, 344–45 weavers (India) 229–30, 241–50, 252–54 – see also British East India Company

West African slaves 18, 229, 232–38, 250, 253–54 West Central Africa 238 Western Han dynasty 152 Wheaton, Henry 206 Wickramasinghe, Nira 52–53 Wijngaarden, J.K. 313–14 Wilbur, Clarence Martin 213 William of Rubruck 116 Williams, Eric 39 Winterbottom, Anna 251 Witzenrath, Christoph 87, 128 women 7–8, 10, 37, 37n11, 116–23, 155, 162–64, 204, 215–18, 220, 316, 323, 325, 335–39, 344, 348, 351, 358–59 – see also Qing China/dynasty; slaves/slavery in China as wives 78–79, 81, 83–84, 89–90, 92–97, 100, 102–04, 106–07 status of 81–83, 86–88, 89–90, 92–95, 103, 106 Wu Weiping 208–12, 219, 223–24 Wuchang (Hubei province) 168 Wuhan (Wuhan province) 168, 170 Wyatt, Don 10 Xiangshan (Guangdong province) 157 Xinjiang 25 Xiuning (Anhui province) 154 Xu Diankui 163 Xu Ke 171 Xu Xiaoqun 206 Xuantong Emperor 212 Yan Junyan 155 Yanam 20, 27, 251 Yangan 336 Yangzi River 162, 171 Ye Maochang 155–56 Ye Quan 154–55 Ye Xian’en 140 Ye Ziqi 119 Yemen 14 Yŏngjo 179, 191, 195, 197 Yongzheng 174 Youyuzheng (Fujian province) 174 Yu Anxing 157 Yu Chenglong (?–1714) 169 Yu Chenglong (1617–84) 164–66, 168

432 yubi – see muitsai Yuan dynasty 112, 125–20, 122, 124, 127–28 Yuanshi (History of the Yuan) 121–22 Yunnan (province) 174 Zamboanga 268, 270 Zeuske, Michael 151 Zhangzhou (Fujian province) 160

Index Zhejiang 166 Zhengde era 155 Zhou dynasty 209 Zhou Fun 208–12, 219, 223–25 Zongli Yamen 206 Zu Dashou 152 Zurndorfer, Harriet 5, 10