Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition 9780300166460

Citation preview

Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition

This page intentionally left blank

edited by R O B E R T H A R M S, B E R N A R D K. F R E A M O N, a n d D AV I D W. B L I G H T

Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College and with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale. edu (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Sabon type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Indian Ocean slavery in the age of abolition / edited by Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight. pages cm “Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College and with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–300–16387–2 (alk. paper) 1. Slavery—Indian Ocean Region—History—19th century. 2. Slavery— Indian Ocean Region—History—20th century. 3. Slave trade—Indian Ocean Region—History—19th century. 4. Slave trade—Indian Ocean Region— History—20th century. 5. Slavery and Islam—Indian Ocean Region. 6. Freedmen—Indian Ocean Region—Social conditions—19th century. I. Harms, Robert W., 1946– editor of compilation. II. Freamon, Bernard K., 1947– editor of compilation. III. Blight, David W., editor of compilation. HT1430.I53 2013 306.3'62091824—dc23 2013018793 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9

8 7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Contents

Maps vii 1 Introduction: Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition Robert Harms 1 Part I. The Indian Ocean World in the Nineteenth Century 2 Servitude and the Changing Face of the Demand for Labor in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1800–1900 Gwyn Campbell 23 3 On Becoming a British Lake: Piracy, Slaving, and British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Edward A. Alpers 45 Part II. Slavery, Abolition, and Islamic Law 4 Straight, No Chaser: Slavery, Abolition, and Modern Islamic Thought Bernard K. Freamon 61 5 Islamic Abolitionism in the Western Indian Ocean from c. 1800 William Gervase Clarence-Smith 81

vi

Contents

Part III. Fighting the Maritime Slave Trade 6 “The Flag That Sets Us Free”: Antislavery, Africans, and the Royal Navy in the Western Indian Ocean Lindsay Doulton 101 7 “If You Catch Me Again at It, Put Me to Death”: Slave Trading, Paper Trails, and British Bureaucracy in the Indian Ocean Mandana E. Limbert 120 Part IV. Economic and Social Mobility of Slaves 8 Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery: The Strange Career of Sultan bin Aman Abdul Sheriff 143 9 Deeds of Freed Slaves: Manumission and Economic and Social Mobility in Pre-Abolition Zanzibar Thomas F. McDow 160 Part V. The Changing Face of Slavery 10 Slave Trading, Abolitionism, and “New Systems of Slavery” in the Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean World Richard B. Allen 183 11 African Bondsmen, Freedmen, and the Maritime Proletariats of the Northwestern Indian Ocean World, c. 1500–1900 Janet J. Ewald 200 12 Slaves of One Master: Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire Matthew S. Hopper 223 List of Contributors 241 Index 243

Maps

Map 1. Indian Ocean World

Map 2. Western Indian Ocean

Map 3. Legal Slave-Trading Zones in the Western Indian Ocean, Nineteenth Century

1

Introduction: Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition robert harms

When the British Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade on March 25, 1807, it transformed Britain almost overnight from the world’s leading slave-trading nation to the world’s leading crusader against the slave trade.1 With its diplomatic initiatives proving woefully inadequate to stop the transatlantic slave trade, Britain established its West Africa Squadron in 1818 with an initial fleet of six ships that had grown to thirty ships by the mid-1840s.2 The abolition of the slave trade was followed in 1833 by the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished the institution of slavery itself in areas of the world under direct British rule. Britain’s actions and diplomatic initiatives put pressure on other European powers and New World nations to follow its lead. Despite opposition, evasion, and numerous setbacks, transatlantic slave trading and New World slavery had been abolished by the end of the nineteenth century. It may seem ironic, therefore, that the decline of slave trading in the Atlantic was accompanied by a rise in both slave trading and slavery in the western Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century. With the British West Africa Squadron patrolling Africa’s Atlantic coast, many European slave traders rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean to get slaves from Mozambique, causing a fourfold rise in slave shipments from the Mozambique Channel.3 The growth of French sugar production in the

1

2

robert harms

Mascarene Islands, which had begun in the eighteenth century, brought the Caribbean slave plantation system into the Indian Ocean. There were also developments within Africa itself that increased both slave trading and slavery. The establishment of clove plantations on the East African islands of Zanzibar and Pemba in the nineteenth century spawned a plantation system in which the planters were mostly Omani Arabs and the laborers were slaves from the interior of East Africa. At the same time, a steep rise in the world price of ivory induced merchant-adventurers from the East African coast and Egypt to travel far into the African interior with heavily armed caravans to bring back both ivory and slaves. Many of those slaves were carried to destinations around the Indian Ocean rim: the Red Sea, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and India. The studies in this volume examine slavery in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the abolition of both slave trading and slavery was the official British policy.4 The slaves discussed in the case studies were predominantly, but not exclusively, of African origin, and they were traded mainly along the rim of the western Indian Ocean. Although the British had very limited success in abolishing either the slave trade or slavery there during this period, the records they kept and the reports they wrote have opened up a window into a previously hidden world. They allow historians to probe the nuances and complexities of slavery in societies where slaves occupied multiple social and legal statuses, and they shed new light on the multiple meanings of abolition. The western Indian Ocean was part of a larger complex of trade, capital flows, and labor migration that Gwyn Campbell in this volume refers to as the Indian Ocean World. He defines the Indian Ocean World in the widest sense as a “sophisticated and durable system of long-distance exchange” that linked “Africa to China and all points in between,” thus expanding the definition beyond the strict geographic limits of the Indian Ocean itself. Similarly, Edward A. Alpers’s survey of the Indian Ocean World at the beginning of the nineteenth century stretches from the East African coast into the South China Sea. Historians have found various ways to characterize the Indian Ocean World as a special type of interconnected zone. Fernand Braudel focused on trade relations and characterized it as a “world economy” with India at its center. K. N. Chaudhuri, by including cultural factors in his analysis, described the Indian Ocean as an area of social and cultural diversity rooted in four civilizations: Irano-Arabic, Hindu, Indonesian, and Chinese. This formulation inexplicably marginalized the coast of East Africa, which has long been a vital part of Indian Ocean trading networks. A more flexible and nuanced definition has been proposed by Sugata Bose, who described the Indian

Introduction

3

Ocean as an interregional arena of economy and culture that stands “somewhere between the generalities of a ‘world system’ and the specificities of particular regions.”5 Books on the history of the Indian Ocean World invariably contain a map showing India at the center, mediating between the western Indian Ocean (dominated by the Arabian Sea) and the eastern Indian Ocean (dominated by the Bay of Bengal and stretching into the South China Sea). Although ships, goods, and people could—and did—pass from one zone to the other, each zone had its own distinct character and identity. Around the year 1500, for example, the ships in the Arabian Sea were mostly Arab owned, whereas those in the Bay of Bengal were mostly Indian owned. Beyond the Strait of Malacca, goods traveled on Chinese junks. An East African ivory tusk bound for China would travel on a minimum of three ships, often many more.6 With the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French after 1500, the Indian Ocean became an arena of competing global imperial systems. The European trading companies short-circuited many of the older regional trading networks while extending the shipping lanes into the Atlantic Ocean. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European maritime power hardened into territorial imperialism. Nevertheless, as Rajat Kanta Ray has argued, the older Indian Ocean commercial economy never lost its identity. Underneath the dominant European capital and shipping, networks of indigenous traders traveling in traditional vessels remained vibrant and even expanded in the nineteenth century. As an example, he points to the sultan of Muscat, who opened up a triangular maritime traffic in slaves and various commodities between the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and western India after 1800.7

The Dhow Countries Every summer since 1998, the tiny island of Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa has hosted the Festival of the Dhow Countries—a two-week celebration featuring films, lectures, and cultural performances from a variety of countries located along the rim of the western Indian Ocean. The festival brings together a racially and culturally diverse assemblage of people from Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and India. What all these places have in common is centuries of commercial and cultural interchanges made possible by a special type of sailing ship that Europeans referred to as a “dhow.” The commercial system of the western Indian Ocean grew up as a child of the monsoon winds. From October to April the northeast monsoon blows from India to the East African coast, passing over the Persian Gulf and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, and continuing down the East African

4

robert harms

coast as far south as the Mozambique Channel. Indian Ocean sailing ships would leave for East Africa soon after the monsoon set in. Ships from India could reach Zanzibar and Mombasa in twenty to thirty days, whereas ships from Oman and the Persian Gulf averaged thirty to forty days owing to the lighter winds on the edge of the monsoon. Beginning in April, the winds start to reverse themselves and blow from the southwest. April and May were the best times to set out from East African ports. With favorable winds and currents, a ship could make the 2,400-mile trip to the southwest corner of Arabia in as little as ten to twelve days, though a normal trip took seventeen to twenty. By timing their departures to take advantage of the monsoons, ships could cover vast distances in a remarkably short time.8 It is difficult to determine when ships first began sailing on the monsoon winds between the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, India, and the coast of East Africa, but the trade is clearly of great antiquity. The earliest documentary evidence goes back to 510 bce, when a Greek sea captain reported making a voyage from the mouth of the Indus River to the Gulf of Suez, following a route that had probably been sailed for centuries. Trade between East Africa and China was well established by the mid-800s ce, when a Chinese compendium of knowledge reported that East Africa exported ivory, ambergris (from whales), and slaves.9 When the Arab traveler al-Masudi visited the East African coast in the early 900s, he observed the trans–Indian Ocean trade in ambergris, leopard skins, tortoise shells, ivory, and gold. Ivory tusks weighing fifty pounds and more, he reported, were sent from East Africa to Oman, and from there to India and then on to China. In India, the soft East African ivory was used for making chess and backgammon pieces, handles for daggers, and curved sword scabbards; in China, emperors, military officers, and government officials used the straight tusks in making palanquins (sedan chairs). No Chinese officer or notable, al-Masudi noted, dared come into the royal presence in an iron palanquin.10 We have very few details on the early trade in slaves. In 869 there was a bloody rebellion of slaves from the East African coast who labored in southern Iraq to drain the marshes and mine the salt flats. The rebellious slaves captured several important cities and controlled considerable territory near the mouth of the Tigris River for fourteen years until they were finally defeated in 883 by an army that the Abbasid Caliphate sent from Baghdad. In the mid-tenth century, the princes of Bahrain reportedly employed some thirty thousand “Abyssinian” slaves, who worked mostly in agriculture. There is also some vague evidence of a long-standing trade in African slaves to India.11 The ships that crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages were made of wooden planks sewn together by cords made from coconut fibers. When the

Introduction

5

Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Cabral arrived at Malindi, on the East African coast, in 1500, they found three ships from Cambay, India, lying at anchor. A member of the expedition described them as follows: “Each of these ships had a capacity of 200 botte [67 tons]. Their hulls are well built of good wood, tied together with cord (for they have no nails), and they are covered with a mixture in which there is much incense. They have no castles except in the stern. These ships come to trade from parts of India.” The writer of that passage did not describe the sails, but they were most likely square. The lateen sail—a triangular sail fixed to a long moveable yard—was probably adapted from the Portuguese caravels after 1500. Drawings of sailing ships cut into the plaster on the walls of the ruins of palaces, mosques, and domestic buildings along the East African coast between 1200 and 1500 all show square sails, but after 1500, all but one show lateen sails.12 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans began to refer to all lateen-rigged seagoing vessels in the Western Indian Ocean as “dhows,” though the origin of the term remains a mystery. It has no antecedent in either Arabic or Indian languages. One possible antecedent is the East African dau la mtepe, a now-extinct sewn vessel with a square sail, but the Swahili origin of the term remains debatable. All we can say with certainty is that the term “dhow” came to be applied to a wide variety of ship designs. Clifford W. Hawkins’s book The Dhow: An Illustrated History of the Dhow and Its World shows drawings of some thirty different types of dhows with specific names such as balam, batella, bedan, dinghy, ganja, jalbaut, sambuk, and the like. Nevertheless, as Zanzibar’s annual Festival of the Dhow Countries demonstrates, the term “dhow” has endured as a general term for traditional Indian Ocean sailing vessels.13 The commercial commonalities created by dhows in the western Indian Ocean were part of the cultural commonalities provided mostly by Islam. Moving from their homeland in the Arabian Peninsula, Muslims had gained control of Egypt by 641 and established Baghdad as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate in 762, thus gaining control of the Persian Gulf. All the Swahili trading towns on the East African coast had adopted Islam by the 1300s, and Islam subsequently became a key element of Swahili identity. To be Swahili was to be Muslim. In India, the Muslim Delhi Sultanate controlled most of the subcontinent after 1350, to be succeeded by the Muslim Mughal Empire after 1526. Ross Dunn has argued that by the eleventh or twelfth century a Muslim network of trust, friendship, and social expectations ruled the commerce of the western Indian Ocean. When the great Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta traveled along the rim of the western Indian Ocean in the 1300s, from Kilwa, at the southern edge of the East African monsoon zone, to Calicut, near the

6

robert harms

southern tip of India, he was within the cultural boundaries of Dar al-Islam, the Abode of Islam.14 Although before the nineteenth century, Islam in East Africa did not penetrate inland much beyond the coast, the dhow traders could find common religious practices and a common framework of Islamic law at most of the ports of the western Indian Ocean.

The New East African Slave Trade The establishment of British dominance of the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, described by Alpers in this volume, had curiously contradictory effects. British purchases of cloves and ivory from East Africa stimulated an increase in both slavery and slave trading at the very time the British were campaigning to end the Indian Ocean slave trade. The clove boom began after an Omani Arab merchant smuggled cloves into Zanzibar in 1812 and discovered that they grew well in the soil and climate of the island. Clove production took off in the 1840s, when many Omani Arabs moved from the Persian Gulf to Zanzibar to establish clove plantations. Anticipating high profits, they borrowed money from Indian financiers to purchase slaves to labor on their new plantations. The slave population of Zanzibar grew rapidly. In 1839, at the beginning of the clove boom, there were 17,000 slaves in Zanzibar; by the 1850s there were 60,000–100,000. Thereafter, approximately 10,000 slaves were required annually to replenish the slave population.15 The other commodity that transformed the economy of Zanzibar was ivory. Because of new uses for ivory, including piano keys and billiard balls for the expanding middle-class societies of the United States and Europe, Britain’s imports of ivory rose from 120 tons in 1800 to over 800 tons in 1875. With the price of ivory in Zanzibar rising 400 percent between 1825 and 1875, heavily armed caravans organized by Swahili and Arab traders who were financed by Indian capital began traveling into the East African interior starting in 1825.16 They returned to Zanzibar with ivory and also with slaves; the high profits on the ivory compensated for the more modest returns from slave trading. By the 1860s, the caravan traders had crossed Lake Tanganyika and entered the rainforests of eastern Congo. The most successful of these traders was Hamed bin Muhammad, known as Tippu Tip, whose hired Swahili and Nyamwezi soldiers would attack villages, seize stockpiles of ivory, and take captives who could be ransomed with ivory or sold in Zanzibar. By the 1880s, the raiding state that Tippu Tip had constructed in the Manyema region of eastern Congo had congealed into a merchant-led confederation whose territory extended over five hundred miles from north to south along the upper Congo River. Despite its state-like structure, it served mainly to funnel slaves and ivory to

Introduction

7

Zanzibar. The ivory was then shipped to Europe, the United States, and India; the slaves were put to work on the clove plantations or carried by dhows to destinations in the western Indian Ocean.17 A similar relationship between the ivory and slave trades developed between Egypt and southern Sudan. In the early nineteenth century, Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, began to buy large numbers of weapons from Europe in order to make Egypt into a powerful modern nation. The military buildup brought a demand for slaves to serve in the army, and Egyptian households sought slaves as domestic servants. Surplus slaves were exported to the Arabian Peninsula as well as to Istanbul and other ports in the eastern Mediterranean. In the 1840s, Sudanese merchant firms with headquarters in Khartoum began to mount slave-raiding and ivory-trading operations to the south. They developed fortified trading settlements called zaribas, from where they mounted slave-raiding operations. In the 1850s a merchant-adventurer from Khartoum named al-Zubayr Pasha led his armed caravans southward into the Bahr el Ghazal and Dar Fur regions, where he conquered territory, built zaribas, and carried on a lucrative trade in ivory and slaves. In 1873 he was asked by the Egyptian governor of Khartoum to administer the lands he had conquered— a territory as large as France—on behalf of the Egyptian government, thus creating a short-lived trading and raiding state similar to that of Tippu Tip.18 The trading and raiding states of Tippu Tip and al-Zubayr were a new kind of political entity that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of five factors: the uniquely soft quality of East African ivory, the luxury demands of the new industrial bourgeoisie in Europe and the United States, the availability of Indian and Egyptian merchant capital, the rising demand for slaves in Egypt and Zanzibar, and the decentralized political systems in Manyema, Dar Fur, and the Bahr el Ghazal, which were vulnerable to attacks from heavily armed caravans. Egypt and the East African coast became the most common destinations for slaves coming along ivory caravan routes from the African interior. The clove and ivory booms in East and northeast Africa in the nineteenth century illustrate the complexity of multitiered global trading patterns. The cloves and ivory were destined largely for Europe and the United States, and were thus a part of a global trading pattern that extended beyond the Indian Ocean. Within the western Indian Ocean itself, however, the clove and ivory trades created new flows of labor and capital in their wakes. Arab merchants and planters moved from the Persian Gulf to East Africa and from Egypt to Sudan, and Indian merchants and capital moved to Zanzibar to finance the clove plantations and ivory caravans. At the same time, increasing numbers of enslaved Africans were being shipped to destinations around the rim of the

8

robert harms

western Indian Ocean. A similar phenomenon could be seen in the Persian Gulf, as described by Matthew S. Hopper in this volume. He shows that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 greatly facilitated the shipping of dates from the Arabian Peninsula to markets in the United States, causing a sharp rise in date production. Because the labor of irrigating the date groves, harvesting the date palms, and processing the dates was arduous and intense, date production stimulated an increase in the slave trade to the Persian Gulf.

The Age of Abolition While Britain was intensifying its anti-slave-trade activities in the Atlantic, the British Empire was expanding and consolidating its positions in the Indian Ocean. As Alpers describes in this volume, Britain captured strategic points from the Cape of Good Hope, at the western entrance to the Indian Ocean, to Malacca, at the eastern edge of the Bay of Bengal, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1835 it had captured the port of Aden, which guarded the entrance to the Red Sea. Its growing power brought pressure to enforce British anti-slave-trade laws in the Indian Ocean. Following the pattern they had established in the Atlantic, the British first used diplomatic pressure and treaties to fight the slave trade in the Indian Ocean and followed up with an anti-slave-trade patrol. Both strategies were remarkably ineffective. The British faced three major challenges in enforcing the Slave Trade Act of 1807 in the Indian Ocean. The first was that ships from Brazil flying Portuguese flags were increasing their slave purchases from ports in the Mozambique Channel, shipping out some 440,000 captive Africans between 1801 and 1860. That figure exceeded the total number of African slaves carried to North America during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. The British were hamstrung in counteracting this trade because they were allowed to stop ships only from countries that had signed treaties allowing their ships to be searched. Portugal did not grant British antislavery vessels the right of search until 1842, and it was not until 1845 that Britain unilaterally claimed the right to seize Brazilian ships. Even then, the task of stopping the European slave traders fell to the small British anti-slave-trade patrol based in Cape Town. Tasked with patrolling the East African coast from the Cape of Good Hope to the Equator with about a dozen ships, the Cape Command concentrated its ships in the waters around the Cape, leaving only two or three ships to patrol the 1,300- mile stretch between Delagoa Bay and Zanzibar.19 An equally vexing problem for the British was the French slave trade from the East African coast to the sugar plantations in the Mascarene Islands

Introduction

9

(Île de France and Île Bourbon), which lay some five hundred miles east of Madagascar. Under French control, sugar production had begun in the 1730s with slave labor drawn from East Africa, and by 1800 the slave population of the islands had reached 100,000. In 1810 the British gained control of the Île de France, which they renamed Mauritius, but they did not apply the Slave Trade Act to the island until 1813. Even then, the British governors turned a blind eye toward slave smuggling. On the Île Bourbon, which had been renamed Réunion in the wake of the French Revolution, the slave trade continued because the French neither seriously enforced their own anti-slave-trade legislation nor allowed the British to search vessels flying the French flag.20 The third problem for British anti-slave-trade efforts concerned the Swahili port towns and offshore islands strung along the East African coast north of the Mozambique Channel. In 1698 the sultan of Oman had driven the Portuguese out of their fortress in the East African coastal town of Mombasa and subsequently brought the trading ports in the monsoon zone under his control. But the Sultan did not consolidate his control over the coast, and during the eighteenth century the trading towns operated more or less independently or triangulated between the Portuguese and the Omanis. The person who brought effective Omani rule to the East African coast was Sayyid Said bin Sultan, who transferred the Omani capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840. From there, he claimed dominion over the east coast of Africa from Mogadishu in the north to Cape Delgado (the northernmost point in Mozambique) in the south.21 The British welcomed Said bin Sultan’s assertion of power over the East African coast because it allowed them to negotiate a single anti-slave-trade treaty instead of signing separate ones with the rulers of the trading towns. The Moresby Treaty of 1822 was designed to inhibit the shipment of slaves from East African ports to the French sugar plantations in the Mascarene Islands by banning the sale of slaves to Christians or to people outside the sultan’s dominions. Richard B. Allen in this volume shows that as the slave trade to the Mascarene Islands diminished, it was quickly replaced by a traffic in indentured laborers, who, some have argued, were little more than slaves themselves. Although forbidding the slave trade to the French sugar plantations on the Mascarene Islands, the Moresby Treaty allowed the transport and sale of slaves along the western Indian Ocean rim to continue unabated, because the sultan’s dominions were very generously defined to include the Indian Ocean rim from Cape Delgado, in southern Africa, to the beginning of the Gulf of Cambay, on the west coast of India, a straight-line distance of over three thousand miles. The main impact of the treaty was to steer the dhowbased slave traders away from the Mascarene Islands and toward the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea.22 Because countervailing winds

10

robert harms

made it difficult to sail a dhow directly between Zanzibar and the Red Sea, most of the Red Sea slave traffic was carried by small sailboats making relatively short runs from small ports on the African side to small Arabian ports.23 In an effort to curtail the slave trade from Zanzibar to the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea, the British consul Atkins Hamerton bullied the sultan of Zanzibar into signing a new treaty in 1845 that restricted the legal slave trade from Zanzibar to his African dominions between Lamu to the north and Kilwa to the south, a region that covered only five hundred miles or so of East African coastline. Once a slave dhow traveled beyond that protected area, it was vulnerable to seizure. Like the Moresby Treaty before it, the Hamerton Treaty was a failure: the sultan of Zanzibar had neither the desire nor the ships to enforce the treaty, and the British anti-slave-trade patrol was barely functional. During the period 1845–1860 the fleet at the Royal Navy’s Cape of Good Hope Station, which patrolled in both the southern Atlantic and the Indian Ocean below the Equator, had an average of nine ships at any given time. That number included a stationary coal ship at the Cape of Good Hope, a flagship, and a tender to the flagship. The effective anti-slave-trade patrol along the coast of East Africa often consisted of a single ship, and never more than three, a woefully inadequate effort when compared to the twenty to thirty ships that Britain had dispatched to the Atlantic during the heyday of the West Africa Squadron.24 If shipments of slaves from Zanzibar and nearby East African ports could not be interdicted in East African waters, then the backup plan was to intercept them when they reached the Persian Gulf. Yet the Gulf Station, which was under the Royal Navy’s East Indies Command, headquartered in Bombay, had only one small schooner dedicated to anti-slave-trade activities in 1853, and that state of affairs did not improve much in subsequent years. In the Red Sea, where much of the slave traffic was carried on small sailboats, the main effect of the British efforts was to move the slave traders away from the major ports and into a variety of creeks and small inlets where British warships could not go. Summing up the overall effectiveness of the British naval campaigns against the Indian Ocean slave trade, Admiral Leopold Heath told a select committee of the House of Commons in 1871, “We have gone on for twenty-five years and have done no good whatever.”25 It was not until 1873 that the British convinced Sultan Said Barghash of Zanzibar to sign a treaty banning the export of slaves from the African mainland and closing the slave markets in the port cities under the sultan’s control. This was followed by the Anglo-Turkish convention for the abolition of the African slave trade in 1880, which was useful for fighting the slave trade in the Red Sea, and the convention with Persia in 1882, which gave the British

Introduction

11

additional leverage in the Persian Gulf.26 Like the earlier treaties, these did not end the seaborne slave trade from East Africa, but they did give the antislave-trade patrol increased authority to search and seize dhows. As Lindsay Doulton points out in this volume, the last three decades of the nineteenth century were the glory days of the Indian Ocean anti-slave-trade patrol. Ending the institution of slavery itself in the lands bordering the western Indian Ocean was a different matter entirely. When slaveholding in the British Empire was abolished in 1833, the Cape Colony in southern Africa and the island of Mauritius fell under the provisions of the Emancipation Act, but an exception was made for India and other territories governed by the East India Company. Although there were some slaves of African origin in India—mostly in the Portuguese enclaves and the Muslim polities of northwestern India—the overwhelming majority of the slaves were Indian. The World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 estimated that six million to eight million Indians lived in bondage, and Bartle Frere later estimated that if the British territories and the princely protectorates in India were taken together, the total might rise to sixteen million, roughly 10 percent of India’s population. After pressure from the British government forced the East India Company to take action against slavery in 1843, the company simply declared that slavery had no legal status in the parts of India under direct British rule. The slaves were neither informed of that change nor encouraged to leave their masters. The main legal ramification was that slave owners could no longer use East India Company courts to recover runaway slaves. Howard Temperley has characterized this process as “delegalization” instead of abolition.27 In the Persian Gulf, where British influence was limited to certain coastal enclaves, there was no general emancipation of slaves until the mid-twentieth century. But as Abdul Sheriff explains in this volume, individual slaves could be emancipated at British consulates on a case-by-case basis if they could prove ill-treatment by their masters. A similar situation prevailed near the entrance to the Red Sea. Janet J. Ewald in this volume shows how enslaved pearl divers and sailors on Indian Ocean vessels would flee to the British port of Aden to seek asylum and emancipation. The men and women thus freed lived in shantytowns alongside free migrant laborers and sought employment in the port or aboard British steamships. A more complex process of abolition took place on Zanzibar, which became a British protectorate in 1890. The Abolition Decree of 1897 contained a typical statement of delegalization when it decreed that the district court “shall decline to enforce any alleged rights over the body, service, or property of any person on the ground that such person is a slave.” It also specified that concubines were considered wives, not slaves. Slaves were allowed to petition a British court for

12

robert harms

a certificate of freedom, but those who received one could be declared vagrants unless they could prove that they had a place to stay and a means of livelihood. If they stayed on the estates of their former masters, they had to pay rent. In the ensuing decade, some eleven thousand slaves were given certificates of freedom, and another six thousand were manumitted by their masters under Islamic law, but those figures together probably represented less than a quarter of the slave population. Other slaves stayed with their masters or simply drifted off, knowing that their masters could not pursue them. The possibility of leaving gave greater bargaining power to those slaves who chose to stay, causing the standard workweek on clove plantations to drop from five days to three. The practical result of Britain’s delegalization policy was that emancipation in the western Indian Ocean came to be seen as something bestowed upon certain favored individuals and not as a right that applied to an entire category of people.28

Defining Slavery and Abolition One of the key issues running through the essays in this book is to determine the meanings of the term “slave” in the Indian Ocean context. Campbell previously observed, “There is no scholarly consensus as to the meaning of slavery in the Indian Ocean World.” He noted that with the exception of the plantation economies that grew up in the Mascarene Islands, Madagascar, and the East African coast, an exact correspondence with New World chattel slavery rarely existed.29 Instead, servile laborers in the Indian Ocean World ranged from plantation laborers and domestic servants to armed soldiers and palace concubines, all of whose status and circumstances varied considerably. In discussing varieties of slavery in South Asia, Richard Eaton concluded, “The only common denominator was the slaves’ total dependency on some powerful person or institution.” Studies of slavery in the Ottoman Empire have similarly struggled to define an institution that included agricultural and domestic slaves, on the one hand, and military-administrative and harem slaves on the other. Toledano has sought to link the diverse categories by placing them on a “continuum of various degrees of bondage rather than a dichotomy between slave and free.”30 Explorations of the varied meanings of slavery have been particularly fruitful for the East African coast, where New World–style plantation slavery coexisted with other forms. In a report on slavery in Zanzibar published in 1871, James Christie made a sharp distinction between rural plantation slaves and urban slaves, a category that included domestic servants, artisans, day laborers, and porters. The armed slaves who traveled with their masters along the ivory caravan routes made up a separate category. The one category of slavery that

Introduction

13

Christie omitted was the palace harem women, but the lapse can be explained by his sense of discretion, given that he was the sultan of Zanzibar’s personal physician.31 Frederick Cooper’s Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (1977), which focused on plantation slaves, argued that although they enjoyed some latitude in negotiating their working and living conditions, they could never attain the status of the freeborn. Jonathan Glassman broadened the analysis of slavery on the East African coast in Feasts and Riot (1995) by looking at four broad categories of slaves—rural field hands, urban wage laborers, concubines, and artisans—and noting that the “concepts of ‘slave’ and ‘master’ denoted vague status ascriptions, not precise class positions.”32 Slavery in the western Indian Ocean rim conferred at once a legal status, a social status, and a form of patron-client relationship. Regarding their legal status, masters and slaves could look to two sets of laws that transcended national and regional boundaries. The first was Islamic law. Shari’a law determined who could or could not be enslaved, prohibited ill-treatment of or cruelty to slaves, and encouraged manumission, but left issues such as workloads, work hours, and rations to be negotiated between the slaves and their owners. Moreover, it did not distinguish among different categories of slaves, recognizing only the basic dichotomy between slave and free. Breaches of shari’a law or legal disputes regarding slaves could be settled by the qadi (Islamic judge) or the sultan, but were more often left to the slave owners themselves, especially in regions far from the court life of the capital cities.33 The other legal framework was British colonial law, which was enforced by consular and colonial courts. The British policy of delegalization rather than strict abolition left many murky issues to be settled by the courts. Slaves had a complicated social status. Glassman has argued that slaves on the Swahili coast in the nineteenth century did not aspire to the Western concept of “freedom” as much as they sought to gain full participation in the Islamic institutions of their communities and thus to improve their social status. And manumission was not necessarily a path to advancement: slaves freed by the British continued to be seen as slaves by their former masters, despite their altered legal status. Because the British court in Zanzibar paid compensation to the slaveholders, slaves who received a certificate of freedom were often referred to as “slaves of the government” and thus retained their social status as slaves. Sheriff in this volume shows how the freed slave Sultan bin Aman in the Persian Gulf was blocked by British consular officials from trying to collect debts owed to him by the sons of his former master. His certificate of freedom apparently did not give him equal standing with his former owners.34 Third, slavery was a form of patron-client relationship. For the Ottoman Empire, Toledano has argued that the master-slave relationship is best

14

robert harms

understood as a form of patronage. Glassman has previously shown that the language and rituals of master-slave relations on the East African coast were hardly distinguishable from other types of patron-client relations among the freeborn population. People at all levels of coastal society had long relied on various ties of dependency for security and identity. Many slaves sought to upgrade the nature of the patron-client relationship rather than to gain complete freedom, especially those who wished to engage in commerce. Thomas F. McDow in this volume shows how patron-client relations often endured long after manumission. In some cases, slaves refused manumission because it would mean the loss of a patron. He argues that the “distinction of slave versus free is not always the best way to understand the position of slaves.”35 The concept of abolition was as fraught as that of slavery, as several essays in this volume show. Richard B. Allen shows that European plantation owners in Mauritius and Réunion sought to replace the traffic in slaves with traffic in indentured laborers, and he engages with the debate whether this was merely a new form of slavery. McDow uncovers the practice of “insincere manumissions” in Zanzibar, which allowed slaves to be shipped legally to the Mascarene Islands as indentured laborers. Doulton shows that slaves liberated at sea by the Royal Navy, instead of being returned to their homelands, were often resettled in coastal mission stations, where they were expected to become Christians and adopt Western ways. This practice raises the question of what freedom meant when the social and cultural parameters of former slaves’ new lives were dictated by outsiders. In places where slavery was delegalized by British fiat, ex-slaves often retained the social status of slaves, even though the legal status could no longer be enforced. William Gervase Clarence-Smith in this volume highlights the ambiguity of the freed slave’s position when he points out that Zanzibari petitioners once asked a Muslim scholar whether it was legal to hire slaves freed by Europeans without the former owner’s consent. When slaves were junior business partners of their masters, terms of the partnership had to be redefined. Sheriff’s essay on Sultan bin Aman in this volume shows how his British manumission ruptured his business relationship with his former master, leaving him vulnerable to his creditors while failing to give him the legal authority to collect on debts owed to him.

Organization of the Volume Part I establishes the wider context for the case studies that follow. Gwyn Campbell surveys the Indian Ocean World in the nineteenth century and notes that “forms of bondage and traffic in human beings affected the

Introduction

15

entire macro-region,” not just the western Indian Ocean. He identifies a range of systems of servile or unfree labor: chattel slavery, client slavery, pawnship, agrestic servitude, and debt bondage. He shows that new systems of bonded labor arose in response to abolitionist pressure in the nineteenth century, including corvée labor, penal labor, and indentured labor. Edward A. Alpers looks at the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean World in the nineteenth century and traces the process by which the British gradually gained supremacy. He argues that suppression of the slave trade and slavery remained a “central pillar of British policy throughout the entire century.” Part II situates slavery in the western Indian Ocean in the context of Islamic thought and law. Bernard K. Freamon views slavery as part of the “plural imperialisms” of both Muslim and European powers, arguing that their policies reflected broad variations in the legal conceptions of slavery, particularly among Muslims. Similarly, he describes plural abolitions, which were influenced by a variety of pressures from both inside and outside the Muslim world. William Gervase Clarence-Smith shows that there was abolitionist thinking among Islamic intellectuals around the western Indian Ocean rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though it was vigorously opposed by many Muslims. In a survey of Islamic abolitionist thinkers in countries from Egypt to India, he argues against the notion that there was any kind of clear dichotomy between a progressive Muslim heartland and a reactionary periphery. The analyses in both essays draw on both Western and Islamic scholarship on the abolition of slavery. Part III gives two case studies of the anti-slave-trade efforts of the Royal Navy in the western Indian Ocean. Lindsay Doulton shows how the Union Jack became a symbol of Britain’s anti-slave-trade commitment and how British naval officers envisioned their role as part of a larger imperial and civilizing mission. Many slave children settled on mission stations were turned into mission children, a process revealing the ambiguous nature of freedom in the British anti-slave-trade campaign. Mandana E. Limbert examines the extraordinary documentation regarding the slave dhow Yasmeen, which was captured by HMS Vulture in 1872. In a close reading of the documents, she uncovers the bureaucratic framework of British slave-trade suppression and explores which questions about the nature and practice of the dhow-based slave trade can be answered and which must be left unanswered for lack of documentation. Part IV looks at the social and occupational mobility of slaves, either through manumission or through upward mobility within slavery. These cases illustrate the remarkable contrast between the fluid nature of bondage in the western Indian Ocean and the rigid chattel slavery typical of the Caribbean or the southern United States. Abdul Sheriff draws on the extensive documentation

16

robert harms

on the career of a slave named Sultan bin Aman to probe the twilight zone of slavery and manumission in the Persian Gulf. As a slave, Sultan operated as an independent trader under the protection of his master. Not long after he requested and received a manumission certificate from the British, however, he found himself hounded by creditors, yet unable to collect on a large debt owed to him by the sons of his ex-master. In gaining his freedom, he had lost his protection. Thomas F. McDow uses Arabic-language business deeds (later registered at the British consulate) to document the careers of slaves manumitted by their owners in Zanzibar before the formal ending of the slave trade in 1873. In a social system characterized by hierarchies of dependency, he shows how manumitted slaves became legal clients of their former masters and leveraged the relationship to obtain property and to engage in trade across the Indian Ocean or along inland caravan routes. Part V explores the changing face of slavery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richard B. Allen provides a sweeping survey of the flows of indentured laborers all across the Indian Ocean World in the wake of British and French abolition efforts. Tracing the continuities between nineteenth-century patterns of indentured-labor migration and earlier patterns of slave trading, he suggests that the pre-abolition slave trade laid the foundations upon which the indentured labor trade subsequently rested. He notes the development of “increasingly integrated networks of free and unfree or forced migrant labor.” Janet J. Ewald uncovers a “drifting sea proletariat” made up of formerly enslaved Africans who worked on ships and in the ports of the western Indian Ocean. She traces the development of a special category of African freed people known as “seedies,” who worked in the stokeholes of British steamships. Matthew S. Hopper looks at the Persian Gulf, where slavery and slave trading increased in the late nineteenth century because of the rising global demand for dates and pearls. Slaves maintained and harvested the palm groves, and teenage slave boys became highly skilled pearl divers in the gulf waters. Hopper carries his analysis into the twentieth century, when the collapse of the date and pearl markets in the 1920s finally doomed slavery in the Persian Gulf. Taken together, the case studies provide a nuanced and sometimes intimate portrait of slavery and the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean in the age of abolition. The chapters that survey the wider Indian Ocean World, which was being challenged by global imperial systems emanating from Europe, provide the wider context in which the interactions among slaveholders, slaves, and antislavery forces played out. The analyses and stories presented here illuminate key themes in the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean World in the nineteenth century. Although they may seem new or unusual to scholars and readers more conversant with slavery and the slave trade in the

Introduction

17

Atlantic world, they will not be completely unfamiliar. Both stories concern epic social and cultural upheaval set against massive economic transformation in an increasingly globalized world.

Notes 1. There has been an ongoing debate among historians as to the underlying reasons for the victory of the British abolitionist forces in 1807. For an overview of the debate, see Boyd Hilton, “1807 and All That: Why Britain Outlawed Her Slave Trade,” in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek Peterson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 63–83. For some recent contributions to this debate, see Seymore Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament, and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 42–65; David Richardson, “The Ending of the British Slave trade in 1807: The Economic Context,” in Farrell et al., British Slave Trade, 138–40; Stephen Farrell, “Contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity, and Sound Policy: The Slave Trade, Parliamentary Politics, and the Abolition Act, 1807,” in Farrell et al., British Slave Trade, 141–71. 2. Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1949), 67–68, 279–84. 3. Figures from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org, show that approximately 50,000 slaves were taken from this region during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but over 225,000 were carried off in the quarter century between 1826 and 1850. 4. Most of the essays in this volume were first presented at the conference “Slavery and the Slave Trades in the Indian Ocean and Arab Worlds: Global Connections and Disconnections,” held at Yale University, November 7–8, 2008. The conference was sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. 5. Fernand Braudel, “The Expansion of Europe and the Long Durée,” in Expansion and Reaction: Essays on European Expansion and Reaction in Asia and Africa, ed. H. L. Wesseling (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1978), 22; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7–10. 6. W. H. Moreland, “The Ships of the Arabian Sea about A.D. 1500,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1 (January 1939): 64. 7. Rajat Kanta Ray, “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (1995): 472, 550–54. 8. C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy, and Trade on the East African Littoral, 1798–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 74–75; R. W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa (London: Rex Collings, 1976), 68–76.

18

robert harms

9. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 52; G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Early Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 8. 10. Freeman-Grenville, East African Coast, 14–17. 11. Theodor Noldeke, Sketches from Eastern History, trans. John Southerland Black (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), 146–75; Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century, trans. Léon King (Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener, 1999); Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 4. 12. Freeman-Grenville, East African Coast, 61; Lynn Townsend White, “The Diffusion of the Lateen Sail,” in Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays, ed. Lynn White, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 255–60; Peter and Margaret Garlake, “Early Ship Engravings on the East African Coast,” Tanganyika Notes and Records, nos. 62–63 (1964): 197–206; I. C. Campbell, “The Lateen Sail in World History,” Journal of World History 6, no. 1 (1995): 6. 13. Clifford W. Hawkins, The Dhow: An Illustrated History of the Dhow and Its World (Lymington, UK: Nautical, 1977), 21–2, 138–41. 14. Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 48–48; Ross Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 6–7, 248. 15. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Oxford: James Curry, 1987), 48–73. 16. Ibid., 103–4, 253–58. 17. Norman Bennett, Arab Versus European: Diplomacy and War in NineteenthCentury East Central Africa (New York: Africana, 1986), 112–18; Tippu Tip’s autobiography was published in Swahili and English as: Tippu Tip, Maisha ya Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, Yaani Tippu Tip, kwa Maneno Yake Mwenyewe, trans. W. H. Whitely (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1966). A rough translation of the Swahili title would read: The Story of Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, known as Tippu Tip, in His Own Words. 18. Abbas Ibrahim Muhammad Ali, The British, the Slave Trade, and Slavery in the Sudan, 1820–1881 (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1972); Beashea al-Zubayr, Black Ivory; or, the Story of El-Zubeir Pasha, Slaver and Sultan, as Told by Himself, trans. H. C. Jackson (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970). 19. Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 11–23. The slave trade figures come from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org. 20. Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 26–30. 21. Ibid., 37–50. 22. Ibid., 44–47. 23. Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 27, 32–39. 24. Raymond Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 11–12, 24–25; Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, 279–84.

Introduction

19

25. J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 600–19; Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 37; G. L. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters (1873; repr., Zanzibar: Gallery Publications, 2003), 152–53. 26. Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 158, 178. 27. Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans–Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: A Historical Outline,” in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 292–95; Howard Temperley, “The Delegalization of Slavery in British India,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 2 (2000): 175–77, 183–84. 28. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 72–84, 295–96. 29. Gwyn Campbell, introduction to The Structure of Slavery in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), x–xi. 30. Richard Eaton, introduction to Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3; Y Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 1–17; Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96–117; Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 166; Ehud Toledano, “The Concept of Slavery in Ottoman and Other Muslim Societies: Dichotomy or Continuum,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa, ed. Miura Toru and John Edward Phillips (London: Keagan Paul International, 2000), 173–75. 31. James Christie, “Slavery in Zanzibar as It Is,” in H. A. Fraser, Bishop Tozer, and James Christie, The East African Slave Trade and the Measures Proposed for Its Extinction as Viewed by Residents of Zanzibar (London: Harrison, 1871), 31–45. 32. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 256–57; Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), 85–96. 33. Frederick Cooper, “Islam and Cultural Hegemony: The Ideology of Slaveowners on the East African Coast,” in The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, ed. Paul Lovejoy (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 271–307; Toledano, Slavery and Abolition, 165–67; Toledano, “The Concept of Slavery,” 174. 34. Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 95; Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 76. 35. Ehud Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 24–34; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 94.

This page intentionally left blank

PART

I

The Indian Ocean World in the Nineteenth Century

This page intentionally left blank

2

Servitude and the Changing Face of the Demand for Labor in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1800–1900 gwyn campbell

The nineteenth century marked the single most important turning point in the economic history of the world: the creation of a truly international economy, centered on the burgeoning capitalist economies of western Europe and North America, which by the close of the 1800s had drawn all but the remotest regions of the globe into its orbit. The new international economy was driven by ever-accelerating technological change that transformed the relationship between the West and the rest of the world, underpinning the economic and political expansion of the West, including modern European colonialism. It also fundamentally changed labor relations. In the West it transformed agricultural production and the trade in agricultural produce, thus permitting the build-up of agricultural surpluses, breaking the Malthusian nightmare, and facilitating sustained demographic growth. Elsewhere, the new economic forces resulted in heightened demand for labor to service international commerce, and political forces simultaneously led to increasingly effective attacks on the slave trade and on slavery—thus releasing privately owned bonded labor into the ranks of the free workforce available for hire and promoting free trade and unrestricted migration of labor. This chapter outlines the impact of these forces upon forms of bondage in the Indian Ocean World in the nineteenth century.

23

24

gwyn campbell

The Indian Ocean World There is growing consensus that studies of servitude in the Indian Ocean World can no longer be limited, as they conventionally have been, to the history of the East African slave trade and of the African diaspora in Asia and the islands of the western Indian Ocean.1 This consensus stems from the growing acceptance that East Africa and the western Indian Ocean were part of a much greater interregional economy—that of the Indian Ocean World—and that forms of bondage and the traffic in human beings affected the entire macroregion. The Indian Ocean World economy has been termed the first “global” economy—defined as a sophisticated and durable system of long-distance exchange—linking Africa to China and all points in between. Trans–Indian Ocean World maritime exchange stemmed from human mastery of the monsoons, a system of winds and currents unique to the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Unlike the other large oceans—the Pacific and Atlantic—the Indian Ocean possesses a massive northern cap, the Asian continent. In the northern summer months, the Asian landmass heats up, the warm air rises, and by convection sucks in cooler air from the Indian Ocean. This causes the southwest monsoons from April to September. During the winter months, from October to March, the reverse phenomenon occurs, creating the northeast monsoon. Moreover, the monsoons are supplemented by two-way equatorial currents and a perennial system of southeast trade winds. Once humans had developed vessels sufficiently strong to take advantage of the monsoons, and the navigational techniques to sail across the open sea, the possibility opened up of direct return voyages across the Indian Ocean World. By the first century ce, a long-distance maritime trading network had emerged, developing by the mid to late first millennium into a regular and sophisticated system of trans–Indian Ocean World exchange linking Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Far East. K. N. Chaudhuri, André Wink, Janet Abu-Lughod, and others refer to this system as the first “global economy.”2 Most authors contend that this global economy declined from the mid-eighteenth century as Europeans became dominant in the region, although Andre Gunder Frank contended that this occurred only in the nineteenth century and was a temporary phenomenon.3 Certainly, there is growing evidence of the continued vitality of indigenous trade and other forms of trans–Indian Ocean World exchange during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.4 It is here argued that the economic vitality of indigenous economies directly affected the labor market and issues of servitude in the Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century as indigenous and European actors in the region competed for the available workforce.

Servitude and Labor

25

Traditional Forms of Bondage in the Indian Ocean World Like all premodern economies, the Indian Ocean World global economy was labor intensive. Control over labor resources was at a premium, and consequently forms of bondage developed. But few of these resembled the conventional Anglo-American image of a chattel—defined as a “person as property” who could be freely bought, sold, and transferred.5 Chattel slavery did exist in the Indian Ocean World, with individuals or groups “owning” slaves. Corporate slave property was formerly widespread in India and remained common in Africa into the nineteenth century,6 and chattel slavery was also apparent on the plantations that developed on the Mascarenes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on the Swahili coast and islands in the nineteenth century.7 In general, however, Indian Ocean World slavery contrasted considerably with the conventional image of slavery in the Atlantic system. Unlike the Atlantic world, where almost all terms for abject servitude—for example, “slave,” “esclave,” or “escravos”—derive from a common linguistic origin (slav) and have a common meaning, the Indian Ocean World had multiple indigenous terms for servitude, whose meanings varied with time and place. Black Africans formed a minority of servile people traded in the Indian Ocean World, where a minority of the slave population worked on plantations and in mines. Most slaves were females who were absorbed into households as secondary wives, wet nurses, servants, or as entertainers and providers of sexual services.8 James Watson categorized Indian Ocean World forms of bondage into “open” and “closed” systems. “Open” systems, such as those in Africa that were forged around concepts of clientage, facilitated slaves’ shedding of their abject status and assimilating into the dominant society. “Closed” systems, such as those that prevailed in the Far East, parts of India, and Madagascar, frequently became cemented into caste or caste-like social structures, maintaining a rigid and intergenerational divide between the bonded and free.9 However, while forms of servitude varied widely across the Indian Ocean World, it is probably more fruitful to analyze them within the context of hierarchies of dependence, as is suggested by historical studies of bondage in Southeast Asia.10 All members of Indian Ocean World societies were bound by ties of obligation and responsibility to those of higher and lower status. Moreover, individuals and groups, including those of servile status, could, over time, alter their status. Indeed, a few bonded individuals rose to positions of immense power and wealth; and some servile groups achieved a standard of living and liberty of movement and action superior to those of some nonservile “peasant” groups.11

26

gwyn campbell

The Nineteenth-Century International Economy and the Indian Ocean World During the burgeoning international economy of the nineteenth century, considerable capital flowed outward from the industrializing West. In the Indian Ocean World, European investment was directed predominantly at cash crop production, natural (mineral, forest, animal) exploitation, and a transport and communications infrastructure aimed at facilitating exports. Thus, the £95 million invested in Indian railways from 1845 to 1875 promoted a fivefold increase in the value of Indian exports between 1870 and 1914.12 Rail and maritime steam-transport innovations similarly reduced freight costs and promoted export production across the Indian Ocean World.13 Yet capital resources were relatively limited in the Indian Ocean World, where, with the important exception of Japan, attempts at industrialization faltered and economies remained overwhelmingly agricultural and artisanal.14 In the absence of capital investment, the commercial boom that accompanied the growth of the international economy greatly enhanced labor demands for hunting, collecting and mining natural resources, growing food crops, cultivating cash crops in demand regionally (including wheat and rice) and in Europe (spices, but also increasingly tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa), porterage, and maritime transport (dockworkers and sailors). But the labor market suffered great structural strain as growing demand failed to result in a growth in the supply of labor. This imbalance occurred for two main reasons: uneven demographic growth and the prevalence of systems of bonded labor.

Indian Ocean World Population Growth in the Nineteenth Century From the emergence of humankind until about 1800, the world’s population increased to about 1 billion people, and then increased exponentially to reach roughly 1.7 billion by 1900.15 Demographic transition theory accredits this chiefly to improved standards of hygiene and to medical techniques that significantly reduced the death rate, combined with initially high birth rates—leading to significant population growth. In the Indian Ocean World, however, while colonization appears to correlate with significant increases in population growth, in regions such as Southeast Asia it was less an outcome of colonial medical policies than of the adoption, under both indigenous and colonial regimes, of high-yield food crops such as corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and, in tropical regions, wet rice, combined with intensive agricultural techniques.16

Servitude and Labor

27

From the tenth century at least, Asia possessed a greater population than any other continent, concentrated notably in China and India. During the nineteenth century, much of the region experienced general population growth rates of around 1.4 percent annually. But while Europe’s population more than doubled in the nineteenth century, from 190 million to 423 million, and that of Britain, Germany, and the United States increased almost fivefold in the hundred years before 1914, it took almost two hundred years for the Asian population to double: it increased from about 415 million to 970 million between 1700 and 1900. In 1750, Asia possessed 64 percent of the global population, Europe 21 percent, and Africa 13 percent, but Asia’s share of the global population had fallen to 57 percent by 1900 and Africa’s to 8 percent, while Europe’s share had increased to 25 percent, and the Americas’ to 10 percent.17 In addition, population growth within the Indian Ocean World was uneven. China’s population increased rapidly during the eighteenth century, reaching about 300 million in 1795, and it climbed further to reach 420 million by 1850. The rate of growth then slowed, the total population reaching approximately 480 million by 1900.18 Sumit Guha has estimated that the Indian population increased by 44 million between 1600 and 1800, when it reached 161 million, followed by a further 76 percent increase to reach 283.4 million by 1901. But the rate of growth varied considerably from region to region.19 Overall, between 1871 and 1921 the India population grew at an annual rate of only 0.4 percent.20 Mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Java, and South Sumatra also experienced significant population growth in the nineteenth century, albeit with periods of demographic crisis.21 By contrast, in most of the Indonesian archipelago outside Java and southern Sumatra, population growth remained low, and in some areas it declined.22 Africa experienced generally stagnant population growth until the introduction of systematic attempts to improve health care beginning in the 1920s.23 The conventional view is that precolonial demographic stagnation in the Indian Ocean World was chiefly a consequence of the slave trade, petty warfare, and political instability. Most important was the slave-export trade. Thus, Patrick Manning argues, “In the East African region from Mozambique to Kenya, a serious population decline occurred later, from about 1820 to 1890, as slaves were taken both to Muslim areas in Arabia and the Persian Gulf and to European-ruled territories in the Indian Ocean and the New World.”24 It is held that this loss, which may by midcentury have bled sub-Saharan Africa of half of its potential population of 100 million, was compounded from the late 1880s, at least in eastern Africa, by the impact of European conquest, human and animal diseases, and droughts.25

28

gwyn campbell

But it is now clear that demographic stagnation in Madagascar— conventionally attributed to French colonial policies from 1895—was evident from the early 1830s and resulted from causes both man-made (warfare, slave raiding, economic mismanagement, labor exploitation) and natural (disease, cyclones, climatic variations).26 Many of these factors affected the neighboring African continent as well, which, in addition, suffered acutely from rinderpest and other cattle diseases, notably from the 1880s. It is therefore likely that the same mixture of forces active in molding demographic trends in Madagascar was present in the rest of eastern and southern Africa from the early nineteenth century.27

Systems of Bonded Labor The cycle of human-induced and natural disasters, and its demographic impact, forms the backdrop against which to consider Indian Ocean World systems of servile or unfree labor, which included chattel slavery, the client slavery that characterized the prazos of Mozambique, pawnship, agrestic servitude in India, and debt bondage.28 Slavery was important. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slaves made up between 20 and 30 percent of the population of many Indian Ocean World societies, rising to 50 percent and over in parts of Africa and in Indonesian ports.29 Debt bondage was possibly even more significant, embracing, for example, the majority of the population of Majapahit, in Java, and up to 50 percent of the total population in central Thailand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.30 Most victims entered debt bondage voluntarily, as a credit-securing strategy. It affected a vast range of people in the Indian Ocean World: farmers mortgaging future harvests, potential grooms borrowing a bride price, small traders living off credit from larger merchants, the ubiquitous rural gamblers of Southeast and East Asia, and opium addicts in nineteenth-century China.31 During catastrophes, people often entered debt bondage or slavery in return for subsistence as a survival strategy, either voluntarily, as was the case of many dvija caste members in India, or propelled by their kin group.32 Moreover, they did so whether they lived in regions of relatively low population density, such as Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the Middle East, and Africa, or of relatively high population density, such as Bengal, Vietnam, Korea, and South China.33 Debt-bondage servitude was generally used to pay off interest on the loan that debtors had contracted, to which was added the cost of their lodging, food, and clothing. Consequently, the debt usually increased and servitude could become permanent, even hereditary, at which point there was little to distinguish debt bondage from slavery.34

Servitude and Labor

29

The International Economy and Bonded Labor in the Indian Ocean World The classical liberal theory associated with nineteenth-century capitalism attacked the patronage inherent in the preindustrial order and in mercantilist concepts of protectionism, monopolies, and state involvement in the economy. Liberalism promoted free trade and individual endeavor in a laissez-faire environment marked by the absence of government and by the domination of the market, wherein people sold their labor according to laws of supply and demand. Such forces were neutral and just, governed by the invisible “guiding hand” described by Adam Smith. Liberals espoused the new economic creed with religious fervor, preaching the moral superiority of free trade to protectionism, and of wage labor to slavery. The catalysts of economic change in Britain—population growth, cheap capital, and industrialization—spread to affect the entire North Atlantic world, where, in conjunction with the abolitionist movement, they steadily undermined the slave trade, forms of bonded labor, and “Owenite” experiments in paternalistic labor relations, and promoted the rise of contract wage labor. The process took longer than is usually thought—slave labor persisted in the southern United States until the 1860s—but by the late nineteenth century wage labor predominated. In the Indian Ocean World, population growth rates were comparatively lower and uneven, capital was comparatively more expensive and more readily available from Indian and other indigenous creditors than from Western sources,35 and attempts at industrialization—with the exception of Japan— failed (as in Madagascar)36 or remained small-scale, with limited linkages.37

Bondage in the Indian Ocean World Indigenous Indian Ocean World demand for slaves was generated first by traditional canons of conspicuous consumption. Elites universally accumulated and displayed as many slaves as possible.38 Indeed, in some cases the costs of maintaining a slave exceeded the benefits accruing from his or her services, which, in exceptional circumstances, could lead to the financial ruin of the owner.39 Thus, while some female slaves—who formed the majority of slaves traded in the Indian Ocean World—were employed as water carriers and in agriculture, textile production, and mining,40 the majority were absorbed by wealthy households, which employed them predominantly in domestic and sexual services and in entertainment.41 Female slaves who were secondary wives, concubines, entertainers, and domestic servants of the wealthy enjoyed a lifestyle and—as Anthony Reid argues for Southeast Asia—a respect superior

30

gwyn campbell

to that of female peasants.42 There are instances of concubines in the Middle East sending for family members to join them—albeit as nonslaves.43 Female slaves were also less likely than male slaves to be sold.44 Nevertheless, a false dichotomy has often been assumed between “productive” and “unproductive” slave activities, many of which had considerable economic significance.45 Wives and children acquired for kinship groups were both status symbols and important additions to the group’s productive and reproductive capacity, while throughout the Indian Ocean World slaves acquired by elite households were often encouraged to engage part-time in profit-bearing activities.46 Slave soldiers enforced law and order—a prerequisite for economic growth—and safeguarded vital trade routes, supply centers, and markets. Most were “remunerated” with battle spoils or were expected to engage part-time in economic activities. Indeed, the capture and exchange of slaves was a principal objective of most precolonial armies and navies. Slave armies thus often generated slaves, sometimes—as in the Sulu case—on their own initiative and for their own as well as their owner’s material interests.47 Finally, slaves acquired for status often served the same function as status symbols and activities did for businesspeople in the capitalist West. Signs of wealth, prestige, and influence, they were considered essential in forging the right contacts and business deals.48 Moreover, the nineteenth-century commercial boom ensured a rising demand for slaves for directly economic purposes associated with export commodities such as pearls, dates, cotton, wool, and opium in the Persian Gulf,49 and cloves, coconuts, and grain on the Swahili coast.50 The international economy also resulted in a modern form of sexual slavery in the Indian Ocean World because of a rising gender imbalance in key locations. For example, the migration of millions of Chinese male laborers to Indian Ocean World centers such as Singapore led to a huge demand there for females for sexual purposes, which was met by a traffic in mostly involuntary prostitutes.51 Large concentrations of soldiers led to a similar demand, which, in European colonies, was often facilitated by colonial officials who feared unrest should the sexual needs of soldiers not be met. Indrani Chatterjee notes that British garrisons in India openly employed “slave” prostitutes who, in the 1860s, were officially taxed—a measure that, alongside fines, served only to increase the debt bondage that more often than not had “enslaved” such women originally.52

The Maritime Slave Trade Such was the demand for servile labor that the Indian Ocean World slave trade peaked in the nineteenth century despite an increasing abolitionist scru-

Servitude and Labor

31

tiny that induced slavers to adopt indirect routes and pass slaves off as nonslave porters, sailors, domestics, and even children or other kin.53 Large numbers of East Africans were shipped to Zanzibar, Pemba, Somalia, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes, and some to Cape Town. They were also exported to India and the Americas. Malagasy slaves were sent in considerable numbers to Réunion and Mauritius. Indian slaves were shipped to Indonesia, Mauritius, Cape Town, and the Middle East. Most slaves to the Middle East originated from the Caucasus, eastern Europe, and Africa, but were joined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by slaves from the Makran coast of Iran, some from western India, and a few from Indonesia and China.54 Indonesians were sent mainly to markets across Southeast Asia, Indochinese and Koreans to China, and Chinese to Singapore and San Francisco. In all these cases, sources, markets, routes, and slave functions varied considerably.55 It is currently impossible to estimate with any precision the number of slaves traded in the Indian Ocean World, given the duration of the slave trade there and the limited nature of extant records. Even in European-dominated enclaves, statistics are, at the very best, patchy. Research is only just beginning into slave-ship journals and records in the region, but unlike their Atlantic Ocean counterparts, Indian Ocean World slaves rarely constituted a specialized cargo.56 This was especially the case on indigenous ships, but also on many European-captained slaving vessels.57 Thus, scholars’ attempts to divine quantities of slaves traded in the Indian Ocean World are, at best, guesstimates. The result, inevitably, is that such guesstimates have considerable range. Moreover, they rarely take into account either demographic conditions in source areas or the variance in the number of slaves embarked and those reaching their destination. Mortality rates aboard ship decreased significantly over the centuries as slave traders paid increasing attention to improving slave hygiene, nutrition, and security aboard ship, so historians have emphasized that distance constituted the main contributory factor for continued slave mortality by the nineteenth century.58 There appears to be consensus that the slave mortality rate aboard ships to the Mascarenes was 20 to 25 percent from India, and 25 to 30 percent from West Africa; in the late eighteenth century, it was 12 percent from Madagascar and 21 percent from East Africa.59 But these figures take little account of disease, which played a major role in the nineteenth century, or mounting pressure by anti-slave-trade patrols in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, which forced the captains of slave ships to take more risks, overcrowd their ships, and jettison slaves should their ships be threatened with capture. Because of the conventional focus on black slaves, the only Indian Ocean World region with concentrated guesstimates for the slave trade is continental

32

gwyn campbell

East Africa, for which guesstimates range from 800,000 to over 2 million,60 and Madagascar, for which guesstimates vary from about 72,000 to double that figure.61 In total terms, factoring in other regions and non-African slaves, it is probable that the cumulative number of slaves traded across the maritime space of the Indian Ocean World over the centuries well exceeded the 10 million to 12 million that landed in the Americas. Moreover, it is highly probable that the greatest Indian Ocean World slave traffic was overland, notably within Africa, Hindu India, and the Confucian Far East—in India alone there were an estimated 8 million to 9 million indigenous slaves in 184162—double the number of black slaves in the United States in 1865. This again speaks to the major difficulty faced by Europeans, but largely ignored in the literature: the tying up of the Indian Ocean World workforce in indigenous systems of bonded labor.63

Other Forms of Bonded Labor Western powers, notably Britain, applied pressure on indigenous Indian Ocean World authorities to adopt abolitionist measures, with the aim of transforming some of the slave workforce into free wage laborers. This prompted powers as far apart as the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Zanzibar, Imerina, and Ethiopia to make at least official proclamations against the slave trade and slavery.64 But these measures were rarely effective, or else were manipulated by indigenous regimes to divert slaves from private ownership into state labor pools, as occurred in late eighteenth-century Korea65 and in nineteenthcentury Thailand66 and Madagascar.67 In these countries and in Java,68 most productive labor was performed not by slaves but by the nominally “free” population that was subject to government corvées, while in many states, as in Egypt under Muhammad Ali69 and in imperial Madagascar,70 indigenous regimes used the forced labor of nominally “free” subjects to drive programs of economic modernization. Often inextricably linked to indigenous modernization programs were attempts, from Korea, Thailand, and Burma to Iran, Zanzibar, and Imerina, to create and economically exploit “secondary empires.” Critical to their success were armies of mostly forced laborers. Indeed, to escape state corvée, which in Korea, Burma, and Thailand often claimed up to 50 percent—and in imperial Madagascar up to 100 percent—of a draftee’s labor, some slaves rejected opportunities to gain “free” status and some nonslaves voluntarily entered slavery.71 In this context, early abolitionist pressure, which was concentrated principally on the Atlantic, had an initially muted influence except in the Cape, where, well before the 1834 abolition of slavery, the removal in 1826 of mea-

Servitude and Labor

33

sures protecting wine had diverted investment into the far less labor-intensive wool-producing sector—a measure that effectively undermined slavery.72 Elsewhere, however, the labor-intensive nature of the economy and the lack of free wage labor rendered academic any arguments that slave labor might be inefficient.73 Until the abolition of slavery in European territory—in British colonies in 1833, in French colonies in 1848, and in the Dutch East Indies in 1860—European-held territory in the Indian Ocean World initially depended largely on slaves to meet labor demands. For instance, Robert Farquhar, the first British governor of Mauritius, delayed anti-slave-importation measures in acknowledgment of the cheap labor requirements of local sugar planters.74 Widespread slave ownership, and indigenous control over free subjects, drove Europeans in the Indian Ocean World to adopt other forms of bonded labor, including penal and indentured varieties. Tens of thousands of indigenous convicts, predominantly male, were shipped to British settlements across the Indian Ocean World to serve as penal labor.75 Indigenous convicts were sent from Goa to Mozambique by the Portuguese, and by the Dutch from Batavia to the Cape.76 Such practices increased during the transition years of abolition as slave labor progressively dwindled. For example, during the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company dispatched Indian convicts to Singapore, Malacca, Mauritius, and Burma. Clare Anderson presents a case study of some of the 1,500 Bengali convicts shipped to Mauritius between 1815 and 1836 (the migrant convict-labor system there lasted until 1851), ostensibly for public works but sometimes, in return for payment, to private plantations, where they were often treated as slaves.77 Penal labor was also widely used by indigenous authorities for the harshest types of work. For instance, the Merina regime in Madagascar used convicts in road-construction crews, mines, and foundries.78 Another temporary solution to labor shortages was the placing of “prize Negroes,” captured from slave ships, under contract to European settlers; those granted to Mauritian planters were “leased” to the government for four days a year to perform public works.79 Such measures were overshadowed by the indenture system. Indentured labor was an old institution, either formalized by contracts or by ad hoc means, as with Khoi and San boys captured by Dutch farmers in the Cape interior during the eighteenth century. The captives were forced to work until the age of twenty-five, by which time they were often married, with sons who were subject to similar obligations. Many parents refused to abandon their children, and so remained tied to the farm for life. Following abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Caledon Code of 1809 formalized indenture in the Cape through a “pass” system, which restricted San and Khoi to farms in

34

gwyn campbell

a system of “virtual slavery.” Thus, Nigel Worden argues, the first effective formal abolition in the Cape was not official abolition in 1834 but the repeal of the Caledon Code in 1828.80 Upon abolition in the Cape and Mauritius, ex-slaves, who received no financial assistance, were declared “apprentices” and obliged to continue working for a fixed period for their old masters. In the Cape, the system ended in 1838, but on Mauritius it continued until midcentury. Many apprentices fell into debt bondage to their old employers or chose to continue working for them in order to remain with their children.81 A new indenture system arose from the failure of the abolitionist measures of 1834 and 1848 to transform ex-slaves into pliant wage laborers. Generally involving five-year contracts, it channeled manpower resources to enterprises both within and external to the Indian Ocean World—such as the sugar plantations of the Fiji islands. For the most part, recruits were poverty-stricken Indians, Chinese, and, for the French islands, Africans. By the end of the nineteenth century, approximately one million Indian indentured laborers were employed in India; two million were shipped to overseas plantations between 1834 and 1920.82 Contemporary observers and subsequent historians have underlined that the recruitment, transport, and living and working conditions of indentured laborers were often similar to those of slaves. Attention in the Indian Ocean World has predominantly focused on indentured labor on European plantations83 and in mines—including those of Australia, dating from the discovery of gold there in 1851.84 But other destinations were also served: for example, European sources indicate that by the mid-1840s, an estimated fifteen thousand Chinese workers annually were being carried in Chinese junks to Bangkok.85

Colonialism and Abolition in the Indian Ocean World During the late nineteenth-century imperialist surge in the Indian Ocean World, abolition formed a central justification for the imposition of European colonial rule. Moreover, “liberated” slaves were a potentially vital source of both taxation and manpower under colonial regimes governed by precepts of self-financing. A colonial priority was thus to transform the local working population into a free wage-labor force. Yet it was also vital to retain the goodwill of local slave-owning elites, whose assistance was required to administer the colony. Thus, while moving quickly to hinder slave trading, colonial authorities were reluctant to enforce rapid abolition, lest it spark revolt, as occurred in the Muslim province of the southern Philippines after abolition was enforced in 1904.86 In Somalia, the colonial regime initially

Servitude and Labor

35

permitted European settler-farmers access to slave labor, and even returned fugitive slaves to their owners,87 while in German East Africa, European planters were permitted to “ransom” slaves, who were then obliged to work for their “liberators” until the ransom had been paid off.88 The British, in a variant adopted by other colonizing powers, declared newly conquered territories to be “protectorates,” thereby avoiding enforcing some abolitionist measures compulsory in colonies. Complete bans on slavery in European-controlled territories occurred fitfully well into the twentieth century. In Africa, the internal slave traffic remained buoyant for some fifty years after the banning of the external slave trade. In Sudan, effective measures to curtail slavery were taken only in the late 1920s.89 On the eastern side of the Indian Ocean World, the French first seriously applied antislavery measures in Indochina in 1897, while the British abolished slavery in the Hukawng valley in eastern Burma only in 1926. Slavery was outlawed in the Dutch East Indies in 1860, but the Netherlands then possessed merely a quarter of the Indonesian territory that was to pass under its control by 1910—in much of which it tolerated slavery. Slavery endured in remoter regions of French Indochina and the Dutch Indies into the 1940s.90 In the Middle East, drawn into the British informal empire after the First World War, abolitionist pressure remained muted until after 1945.91 While there were few swift and effective abolition measures by European powers in the Indian Ocean World,92 there were some effective indigenous antislavery measures. In Korea, the abolition in 1801 of the public nobi system of hereditary bondage undermined slavery, which was finally abolished in 1894.93 Again, abolitionist measures appear to have been effective in Thailand, where slavery had largely disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.94 In addition, colonial authorities imposed monetary taxes, promoted commercialization, and enforced credit contracts, all of which facilitated a growth in indebtedness, and maintained tight budgetary regimes that avoided funding public welfare programs. But officials distinguished debt bondspeople from “true” slaves, whose condition they attributed solely to violent capture. As a result, debt bondage and enslavement through debt expanded considerably across the Indian Ocean World.95 India is a prime example. In a century characterized by rising taxation and years of famine, “freedom” for members of the former slave outcastes, who had deliberately been kept destitute and debarred from land ownership, translated into the liberty to starve. Some adopted sharecropping, but with two-thirds of the crop paid to the landlord, the risk of failure was high. To survive, many entered debt bondage, which was, from 1859, reinforced by the Breach of Contract Act.96 In some areas of

36

gwyn campbell

India, members of the most depressed castes formed the overwhelming bulk of those in debt bondage. The condition closely resembled slavery, in that bondage could be inherited, and the vast majority of bonded people had their geographic mobility restricted.97 Nevertheless, colonial powers across the Indian Ocean World considered debt bondage to be a benign form of private welfare and generally condoned its continuation well into the twentieth century.98 In areas such as Thailand, Burma, and Indochina, this form of servitude encouraged a revival of covert slave raiding.99 In Africa, where debt bondage was represented by the “pawnship” of a person, usually a young girl to a creditor in return for a loan, the system weakened only during the post–Second World War boom.100 In all cases, the debtor had a clear market value, expressed in cash in more monetized Asian economies, and in “human” wealth in less monetized economies, as in most of Africa. Any discussion of forms of servitude and the labor market needs to be framed within a discussion of the wider economy. There is growing consensus that the history of servitude in the Indian Ocean World can no longer be limited to that of the East African slave trade and the African diaspora. Rather, issues of servitude and labor relations need to be framed within the context of the Indian Ocean World global economy, which had emerged by at least the tenth century, linking the entire region from China to Africa and all points in between in a sophisticated and durable system of maritime exchange. Moreover, this system of exchange remained vital during the nineteenth century, when the growth of a truly international economy created an unprecedented commercial boom in the Indian Ocean World and established a large and growing demand for menial labor. But there was difficulty in meeting that demand, for two main reasons: comparatively low and uneven demographic growth, and the tying up of the potential workforce in largely indigenous systems of bonded labor. Abolitionist pressure in the Indian Ocean World was muted, since the focus of abolitionists was on the Atlantic slave system, and European officials in the Indian Ocean World were reluctant to attack a ubiquitous system that most regional elites cherished. They therefore perpetuated some traditional systems of bondage and introduced new ones, in the form of penal and indentured labor. And while abolition formed a central justification for the imposition of colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century, colonial regimes likewise resisted outright attack on many forms of bonded labor and, borrowing from precolonial regimes, often introduced varieties of forced or corvée labor.

Servitude and Labor

37

Notes 1. James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983); Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); William Gervase ClarenceSmith, ed., The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1989); Gwyn Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004). 2. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996, 1997); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 142–45, 156. 3. Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 4. See, for example, Ulrike Freitag and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, eds., Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean (Brill: Leiden, 1997); Erik Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860–1970 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). 5. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10–11; James L. Watson, introduction to Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. Watson, 4–6; Anthony Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid, 2, 36. 6. See Watson, introduction to Asian and African Systems of Slavery, 4–5; Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Kopytoff and Miers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 7–26; for India, see Utsa Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India, ed. Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dinwaney (Hyderabad: Sangam, 1990), 28–29. 7. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heineman, 1997). 8. Gwyn Campbell, “Slave Trades and the Indian Ocean World,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. John C. Hawley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 17–51; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller, eds., Women in Slavery, vol. 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 9. Watson, Asian and African Systems of Slavery; see also Kopytoff and Miers, Slavery in Africa; Klein, Breaking the Chains. 10. Gwyn Campbell, introduction to Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Campbell, vii–xxxii.

38

gwyn campbell

11. Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans-Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: A Historical Outline,” in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 273–91; Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency. 12. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), 333; A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy, 1820–1990 (London: Routledge, 1992), 30. 13. See, for example, Hein Heydenrych, “Railway Development in Natal to 1895,” in Enterprise and Exploitation in a Victorian Economy: Aspects of the Economic and Social History of Colonial Natal, ed. Bill Guest and John M. Sellers (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1985); Edmond Maestri, “Naissance et premiers développements d’un outil économique: Le chemin de fer de la Réunion,” in Fragments pour une histoire des économies et sociétés de plantation à la Réunion, ed. Claude Wanquet (St. Denis: Université de la Réunion, 1989); Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business, and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line, and Southern Africa (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1986); William Ashworth, A Short History of the International Economy since 1850 (London: Longman, 1987), 70. 14. As is demonstrated, for example, in Africa by the cases of Egypt and Madagascar. The issue of Egypt is complex: see, for example, Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Mineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jean Batou, “Attitudes of State and Society towards Industrialization in the Nineteenth-Century Third World: The Cases of Egypt and Paraguay,” paper presented to the Third World Economic History and Development Conference (University of Manchester, September, 13–15, 1991); Afaf Lufti al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The attempted industrialization of Madagascar, while little known, is more clear-cut: see Gwyn Campbell, “An Industrial Experiment in Pre-colonial Madagascar, 1825–1861,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 3 (1991): 525–59. 15. John D. Durand, “A Long-Range View of World Population Growth,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 369 (1967): 2. 16. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976), 268–69; Yoshihiro Tsubouchi and Keiichiro Matsushita, “On the High Population Growth Rates of the Past in South Sumatra,” Southeast Asian Studies 19, no. 1 (1981): 54–61; Ethan Goffman, “China and the Path to Environmental Sustainability,” August 2007, http:// www.csa.com/discoveryguides/china/review2.php#v2; Anthony Reid, “South-East Population History and the Colonial Impact,” in Asian Population History, ed. Cuirong Liu, Ts’ui-jung Liu, James Lee, David Sven Reher, Osamu Saito, and Wang Feng (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 45–62. 17. Sumit Guha, “The Population History of South Asia from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: An Exploration,” in Cuirong et al., Asian Population History, 63; Reid, “South-East Population History,” 45–62; Bipan Chandra, “The Colonial Legacy,” in The Indian Economy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Bimal Jalan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993), 11; Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., Times Atlas of World History (London: Times Books, 1978), 208.

Servitude and Labor

39

18. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 268–69; Goffman, “China and the Path to Environmental Sustainability.” 19. Guha, “Population History of South Asia,” 74. 20. Chandra, “The Colonial Legacy,” 11. 21. P. C. Smith, “The Components of Population Change in 19th Century Southeast Asia: Village Data from the Philippines,” Working Paper 6 (Honolulu: East-West Population Institute, February 1981); Tsubouchi and Matsushita, “Population Growth Rates in South Sumatra,” 54–61; Peter Boomgaard, “Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 83–96; Reid, “South-East Population History,” 45–62. 22. Reid, “South-East Population History,” 52 23. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, eds., African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, I987); Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 206; Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of African History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 80, 90. For Madagascar, see Gwyn Campbell, “The State and Pre-colonial Demographic History: The Case of Nineteenth Century Madagascar,” Journal of African History 32, no. 3 (1991): 415–45. 24. Patrick Manning, “The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System,” Social Science History 14, no. 2 (1990): 258 (see also 255–79); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Martin Klein, “Simulating the African Slave Trade,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 28, no. 2 (1994): 296–99. For Indonesia, see, for example, Reid, “South-East Population History,” 52. 25. J.-P. Chrétien, “Démographie et écologie en Afrique orientale à la fin du XIXe siècle: une crise exceptionnelle?,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 27 (1987): 43–59, 225; Yvan-Georges Paillard, “Les recherches démographiques sur Madagascar au début de l’époque coloniale et les documents de ‘l’AMI,’ ” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 27 (1987): 17–42; see also Ralph Austen, African Economic History (London: James Currey and Heinemann, 1987), 67. 26. Campbell, “The State and Pre-colonial Demographic History.” 27. Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History (London: Heinemann, 1977), esp. ch. 1; Gwyn Campbell, “Disease, Cattle, and Slaves: The Development of Trade between Natal and Madagascar, 1875–1904,” African Economic History 19 (1990–91): 105–16. 28. For Africa, see Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution; Kopytoff and Miers, Slavery in Africa; Paul E Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Meillassoux, Anthropology of Slavery; Manning, Slavery and African Life. For Asia and the Indian Ocean World, see Campbell, Structure of Slavery; Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency; Watson, Asian and African Systems of Slavery; Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Klein, Breaking the Chains; Clarence-Smith, Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade. 29. Bok Rae Kim, “Nobi: A Korean System of Slavery,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 155–68; Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery,’ ”

40

gwyn campbell

60–61; Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 12, 29; Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and Fanompoana: The Structure of Forced Labour in Imerina (Madagascar), 1790–1861,” Journal of African History 29, no. 2 (1988): 474–75. 30. Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 12. 31. Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; Karine Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations in Indochina from the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 129–42; Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries),” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 143–54; see also James Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems of Slavery, 228–36. 32. Martin Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, ed. Klein, 11; Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude, 25–26. 33. Gwyn Campbell, introduction to Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2005), 15. 34. Kim, “Nobi”; Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 12. 35. See, for example, Gwyn Campbell, “Indians and Commerce in Madagascar, 1869–1896,” University of the Witwatersrand, African Studies Seminar Paper 345 (1993). 36. Campbell, “Industrial Experiment.” 37. See, for example, Ken Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 13–18, 42; Toledano, State and Society. 38. Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; see also Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude, 2–4, 26; Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 13; Jack Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” in Watson, Asian and African Systems of Slavery, 36–37; Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, 8–13, 39. Boomgaard, “Human Capital.” 40. Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” 21, 32. 41. See Joseph Miller, “A Theme in Variations: A Historical Schema of Slaving in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 169–94. 42. Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 25–26. 43. Suzanne Miers, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Saudi Arabia and the Arab States on the Persian Gulf, 1921–63,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 120–36. 44. Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 25–26. 45. See Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery,’ ” 55–57, 64–66. 46. See, for example, Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 14. 47. James Francis Warren, “The Structure of Slavery in the Sulu Zone in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 111–28; Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” 26–27. 48. See, for example, Andrew Turton, “Violent Capture of People for Exchange on Karen-Tai Borders in the 1830s,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 69–82; Boomgaard, “Human Capital.”

Servitude and Labor

41

49. Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” in Clarence-Smith, Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 60, 65; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10. 50. Cooper, Plantation Slavery; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Currey, 1987). 51. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, “Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System: Submission, Servitude, Escape and Collusion,” in Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape, ed. Jaschok and Miers (London: Zed Books, 1994), 19–20; James Francis Warren, “Chinese Prostitution in Singapore: Recruitment and Brothel Organisation,” in Jaschok and Miers, Women and Chinese Patriarchy, 77–105. 52. Indrani Chatterjee, “Abolition by Denial: The South Asian Example,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 150–68; see also Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude, 32. 53. Campbell, introduction to Abolition and Its Aftermath. 54. Miers, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Saudi Arabia”; Abdul Sheriff, “The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 103–19; Martin Klein, “The Emancipation of Slaves in the Indian Ocean,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 198–218. 55. Richard B. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 33–50; Warren, “The Structure of Slavery”; Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations”; Edward A. Alpers, “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1750–1962,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 51–68; Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery”; Pedro Machado, “A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, c. 1730–1830,” in Campbell, Structure of Slavery, 17–32; Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; Nigel Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise in the Cape Colony,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 29–49; Gwyn Campbell, “Unfree Labour and the Significance of Abolition in Madagascar, c. 1825–97,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 66–82; Sheriff, “The Slave Trade and Its Fallout.” 56. See, for example, Robert Ross, “The Dutch on the Swahili Coast, 1776–1779: Two Slaving Journals,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (1986): 304–60, and 19, no. 3 (1986): 479–506; Richard B. Allen, “The Constant Demand of the French: The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of African History 49 (2008): 43–72; Piet Westra and James Armstrong, eds., Slave Trade with Madagascar: The Journals of the Cape Slaver Leijdsman, 1715 (Cape Town: Africana, 2006). 57. Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 228; Allen, “Constant Demand,” 64–65. 58. Westra and Armstrong, Slave Trade with Madagascar, 13, 15, 25, 33, 35. 59. Allen, “Mascarene Slave-Trade,” 39. 60. Ralph A. Austen, “The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in Clarence-Smith, Economics of the

42

gwyn campbell

Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 29, 31, 33; Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory, 226; Campbell, Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 238; Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa: Changing Patterns of International Trade to the Later 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 151, 185–87; Allen, “Mascarene Slave-Trade,” 38–39; José Capela and Eduardo Medeiros, O Tráfico de Escravos de Moçambique para as Ilhas do Índico 1720–1902 (Maputo: Departamento de História da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, 1987), 24–25, 41; Gerhard Liesegang, “A First Look at the Import and Export Trade of Mozambique, 1800–1914,” in Figuring African Trade: Proceedings of the Symposium on the Quantification and Structure of the Import and Export and Long Distance Trade in Africa, 1800–1913, ed. Gerhard Liesegang, Helma Pasch, and Adam Jones (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer 1986), 463; Kjekshus, Ecology Control, 14–16. 61. J.-M. Filliot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer, 1974), 157–59; Campbell, Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 55–56, 238; Allen, “Mascarene Slave-Trade,” 35, 38. 62. Edward Balfour, The Cyclopædia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia: Commercial, Industrial, and Scientific; Products of the Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal Kingdoms, Useful Arts and Manufactures (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1885), 3:674. 63. Miller, “A Theme in Variations”; Watson, “Transactions in People,” 235. 64. Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations”; Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, 25; Suzanne Miers, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in Ethiopia,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 3 (1977): 257–88. 65. Kim, “Nobi.” 66. B. J. Terwiel, “Bondage and Slavery in Early Nineteenth Century Siam,” in Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 118–37; Andrew Turton, “Thai Institutions of Slavery,” in Formes extrêmes de dependence: Contributions à l’étude de l’esclavage en Asie du Sud-Est, ed. Georges Condominas (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998), 411–57; 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 Klein, Breaking the Chains, 83–111. 67. Campbell, Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 112–19, 131, 213–18. 68. Anthony Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia,” in Klein, Breaking the Chains, 64–82 ; Boomgaard, “Human Capital.” 69. Toledano, State and Society, 6–7; Batou, “Attitudes of State,” 14; Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 10, 11, 86–93, 96. 70. Campbell, “Slavery and Fanompoana.” 71. Campbell, “Unfree Labour”; Kim, “Nobi”; Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 18–19. 72. Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise.” 73. Clarence-Smith, Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 4–5. 74. Clare Anderson, “The Bel Ombre Rebellion: Indian Convicts in Mauritius, 1815–53,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 50–65; see also Samuel Pasfield Oliver, “Sir Robert Townsend Farquhar and the Malagasy Slave Trade,” Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine 15 (1891): 319–21.

Servitude and Labor

43

75. Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 76. Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise”; P. P. Shirodkar, “India and Mozambique: Centuries Old Interaction,” Purabhilekh-Puratatva 6, no. 1 (1988): 51. 77. Anderson, “Bel Ombre Rebellion.” 78. Campbell, “Unfree Labour.” 79. Anderson, “Bel Ombre Rebellion.” 80. Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise.” 81. Worden, “Indian Ocean Slavery and Its Demise”; see also Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 82. Chandra, “The Colonial Legacy,” 11; see also Allen, “Mascarene Slave-Trade”; Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude, 5–7, 27; Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, 20–21. 83. See, for example, on Indian indentured labor, Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984); Sudhansu Bimal Mookherrji, The Indenture System in Mauritius, 1837–1915 (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1962); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers; Hubert Gerbeau, “Engagees and Coolies on Réunion Island: Slavery’s Masks and Freedom’s Constraints,” in Piet C. Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1986), 209–36; Marina Carter and Hubert Gerbeau, “Covert Slaves and Coveted Coolies in the Early Nineteenth Century Mascareignes,” Slavery and Abolition 9, no. 3 (1988): 193–207; Keya Dasgupta, “Plantation Labour in the Brahmaputra Valley: Regional Enclaves in a Colonial Context,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 169–79. 84. A. D. Blue, “Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 10 (1970): 83. 85. Ibid., 80. 86. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Islam and the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 137–49; Michael Salman, “The Meaning of Slavery: The Genealogy of ‘an Insult to the American Government and to the Filipino People,’ ” in ibid., 180–97. 87. Omar A. Eno, “The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath Stigma: The Case of the Bantu/Jareer People on the Benadir Coast of Southern Somalia,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 83–89. 88. Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein, introduction to Slavery in Colonial Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1998), ed. Miers and Klein, 6; see also Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery,’ ” 73–74. 89. Miers, “Slavery and the Slave Trade”; see also Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery,’ ” 72; Miers and Klein, introduction to Slavery in Colonial Africa, 1–2, 4–5. 90. Klein, “Emancipation of Slaves”; Boomgaard, “Human Capital”; Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations”; see also Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 34; Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, 24.

44

gwyn campbell

91. Miers, “Slavery and the Slave Trade”; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The 1848 Abolitionist Farma-n: A Step towards Ending the Slave Trade in Iran,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 94–102; Klein, “Emancipation of Slaves”; Clarence-Smith, “Islam and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” 92. One of these was Madagascar, where abolition was declared in 1896; see Mervyn Brown, A History of Madagascar (London: Tunnacliffe, 1995), 233. 93. Kim, “Nobi.” 94. Klein, “Emancipation of Slaves.” 95. Reid, introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 11. 96. Patnaik, introduction to Chains of Servitude, 29–30. 97. Ibid., 30–31. 98. Chatterjee, “Abolition by Denial”; Klein, “Emancipation of Slaves”; Salman, “Meaning of Slavery.” 99. Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations”; Turton, “Violent Capture of People”; Klein, introduction to Breaking the Chains, 23. 100. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 13–14; Miers and Klein, introduction to Slavery in Colonial Africa, 12.

3

On Becoming a British Lake: Piracy, Slaving, and British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century edward a. alpers

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Indian Ocean was still very much a contested maritime space. Beginning with the great Ming voyages led by Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century, various powers had sought to establish regional hegemony on its waters, with only limited success. First after the Ming to attempt maritime dominance was the Kingdom of Portugal, which established a militant thalassocracy in the sixteenth century that did not survive challenges by the Omani Arabs, the Dutch, and the British in the seventeenth century. Eventually joined by the French as a lesser contender for Indian Ocean supremacy later in the same century, these imperial states claimed significant footholds around the rim, or on the islands, of the Indian Ocean region right through the eighteenth century. No one could claim real superiority over its waters, although Michael Pearson suggests that British naval superiority was unchallenged by the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763.1 Indeed, not only did the navies and merchants of these competing powers struggle against one another for maritime domination, but each was challenged by local or subregional indigenous naval rivals. These challengers included the Caribbean pirates, who made the coast of eastern Madagascar their base of operations in the last decades of the seventeenth and first decades of the eighteenth centuries; their Zana-Malata and Betsimisaraka descendants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the Omanis in the Arabian Sea and in eastern Africa

45

46

edward a. alpers

north of the scattered Portuguese possessions; the Qawasim, an important Arab tribe inhabiting what the British called the “Pirate Coast,” who had their main port at Ras al-Khayma, in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, in the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth; the Sidis of Janjira along the western coast of India from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth; and the several regional competitors for control of the sea-lanes through the Strait of Malacca and in the Java and South China Seas.2 Many of the indigenous rivals to the European powers were characterized as pirates, but however one thinks of them, the cumulative effect of their activities was to render control of the sea-lanes precarious at best.3 Furthermore, in addition to these competing global and subregional players, the Indian Ocean was crisscrossed with trading networks, some of which were dependent upon the imperial powers, others of which operated independently of them, even where they could not ignore them. This chapter explores the beginnings of how the Indian Ocean eventually became a British “lake” over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century and how that imperial transformation affected Indian Ocean trade, but especially the trade in enslaved labor. Politically, this transformation began with the extension of the Napoleonic Wars into the Indian Ocean. At the end of the eighteenth century, with the defeat of the Netherlands by France in 1795, Great Britain—already well along its way to dominating the South Asian subcontinent—seized upon the enforced alliance between its main European and Indian Ocean rivals to take Cape Town, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Java, and Malacca from the Dutch, and the Mascarene Islands of Bourbon (La Réunion) and Île de France (Mauritius) from the French. Twenty years later, in 1815, the British controlled the Cape, Ceylon, Mauritius (Bourbon was returned to France by the Treaty of Paris), and Malacca, whose economic significance was almost immediately reduced by the occupation of Singapore in 1819. Thus, two decades into the nineteenth century the basic framework of British domination in the eastern Indian Ocean was established, with the Dutch limited to Indonesia and the French an afterthought.4 The situation in the western Indian Ocean was not, however, resolved. Although the British controlled the Cape and thereby dominated the seaborne route linking the Atlantic world to that of the Indian Ocean, they were at that time resolutely not interested in controlling the coast of eastern Africa, limiting themselves to cordial relations with the Comorian rulers of the island of Nzwani (Anjouan), where ships belonging to the British East India Company had been stopping to refresh their supplies since the seventeenth century.5 As late as the mid-1820s, for example, His Majesty’s Government refused the offer by Captain W. F. W. Owen of the Royal Navy, who was commissioned

On Becoming a British Lake

47

to undertake a major surveying project of the African coasts, to declare a protectorate over Mombasa.6 Meanwhile, Madagascar remained independent of foreign domination, although not influence, until French conquest in 1895. On the surface, although the Portuguese still clung to their coastal enclaves along the Mozambique coast and up the Zambezi River, there really was no dominant power along the entire East African littoral at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The same could be said of the Persian Gulf, where the Qasimi pirates, as they were regarded by the British, challenged both Omani and British shipping. Gradually, however, two factors changed this situation. The first of these was the Anglo-Omani alliance founded on the domination of Gujarati and Kutch merchants based at Bombay and Muscat and designed to eliminate the French as imperial rivals in the Gulf.7 The second was the British determination to abolish both piracy and the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bombay (now Mumbai) had supplanted Cambay (Khambhat) and Surat as the principal trading emporium on the northwestern coast of India. British commerce depended not only on the fortunes of the faltering East India Company, but also, more specifically, on the flourishing trade in Indian textiles and other products into the western Indian Ocean. Here the dominant merchants and vessels were South Asian, most especially Gujarati of many different sects and communities, but also merchants from Kutch, which lay outside the reach of British domination. At the same time, a large community of some 1,000–1,200 Gujarati merchants was established at Muscat, where their business and their capital provided the financial backbone of the al-Busaidi family, which ruled Oman.8 When the youthful Sayyid Said bin Sultan came to power in 1804, his interests were already intimately linked with these merchants and, ultimately, to the British in India; eventually, his fortune would be also. Indeed, Gujarati merchants enjoyed a special place in the political economy of an emerging Omani empire in the subregion, and as British subjects they became the stalking horse for a British imperial presence in both the Persian Gulf and eastern Africa north of the Portuguese possessions. Already by this time, Omani customs collection, which was farmed out on five-year contracts to the highest bidder, was in the hands of a Kutchi Hindu trader named Mowjee Bhimani, whose family maintained control of the customs farm at Muscat into the 1840s. No less important was the Khoja (a Shia Muslim sect) family of Shivji Topan, which was originally based at the port of Mandvi in Kutch. Sayyid Said was intimately connected with the Shivjis through bonds of friendship and indebtedness, and in 1818 he granted control of the customs farm at Zanzibar to Ebji Shivji. Similar to the case for Muscat, the Zanzibar customs remained

48

edward a. alpers

in the hands of the Shivji family for the remainder of the half century, indeed into the late 1880s.9 By the beginning of the century, however, Great Britain had already established itself as a dominating foreign power in Oman by virtue of a treaty concluded with (some would say imposed on) Said’s predecessor in 1798, which granted the British the right to build a fortified factory at Muscat and forbade similar footholds by their French and Dutch rivals.10 Whatever British imperial motives may have been, Reda Bhacker argues that the Omani reasons for consenting to this treaty lay primarily in the ruling house’s interest in protecting its commercial linkages with numerous ports under British domination around the western Indian Ocean.11 For Bhacker, the treaty represented “the first nail in the coffin on Omani independence of action in both the trade and the politics of the Indian Ocean,” while for Abdul Sheriff, it cemented “the compradorial character of the Omani state.”12 In the Persian Gulf, the British struggled to protect their shipping against Qasimi attacks there and in the northern reaches of the Arabian Sea, and also to support their Omani allies for control of the Strait of Hormuz and the eastern Arabian coastline. The Qawasim ships ranged from the gulf to the Makran coast of what is today Iran and Pakistan, raiding East India Company and native vessels indiscriminately and disrupting British designs to expand their control from Bombay into the gulf, in particular by plundering shipping destined for Muscat. The Qawasim were both opponents of the Omanis for control of the gulf as well as allies of the fundamentalist Wahhabis of central Arabia, who were challenging Omani control of the peninsula’s inland frontiers, with particular effectiveness among the northern tribes of Oman, who, like the Wahhabis, were Sunni Muslims, in contradistinction to the Ibadi Muslim rulers based at Muscat.13 In this context, British attempts to control Qasimi maritime violence can be understood as a reflection of the political and commercial rivalries in the gulf. In December 1819, the British seized the Qasimi headquarters at Ras al-Khayma,14 and in 1820 they imposed a General Treaty of Peace, Article 9 of which joined piracy with the slave trade, the object of the major humanitarian and international political campaign of the expanding British Empire, in the following terms: “The carrying off of slaves (men, women, and children) from the coast of Africa or elsewhere, and the transporting them in vessels, is plunder and piracy; and the friendly Arabs shall do nothing of this nature.”15 Great Britain had no interest in obtaining command over the Arabian Peninsula at this time, its only concern being, as noted by Lord Curzon at the end of the century, “to secure the maritime peace of the Gulf.”16 By 1853 the British had imposed a Perpetual Maritime Truce, from which the Trucial Coast, now the United Arab Emirates, took its name.

On Becoming a British Lake

49

Thus, whether the Qawasim were pirates or not, they were certainly political rivals of the Omanis and their British allies. Furthermore, when Sayyid Said followed the logic and encouragement of his Indian trading partners and first visited East Africa in 1826, he had already been obliged by the British to sign a treaty (the so-called Moresby Treaty) in 1822 that had been initiated by the governor of Mauritius, Robert T. Farquhar. This treaty prohibited trading in slaves to Europeans, empowered British seizures of transgressors, and limited the range of Omani slave trading to a line that ran from Cape Delgado, which marked the nominal boundary between Omani and Portuguese jurisdiction along the East African coast, and Diu Head on the Kathiawar Peninsula in Gujarat (see map 3). Although the British had been actively engaged in successfully asserting their influence in the northwestern Indian Ocean, the southwestern Indian Ocean remained outside any effective British influence during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, although it was not for lack of trying. British antislavery efforts focused on two protagonists in those years, the Merina kingdom of highland Madagascar and the Portuguese at Mozambique. The endeavors on Madagascar, initially the more successful, focused on eliminating the slave trade from eastern Madagascar to the Mascarenes, but particularly in Britishcontrolled Mauritius. The story of the trials and tribulations of Farquhar, the first British governor of Mauritius (December 1810–May 1823) with respect to slavery, which was not abolished until 1835, and the illegal slave trade on that island colony is well known. Faced with determined opposition from the French plantation owners on the island, and with the trade’s main sources of supply from the eastern coasts of both Madagascar and eastern Africa still lying outside British influence, Farquhar was caught between those who drove the illegal slave trade and those abolitionists who charged him with turning a blind eye to the trade.17 Unable to deal directly with the French authorities at Bourbon, where slavery remained legal until 1848 and where a vigorous illegal slave trade flourished, Farquhar focused his attention on Radama I, the ruler (1793–1828) of the Merina kingdom of highland Madagascar, which exercised a certain degree of control over the eastern shores of the Great Island. Not unlike Anglo-Omani diplomatic dynamics of the period, Radama’s ambition to extend Merina suzerainty over as much of Madagascar as possible neatly complemented Farquhar’s desire to suppress the slave trade to Mauritius from the main port of Tamatave (modern Toamasina). Accordingly, in exchange for British training of both his army and other elements that supported his state, Radama agreed to end the slave trade in his realm in a treaty with Great Britain signed in 1817.18 However ineffective this treaty may have been at suppressing the slave trade from

50

edward a. alpers

eastern Madagascar, it completely overlooked the traffic that continued, and was rising, across the Mozambique Channel, including the littoral of western Madagascar, which, until Imerina conquered the Sakalava town of Majunga (modern Mahajanga) in 1825, remained entirely outside the orbit of the highland empire. Furthermore, it took the British more than two decades to recognize the threat posed by the series of devastating maritime slaving raids launched by the Betsimisaraka from eastern Madagascar onto the Comoro Islands and the East Africa coast beginning in 1785, which, after being augmented by Sakalava war canoes, did not end until 1816/1817.19 Gwyn Campbell notes, for example, that in 1809 the British stationed a ship off the Mozambique coast in response to the Malagasy marauders and that it was only in 1817, at a time when the raids had already been ended, that “the Supreme Court of Calcutta petitioned Robert Farquhar, the British governor of Mauritius, to end them.”20 At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the British, with strongholds at the Cape and Mauritius, a foothold on Nzwani, a presence in Madagascar, and an ancient alliance with Portugal, were the only European power to exercise even nominal control over the coast of eastern Africa. No doubt they entertained hopes of replicating the influence that they enjoyed through their alliance with Oman in the northwestern Indian Ocean over the region of the southwestern Indian Ocean. But this vision was not achieved during the early decades of the nineteenth century. First, the British representative at the Merina court was expelled from the island by Queen Ranavolana in 1829, and shortly thereafter the property of the London Missionary Society was confiscated. Then, despite putting much pressure on Portugal to exercise its sovereign claims to the Mozambique coast and abolish the slave trade, Great Britain utterly failed to suppress the slave trade in the Mozambique Channel during this period. As is well known, the Portuguese, who were not at all interested in abolishing the slave trade, thwarted British efforts to bring them into line until midcentury.21 Indeed, the flourishing trade was not stopped definitively until the very beginning of the twentieth century.22 Before the development of plantation economies along the Swahili coast (in the Mascarenes and later in Zanzibar) and in the Persian Gulf, the slave trade did not, however, dominate regional or international trade in the western Indian Ocean. Neither, of course, had the products of slave labor—sugar from the Mascarenes, copra and cloves from Zanzibar and Pemba, grain from the Swahili coast, dates and pearls from the Persian Gulf—yet entered the commercial circuits of the western Indian Ocean in as significant volumes and values as they would later in the nineteenth century.23 In these early decades, African ivory still dominated the export market of the western Indian Ocean in exchange, primarily, for manufactured textiles from western India. But as

On Becoming a British Lake

51

I have suggested elsewhere, a very active regional market in foodstuffs both paralleled the luxury trade and the traffic in bonded labor and moved along much more localized, shorter-distance networks that crisscrossed the entire region.24 Moreover, different elements of maritime trade provided opportunities for a varied cast of characters to participate in the trade. The ivory trade was dominated on the export side by South Asian merchant capitalists and shipowners, with Portuguese and Omani authorities raking off a percentage of the profits, yet it also provided opportunities for African hunters and traders, who dominated production and the continental carrying trade, to engage as partners in this luxury business.25 Similarly, the maritime transportation of foodstuffs was mainly in the hands of local Swahili, Arabs, and Indians—often occupying different roles in the same ship—and by some French merchant shippers on the eastern side of Madagascar, but production was equally controlled by African and Malagasy agriculturalists and pastoralists who produced the food crops and raised the livestock that was exported across the region. The trading networks that were both a consequence of these exchanges and the sinews upon which they were constructed also included deeply rooted familial, ethnic, and religious ties.26 Like the Persian Gulf in being a regionally distinct arm of the western Indian Ocean, the Red Sea was only peripheral to British control of the wider maritime basin until Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 raised the stakes. A year later the British momentarily occupied the uninhabited volcanic island of Perim, some ninety miles west of Aden off the coast of Yemen in the Bab-el-Mandeb. Notwithstanding the continuing commercial interests of the East India Company in the coffee trade at Mocha, it was not until 1839, after taking possession of Aden, which had not been of any commercial value for a very long time, that Great Britain staked its claim to the northwest corner of the Indian Ocean.27 From a commercial point of view, Red Sea trade languished during the early decades of the century, so there is not a very good picture of its activity. From studies of eighteenth-century Mocha and nineteenth-century Massawa, where trade experienced a revival from the 1850s, however, we can get a sense of the extensive links between the Red Sea in general and the northwestern Indian Ocean.28 What is revealed in these studies, and even more so in the recent literature on the Hadrami diaspora, is that extensive ethnic networks built on trade were also major vehicles for cultural exchange, in particular for energizing Islam. The Hadrami network, in particular, extended from southeastern Yemen down to Zanzibar and the Comoro Islands, across to the Deccan, and further east to Indonesia.29 British control of the western Indian Ocean was still evolving in the early decades of the century, but by the time that the Bombay government occupied

52

edward a. alpers

Aden in 1839, the final footing of the foundation that already included Cape Town, Port Louis in Mauritius, and Bombay—with Durban (1843) and Karachi (1839–43) soon to follow—was clearly in place. A derelict place by the time of the British occupation, Aden was initially valued as a fueling base between Bombay and the Red Sea ports, while the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave the port city a strategic significance that it retains to this day. British domination at Muscat and, with its ups and downs, at Zanzibar, where the prickly first British consul, Atkins Hamerton, imposed a second and more restrictive anti-slave-trade treaty on Sayyid Said bin Sultan in 1845, more or less completed the edifice. Although the French occupied the small island of Nosy Bé in 1840, and claimed Mayotte in 1841, later to be followed by the rest of the Comoros and, at the end of the century, by Madagascar, the essential control exercised by Great Britain was not in doubt by midcentury. Matters were not altogether different in the eastern Indian Ocean. Great Britain seized Ceylon from the Dutch in 1795, as they initially had the Cape, and over the course of the Napoleonic Wars pushed the Dutch out of the rest of their Indian Ocean maritime empire.30 At war’s end, however, driven by concerns to secure Dutch support against the French in Europe, the British returned Dutch possessions in the Indonesian archipelago by the Treaty of London (1814), adding Java in 1816. Although the British had established Penang, on the northwestern Malay Peninsula, as a free port as early as 1786, they had effectively surrendered control of the critical chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca. Indeed, since it was incapable of providing a meaningful base for British domination of the sea route from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to China, they began to withdraw from Penang in 1811. Because of the growing significance of the China trade (mainly in tea and opium), this situation made no sense at all, and the solution, from an imperial and commercial perspective, was the sudden, unexpected occupation of Singapore for the East India Company by Thomas Stamford Raffles in 1819. So while the Dutch turned increasingly to nurturing and exploiting a plantation economy on Sumatra and Java, the British sought to secure the sea-lanes to China from their rapidly growing base at Singapore. The final link in this imperial process during the first half of the century was the occupation of Hong Kong in 1841 and the securing of access to the five so-called Treaty Ports a year later. Control of Singapore, previously an obscure island in a sea of thousands of islands, gave Great Britain a dominant position in what Gerald Graham calls “a focal sea area . . . where several or many sea routes are compelled by geography to converge.”31 The economic impact was virtually immediate. George Windsor Earl describes Jakarta in 1832 as “formerly visited by numbers of large junks from China and Siam, and by prahus from all parts of the Archipelago; but from the

On Becoming a British Lake

53

establishment of the British settlement at Singapore, the perfect freedom of commerce enjoyed at that place has attracted the greater part of the native trade, while that formerly carried on by junks between Jakarta and China has totally ceased.”32 The capture of Hong Kong was no less precipitous, but as Graham notes, “to the traders and merchants concerned, it was a necessary act of violence which nailed the terminus of the Cape to Canton route.”33 Yet how effective was this control with respect to the trading economy of the eastern Indian Ocean? The British East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade in 1833, which paved the way to a more efficient system of commerce for the burgeoning British capitalist economy. But it also created more space for regional merchants to engage in this increasingly lucrative business, which now came to include a wide range of different commodities from earlier eras.34 Although Indian Ocean merchants never managed to trade beyond the wider region itself, they continued to pursue important intra–Indian Ocean business, including the trade in foodstuffs and even in leeches, which were critical for local medical practices.35 For the British, however, the biggest challenge to control of the eastern trade was piracy. The South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca have a long history of piracy, which remained a serious threat to imperial control—British, Dutch, and Spanish (from the Philippines)—throughout the nineteenth century. Seasonal attacks on European and Chinese shipping, the latter of which continued to be important in regional trade, posed a constant threat as fleets of prahus easily outpaced and outmaneuvered the slower-sailing merchant vessels of the Europeans and Chinese. Like piracy in the Gulf during the Qawasim challenge to Omani, Gujarati, and British Indian shipping, its counterpart in this vast region of the eastern Indian Ocean shared the characteristic of being intimately linked to regional politics. That is to say, pirates were usually neither an independent force nor independent bandits. Rather, they were more generally an arm of local potentates, some of whom began as pirates, others of whom embraced maritime raiding as a way to expand their domains. The Chinese pirate Cheng Yao-I (also known as Cheng I) led a major pirate confederacy numbering tens of thousands of members around Canton in the first decade of the century. It disrupted imperial Chinese control of trade, captured European vessels, and held their passengers and crews for ransom. His activities and those of his widow and successor, Shih Hsiang-ku (Shih Yang), eventually forced the Qing dynasty to conclude a truce and to grant her immunity from prosecution.36 In the Malacca and Singapore Straits and the Java Sea, pirates came from several ethnic groups connected to specific local polities across the Indonesian and southern Philippine archipelagos. As the volume and value of trade moving through the straits increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, piracy increased

54

edward a. alpers

accordingly. Furthermore, European intervention created a sense of grievance, legitimizing piracy among Malay elites. Although the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 settling the division of European territory and maritime space in insular Southeast Asia included a strongly worded clause committing both nations to the suppression of piracy and to the wiping out of slavery and regional slave markets, the 1830s marked a decided upswing in the incidence of piracy.37 Indeed, piracy was not effectively eliminated for many decades afterward. Nor were the slave trade and slavery eliminated during this period, any more than they were in the western Indian Ocean.38 Most accounts of British imperialism in the Indian Ocean focus on the decades after 1850; Graham, for example, observed that “the forty years that followed Napoleon’s defeat were a period of dormant peace which blanketed military initiative and encouraged neglect.”39 Yet it is clear that the basic structure of British domination of the entire region was secured as a consequence of piecemeal activities of the decade and a half preceding midcentury. British interests were well established in both the western and eastern reaches of this vast oceanic expanse, and Great Britain was poised to complete its domination of the entire region over the next half century. As both Kenneth McPherson and Michael Pearson point out, this transformation was accomplished by a combination of governmental support, technological development in shipping through the change from sail to steam power, the mapping of the ocean and its complex littoral, the development of modern deepwater ports, the extension of maritime domination to continental empire, and, finally, the accompanying control over production for export.40 What is noted here is the degree to which imperial politics and suppression of slavery and the slave trade, often incorporated into the struggle against piracy, remained a central pillar of British policy throughout the entire century. If the Indian Ocean were to become a British lake, it was intended to be a body of water in which antislavery reigned supreme.

Notes 1. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 197. 2. For overviews of the pirates of Madagascar and their descendants, see Hubert Jules Deschamps, Les pirates à Madagascar aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2nd ed. (Paris: BergerLevrault, 1972); Mervyn Brown, A History of Madagascar (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1995, 2000), 64–74; for important corrections see also Arne Bialuschewski, “Pirates, Slavers, and the Indigenous Populations in Madagascar, c. 1690–1715,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 401–25; Stephen Ellis, “Tom and Toakafo: The Betsimisaraka Kingdom and State Formation in Madagascar, 1715–1750,” Journal of African History 48 (2007): 439–55. For the Omanis, see Patricia

On Becoming a British Lake

55

Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986). For the Sidis of Janjira, see Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod, eds., Habshi Amarat: African Elites in India (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2006), 176–217. See below for the Qawasim, China Sea, and Southeast Asian examples. 3. For differing perceptions of pirates, see Patricia Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 293–319; Lakshmi Subramanian, “Of Pirates and Potentates: Maritime Jurisdiction and the Construction of Piracy in the Indian Ocean,” UTS Review 6, no. 2 (2006): 14–23; James Francis Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes, and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno- and Social History of Southeast Asia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008), 93–119, especially 100. 4. Gerald S. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise, 1810–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 1–109, 329–401. 5. Henri Daniel Liszkowski, Mayotte et les Comores: Escales sur la route des Indes aux XVe et XVIIIe siècles (Mamoudzou, Mayotte: Éditions du Baobab, 2000), 140–47; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 13–33. 6. Reginald Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders from the Earliest Times to the Death of Seyyid Said in 1856 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 217–70; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 203–16; John Milner Gray, The British at Mombasa, 1824–1826: Being the History of Captain Owen’s Protectorate, Transactions of the Kenya History Society 1 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1957). 7. For details see Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders, 10ff; C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast, 1796–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 101–18; M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992), 31–44. 8. J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 13–15. See also Peter Reeves, “Sindhi and Gujarati Merchants in Oman,” in The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 229. 9. Bhacker, Trade and Empire, 71–72. 10. Risso, Oman and Muscat, 55–57, 75–77, 139–57. 11. Bhacker, Trade and Empire, 32–37. 12. Ibid., 33; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 21–22. 13. Risso, Oman and Muscat, 169–82; Bhacker, Trade and Empire, 31–52, 88–92; Christopher M. Davidson, Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 7–14. 14. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 139–66; Pearson, Indian Ocean, 198; for more on the Qawasim and their center of power at Ras al-Khayma, see Risso, Oman and Muscat, 61–65, 172–74, 177–82; for a dissenting view of the Qawasim as pirates and details on the destruction of Ras al-Khayma, see Sultan Muhammad al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Croom Helm, 1986), especially 185–232.

56

edward a. alpers

15. The treaty is reproduced in Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1877), 1:364; the author specifically draws attention to the significance of this article on 365. 16. Quoted in Pearson, Indian Ocean, 199. For more on Curzon and the gulf in British imperial policy in the Indian Ocean, see Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 36–71. 17. See Anthony J. Barker, Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810–1833: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Vijaya Teelock, Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in 19th Century Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1998), 46–65. For the illegal slave trade to the Mascarenes, see Hubert Gerbeau, “Quelques aspects de la traite illégale des esclaves à l’Ile Bourbon au XIXe siècle,” in Mouvements de populations dans l’océan indien (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1979), 273–308; Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: the Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 42 (2001): 91–116. 18. For the British side, see Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean, 58–72. For the perspective from Imerina, see Gwyn Campbell, Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 61–78; Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000), 206, 222–30. 19. Jean Martin, Comores: Quatre îles entre pirates et planteurs, vol. 1, Razzias malgaches et rivalités internationales, fin XVIIIe–1875 (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1983), 81–110; Edward A. Alpers, East Africa and the Indian Ocean (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2009), 131–46. 20. Campbell, Economic History of Madagascar, 43. 21. Edward A. Alpers and Benigna Zimba, “British Abolition in Southeast Africa: The First 50 Years,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 63, nos. 1 and 2 (2009): 5–15. 22. José Capela, O Tráfico de Escravos nos Portos de Moçambique (Porto, Portugal: Edições Afrontamento, 2002), 103–33. 23. For sugar production in the Mascarenes, see Hai Quong Ho, Contribution à l’histoire économique de l’île de La Réunion, 1642–1848 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 163–66; Alfred North-Coombes, A History of Sugar Production in Mauritius (Mauritius: Mauritius Specialists, 1993), 145–46, tables 5 and 6; Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29, table 2. For copra, cloves, and grain from Zanzibar and Pemba, see Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory, 48–73. For dates and pearls from the Gulf, see Matthew Scott Hopper, “The African Presence in Arabia: Slavery, the World Economy, and the African Diaspora in Eastern Arabia, 1840–1940” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2006), 101–217. 24. Alpers, East Africa and the Indian Ocean, 23–38. 25. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory, especially 78–115, 202–8; Pedro Alberto da Silva Rupino Machado, “Gujarati Indian Merchant Networks in Mozambique, 1777–c. 1830”

On Becoming a British Lake

57

(PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2005); Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (London: Heinemann, 1975); Stephen J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2006). 26. For a broadly cast essay that explores some of these connections in the Mozambique Channel, see Alpers, East Africa and the Indian Ocean, 167–80. 27. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean, 287–91. 28. See Nancy A. Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Jonathan Miran, Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), especially 66–77. 29. Ulrike Freitag and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, eds., Hadrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden: Brill, 1997). For later periods, see Anne K. Bang, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 30. Montagu Burrows, “The Conquest of Ceylon, 1795–1815,” in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 4, ed. H. H. Dowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 400–408; K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (London: Hurst, 1981), 210–19; David Ludden, India and South Asia: A Short History (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 127; Jean Gelman Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 219–21. 31. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean, 342. 32. George Windsor Earl, The Eastern Seas; or, Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago in 1832–34 (London: Allen, 1837), 23–24, quoted in Pearson, Indian Ocean, 214. 33. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean, 391. 34. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 219. 35. Pearson, Indian Ocean, 195. 36. Dian H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Robert J. Anthony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). 37. Xu Ke, “Piracy, Seaborne Trade, and the Rivalries of Foreign Sea Powers in East and Southeast Asia, 1511 to 1839: A Chinese Perspective,” in Piracy, Maritime Terrorism, and Securing the Malacca Straits, ed. Graham Gerard Ong-Webb (Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies, 2006), 230. 38. See Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xii–xxxii; Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans–Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: A Historical Outline,” in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 286–305; Campbell,

58

edward a. alpers

“Slave Trades and the Indian Ocean World,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. John C. Hawley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 17–51; 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). 39. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean, 444. 40. McPherson, Indian Ocean, 216–44; Pearson, Indian Ocean, 199–219.

PART

Slavery, Abolition, and Islamic Law

II

This page intentionally left blank

4

Straight, No Chaser: Slavery, Abolition, and Modern Islamic Thought bernard k. freamon

It might strike the reader as odd to use an allusion to the drinking of alcohol in the title of an essay concerned with modern Islamic thought. That is not the intention. The title of this chapter is actually drawn from the world of jazz. Viewed from that perspective, it has direct relevance to the topic at hand. The words “Straight, No Chaser” are borrowed from the title of a famous jazz piece written and often performed by Thelonious Monk, the iconic jazz composer and pianist who brought great influence to the music, beginning in the early 1940s and continuing until his death in 1982. Monk’s piece has come to be a metaphor for the introduction of “modern” jazz idioms into the traditional jazz and blues forms popular in the early to mid-twentieth century. By using eloquent, economical phrasing combined with unusual rhythmic devices, long silences, angular arresting melodies, and a dissonant chord structure that became his quintessential signature, Monk forced many composers, musicians, and listeners to confront their shortcomings and the limitations of the music as it then existed. Monk’s music took no prisoners. Employing a spare and precise realism, he made no sacrifices to sentimentalism, romanticism, self-delusion, complacency, or slavish devotion to tradition. His music looked the listener straight in the eye. Although “Straight, No Chaser” carried jazz to places it had never been before, it also accepted its lot in the life and history of the music without dilution or disguise. By turning the traditional jazz

61

62

bernard k. freamon

form inside out and sometimes on its head, Monk exposed the “unvarnished truth” of the past forms and advanced everyone’s understanding of the music, lighting the way to the future. This is what I want to do here in my discussion of the history and historiography of slavery and abolition in the Muslim world and their relationship to contemporary Islamic thought.

An Impoverished Sense of History There is a rich and rapidly developing historiography in the Western academies on slavery and abolition in the Muslim world.1 Yet discussion and understanding of that history among Muslims outside these academies remain deeply impoverished and shockingly uninformed. Most Muslims, even many scholars, have little or no knowledge of the modern history of slavery and its abolition in their communities. Educational curricula in secondary schools and universities, particularly in the Arab world, rarely if ever contain any references to the topic.2 Modern Muslim intellectuals essentially retreat into denial when asked to reflect on the Muslim world’s long, deep, and continuous connection with slavery and slave-trading systems. Many Muslims possess a kind of idealized knowledge of slavery’s role in Islamic history, supplied by normatively instructive lessons from their religious history, but this knowledge is a poor surrogate for a more critical understanding. Perhaps the best example of this idealized knowledge is the tradition surrounding the emancipation of Bilal ibn Rabah.3 Every Muslim schoolchild knows the story of Bilal. An Ethiopian slave who converted to Islam while still enslaved, Bilal was rescued from certain death at the hands of his pagan Meccan owner and emancipated by Abu Bakr, a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad and later the first Caliph. Bilal became a devoted adherent of the new religion and is said to have been the first muezzin (prayer caller) in Islam, devising a formula for a summons to prayer that employed the human voice rather than a drum, horn, or bell. The Qur’an later recognized the call, its cadence and beautifully melodic sound now heard five times a day all over the world, as critically important for maintaining communal public worship.4 The Prophet Muhammad later appointed Bilal as interim governor of Medina and entrusted him with other important duties in the affairs of the new Islamic state.5 Parents, religious teachers, political leaders, and even many academics cite the example of the emancipation of Bilal and his role in early Islamic history as a kind of proof text of both Islam’s emancipatory ethic with regard to slavery and its intolerance of racial discrimination.6 Indeed, this example and others like it do in fact show that the experience of the early Muslims—an experience

Straight, No Chaser

63

that forms the revelational context for much of the Qur’an—was fundamentally emancipatory and transracial. This experience is an important backdrop to Qur’anic and prophetic discussions of human equality, and it forms the basis for the overarching egalitarian message of Islam, which became one of the hallmarks of the religion. Yet in the discourse on Islamic history among Muslims, the history of slavery, slave trading, and their abolition remains impoverished and undertheorized. Idealized set-piece religious histories, like the account of the emancipation of Bilal, have dominated Muslim historical understandings of slavery. Although important, such histories cannot assist those who seek to gain an effective understanding of their own history and its relationship to slavery-related problems in the Muslim world today, including human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, child labor, and gender and racial bias.7 This chapter is a call for a fresh realism with respect to the study of slavery in the Muslim world and its relation to Islamic law. The need for such realism is compelling. A widely held conventional wisdom posits that the shari’a, as a system of law, cannot adequately assist Muslims in grappling with the demands of modern life because it is essentially a premodern anachronism. Some want to point to Islamic law’s difficulty with slavery as a prime example of this failure. The argument is strengthened by the assertion that there was never any significant indigenous impetus for the abolition of slavery and slave trading in the Muslim world. This argument understandably posits that the thirteenhundred-year history of the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and trans-Saharan slave trades, and of widespread chattel slavery in Muslim communities, belies Islam’s much-trumpeted egalitarian message.8 Islamic egalitarianism, it is asserted, made little contribution to the closing of the slave trades and the eventual elimination of chattel slavery in most Muslim communities. Slavery in the Muslim world was never the subject of any homegrown abolitionism, the argument runs. Rather, in places where slavery was eliminated, this result was achieved largely because of pressure from Western governments, including naval antislaving patrols, diplomatic coercion, treaties, financial reward schemes for local sheikhs, colonial fiats, and the shaming exhortations of European and American abolitionist movements.9 It was therefore the hegemony of colonialism that ended slavery in the Muslim world, substituting one pervasive regime of inequality and hierarchy for another. Now that the colonialist legacy has receded, it is argued, slavery might reappear in Muslim communities. Recurrent reports suggest that chattel slavery and apartheidlike inequalities remain a problem in some Muslim communities in the Sahel and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, in the Persian Gulf, and on the Arabian Peninsula.

64

bernard k. freamon

These arguments overgeneralize, clouding our ability to gain a better understanding of the role of Islamic law in processes that led to the end of chattel slavery in the Muslim world. There is no question that the exhortations and diplomatic and legal initiatives of Western governments and the actions of antislavery activists, particularly British activists, were primary causative agents in ending Islamic slavery. A close examination of nineteenth-century history shows, however, that Islamic law also played a curiously ambivalent but nonetheless important role in efforts to abolish chattel slavery and the slave trades in the Indian Ocean and Arab worlds. This role was bound up in the development of an “intertwined” and “plural” set of Western and Muslim imperialisms that were unique to those regions and may still exist today. Slavery and the slave trades were important factors in helping bind those imperialisms together. The emergence of this plural set of imperialisms led to plural conceptions of slavery, plural understandings of what it meant to be a slave, and, eventually, plural scenarios for seeking abolition. Western historians, while acknowledging the role of imperialism in abolitionist thought, have tended to marginalize the role of Islamic law when recounting narratives of abolition in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They ignore the fact that Islamic law has an important imperialist legacy and that this legacy affected efforts to abolish slavery and slave trading. In some locales, such as India and the Persian Gulf, the abolitionist enterprise largely failed, in spite of the efforts of the Muslim and European imperialists. This failure cannot be laid exclusively at the feet of the shari’a, although local legal culture and misconceptions about shari’a provisions on slavery led to the continuation of slavery and the slave trade in many places. This continuation was also frequently enabled by the connivance and the duplicitous policies of European imperial authorities who tolerated a continuation of slavery to supply labor and keep slave-owning elites happy. By contrast, in places such as Egypt and Tunisia, abolition succeeded, not only because of firm pressure from colonial authorities but also, in part, because of the influence of the shari’a and the arguments of religious opinion makers. The history of abolition and antislavery thought in the Muslim world is therefore a nuanced and complex tale, one that offers profound lessons for those concerned with contemporary issues that similarly implicate the role of Islamic law. Much of the Muslim world is currently convulsed with anxious concern over Islamic law’s relationship—or perhaps, nonrelationship—to some of the great issues of our time. These issues include demands for the installation of democratic governments, equality for women, respect for the rights of non-Muslim citizens and other minority groups, the rejection of false jihadist ideologies, freedom of expression and conscience as fundamental entitlements of all persons, elimination of the scourges of human

Straight, No Chaser

65

trafficking and forced labor, and a more generalized effort to integrate universalist ideas into the administration of legal systems based, in large part, on Islamic paradigms. The challenges presented by these issues, while topical and attention grabbing, are not new. These same challenges were faced by Muslims initially confronted with nineteenth-century demands to abolish slavery and slave trading in their communities. An understanding of what happened in the Muslim world with respect to slavery and its abolition will leave those concerned much better equipped to approach issues that convulse the Muslim world today. There are some dangers involved in this enterprise. The most significant danger involves the very real temptation to essentialize the history of ideas in Muslim communities and to overgeneralize when comparing communities or regimes. This problem may become acute when one takes on the problem of abolition.10 Islamic thought on slavery is not monolithic, but plural and sometimes contradictory. This chapter explores the nature of that pluralism, particularly in the Indian Ocean World. Keeping Thelonious Monk’s example in mind, we will get at as much of the “unvarnished truth” as we can in this short space.

“Plural Imperialisms” and Plural Conceptions of Slavery in the Indian Ocean World The history of European imperialism in the Indian Ocean World is much more “intertwined” with the legacy of the Muslim empires that the European powers sought to replace than many historians have acknowledged. As Frederick Cooper has pointed out, oceans, continents, and, indeed, empires are about intertwined histories, not histories that are stand-alone and disconnected.11 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interconnections in the Indian Ocean region led to a kind of pluralism not seen before in world history, a phenomenon I call “plural imperialisms.”12 This pluralism emerged from a strong and vibrant web of economic, historical, legal, cultural, and religious connections between and among the Islamic empires and subempires that thrived along the shores of the Indian Ocean and its Red Sea and Persian Gulf inlets before and after the arrival of the Europeans.13 These connections can be traced back as far as the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad, which waxed and waned over a five-hundred-year period beginning about 750 ce. In its later years, the Abbasid Empire (750–1258) became politically fragmented, and a number of empires, subempires, sultanates, and mini-caliphates emerged. Although the fortunes of these empires were in decline by the eighteenth century, the intrusion of European imperialist and mercantilist ventures at that time coincided with the reemergence of a vibrant Persian imperial polity in Iran, coupled with

66

bernard k. freamon

the rise of the Wahhabi insurgency on the Arabian Peninsula, a rekindling of Ottoman interest in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, the strikingly imperialistic interventions of semi-independent Egypt under Muhammad Ali and his progeny, the rise of powerful Islamic sultanates on the islands of Southeast Asia, and the spreading of the Omani maritime empire based in Muscat to Zanzibar and other cities on the East African coast. In addition, the northern tribes on the Arabian Peninsula asserted a regional suzerainty over the regions around the Persian Gulf and in Iraq during this period. There was, therefore, a veritable explosion of imperialist activity in the Indian Ocean World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and not all of it was European. Historians have tended to see the entry of European adventurers into this world as just that, an intervention by outsiders, but it is probably more accurate to see them as behaving very much like the other sovereigns, imperialists, and sheikhs resident in the region, staking out zones of influence in what was already a highly complex and interconnected web of relationships.14 Slavery was an important part of the connective sinew in this pluralistic web. André Wink has noted that the empires that emerged from the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate retained, inter alia, an “Islamic military-bureaucratic apparatus staffed with imported slaves on an extended scale.”15 The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires best fit this description, but it is important to note that the Omanis, the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, and the Egyptians all extensively employed slaves in military and naval capacities and also fostered the trade in slaves well into the nineteenth century.16 When the British East India Company and its Portuguese, Dutch, and French counterparts first entered the Indian Ocean arena, they vigorously traded in slaves and looked to slave labor to staff their mercantilist enterprises.17 It is not helpful to superimpose a transatlantic conception of slavery on this milieu. Unconscious and subtle pressures to view all slavery through the prism of the transatlantic paradigm, one that suggests that the institution is a “monolithic, one-size-fits-all phenomenon” characterized by the classic markers of racialized chattel slavery, with a history of a “triumphant march from bondage to freedom,” obscure our understanding of the institution’s nature, history, and impact in the Indian Ocean and Arab worlds.18 For example, the Indian Ocean and Arab slave trades were not just about Africans. Although Africans made up the bulk of the slave-traded populations, particularly in the western Indian Ocean,19 there were significant numbers of non-Africans transported westward, from the islands of the Far East, the Asian steppes, Nepal, Bengal, the Malabar Coast, and the shores of Baluchistan to the cosmopolitan centers of the Middle East and to centers of commercial production in East Africa.20 Gwyn Campbell notes that slaves sometimes

Straight, No Chaser

67

constituted between 20 and 30 percent of the population of Indian Ocean societies, “rising to 50 percent and over in parts of Africa and in Indonesian ports.”21 Wink similarly notes that in the 1860s one-third of the population in regions of Sumatra were descended from slaves.22 The Indian Ocean slave trade, and the systems and practices of slavery that it fed, were much more complex, multidirectional, and fluid than the transatlantic trade and the latifundial systems of the Western Hemisphere.23 This complexity took a variety of forms, with many slaves performing elite functions as well as working as laborers, concubines, and domestic workers. Manumission was not uncommon, and many slaves functioned in a kind of quasi-emancipatory status or condition. Juridical, imperial, and academic definitions and conceptions of slavery and the role of slaves in these societies therefore tended to challenge and confound Western attempts to accomplish abolition.24 These imperial systems led to broad variations in the legal conceptions of slavery, particularly among Muslims, and among the colonial officials that interacted with the Muslims. Orlando Patterson’s universalistic definition, describing slavery as “social death,” is very useful, but in many respects it does not adequately account for the variety of conditions and relationships that existed throughout the region.25 George William Curtis, an American living in Egypt in the late 1840s, noted that it seemed only an “accident” of social life that one person might be enslaved while the other lived in relative freedom.26 James Francis Warren, in describing the occupations and social mobility of slaves in the Southeast Asian Sulu sultanate, describes the slaves recruited by the sultan as officeholders enjoying “considerable power and prestige.”27 Yet elsewhere in the Sulu Empire, conditions were horrific, with fugitive slaves demanding to be thrown into the sea rather than be returned to Zamboanga, a slaving outpost with a nightmarish reputation among the Sulu slaves.28 Life was also extremely difficult for most black African captives transported across the Nubian Desert or up the Nile River to markets in Upper and Lower Egypt or up the coast of East Africa and through the Red Sea to markets at Jiddah, Port Sudan, Suez, and Cairo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were at least seven principal pathways by which slaves entered Egypt.29 The Dar Fur trading caravan was “the greatest of all caravans reaching Egypt,”30 and its principal commodity was male and female black African slaves.31 The death rate along these caravan routes, including the fabled “forty-days road” across the desert, has been estimated to have been as high as 30 percent.32 Egypt and its slaving outlets on the Red Sea were thus important nodes in this complex web, just as were those found on the southern Arabian coast, in the Persian Gulf, along the Baluchi and Indian coasts, and in Southeast

68

bernard k. freamon

Asia. Each presented a different milieu and set of conditions for slavers and slaves as well as for the abolitionists. There was not a single conception of slavery, nor was there even one definition in legal terms. Conceptions of slavery varied depending on the nature of the function performed by the slave, the social and economic milieu in which he or she performed, and whether the enslaved person worked on the periphery or in the cosmopolitan heartland. A military slave commanding a contingent of soldiers, or an enslaved ship captain piloting an oceangoing dhow, or a slave holding an important position as a treasurer or accountant for a state organization or private merchant company had fundamentally different obligations from, and possessed much greater latitude and freedom of movement than, a field hand in rural Egypt or a pearl diver in the Persian Gulf or domestic servant in Baghdad. The Islamic fiqh, or positive law, recognized these distinctions.33 Multiple definitions and, more importantly, plural conceptions of what it meant to be enslaved led to plural approaches to abolition as well. Varied understandings of Islamic law’s receptiveness to the idea of abolition contributed to these pluralities.

Plural Abolitions Historians have tended to describe abolition in the Indian Ocean World as a phenomenon initially marked by a tremendous inertia. What they have observed was not always inertia but rather markedly different results arising from the plurality of circumstances described above. True, there were no great slave revolts; no Toussaint Louverture or Frederick Douglass or Denmark Vesey or John Brown or Simón Bolívar rallied the faithful to rise up against the yoke of the slave masters.34 Western imperialist efforts to abolish slavery and slave trading were almost always gradualist and marked by numerous exemptions and diplomatic intricacies. For example, India, Ceylon, St. Helena, and all the territories in the dominion of the British East India Company were initially deliberately exempted from the worldwide abolition of slavery in British dominions enacted by the British Parliament in 1833.35 This fact encouraged many Arab, Indian, and Southeast Asian entrepreneurs, privateers, and government operatives to continue what was by then a robust and lucrative oceanic and overland slave trade. In India, child slavery and debt bondage continued to be particularly problematic, especially in times of famine and economic distress, even after the owning of slaves became a criminal offense. Slavery and slave trading also remained a serious problem on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Persian Gulf until well into the twentieth century.36 In Egypt and Zanzibar, on the other hand, the effort to bring an end to slavery and slave trading moved with a greater speed.

Straight, No Chaser

69

The path to abolition thus varied in each location, depending on the nature of the institution of slavery, economic conditions, the attitude of notables and religious opinion makers, and the local approach to empire. For example, abolition, in the strict juridical sense, never really happened in Egypt. The Egyptian government, dominated by the British after 1882 and headed by the nominally Ottoman khedive, never enacted a domestic law abolishing slavery, even though the khedive had the undoubted juridical authority to issue an abolitionary decree. Rather, the Anglo-Egyptian Conventions of 1877 and 1895, signed by the khedives Isma’il and Abbas Hilmi respectively, criminalized all forms of slave trading and severely restricted the importation of slaves into Egypt. The 1877 Convention created Bureaus of Manumission, which permitted slaves to get certificates freeing them from the normal conditions of slavery, although such certificates did not enable former slaves to marry without the former master’s permission or permit them to inherit property. The 1895 Convention, by criminalizing any interference in the “full liberty of action of an enfranchised slave,” effectively granted former slaves the unconditional right to marry and to inherit.37 The 1895 Convention also made slave trading punishable in the domestic criminal courts rather than by courts-martial in most areas, increased the penalties for such activities, and authorized increased vigilance against slave traffic at the ports on the Red Sea. So even though there was no abolition and Egyptians were permitted to continue to own slaves, the two anti-slave-trading conventions, particularly the 1895 convention, were more effective in ending slavery in Egypt than the delegalization decrees enacted over fifty years earlier in India and at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in Zanzibar.38 The disappearance of slavery in Egypt offers an interesting contrast with events occurring elsewhere in the region at about that time. Almost fifty years ago, the historian Gabriel Baer observed that slavery “vanished” in Egypt in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.39 This is a rather strong statement, especially since just to the south in Sudan and across the Red Sea in Arabia slavery and slave trading continued to flourish for many years. Baer attributed the disappearance of slavery in Egypt to “favorable conditions for eliminating both supply and demand.” What were those conditions? Did they have anything to do with Islam and conceptions of slavery in Islamic law? Conditions certainly included an increased demand for wage labor, continued vigilance over slave trading routes into Egypt, vigorous diplomatic pressure from the British, criminal liability for trading in slaves, and continued liberal European condemnations of slavery and slave trading, coupled with contact between the Egyptian intelligentsia and Europe’s antislavery movement. Egypt’s rapid industrialization and the concomitant need for

70

bernard k. freamon

wage labor made slavery a less attractive alternative for many in the population. In addition to the Bureaus of Manumission established in 1877, British antislavery activists opened a home for freed female slaves in 1884 to assist in the rehabilitation of manumitted women and to prevent prostitution. Many women passed through the home, but it seems that by 1908 the home was closed; there was no more need for such services, and the number of women requesting manumission certificates had dwindled to almost zero.40 A French observer, writing in 1901, similarly observed that slavery in Egypt had “in fact and in law” disappeared.41 The Egyptian census of 1907 made no references to slavery, and neither did the British government’s official reports to Parliament on Egypt from 1910, nor the regular reports in the Anti-Slavery Reporter.42 Then, in early 1911, the Repression of Slave Trade Department in Egypt, established under the conventions, was closed and transferred to Sudan.43 So by 1911 the demand in Egypt for certificates of freedom had dwindled to almost nothing. These facts might not mean that slavery had completely “vanished” in Egypt by 1911, but it certainly seems clear that the issue was no longer one of concern for the British and the Egyptian population. Indeed, as Lord Cromer wrote in 1908, “It may safely be asserted that slavery in Egypt, although it will take a long time to die out completely, is moribund.”44 It has been observed that the disappearance of slavery in Egypt also came about because of a subtle and important change in attitude among Egyptians.45 There is some basis to conclude that this change in attitude was due, in part, to fresh arguments against slavery asserted by a rising and important group of Islamic “modernists” and reformers writing in Egypt at that time.46 It is important to note that both Muhammad ‘Abduh, an important and influential modernist Islamic thinker writing during that time, and his disciple Muhammad Rashid Rida, a significant Islamic utilitarian in his own right, held the view that Islamic law was compatible with the secular abolition of slavery. They openly expressed these views in the popular press and in scholarly writings. Amal Ghazal has recently shown that the views on slavery of ‘Abduh, Rida, and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, an important Syrian reformist scholar and critic of the Ottoman Porte who joined them in Cairo, were all regularly published in al-Manar, a magazine with a significant circulation in the Muslim world at the time.47 These expressions of support for abolition were centered in a larger modernist movement that urged Islamic law reform more generally and paralleled the emergence of Egyptian nationalism, which emphasized equality among citizens, including women, and a desire to enter the world dominated by the egalitarian Western democracies. Although these modernist reform ideas met with fierce opposition from mainstream Islamic clerics, the arguments were widely reported on in the press and followed in

Straight, No Chaser

71

Egypt and in other cosmopolitan centers in the Islamic world.48 A few years later, Rida, in his work The Muhammadan Revelation, argued that one of the purposes of the revelation of the Qur’an was the elimination or “disappearance” of slavery.49 This was consistent with the emancipatory ethic developed both in Islam’s formative years and in the arguments of ‘Abduh and Kawakibi at the turn of the century. The seeds of these views can be found earlier in the twentieth century in the policies of Khedive Isma’il, who made antislavery efforts part of his vision for Egypt as a dominant imperialist power in Africa.50 It may very well be, therefore, that scholarly reformist attitudes toward Islamic law, particularly pietist and egalitarian arguments, as expressed in popular writing, coupled with a rising nationalist fervor, had some bearing on the change in Egyptian attitudes toward slavery. These reformist beginnings are the basis for much of the modern thinking about Islam and Islamic law that we see in the Muslim world today. Abolition in Zanzibar and on the East African coast was in some ways similar but in other ways quite different from the Egyptian example. The British entered into a succession of anti-slave-trade treaties with the sultans of Oman and Zanzibar, and the Sultans eventually promulgated a series of abolitionary and delegalization decrees, beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continuing until 1909. The most important of these decrees were those issued by Sultan Barghash, particularly his abolition of the slave market in Zanzibar in 1873. Barghash’s motives were in some ways similar to those of Isma’il in Egypt: he was a modernizer who desired to bring Zanzibar into the international club of modern nations. He is credited with bringing many modern innovations to Zanzibar, including a postal service, electricity, paved roads, and improved banking and shipping services. He did not, however, have grand imperial visions for his sultanate. The son of a slave woman himself, he was acutely aware of the perceived role of Islamic law in regulating the affairs of slaves owned by Muslims, even in the age of abolitionist entreaties by the European imperialists. The record of his conversations with Sir John Kirk, the British consul, is replete with references to the attitudes of the Zanzibari ulama on slavery.51 Citing the attitudes and opinions of the Zanzibari ulama and other notables, Barghash initially firmly resisted any effort to abolish slave trading or the slave market in Zanzibar. He was so intransigent that the British government determined to send a special envoy, Sir Bartle Frere, to negotiate with him. When negotiations failed, the British decided to impose a naval embargo on the sultan’s commercial trading enterprises. It was only then that Barghash finally agreed to abolish the slave market in Zanzibar town and to enforce other measures designed to interdict slave trading.52 Resistance to the abolition of slavery among Arab and Swahili notables and in

72

bernard k. freamon

the Islamic religious community continued, and slavery came to an end only after the enactment of a series of delegalization and partial-abolition decrees, the most important after Barghash’s decree of 1873 being the sultan’s edict of 1897 and a final delegalization decree of 1909. Even those decrees continued the existence of concubinal relationships between Zanzibari Muslim men and enslaved women. The 1909 decree gave all concubines in Zanzibar and Pemba the right to seek their freedom, but such women would forfeit their right to custody of children from those relationships.53 Although there was active nationalist and reformist sentiment among the Zanzibari ulama at the time, reformist ideas on slavery apparently did not play the same role. There were no ulama in Zanzibar of the stature of Muhammad ‘Abduh or Rashid Rida. One Zanzibari ‘alim who might be ranked with ‘Abduh and Rida was the famous scholar Ahmed bin Sumayt. Sumayt came from a distinguished Hadrami family that had settled in the Comoros, and he eventually migrated to Zanzibar, where he occupied the position of chief judge for many years until his death in 1925. There is some evidence that Sumayt traveled to Egypt and met with Muhammad ‘Abduh when the latter occupied a similar position in Egypt. More research might reveal the substance of their conversations and correspondence.54 Amal Ghazal has recently shown that there were intense and regular contacts between a number of Zanzibari ulama and Egyptian scholars beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting well into the twentieth.55 After Sultan Barghash issued the decree abolishing the slave market, he was congratulated in European capitals and feted by Queen Victoria. On his return from England, Barghash stopped in Egypt to visit Khedive Isma’il. We know that the Egyptian had designs on some of the sultan’s dominions on the East African coast, so Barghash may have been seeking to defuse that effort. Alastair Hazell has reported that perhaps Barghash’s main purpose in stopping in Egypt, a requirement if one travels by ship and uses the Suez Canal, was to purchase Circassian concubines for himself and members of his entourage, behavior that was quite duplicitous, given the reasons for his visit to England.56 Nonetheless, it could be that the two Muslim rulers or their advisers discussed problems of slavery and the slave trade during their visit.57 We also know that Kawakibi traveled to Zanzibar some years later, in 1903, to investigate the state of affairs there in regard to slavery. Rashid Rida later published his opinions on slavery in al-Manar.58 Based in part on his observations in Zanzibar, Kawakibi expressed his view that slavery could and should be abolished throughout the Islamic world. But Zanzibar, unlike Egypt, did not witness the sudden disappearance of the institution. Abolitionist initiatives provoked riots, and many of the local Arabs put up stout resistance.59 By the

Straight, No Chaser

73

first decades of the twentieth century, slavery and the slave trade had largely come to an end in Zanzibar, although problems involving concubinage and discrimination based on the badges and incidents of former slavery lingered for many years thereafter. The chronicles with respect to abolition in the Persian Gulf and in India present still another starkly different picture.60 In the Persian Gulf and along the southern shores of the Arabian Peninsula, trafficking in Africans and Indians, although illegal, continued until well into the middle of the twentieth century.61 In India the path to abolition was even more tortured and littered with obstacles and false starts. As already noted, India was exempted from the general emancipation of 1833 in British dominions. Ten years later, the Indian government promulgated Act V of 1843, a measure designed to delegalize slavery in India.62 As in Egypt and in Zanzibar, this measure was not a general abolition; but unlike the experience in Egypt and Zanzibar, slavery and slave trading remained a problem in India for many years. Fifty years after delegalization, an official of the Crown colony noted that “slaves are still purchased and imported into India” and that “slave girls are kept in the establishments of Muscat refugees and other Mohamedan residents in Bombay.”63 Similarly, a consular official in Hyderabad observed that “every Arab who comes to Hyderabad . . . brings with him one or two Habshi slaves.”64 Slavery and slave trading in India also continued well into the twentieth century, although not with the virulence and persistence seen in the Persian Gulf.

Islamic Law and Abolition Islam is too often regarded as a creed that uncompromisingly demands that governments conform to a monochromic religious and legal ideology. This is not always true; the abolition of slavery is perhaps the best historical example. Although conservative ulama and heads of state sometimes objected, many Muslim secular and religious leaders early on came to see that abolition was in the best interest of their societies and their governments. Action in the best interests of the community, sometimes requiring the overruling of an otherwise valid rule of Islamic law, is a well-recognized jurisprudential option allowed by the shari’a for governments in Muslim communities.65 William Gervase Clarence-Smith and other historians have pointed to the example of Ahmed Bey in Tunisia, also the son of a slave woman, who banned the slave trade in 1841–42 and issued a decree permitting emancipation for all who requested it. In doing so, he relied, in part, on the opinions of Maliki and Hanafi jurists.66 In another example, given to us by Behnaz Mirzai, British officials in Iran obtained a fatwa from the Shi’a ulama of Najaf, declaring

74

bernard k. freamon

that nothing in the shari’a prevented the shah from declaring the slave trade illegal.67 Isma’il in Egypt and Barghash in Zanzibar, while continuing to be slaveholders personally, both apparently also worked hard to secure the assent of their ulama for abolition, achieving success with some individuals and other times not. There is a rich history and a vibrant discourse on slavery and abolition among Muslim scholars and opinion makers that has failed to gain public attention and deserves to be made a part of the educational programs and public education in the Muslim world. There is a direct and traceable, but not very well understood, relationship between this discourse and modern Islamic thought on equality, the role of the nation-state, obligations of government, and citizenship. Because of this lack of understanding, the “badges and incidents” of slavery still exist in many Indian Ocean societies, particularly in places such as the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Malabar Coast of India, and Zanzibar. There are African diasporic communities in Iraq, Iran, and Palestine that continue to suffer racial discrimination. Those who are trafficked into the Middle East today come from the same communities that were trafficked during the nineteenth-century slave trade. The difficulty is that most Muslims have not yet learned to recognize these “badges and incidents” because they are not aware of the events that caused them to come into existence, and any historical memory that might generate awareness is not animated by critical discourse. Increasing public and academic awareness of these connections will greatly aid in reducing the continuing scourge of modern day slavery in the region and in the world. It will also increase understanding of contemporary quests for equality. These are the kinds of inquiries that should occupy the attentions of modern Muslim minds.

Notes Thanks to Rebecca Fink for excellent research assistance. Thanks also to Abed Awad, H. Kwasi Prempeh, and my coeditor Robert Harms for their insightful suggestions and comments. 1. Some of the more important recent contributions include Mohammed Ennaji, Slavery, the State, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Eve TrouttPowell, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); Alastair Hazel, The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the East African Slave Trade (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011); Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno, eds., Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and

Straight, No Chaser

75

Slavery, vol. 1., Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007);William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Shaun E. Marmon, ed., Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1999); Elizabeth Savage, ed., The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1992). 2. In 2010 there was only one course on the topic in all of the university curricula in Morocco, and it appears that there are very few, if any, courses on the topic in any of the other major Arab universities (Professor Abdelilah Benmilh, Departement d’Histoire, Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Universite Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah, Fez, Morocco, interview by the author, February 16, 2010). Professor Benmilh is the author of a recently published and critically acclaimed history of slavery in twelfthcentury Andalusian Spain: Riq fi bilad al-Maghrib wa al-Andalus [Slavery in Maghrib and Andalusia] (Beirut: al-Intishar al-Arabi, 2004). The work of Professor Emad Ahmed Helal, an associate professor of contemporary and modern history at Suez Canal University in Ismailiya, Egypt, is another beacon in an otherwise rather barren landscape; see Emad Ahmed Helal, “Muhammad Ali’s First Army: The Experiment in Building an Entirely Slave Army,” in Walz and Cuno, Race and Slavery, 17–42; Emad Ahmed Helal, al-Raqiq fi Misr fi al-qarn al-tasi’ asbar (Cairo: al-Arabi li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzi’, 1999). 3. My account of Bilal’s emancipation is drawn from Khalid Muhammad Khalid, Men around the Messenger, ed. Aelfwine Acelas Mischler, trans. Sheik Muhammad Mustafa Gemeiah (Cairo: Al-Azhar Al-Sharif Islamic Research Academy, 1997), 71. 4. Qur’an 62:9; The Meaning of The Holy Qur’an, trans. ‘Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 11th ed. (Beltsville, Md.: Amana, 2006). 5. Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Freedom, Equality, and Justice in Islam (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2002), 58. 6. Ibid. 7. David McKenzie, “Slavery Very Much Alive” (Sudan), CNN.com, March 7, 2011, http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/tag/cnns-david-mckenzie; “Slavery Today,” http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/what (accessed June 8, 2012); John D. Sutter, “Slavery’s Last Stronghold” (Mauritania), CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/ interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html (accessed June 8, 2012); “Modern Slaves: Domestic Migrant Workers in Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia,” April 5, 2012, http://ethioandinet.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/modern-slaves-domesticmigrant-workers-in-kuwait-UAE-Saudi-Arabia. 8. Ennaji, Slavery, the State and Islam; Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 9. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 79; Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), 191–229; Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon, eds., Slavery, Diplomacy, and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009); see also Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana, 1975).

76

bernard k. freamon

10. See Ehud R. Toledano, “Enslavement and Abolition in Muslim Societies,” review of Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, by William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Journal of African History, 48 (2007): 481–85. Toledano argues that this danger can lead to very undesirable results that obscure understanding and lead to false or unprovable conclusions, and that the study of abolition is a “dubious” exercise, particularly if looked at through a universalist, Islamic lens. 11. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 100–104. 12. See Anthony Reid, introduction to Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia, ed. Anthony Reid and Michael Gilsenan (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 5–11, for an essay helpful in understanding this concept. Reid describes pluralist initiatives by a number of indigenous Muslim rulers in India and Southeast Asia and argues that the English and Dutch policies of “non-interference” with indigenous religious practice created a pluralist milieu in those regions. In my view, there were similar and varied policies of noninterference at work in the western Indian Ocean, and those policies led to a similar pluralism and plural conceptions of slavery and abolition as well. 13. See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 185–290. Gwyn Campbell’s historiographical essay “Islam in Indian Ocean Africa prior to the Scramble: A New Historical Paradigm,” in Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean, ed. Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43–92, excellently summarizes the connections I describe. I have liberally relied upon it in this chapter, although he also falls victim to the temptation to essentialize in his discussion of the role of empire, particularly in the discussion of the role of Islamic law. I have sought here to be more discriminating in my discussion of the role of the law and its practitioners. 14. For articulation of the assertion that the Indian subempire was a “web” of entities, with nodes of imperial activities, rather than a large wheel with spokes radiating from a center, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007). The work of Lauren Benton is also helpful in understanding this concept; see, for example, Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also H. J. Kissling et al., The Last Great Muslim Empires: History of the Muslim World, trans., F. R. C. Bagley (Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1996); Gwyn Campbell, “Islam in Indian Ocean Africa,” 45–60. 15. André Wink, “ ‘Al-Hind’: India and Indonesia in the Islamic World-Economy, c. 700–1800 AD,” in P. J. Marshall et al., India and Indonesia during the Ancien Regime (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 33. 16. Beatrice Nicolini, Makran, Oman, and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the Western Indian Ocean, 1799–1856, trans. Penelope-Jane Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 17. Richard B. Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 4 (Oct. 2009): 877–878n.8.

Straight, No Chaser

77

18. Richard M. Eaton, introduction to Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1. 19. Historians estimate that, between 800 and 1900, at least twelve million Africans were involuntarily transported from the interior of Africa to various destinations on the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean, in the Mascarene Islands, on the Arabian Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, and on the Indian subcontinent. Although a good portion of these migrants traveled over the Sahara, a considerable number, estimated to be at least five million, traveled over the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to destinations on the northeast coast of Africa and in Asia. See Robert O. Collins, “The African SlaveTrade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands,” African and Asian Studies 5, nos. 3–4 (2006): 328, citing Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), tables 2.1, 2.2, 3.7, 7.1, and 7.7. 20. A. L. P. Burdett, introduction to The Slave Trade into Arabia, 1820–1973, ed. A.L.P. Burdett (Chippenham, UK: Archive Editions, 2006), 1:vi; Gwyn Campbell, “Slave Trade and Slavery in the Indian Ocean: A Survey,” paper presented at the “Dialogue between Civilizations” conference, Zanzibar, Tanzania, August 13–17, 2008. 21. Gwyn Campbell, introduction to The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), ix. 22. Wink, “ ‘Al-Hind,’ ” 38. 23. Campbell, introduction to The Structure of Slavery, ix. 24. Martin A. Klein, “The Emancipation of Slaves in the Indian Ocean,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2005), 198. 25. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 26. George William Curtis, Nile Notes of a Howadji (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), 55–56. 27. 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), 223. 28. Ibid., 235. 29. This assertion is derived from a perusal of a number of sources, including, most importantly, Gabriel Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), and Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 30. Baer, Social History of Modern Egypt, 169. 31. Ibid., 169. See also John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (London: John Murray, 1819), 309–20, for a discussion of the route through Sennaar and Shendi and the slave market at Shendi. 32. Descriptions of the “forty-days road” can be found in a variety of sources, most particularly Baer, Social History of Modern Egypt, 169, and Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia, 207–15, 305–27. 33. R. Brunschvig, “‘Abd,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E. Levi-Provencal, and J. Schacht, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 25; Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, “Huquq al-mamluk” (“The Rights of Slaves”), in Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din (Beirut:

78

bernard k. freamon

Dar al Ma’rifa, n.d.), 2:219–21, excerpted in John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 8–9; Ibn Rushd, The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer: A Translation of Bidayat Al-Mujtahid, 2 vols., trans. Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee (Reading: Garnet, 1994); Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Habib al-Basri al-Baghdadi al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam asSultaniyyah, The Laws of Islamic Governance, trans. Asadullah Yate (London: Ta Ha, 1996). 34. The last great slave revolt in the Middle East occurred in ninth-century Iraq when black slaves working the marshes around Basra overthrew their overseers and established a short-lived polity in the area. See Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998). 35. An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies, Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 & 4 William 4, cap. 73, clause 64, August 28, 1833. 36. Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: AltaMira, 2003), 254–77. 37. Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 2:503. 38. It appears that the first juridical act making slavery (as opposed to slave trading) illegal in Egypt occurred with the adoption of the Egyptian Constitution of 1923, which guaranteed the liberty of all individuals in Egypt; see Article 4, Constitution of Egypt (Royal Rescript No. 42 of April 30, 1923), in Amos J. Peaslee, Constitutions of Nations (Concord, N.H.: Rumford, 1950) 1:722. 39. Baer, Social History of Modern Egypt, 179. The argument is repeated and amplified in Borge Fredriksen, Slavery and Its Abolition in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Bergen, Norway: Hisorisk Institutt, Universitetet i Bergen, 1977), 184. 40. Anti-Slavery Reporter, March–May 1908, 68–70. 41. Lamba, “L’Esclavage en Egypte,” Revue de L’Islam, May 1901: 70. 42. Parliamentary Papers, Egypt, no. 1, 1910; Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, July 1910, 140. 43. Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, July 1912, 205, also referenced in Parliamentary Papers, Egypt, no. 1, 1911, 87–88. 44. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2:502. 45. This change in attitude was first identified by Baer. See, for example, Baer, “Slavery in 19th Century Egypt,” Journal of African History 417 (1967): 441; Baer, “Social Change in Egypt, 1800–1914,” in P. M. Holt, ed., Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 153; Baer, Social History of Modern Egypt, 187–89. 46. John Rawls, “The Idea of Overlapping Consensus,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), first published in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1987). 47. Amal N. Ghazal, “Debating Slavery and Abolition in the Islamic Middle East,” in Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora, ed. Behnaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2009), 139–154. 48. Indira F. Gesink, “ ‘Chaos on the Earth’: Subjective Truths versus Communal Unity in Islamic Law and the Rise of Militant Islam,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003): 725–31.

Straight, No Chaser

79

49. Muhammad Rashid Rida, The Muhammadan Revelation, trans. Yusuf T. DeLorenzo (Alexandria, Va.: Al-Saadawi, 1996), 142–48. 50. Lorne M. Kenny, “The Khedive Isma’il’s Dream of Civilization and Progress (Second Installment),” Muslim World 55 (1965): 211–217. 51. See Hazel, Last Slave Market; Daniel Liebowitz, The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade against Slavery in East Africa (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1999), 167–79; Africa through Western Eyes: Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Soldiers, Missionaries, and Diplomats in Africa (Marlborogh: Adam Matthew, 1999; microfilm); J. P. Farker, “The Working of the Decree for the Abolition of the Status of Slavery in Pemba,” 2–4, Zanzibar Archives, AC 3/10 (recounting the influence and advice of Sheikh Abdal Aziz al Amawy, an eminent scholar, Islamic judge, and “astrologer,” the night before Sultan Barghash agreed to issue a decree abolishing the slave trade in Zanzibar). 52. “Correspondence Respecting Sir Bartle Frere’s Mission to the East Coast of Africa, 1872–73,” UK National Archives, FO88/2270, 114013, particularly paragraphs 87, 88, and the manifesto at pp. 198–99. 53. Burdett, Slave-Trade into Arabia, 5:231–35. 54. On Sumayt’s travel to Egypt, see Anne K. Bang, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 55. Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1880s to 1930s (London: Routledge, 2010). 56. Alastair Hazell, The Last Slave Market: Dr. John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade (London: Constable and Robinson, 2011), 284. 57. A. I. Salim, The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast, 1895–1965 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), 43, 44–47. 58. See Ghazal, “Debating Slavery,” 146–50. 59. Salim, Swahili-Speaking Peoples, 45–74. 60. “Slavery in India,” British Library, India Office Records; Public and Judicial Departmental Papers: Annual Files—ref. IOR/L/PJ/6/412 File 66. 61. Confidential Despatch No. 40/79080/36 from the Governor’s Office, Aden, to the Colonial Secretary, June 30, 1937, regarding slavery in the Aden Protectorate and the Hadhramaut, reprinted as appendix 4 in Burdett, Slave-Trade into Arabia, 7:204. 62. Essentially, delegalization meant that: “(1) public officers were forbidden to sell persons in execution of judicial decrees; (2) courts were forbidden to recognize [the status of] slavery; (3) . . . slaves were not to be deprived of their property; and (4) acts which would be an offence if done to a freeman would be equally an offence if done to anyone on the pretext of his being a slave”: Howard Temperly, British Antislavery, 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), 107n55, citing Parliamentary Papers, 1843, 58 (525), 13. The text of the statute is reprinted in Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade. 63. “Slavery in India.” 64. Avril A. Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists and the Issue of Slavery in Islam,” in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2006), 277n61, citing the report of the Resident at Hyderabad to the foreign secretary to the Government of India, which is quoted in Indrani Chatterjee,

80

bernard k. freamon

“Abolition by Denial,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 158n49, citing records from the National Archives of India. 65. See Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, 351–68. 66. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Islam and the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave-Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath, 137n4, citing L. C. Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey, 1837–1855 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 30–32, 322–25; R. Khoi, Modern Arab Thought: Channels of the French Revolution to the Arab East (Princeton, N.J.: Kingston Press, 1983), 152–54. 67. Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The 1848 Abolitionist Farman: A Step toward Ending the Slave Trade in Iran,” in Campbell, Abolition and Its Aftermath.

5

Islamic Abolitionism in the Western Indian Ocean from c. 1800 william g ervase clarence-smith

For Bernard Lewis, Islamic abolitionism is a contradiction in terms, for it was the West that imposed abolition on Islam, directly or indirectly.1 He stands in a long line of scholarship that stresses both the uniquely Western origins of the ending of slavery and the unchallenged religious legitimacy of slavery in Muslim eyes. Other scholars, however, have argued that some Muslims opposed slavery from within their own traditions, and that this eventually flowered into a fully abolitionist program. 2 Islamic abolitionism was crucial to turning laws into lived reality, for it proved very difficult to suppress servitude on the ground. Only when most Muslims accepted abolition did social relations change. Quasi abolitionists were the first to emerge. They did not directly question the legitimacy of slavery, but they believed that strictly enforcing Islamic teachings would cause slavery to wither away. This was because the scholars of Islam, the ulama, considered the normal condition of humanity to be freedom. Enslavement was permitted only through the capture of obdurate infidels in properly constituted holy wars, or through birth from such captives. Free persons could not sell themselves or their children into slavery and could not be enslaved for debts or crimes. No canonical text sanctioned the enslavement of noncombatants or the acquisition of infidels by purchase or tribute.3

81

82

william gervase clarence-smith

Since quasi abolitionism left open the possibility of renewed slavery under altered conditions, some Muslim reformers began to advocate an outright assault on the institution from the 1870s. “Lay” Muslims, influenced by Western abolitionism, spearheaded the movement. Radical abolitionists propounded the theory that slavery had been illicit since the time of the Prophet, whereas gradualist abolitionists thought that ending slavery had become possible only in modern times, with elements of quasi abolitionism creeping into their thinking.4

The South Asian Testing Ground Prompted by a British magistrate in central India in 1808, the East India Company asked the Muslim muftis (legal experts) of its Calcutta court for a fatwa (legal opinion) on slavery. Affirming a quasi-abolitionist perspective, the muftis replied that it was legitimate only to enslave “infidels fighting against the faith,” without commenting on noncombatants. Enslaved persons passed on their status to their descendants, and were transferrable by sale, gift, or inheritance. The muftis rejected the sale of self or children, common in India in times of famine or for debt, and enslavement through kidnapping or fraud, frequent causes of servitude for imported Africans.5 In 1830, the judges of the civil court in Calcutta chose this fatwa over the generally applied Hidaya code (a twelfth-century commentary on jurisprudence), adding that owners had to prove slave status.6 The muftis of the company’s Madras court confirmed the fatwa of their Calcutta colleagues in 1841, three years before the colonial government ceased to recognize slavery in directly ruled British India.7 A conservative Muslim reaction ensued, becoming especially patent in the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58. For many Muslim participants, this anticolonial struggle was a jihad (holy war) to restore the dominance of the Mughal emperor and the shari‘a (holy law), which underpinned the legitimacy of slavery. Thus, Shah Ahmad Sa‘id, an influential Naqshbandi Sufi (mystical) leader, affixed his seal to a fatwa justifying slavery, and a little later to another fatwa declaring the conflict with the British to be a jihad.8 Conversely, the defeat of the rebels was an opportunity for modernist Muslim intellectuals to oppose slavery outright. Sayyid Amir ‘Ali (1849–1928), a Shi‘a from Bengal, published A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed in 1873, reprinted countless times thereafter under the catchy title The Spirit of Islam. In a famous passage, he wrote: The Moslems especially, for the honour of their noble Prophet, should try to efface that dark page from their history—a page which would never have been

Islamic Abolitionism

83

written but for their contravention of the spirit of his laws. . . . The day is come when the voice which proclaimed liberty, equality, and universal brotherhood among all mankind should be heard with the fresh vigour acquired from the spiritual existence and spiritual pervasion of thirteen centuries. It remains for the Moslems to show the falseness of the aspersions cast on the memory of the great and noble Prophet, by proclaiming in explicit terms that slavery is reprobated by their faith and discountenanced by their code.

Sayyid Amir ‘Ali was a gradualist who considered that only in his own day were the times ripe for this noble endeavor. He believed that the Qur’an disapproved of slavery, but that abolishing the institution overnight would have disrupted society and might have turned people against Islam. The Prophet thus ordered an immediate amelioration in the status and treatment of slaves and encouraged manumission, trusting that slavery would soon die out. Sayyid Amir ‘Ali blamed the Umayyad ruler Mu‘awiya, the arch-usurper of Shi‘i narratives, for authorizing the purchase of slaves from the infidel and the employment of servile eunuchs. To fulfill the Prophet’s expectations in his own times, Sayyid Amir ‘Ali hoped that “a synod of Moslem doctors will authoritatively declare that polygamy, like slavery, is abhorrent to the laws of Islam.”9 The standard-bearer of radical abolitionism was Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), a Sunni. For him, slavery was contrary to the will of God, and the institution should have disappeared soon after the first recitation of the Qur’an. The enslavement of war captives had been illegitimate from the dawn of Islamic history, for 47:4–5 in the Qur’an specified only ransom or immediate release. Moreover, these “freedom verses” could not be abrogated by verses revealed later to the Prophet. Sayyid Ahmad Khan further rejected the idea that slavery was no longer an issue just because it had been abolished by colonial legislation in 1843–44.10 Abolition gradually became part of a wider Islamic agenda for social reform, with some support for Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s radical position.11 Mawlwi Chiragh ‘Ali (1844–95), in the princely state of Hyderabad, censured “fanatical Moslems” who defended concubinage.12 Dilawar Husayn (1840–1914), a Bengali Shi‘a, also defended a strong stance.13 The Lahori branch of the Ahmadiyya sect, breaking away from the Qadiyani branch in 1914, turned radically against servitude.14 The debate flared up again in the 1930s when reformers fiercely resisted attempts to rehabilitate the validity of concubinage.15 Ghulam Ahmad Parwez (1903–85) was the most significant figure to carry the radical torch after Pakistan’s independence in 1947, adamantly rejecting all suggestions that slavery be reinstated in the new country.16 Other reformers were more circumspect. The Qadiyani Ahmadi hesitated for a long time over the issue.17 The Western-educated and liberal Aga Khan III

84

william gervase clarence-smith

(ruled 1885–1957), head of the Nizari Isma‘ili (Khoja) community, praised the British in 1909 for abolishing slavery in India while not setting out any doctrinal justification for abolition.18 Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), poet and “intellectual father of Pakistan,” condemned slave purchases in the same year, but depicted Islamic slavery as an institution so benign as to have nothing in common with true servitude.19 Literalist and traditionalist Muslims in South Asia fought a tenacious battle to maintain the religious legitimacy of servitude. Siddiq Hasan Khan, prince consort of Bhopal and member of the Ahl-i-Hadis “Wahhabi” movement, staunchly defended the institution in the 1880s.20 Sayyid Muhammad Kifayatullah, president of the Jamiat ul-Ulama, in 1926 stressed the need to observe traditional rules on slavery.21 In works published as late as 1957, Mawlana Sa‘id Ahmad Akbarabadi, of the influential Deobandi school, denied that the Prophet had ever ordered the abolition of slavery, or even inspired it. At most, Islam had improved the status of slaves and recognized their humanity.22 In articles first published in English in 1972, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi, founder of the literalist Jamaat-i Islami in 1941, upbraided Muslims for being ashamed of slavery, holy war, polygyny, and other fundamental aspects of their faith. To alter any part of Islam was to undermine the entire religious edifice.23 In 1977, when General Zia ul-Haqq seized power in Pakistan and applied shari‘a law, some argued, unsuccessfully, “that slavery cannot be abolished, since to do so would be to deny future generations the opportunity to commit the virtuous deed of freeing slaves.”24

From Caution to Radicalism in the Nile Valley The Egyptian ulama quickly denounced the enslavement of free Muslims, but otherwise remained cautious. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1825), a distinguished scholar of Ethiopian origins, attacked Muhammad ‘Ali, pasha of Egypt, for seizing free Muslims during his conquest of Sudan from 1820.25 The Sudanese themselves accused Egyptian forces of enslaving Muslims for failing to pay illegitimate taxes.26 Wrongly enslaved free Muslims gained redress in shari‘a courts in Cairo, with the support of pious merchants.27 Methods of enslaving infidels were also increasingly questioned. In the 1810s, a Tunisian, Sheikh Muhammad b. ‘Umar al-Tunisi, noted that the sultans of Dar Fur and Wadai did not summon idolaters to adopt Islam before attacking and enslaving them.28 From 1820, Egyptian officers rounded up animists like cattle, with no suggestion that they might convert to Islam or live peacefully as protected subjects. Cowed survivors furnished a regular tribute in slaves.29 Egypt’s foreign minister and Cairo’s shaykh al-Islam admitted in

Islamic Abolitionism

85

1880 that the shari‘a prohibited paying tribute in slaves.30 By the early 1880s, the “vast majority” of Cairo’s ulama accepted that only unbelieving captives taken in a holy war could legitimately be enslaved.31 The ulama split over the establishment of Manumission Bureaus in Egypt in 1877, with some supporting this secular initiative.32 Others, however, insisted that women freed by such institutions had to obtain their owners’ consent to marry, allegedly driving the women to prostitution.33 The shaykh al-Islam refused to grant “the civil rights of a person born free” to those liberated by the bureaus, declaring that he “would be overriding the [holy] law in decreeing the abolition of slavery.”34 But he conceded that existing slavery was not in harmony with the shari‘a and that only custom, not holy law, enjoined automatically reducing infidel captives to slavery.35 Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the great figure of Egyptian modernism, intervened in 1882. As a junior member of a government desperate to prevent a British assault, ‘Abduh sent a letter to Wilfrid Blunt, stating that: The present Ministry is trying hard to suppress domestic slavery. The Mohammedan religion offers no obstacle at all to this; nay, according to Mohammedan dogma, Moslems are not allowed to have slaves except taken from infidels at war with them. In fact they are captives or prisoners taken in legal warfare, or who belonged to infidel peoples not in friendly alliance with Mohammedan princes, nor protected by treaties or covenants. But no Moslem is allowed to be taken as a slave. Moreover, if a person is an infidel, but belongs to a nation in peaceful treaty with a Mohammedan prince, he cannot be taken as a slave. Hence the Mohammedan religion not only does not oppose abolishing slavery as it is in modern times, but radically condemns its continuance. . . . A fatwa will in a few days be issued by the Sheykh el Islam to prove that the abolition of slavery is according to the spirit of the Koran, to Mohammedan tradition, and to Mohammedan dogma.36

‘Abduh’s position was somewhat contradictory, and other writings did little to clarify his position, even if conservatives roundly criticized him for opposing slavery.37 ‘Abduh argued that manumission was an obligatory form of charity, from which he deduced that freedom was the norm and could be suspended only in exceptional cases and in a transitory manner.38 While accepting that concubinage could be a legitimate by-product of war, he called on political and religious authorities to stamp out the practice in the name of the “public interest.”39 In his most influential work, he threw out a tantalizing rhetorical question, to be answered only later: “If religion eagerly anticipates the liberation of slaves, why have Muslims spent centuries enslaving the free?”40 ‘Abduh’s forceful Syrian disciple Sayyid Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865– 1935) published a host of partial opinions on slavery over several decades,

86

william gervase clarence-smith

largely in response to questions from readers of the journal al-Manar. Generalizing from this medley of statements is difficult. There was certainly much that was inimical to slavery in Rida’s writings. He considered that there was no longer a caliph, who was needed to declare a holy war and testify that the enslavement of captives was in the public interest. Even led by a caliph, holy wars should be defensive. It was wrong to enslave noncombatant women and children, kidnap children, buy slaves from the infidel, or fail to seek proof of servile descent. Sudden liberation would have been disruptive in Islamic lands, but gradual abolition accorded with the spirit of Islam and was the final goal of the faith. Rulers were at liberty to decree abolition in the public interest. Yet Rida’s views, which contained ambiguities, became more conservative over time. He clung to the notion that taking slaves in holy wars against infidel aggressors was licit as long as captives were not Muslims, Arabs, or close relatives. Children inherited servile status only if both their parents were slaves, a borrowing from Shi‘i law. In 1922, he opined that Muslims were obliged to retain slavery whenever their enemies did so, to improve their bargaining position. He noted that respected jurists rejected ‘Abduh’s notion that men should free and marry their concubines. Toward the end of his life, Rida even wrote that servitude could be a refuge for the poor and weak and could give all women a chance to bear children.41 A close associate, Ahmad Shafiq (1860–1940), the son of a Circassian concubine, revealed similar contradictions. In a rebuttal of Cardinal Lavigerie’s attacks on slavery in Islam, Shafiq argued in 1891 that international law on prisoners of war had superseded 47:4 in the Qur’an, and that few if any of Egypt’s existing slaves had been properly reduced to servitude. But he still maintained that unbelievers could be enslaved in a jihad “in the interest of Islam” as long as it was preceded by a summons to convert or accept Islamic rule. Moreover, the West should support efforts to convert animists in Egypt’s African empire, for free Muslims could not be enslaved.42 Egyptians long remained divided over the issue.43 The ulama told the British occupiers after 1882 that since the Prophet had not prohibited slavery, neither could they.44 Qasim Amin (1865–1908) called for monogamy in 1899–1900.45 His disciple Mansour Fahmy spelled out that this entailed the abolition of slavery, which had corrupted Muslim women.46 But Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad al-Bulaqi, of al-Azhar, angrily refuted the liberal theses of Amin and Fahmy regarding women.47 Several high-ranking Egyptians were arrested for buying slaves in 1894, and the subsequent trial, resulting in only one conviction, revealed much support for buying slaves, albeit not for selling them.48 In January 1896, the legislative council meekly accepted British-sponsored abolitionist legislation.49

Islamic Abolitionism

87

Although abolition in 1896 caused little overt contestation in Egypt, traditionalists and literalists continued to hold that what the Qur’an specifically permitted could not be outlawed.50 At a 1908 congress of Islamic scholars, the majority pronounced that the shari‘a prohibited the making and owning of servile eunuchs, but a minority contested this ruling.51 Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the literalist Muslim Brothers, sidestepped the issue, stating, “Islam replaced the historical sentence for a captive from capital punishment (death) to life imprisonment through enslavement. However, Islam has made it very easy for the slave to regain his freedom.”52 The Muslim Brothers’ most famous ideologue, Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), was similarly vague and contradictory in scattered comments.53 Sayyid’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, tackled the issue at greater length. While appearing to condemn slavery and denouncing Muslim rulers who had enslaved Muslims and traded in slaves, he affirmed the superiority of bondage in Islam and announced that Muslims were obliged to enslave captives taken in war against infidels who did the same, even though he noted “in passing” that 47:4 in the Qur’an recommended freeing of prisoners of war. When non-Muslim nations decided to abolish slavery, “Islam welcomed it.” Nevertheless, in a long passage on servile concubines, he continued to recommend the practice as superior to Western adultery and prostitution.54 The Muslim Brothers gained great political influence in Sudan, and Hasan ‘Abdallah al-Turabi (1932–) became the regime’s éminence grise from 1989 to 2000. Even though the new Sudanese penal code of 1991, based on the shari‘a, failed to recognize slavery as licit, de facto enslavement boomed during campaigns against non-Muslim southerners.55 Quizzed about this in 1994, al-Turabi answered evasively that slavery had never been a “substantial institution” in Sudan before the Egyptian occupation, and that all men were equal in Islam.56 A Sudanese engineer, Mahmud Muhammad Taha (c. 1909–85) propagated a more radical and highly controversial stream of thought from 1967, the “second message of Islam.” Taha argued that the Prophet had outlined a radical social program, including abolition, in the early Meccan phase of his revelations. Once in control of Medina, Muhammad’s revelations had become more appropriate for ruling a community steeped in ancient traditions. Along gradualist lines, Taha argued that the Prophet had been forced to compromise with slavery’s centrality to the social order, but that the Medinan verses had only postponed the implementation of the Meccan teachings.57 ‘Abdullahi al-Na‘im, a disciple who took refuge in the United States after Taha’s execution for apostasy in 1985, taught that Islam had initially accepted slavery, but that modern Islamic law should “implement the fundamental Islamic

88

william gervase clarence-smith

legislative intent to prohibit slavery forever.”58 Muhammad Khalil, a more radical disciple, deplored Taha’s concession that the Meccan verses had ever been suspended at all. With public interest as the guiding principle, slavery had been illegitimate since the time of the Prophet.59

Shi‘i Attitudes in Persia Justin Sheil, a British diplomat in Tehran from 1844 to 1853, pressed Persia’s Muhammad Shah (ruled 1834–48) on the issue of slavery. Sheil argued that “the sacred law distinguished between slaves bought in commercial transactions and captives made in war,” and that kidnapped Africans were not proper slaves. The shah agreed in principle, but responded, “Buying women and men is based on the Shari‘a of the last Prophet. I cannot say to my people that I am prohibiting something which is lawful,” adding that by abolishing the slave trade, “I would prevent five thousand people a year from becoming Muslims. This would be a great sin, and I would get a bad name.” Sheil’s quixotic campaign divided the ulama. In 1847, he consulted six Persian interpreters of the law, who cited a hadith (tradition) of the Prophet that “the seller of men is the worst of men,” deducing from this that the slave trade was an “abomination.” However, a more eminent mujtahid pronounced that infidels taken in war could be enslaved “in order to convert them to Islam.” The matter was then taken to the chief mujtahid of the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, who agreed that slavery was “discouraged” in Islam’s fivefold ethical system and that the hadith condemning the seller of men was valid. But in a deft piece of casuistry, he asserted that the buyer of slaves was exempt from the censure proclaimed upon the seller. In the event, Muhammad Shah issued a vaguely worded prohibition on importing slaves by sea shortly before his death.60 Formal legislation had little impact for decades in Persia, where officials believed the trade to be religiously licit. Indeed, slaves freed without a letter of manumission from their owners suffered from social death, since nobody would employ them. At best, captives, including Sunni Muslims, might be legitimately freed on adopting the Shi‘i creed.61 Muhammad Shah’s decree of 1848 was largely ignored, and in any event was not applicable to the overland trade; later legislation fared no better.62 Yet doubts emerged among those exposed to Western ideas. Around 1900, Taj al-Saltana, a Persian princess educated on French lines, wrote of the African slaves of the palace as “creatures whom God has made no differently from others except for the colour of their skins—a distinction that in all honesty does not exist at the divine threshold.”63 Bernard Lewis alleges that Persia’s new constitutional legislation, which established equality before the law and individual freedom in 1907, abolished

Islamic Abolitionism

89

servitude, but Robert Brunschvig had earlier noted that this was not the case.64 Indeed, a leading constitutionalist from Najaf, Muhammad Husayn Na‘ini, in 1909 ridiculed those who alleged that the new laws would impose apostasy by erasing social differences between “the free and the coerced.”65 During the struggle for the constitution in 1905–6, elite circles became obsessed with the fate of northeastern women who had either been sold by their parents to pay taxes or seized by Turkmen raiders from Russian territory, but the debate focused on the national shame of women being sold abroad to unbelievers and heretics. Only Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba‘i, a leading ‘alim’ (scholar) of Tehran, made oblique references to persistent slavery in Persia itself.66 It was the mujtahid and Ni‘matullahi Sufi leader ‘Ali Shah (1847–1918) who issued an uncompromising fatwa in 1912. A supporter of the constitution, he stated, “The purchase and sale of human beings is contrary to the dictates of religion and the practice of civilisation; and therefore in our eyes any persons, men or women alike, who are claimed as slaves, are in legal fact completely free, and the equals of all other Muslims of their community.” There had been no properly constituted jihad after the last Shi‘i Imam had been occulted, and it was impossible to prove unbroken descent from slaves on both the maternal and paternal side over a millennium.67 It was left to Riza Shah to enact abolitionist legislation in 1928–29, albeit without religious underpinnings.68 This failed to end the debate in Persia. Intellectuals passionately discussed Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s frontal attacks on slavery, which appeared in an Arabic edition of his work in 1958.69 ‘Ali Shari‘ati (1933–77), a popular radical Islamic lecturer in Tehran from 1967 to 1973, denounced slavery as one of the “evils of class society” that true Islam would overthrow.70 Conversely, in 1970, Sultanhussein Tabandeh queried the validity of the abolitionist fatwa of his grandfather, ‘Ali Shah. Tabandeh maintained that anybody “taken prisoner fighting against Islam with a view to its extirpation, and [who] persisted in his sacrilegious and infidel convictions” would still be a slave, as would anyone for whom there was “legal proof that all his ancestors without exception had been slaves descended from a person taken prisoner.”71 After the overthrow of the shah in 1979, the ayatollahs perpetuated confusion over servitude. Despite his sobriquet of “champion of the oppressed,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lent his name to a popular “question and answer” book that treated slavery as an integral part of holy law.72 Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, the “red ayatollah,” argued that Islam’s commitment to social equality was antithetical to slavery and that modern Muslims should reject the institution. Reducing fellow Muslims to slavery was a Sunni abuse. Nevertheless, it would have been counterproductive for Muhammad to abolish the institution, and Muslims treated slaves better than infidels ever

90

william gervase clarence-smith

did. Taleqani even condoned enslavement in a properly constituted defensive jihad, citing 47:4 in the Qur’an and later commentaries, and repeated the old distinction between rejecting the sale of slaves and accepting their purchase.73

The Ibadi Empire, from Oman to Zanzibar The ruling class of the Omani empire, in the northwestern Indian Ocean, adhered to the Ibadi sect, which had a reputation for radicalism and egalitarianism. The Ibadi ulama certainly denounced standing armies of slaves, but that was for political reasons and not because they objected to servitude as such. Indeed, Ibadi entrepreneurs came to figure prominently among Muslim slave traders in Africa.74 Ending the slave trade, as demanded by Britain, posed religious problems for the sultans. To explain the Moresby Treaty of 1822, which restricted slave exports to a mainly Muslim zone of the western Indian Ocean, Sayyid Sa‘id b. Sultan Al Bu Sa‘id (ruled 1806–56), declared that he was merely prohibiting the sale of slaves “to Christians of all nations,” as demanded by the shari‘a. He omitted to say that his predecessors had shown no such qualms in selling slaves to the French from the 1780s.75 Ending the trade with Islamic lands was more difficult, and Sayyid Sa‘id wrote plaintively in 1826 that he would be forced into exile, since “all Muslims would be his enemies.”76 Indeed, the 1845 treaty prohibiting exports of slaves beyond coastal waters prompted the sharif of Mecca to send an envoy to remonstrate with the sultan in 1850.77 Restricted to Oman’s East African territories after Sayyid Sa‘id’s death, the rulers of Zanzibar reacted variously to British demands to end slavery itself. Sultan Barghash (ruled 1870–88) pleaded for time because of “the weight of Muslim opinion.”78 He opined that “the Koran sanctions slavery,” even if it earnestly enjoined manumission.79 At best, he threatened prison sentences for those caught kidnapping Muslim children on the coast.80 In contrast, Sultan Hamud b. Muhammad (ruled 1896–1902) rapidly proclaimed the abolition of slavery on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba in 1897. When chosen by the British to succeed to the throne, he owned no slaves, which the American consul attributed to poverty.81 Personal conviction seems a more likely explanation, since even the poorest free family owned a slave in Zanzibar at the time.82 In a preamble to his decree, Sultan Hamud wrote: “And whereas the Apostle Mohamed . . . has set before us as most praiseworthy the liberation of slaves, and We are Ourselves desirous of following his precepts.”83 While defending abolition in Islamic terms, he also portrayed it as a generous personal act, and one necessary to obtain free labor for plantations in a colonial context.84

Islamic Abolitionism

91

Abolition, officially decreed on the mainland ten years later, met with considerable passive resistance from Muslims, whether Ibadi or of the Shafi‘i school of Sunni Islam. Some East African owners refused British compensation, while others took the money but argued that the Europeans had bought their slaves, who could therefore not become their clients.85 Even slaves “believed that waiting for their master to manumit them would improve their social status more than the piece of paper provided by an alien authority.”86 Muslims generally spurned manumission certificates signed by officials, or even by the sultan, so that the latter persuaded owners to sign instead.87 Religious courts long continued to deal with slavery in matters of concubinage, marriage, inheritance, and the allocation of land to those of servile origin.88 Sufism, more typical of Shafi‘i than of Ibadi Islam, was important in integrating former slaves into the body of the faithful in East Africa. Somalia’s main Sufi orders formed agricultural settlements for ex-slaves in areas marginal for pastoralism.89 In Tanganyika, the former slave Ramiyya symbolically became a sheikh of the Qadiriyya order, together with Rumaliza, once a great slave trader.90 In Lamu, Kenya, Habib Salih was from a Hadhrami lineage descended from the Prophet and was a member of the ‘Alawiyya order. He worked among former slaves from the 1880s, persuading ex-masters to frequent the same mosque, and became known as the “Sharif of the coconut cutters.”91 He remains a revered and much-cited figure for Muslims of the western Indian Ocean. The Ibadi ulama of Zanzibar initially defended servitude, and only gradually shifted their position. Sheikh ‘Ali b. Msellum al-Khalassi, the Ibadi chief qadi (judge), openly defied abolitionist legislation in 1909, contributing to British threats to sack him.92 The holder of this position in 1914, Sheikh ‘Ali b. Muhammad al-Mundhiri, maintained that slaves freed by the government could not become clients of their former owners, but that it was legitimate for infidels to buy slaves and emancipate them, even if their owners objected, for “the aim was honourable under Islam.” Liberated individuals were entitled to all the rights of free persons. In a pragmatic vein, he further noted that any Islamic judge who opposed the colonial authorities risked dismissal.93 Opinions in Oman were also evolving. Zanzibari petitioners asked the famous blind Ibadi scholar ‘Abdallah b. Hamid al-Salimi (1869/70–1914) whether it was lawful to hire slaves freed by Europeans without their owners’ consent, and whether such slaves were allowed to marry without their owners’ permission. Al-Salimi answered that abolition was “a scourge that has stricken Zanzibaris, as a punishment for the injustice they inflicted upon the slaves.” He ruled that abolition was acceptable if the intentions of Christians were honorable, but not if their motives were “extortion and injustice.”94 An Ibadi imam who was fighting the sultan eventually “repudiated slavery” in

92

william gervase clarence-smith

1963.95 He was probably seeking to strengthen support received from Faysal b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, who had rather unexpectedly abolished slavery in 1962 in Saudi Arabia.96 In 1970, on seizing power in Oman, the Western-educated Sultan Qabus officially ended servitude.97 These case studies demonstrate that there was an Islamic abolitionist process at work in the western Indian Ocean, even if it was hotly opposed. Indeed, it is hard to pinpoint the moment when the majority of Muslims accepted abolition as religiously legitimate. Like a host of other authors, Khaled Abou el Fadl is vague about chronology: “Muslims of previous generations reached the awareness that slavery is immoral and unlawful, as a matter of conscience.”98 The 1960s probably constituted the decade during which an Islamic consensus against slavery became dominant, mainly informed by the cautious gradualism of Sayyid Amir ‘Ali. That said, a minority of Muslims has continued to contest this consensus to our own day.99 These case studies warn against simplistic notions of a progressive Islamic “heartland” and a reactionary “periphery.” While there is some truth to the idea that traditionalist Muslims clinging to slavery lived mainly in remote peripheries, those who elaborated literalist justifications for slavery often lived in core regions of the faith. Indeed, South Asia produced both the most defiant literalist advocate for slavery, Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi, and the most radical modernist denier of slavery, Sayyid Ahmad Khan. As a final irony, both men claimed descent from the Prophet.

Notes 1. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 78–84. 2. For a more detailed overview of the literature, see William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (London: Hurst, 2006), 16–19. 3. R. Brunschvig, ‘ “Abd,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E. Levi-Provencal, and J. Schacht, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960): 1:24–40. 4. Clarence-Smith, Islam and Abolition, chapters 10–11; John Hunwick, “Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century,” Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1999): 43–68. 5. Amal K. Chattopadhyay, Slavery in the Bengal Presidency, 1772–1843 (London: Golden Eagle, 1977), 158, 170–77. 6. D. R. Banaji, Slavery in British India (Bombay: Taraporevala Sons, 1933), 43. 7. Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213.

Islamic Abolitionism

93

8. Avril Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists and the Issue of Slavery in Islam,” in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 271–72. 9. Ameer Ali, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed; or, The Spirit of Islam (London: W. H. Allen, 1891), 330–31, 366–80. 10. Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists,” 269–74; Ahmed Khan Bahador, Life of Mohammed and Subjects Subsidiary Thereto (1870; reprint, Lahore: Sh. Mubarak Ali, 1979), 422–27; M. S. Baljon, The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Ahmad Khan (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1970), 43–44, 143; Bashir A. Dar, Religious Thought of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Lahore: Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim, 1957), 236–39; 258–60; Shan Muhammad, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: A Political Biography (Meerut, India: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1969), 214–17. 11. M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 450–51; Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists,” 274–79. 12. Cherágh Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal, and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1883), xxxii–xxxiii, 144–83; Cherágh Ali, A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1885), 193–215. 13. Ahamed Meerza Delawarr Hosaen, Muslim Modernism in Bengal: Selected Writings of Delawarr Hosaen Ahamed Meerza, 1840–1913 (Dacca: Centre for Social Studies, Dacca University, 1980), 1:iii–vii, x, 24, 59–60, 65. 14. Muhammad ‘Ali, The Holy Qur-an, Containing the Arabic Text with an English Translation and Commentary (Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha‘at-i-Islam, 1920), 78, 975, 1192, and The Religion of Islam: A Comprehensive Discussion of the Sources, Principles, and Practices of Islam (Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha‘at-i-Islam, 1936), 587, 661–70. 15. V. R. and L. B. Bevan Jones, Women in Islam: A Manual with Special Reference to Conditions in India (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1941), 207–10; M. H. Zaidi, Mothers of the Faithful: Being a Discourse on Polygamy, with a Biographical Sketch of the Wives of Muhammad (Calcutta, 1935), 85–6, 89–91. 16. Ghulam A. Parwez, Islam: A Challenge to Religion (New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 1989), 345–46; Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Concept of an Islamic State: An Analysis of the Ideological Controversy in Pakistan (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), 133. 17. Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad, Ahmadiyyat; or, The True Islam (Qadian: Book Depot, 1924), 331–33. 18. Aga Khan III, Aga Khan III: Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah (London: Kegan Paul International, 1998), 1:117–18, 310. 19. Muhammad Iqbal, “Islam as a Moral and Political Ideal,” in Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 304, 307–8. 20. Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 268–69, 278–80. 21. Achille Sékaly, Le congrès du khalifat (Le Caire 13–19 mai 1926) et le congrès du monde musulman (La Mekke, 7 juin–5 juillet 1926) (Paris: Leroux, 1926), 201.

94

william gervase clarence-smith

22. Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, 1857–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 254–55; Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, 450. 23. Abul A‘la Maududi, Purdah and the Status of Woman in Islam (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1972), 20–22, 28, 218–19. 24. Jamal J. Elias, Islam (London: Routledge, 1999), 108. 25. Gilbert Delanoue, Moralistes et politiques musulmans dans l’Égypte du XIXe siècle (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1982), 57. 26. Jay Spaulding, “Slavery, Land Tenure, and Social Class in the Northern Turkish Sudan,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 15, no. 1 (1982): 4, 10–12. 27. Terence Walz, “Black Slavery in Egypt during the Nineteenth Century, as Reflected in the Mahkama Archives of Cairo,” in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, ed. John R. Willis II (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 147–49, 158. 28. Mohammed ibn-Omar el-Tounsy, Voyage au Darfour (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1845), viii–xi, 269–70; Mohammed ibn-Omar el-Tounsy, Voyage au Ouadây (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1851), 404–5, 467–90. 29. John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2002), 53–54. 30. Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 89–90. 31. Gabriel Baer, “Slavery and Its Abolition,” in Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt, ed. Gabriel Baer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 163–66. 32. R. W. Beachey, A Collection of Documents on the Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, (London: Rex Collings 1976), 33. 33. Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 177–78, 187–88; Baer, “Slavery and Its Abolition,” 183–85. 34. Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 89–90. 35. Baer, “Slavery and Its Abolition,” 188; Tucker, “Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” 178. 36. Wilfrid Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: Fisher Unwin, 1907), 253–54. 37. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 222–23. 38. Riad Nourallah, personal communication. 39. Jacques Jomier, Le commentaire coranique du Manâr: Tendances modernes de l’exégèse coranique en Égypte (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1954), 231–32. 40. Muhammad ‘Abduh, The Theology of Unity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), 152–54. 41. Rida’s ideas need to be pieced together from a variety of sources: Amal Ghazal, “Debating Slavery in the Arab Middle East: Abolition between Muslim Reformers and Conservatives,” in Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora, ed. Behnaz Mirzai, Ismael M. Montana, and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2009), 139–54; Mazheruddin Siddiqi, Modernist Reformist Thought in the Muslim World (Islamabad: Islamic Research

Islamic Abolitionism

95

Institute, 1982), 182; A. Chris Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1984), 416–17; M. A. Zaki Badawi, The Reformers of Egypt (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 114; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 142, 239; Jomier, Le commentaire coranique, 231–35. 42. Ahmed Chafik, L’esclavage au point de vue musulman, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1938). 43. Diane Robinson-Dunn, The Harem, Slavery, and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), ch. 2. 44. Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 92. 45. ‘Abdelhamid M. Ahmad, Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen al-Azhar und der modernistischen Bewegung in Ägypten (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1963), 103–8; Hourani, Arabic Thought, 164–70. 46. Mansour Fahmy, La condition de la femme dans l’Islam (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1990), 9–12, 93–113, 159–60. 47. Ahmad, Die Auseinandersetzung, 101, 104–5. 48. Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism; Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 147–49, 150–5. 49. Baer, “Slavery and Its Abolition,” 188. 50. Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, 417. 51. Demetrius A. Zambaco, Les eunuques d’aujourd’hui et ceux de jadis (Paris: Masson, 1911), 36–38. 52. Hasan al-Banna, “Peace in Islam” (1948), http://www.youngmuslims.ca/ online_library/books/peace_in_islam. 53. Sayed Kotb [Sayyid Qutb], Social Justice in Islam, trans. John B. Hardie (New York: Octagon, 1970), 44, 47–49, 112–13, 136, 156–59, 214. 54. Muhammad Qutb, Islam: The Misunderstood Religion (Kuwait: al-Assriya, 1967), 62–99, 101–7, 110. 55. Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 216–20. 56. Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 129, 160. 57. Mahmoud M. Taha, The Second Message of Islam (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 2–23; 31, 47, 137–38, 161–64. 58. ‘Abdullahi A. an-Na‘im, “Shari‘a and Basic Human Rights Concerns,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 228–31, 234, 237. 59. Mohamed I. Khalil, “Human Rights and Islamization of the Sudan Legal System,” in Religion and Conflict in Sudan, ed. Yusuf Fadl Hasan and Richard Gray (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2002), 58–71. 60. John B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 495, 594–604; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The 1848 Abolitionist Farman: A Step Towards Ending the Slave Trade in Iran,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2005), 94–102.

96

william gervase clarence-smith

61. Heinz-Georg Migeod, Die persische Gesellschaft unter Nasiru’d-Din Sah, 1848– 1896 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1990), 333, 339–44; Jakob E. Polak, Persien, das Land und seine Bewohner (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1865), 1:248–49, 252–53. 62. Vanessa Martin, The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in NineteenthCentury Persia (London: Tauris, 2005), 160–64. 63. Taj al-Saltana, Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity (Washington: Mage, 1993), 34, 113. 64. Lewis, Race and Slavery, 79; Brunschvig, “Abd,” 38–39. For the laws, see Eugène Aubin, La Perse d’aujourd’hui: Iran, Mesopotamie (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1908), 210–12; Martin, Qajar Pact, 165. 65. Muhammad Husayn Na‘ini, “Government in the Islamic Perspective,” in Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 124. 66. Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 40–41, 48. 67. Sultanhussein Tabandeh, A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (London: Goulding, 1970), vii–viii, 26–27. 68. Mohamed Awad, Report on Slavery (New York: United Nations, 1966), 77; Brunschvig, “Abd,” 39. 69. Forough Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy, and Religious Modernism in Iran, 1953–2000, from Bazargan to Soroush (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 38. 70. Ali Shar‘iati, On the Sociology of Islam (Berkeley: Mizan, 1979), 103–9. 71. Tabandeh, Muslim Commentary, vii–viii, 27. 72. Ruhollah M. Khomeini, A Clarification of Questions (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), xvi, 86, 220, 254, 274, 278, 353, 354, 429. 73. Seyyed Mahmood Taleqani, Islam and Ownership (Lexington, Ky.: Mazda, 1983), xii–xiii, 186–200. 74. Patricia Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1986) 27, 46; Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995) 14, 93; John C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 222. 75. C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy, and Trade on the East African Littoral, 1798–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 222–24, 231; Beatrice Nicolini, Il sultanato di Zanzibar nel XIX secolo; traffici commerciali e relazioni internazionali (Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 2002), 138, 140; M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992), 103. 76. Nicholls, Swahili Coast, 226, 244. 77. R. W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa (London: Rex Collings, 1976), 52–53. 78. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 632. 79. Bartle Frere, “Correspondence Respecting Sir Bartle Frere’s Mission to the East Coast of Africa, 1872–73,” in Parliamentary Papers 61 (C–820, 1873), 51, 54. 80. Lyndon Harries, Swahili Prose Texts: A Selection from the Material Collected by Carl Velten from 1893 to 1896 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 206–7. 81. Norman R. Bennett, A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar (London: Methuen, 1978), 179.

Islamic Abolitionism

97

82. Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar, 132. 83. Beachey, Documents on the Slave Trade, 125. 84. Arthur H. Hardinge, A Diplomatist in the East (London: Cape, 1928), 197; L. W. Hollingsworth, Zanzibar under the Foreign Office, 1890–1913 (London: Macmillan, 1953), 217. 85. Ahmed I. Salim, Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast, 1895–1965 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), 112, 114; Patricia W. Romero, Lamu: History, Society, and Family in an East African Port City (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1997), 123, 129–30; Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 52, 74–76; Hardinge, Diplomatist, 362–63. 86. Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 76. 87. Beachey, Documents on the Slave Trade, 38–9; Hardinge, Diplomatist, 363–64. 88. J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 137–38, 148; Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 51–54; Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 189–90, 229; Romero, Lamu, 130–31, 147, 158–59. 89. Lee V. Cassanelli, “The Ending of Slavery in Italian Somalia: Liberty and the Control of Labor, 1890–1935,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 322–23. 90. K. S. Vikør, “Sufi Brotherhoods in Africa,” in The History of Islam in Africa, ed. N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 448–49. 91. A. H. M. el-Zein, The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 117–43. 92. Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 120, 191. 93. Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 52. 94. Amal Ghazal, personal communication. 95. Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2003), 360. 96. Gerald de Gaury, Faisal: King of Saudi Arabia (London: Barker, 1966), 151, 155. 97. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, 347. 98. Khaled Abou el Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), 269. 99. Clarence-Smith, Islam and Abolition, 219–21.

This page intentionally left blank

PART

Fighting the Maritime Slave Trade

III

This page intentionally left blank

6

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”: Antislavery, Africans, and the Royal Navy in the Western Indian Ocean lindsay doulton

On June 20, 1897, the residents of the Seychelles, like others living throughout the British Empire, gathered to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The occasion was marked by a weeklong program of events. But to H. Cockburn-Stewart, the colonial administrator later recounting the celebrations to a member of Parliament in England, there was one particularly notable occasion. It concerned a group of 2,000 so-called liberated Africans who had been among the 2,667 individuals settled on the islands between 1861 and 1875 as a result of the Royal Navy’s suppression of the East African slave trade.1 The administrator described how, on the afternoon of the jubilee day, the group of Africans made a spontaneous procession to Government House. They arranged themselves in groups, each carrying a flag with the name of their African tribe, all of which were preceded by a large Union Jack on which was printed the words “The Flag that sets us free.” Once they were gathered, a translated address, having been dictated in Créole, was read in English: We members of the different tribes of Africans living in the Seychelles, take the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria to express to you—Her Representative in these Islands our thanks for all that She and England have done for us. We know that all over the World—where ever the British flag flies, this glorious anniversary will be celebrated in a proper manner—Each colony in its own way by memorials of all descriptions. We are we think a

101

102

lindsay doulton living memorial of the Queen’s glorious reign, for during the period, we have all been freed from slavery. Kindly, Sir, express to the Queen our thanks for our freedom and to England our gratitude to those English Sailors who were killed and wounded, fighting that we might be free.2

Cockburn-Stewart included a number of photographs in his correspondence. Despite being faded with time, these photographs clearly attest to the commanding use of flags during the procession. Intentionally used as a recognizable emblem of their liberty, the flags were also employed as a means of cultural and ethnic self-definition. As Nick Groom’s study of the Union Jack demonstrates, flags are a product of the complex interaction of politics, history, and circumstance.3 Nowhere were these complexities more evident than in the actions of this group of liberated Africans.

The Royal Navy’s Antislavery Campaign: Practices, Perceptions and Representations The Royal Navy’s sustained attempt to suppress the so-called Arab slave trade during the last three decades of the nineteenth century was prompted to varying degrees by a combination of renewed British abolitionist zeal, perceived religious responsibility, and political and economic self-interest. Royal Navy vessels were stationed along key points of the East African and Arabian coastlines in an effort to intercept slave traders exporting enslaved Africans to destinations in Arabia. Between 1860 and 1890, approximately one thousand dhows were seized by the navy, from which some twelve thousand Africans were liberated, and this included those settled on the Seychelles.4 Forming a small fraction of the estimated eight hundred thousand enslaved Africans exported out of East Africa in the nineteenth century, these figures provide some indication of the inefficacy of Britain’s efforts.5 But as noted by Deryck Scarr in the context of the Seychelles, for some liberated Africans, a clear tradition of gratitude was maintained.6 Indeed, further examples—notably, a number of freed-slave autobiographies written by Christian converts— confirm that other emancipated slaves who settled around the western Indian Ocean region clearly attributed their liberation to the British, and specifically the Royal Navy.7 Discussing one such autobiography, Joseph E. Harris has argued that Christian conversion “naturally followed because the liberated Africans regarded the British as ‘saviours.’ . . . Conversion to the faith of their ‘saviours’ was therefore quite an understandable sequence to freedom from slavery.”8 This parallels the imparting of Christianity to enslaved Africans by missionaries in the Atlantic world.9

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

103

For historians studying the Royal Navy’s antislavery campaign in the western Indian Ocean, such sources can be difficult to interpret. Any attempt to move beyond the self-glorifying tone that has dominated the historiography of slave-trade suppression might choose to disregard these accounts on the basis that they were essentially a product of the same imperialist mindset.10 As Joel Quirk and David Richardson write, the antislavery acts of 1807 and 1833, and the navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, were celebrated with immense amounts of self-congratulation: “Abolition was hailed as an extraordinary, unparalleled national accomplishment. It validated British virtues.”11 The continuation of the campaign into the waters of the western Indian Ocean from the 1870s onward represented the zenith of this narrative. By this time, the moral argument in Britain against slavery was long won. Antislavery, however, no longer constituted merely an opposition to slavery; it was about ending slavery and planting what British officials called civilization in its place. Coinciding with racial arguments that helped confirm European “superiority,” the antislavery campaign “placed Britain in the vanguard of European civilization and at the forefront of human progress.”12 A key figure who helped promote this ideology was the Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Historians have unfailingly viewed Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition between 1858 and 1864 as pivotal in publicizing the full scale of the East African slave trade, which led to the naval suppression campaign.13 His imperial vision, which famously promoted “Christianity, commerce and civilization,” was rooted in liberal ideology. It struck a chord with the main concerns of the period and formed the ostensible basis of many of Britain’s imperial forays into Africa in the late nineteenth century, whether under the banner of geographic exploration, scientific inquiry, travel, missionary work, commercial ventures, or antislavery endeavors.14 From the early 1880s on, reports and images of heroic Royal Naval crew members freeing enslaved Africans from Arab dhows featured in popular British illustrated newspapers such as the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, and the Penny Illustrated Paper, and helped affirm the image of Britain as the great emancipator. One example includes a set of engravings that appeared on the front page of the Graphic on October 20, 1888, entitled “Cruising in search of slave dhows off the East Coast of Africa.”15 They depict the crew of HMS Garnet chasing and seizing an Arab slave dhow, rescuing the enslaved Africans, and, finally, returning to Zanzibar to liberate their charges. Suppression of the slave trade was neatly packaged as a straightforward sequence that had a clear beginning, middle, and end. One of the engravings shows three recently rescued Africans seated on the deck of

104

lindsay doulton

the Garnet in front of a billowing Union Jack. Here indeed was “the flag that sets us free.” Symbolically powerful imagery, used alongside interpretive text, cast the British as heroes of suppression, as liberators of enslaved Africans, and as capturers of “enemy” Arab slave traders. In these representations, the capture of slaves by the navy was ostensibly perceived as equal to emancipation from slavery. The prevailing image seemed to suggest that once the Africans set foot on the British ship, they became free persons. Writing in 1869, Admiral Leopold Heath, the commander of the East African antislavery squadron, corroborated this view: “Every man putting his foot upon English soil becomes ipso facto free, and the deck of a British man-of-war is held constructively to be British territory.”16 In fact, emancipation as a legal status was not formalized until decreed by the viceadmiralty court (after 1866, Zanzibar was headquarters of the main court in the region).17 It was here that Africans, if proved to have been traded in contravention of established anti-slave-trade treaties, were awarded freedom papers, which formally declared their change in status from enslaved to free persons.18 Freedom, at least as an ideological concept, was unquestionably the expected consequence of British naval interception. Yet recent scholarship on the history of antislavery has sought to demonstrate that while legal abolition is commonly depicted as “a narrative endpoint” for onetime slaves, freedom often remained an unachievable reality.19 Studies of the postemancipation experiences of Africans liberated in the western Indian Ocean region support this idea.20 They demonstrate that the journey from enslavement to freedom was not the uncomplicated process that some self-congratulatory British accounts suggested. This chapter similarly seeks to problematize the narrative of the Royal Navy as the glorified British liberator. A number of unofficial sources, including contemporary and secondary accounts written by naval officers (published books, letters, diaries, and memoirs) and also some freed-slave autobiographies, reveal that freedom on the antislavery ships was not a normative state, but was shaped according to the “civilizing” ideals of Victorian Britons. The idea that naval rescue was more ambiguous than often portrayed in British accounts links to an argument proposed by Edward A. Alpers, that the “middle passage” of the East African slave trade constituted a far more complex set of fractured and multiple journeys than is usually assumed.21 Naval interception may have constituted yet another traumatic phase in the journey of enslaved Africans. Read in this way, this chapter represents a departure from many of the self-glorifying contemporary and historical accounts of the navy’s antislavery campaign.

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

105

The Royal Navy’s Antislavery Campaign, Christian Missions, and Liberation: Perceptions of Naval Officers In a memorandum published in 1874, the Reverend Edward Steere, a missionary of the United Missions to Central Africa (UMCA) who had extensive experience of the East African slave trade, stated that “external repression” of the slave trade was a necessary tool for missionary activity in East Africa.22 Like David Livingstone, Steere believed that the dual system of external naval suppression coupled with the introduction of missionary work and lawful trade to the interior could have improving effects in East Africa.23 The idea of an external “antislavery police force” was one of the most common terms used by contemporaries and historians alike to describe the navy’s suppression activities.24 Not all naval officers, however, viewed suppression as separated in this way. Rather, they imagined their role as being located within the wider imperial and civilizing mission, and not simply as an adjunct to it. Furthermore, as the following section highlights, they saw themselves as spreading the supposed benefits of empire, which included the introduction of Christianity, by being part of the antislavery movement. The ongoing debate over the lack of provision for liberated Africans brought this argument to the fore. Writing to the Admiralty in 1871, the commander of the East Indies station, Rear-Admiral James Cockburn argued: “Some such place as Sierra Leone might be established on this Coast. Where free Africans can be cared for and educated made capable to enjoy that freedom.”25 This debate was ongoing throughout the 1870s. Another senior officer of the East African squadron, Captain George Lydiard Sulivan, stated in 1875 that only under British rule or protection could liberated Africans experience any “real sense of the word freedom.”26 Drawing on a long-established British abolitionist mantra, and furthering the ideology of the civilizing mission, these officers concurred that antislavery involved more than freeing enslaved Africans from dhows; it was about freeing them from their own “backward” societies and freeing them from the influence of the perceived archaic customs of Islam. Cockburn and Sulivan clearly supported the widely held belief that Africans would not be truly free unless taught by a superior (preferably British) teacher to understand the freedom bestowed to them. In this way, they believed that British imperial expansion within East Africa and the wider western Indian Ocean region was a mutually beneficial arrangement that would offer trusteeship to vulnerable Africans freed by the naval antislavery patrols.27 The lack of provision for liberated Africans was one of the principal factors attracting European missions to the East African region. Seven societies established themselves between 1863 and 1888.28 Naval officers’ accounts

106

lindsay doulton

demonstrate that the antislavery crews commonly visited mission stations.29 In the 1880s, in particular, many social events for the antislavery squadron centered on the coastal mission stations. Ministers frequently provided religious services for naval crews and sometimes provided medical care to the squadron.30 It was here that naval men sometimes reacquainted themselves with slaves they had rescued. The Reverend John Dougherty, chaplain of the Garnet between 1887 and 1890, described in his contemporary published account that the most pleasing part of an excursion to one of the UMCA missions near Zanzibar was the “visit of the little redeemed slaves from the Mission at Mkunazini. . . . Most of them were captured by our boats from slave traders.”31 In 1889, Midshipman Tristan Dannreuther wrote in a letter to his mother that his crew had visited some of “our slave children who had been turned into Mission children after being freed by the consul general.”32 The notion that these Africans had literally been transformed (or, to use an evangelical phrase, reborn) through the dual moments of emancipation and conversion was one widely held by British missionaries and abolitionists.33 In Dannreuther’s case, however, these were not the words of a staunch evangelist, but reflected the widely held European perception that Africans were characterized by what they lacked. Before coming into contact with their civilizers, they were seen to be merely empty vessels who would begin to learn only at the point of conversion. Sometimes the naval crews reciprocated the missions’ hospitality by receiving freed slave children on board their ships while visiting the mission stations. These occasions were typically described in a sentimentalized fashion infused with a sense of Christian celebration. Describing a fete day at Kiungani, site of the UMCA’s Theological College and school near Zanzibar, the Reverend Dougherty wrote how the house and grounds were decorated with flags of “all nations from our ships.”34 When the children visited the Garnet, “they attached themselves to their old friends, many of whom had assisted in rescuing them from slavery.” The children also “took tea on the lower deck with all the comforts the messes could produce, sang ‘Grandfather’s clock’ and other songs in Swahili and left overjoyed with their holyday.”35 Commander George King-Hall recorded in his diary receiving a group of 150 children on board HMS Penguin during a visit to the freed slave settlement run by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) at Freretown (near Mombasa) in 1888. They “roamed delightedly all over the ship” and gathered on the quarterdeck to dance some Swahili dances and sing hymns. It was, he stated, “such a great pleasure seeing all these children enjoying themselves, and my heart was full at hearing them sing of Isa [Jesus] when I remembered they had all been rescued from slavery by our cruisers.”36

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

107

Within this scenario, the navy’s role was to seize slaves from the grip of Arab slave traders and deliver them into the arms of Christian missionaries for conversion. In one sense this was a literal reality—from the early 1870s onward, as missions became one of the main destinations for freed slaves, especially children, it was often the naval ships that transported them. But the notion of the navy as both liberator and deliverer was also metaphorical. A visit by the crew of HMS Dragon to Freretown in 1884 was, for example, described in the monthly journal of the CMS, the Church Missionary Intelligencer, in the following terms: “At eleven we had a special English service for the sake of the crew of the Dragon, which had brought us, and which had no chaplain. It was a very interesting occasion, and a congregation very typical of the work now going on in God’s good providence along the East African coast;—the union of freed slaves and their deliverers in the blessed results of Christian liberty.”37 These activities demonstrate the interconnectedness of Royal Naval suppression and missionary work. Both were seen to be led by the same providential objective: namely, the freeing of Africans from physical and spiritual enslavement, and the defeat of their enslavers. For some liberated Africans, life in the missionary communities brought not only conversion to Christianity, but also adoption of other Western values and structures. Many, for example, were married and started families at the mission stations.38 Petro Kilekwa, a liberated African who wrote an autobiography, married a Yao woman who had also been rescued by the navy, and both became UMCA missionaries.39 Family and the sanctity of marriage were central to the missionary project, a belief also propounded by naval officers. Captain Sulivan, for example, approved, a few days after landing in the Seychelles, the division of a large hut in which a group of freed slaves were temporarily living into smaller rooms, the smallest of which were occupied by married couples. He even felt it his duty to make a list of the married couples to ensure that the commissioner of the islands would register them in that way.40 Commander King-Hall was pleased to observe that the freed slaves at Freretown got “engaged early and marry comparatively young.”41 Accounts of visits to the mission stations by religiously minded naval officers, which appeared in missionary journals, also emphasized the family unit as an essential element of any enlightened community. Their overwhelmingly sentimentalized descriptions focused on extolling the many examples of civilization that had been nurtured within the freed slave settlements. Typical of such accounts were the Reverend Knight’s observations of Freretown, published in the Church Missionary Intelligencer in 1880: “We went over to the Mission-ground, and saw how it had been laid out and planted, with the people busy tilling their plots or building their houses—great contrasts to many of the small and filthy

108

lindsay doulton

huts of the Zanzibar people. We could but wish the supporters of the CMS had been able to see the happy look of one group—a young father and mother (rescued from slavery) busily engaged in clearing the ground near their house, while their little one lay on a tiny native bedstead under the shade of a tree nearby.”42 Such representations detailed, with overwhelming approval, the manner in which British value systems had been grafted onto the freed-slave communities. In this idyllic domestic scene, the necessities of a civilized life, brought about as a result of industrious labor, were emphasized as the boons of freedom. Missionary journals had a direct influence over Britain’s churchgoing public, and with a large and popular readership were an important source for missionary fund-raising in Britain.43 The testimonies of reputable British naval officers who had observed firsthand the regeneration of Africans living in Christian mission stations were therefore vital propaganda. Besides making an explicit connection between suppression and the civilizing mission by visiting mission stations and extolling their many virtues, naval officers also did so through more implicit methods. Sometimes naval rescue was represented as the first stage of rebirth and salvation. It was on board a naval ship that Africans, like children, would take their first steps toward being redeemed by learning the benefits of civilization. In an account published in 1873, Captain Sulivan, for example, alluded to the biblical story of creation: “One of the first things, we are told, Adam did, was to name the animals, and one of the first things done by us was to name these slaves on their being received on board.”44 Writing retrospectively in 1931, Tristan Dannreuther referred to the practice of renaming similarly. He stated that at the christening of liberated Africans in the East African mission stations, “it was the general practice to give them all the surname of the [naval] ship which captured them; with the result that in the Mission Stations at Zanzibar and on the mainland there were some hundreds of Mr., Mrs. And Miss Boadicea, Garnet, Turquoise, Reindeer, Mariner, Kingfisher, Penguin, Griffon, Algerine and later Conquest, Brisk, Cossack, Satellite, Pigeon, Redbreast &c.”45 Of course, naming, as an act of cultural imposition, was a characteristic of British imperial expansion and colonialism on a wider level.46 These elements, in addition to an evangelical one, may be seen in the renaming of Africans on the antislavery patrols. Linked with the ideas of salvation, paternalism, and civilization was the representation of the naval ship as a home and a place of domesticity. James Juma Mbotela, who narrated the experiences of his father, who had been freed by the navy, recorded how the interpreter on board had told the freed slaves to “have no fear, as they were in the hands of the British who would guard them with love.”47 Mbotela’s style, which reflected his evangelical beliefs, depicted suppression in highly idealized accounts of onboard life: “Good

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

109

garments were given to them, and good blankets. Every morning they had porridge, nice and hot, the same as the Europeans themselves were eating. . . . Soon all the slaves had happy faces, as they noticed the difference between the British and their Arab captors.”48 The naval ship as an embodiment of domestic order also worked in contradistinction to the long-established abolitionist trope of familial separation. Describing a series of freed-slave testimonies, Captain Sulivan stated that the many similarities between the stories might be summed up as “fights, murders, robberies, separation from friends, long journeys, cruel treatment, and sold at some market to be taken they know not where, with the conviction that it was impossible ever to return to their own land of relations again.”49 In contrast, the naval crews were depicted as offering paternal protection, a kind of ready-made family. African children and representations of Africans as childlike were central to this discourse. Sulivan, for example, described a twelve-month-old boy who was “often found in the arms of the boatswain’s mate. . . . I believe he was never heard to cry during his six weeks on board.”50 A striking example of this kind of representation can be seen in the caricature of an enslaved Nyasa woman immediately following her rescue by HMS Eclipse off the Comoro Islands in the 1880s (figure 6.1).51 The image was created by one of the ship’s officers, Lieutenant Smith-Dorrien. Like other naval men, Smith-Dorrien was conscious of the power of firsthand testimony as an apparently corroborative source of antislavery propaganda. Entitled “Poor Little Polly Comoro—In the land of plenty,” the caricature was reproduced for a missionary exhibition in Berkhamstead to show “the horrors of the slave trade.” Smith-Dorrien annotated the caricature retrospectively: “This is the picture of a little slave we caught in the Comoro Islands—Unfortunately all the slaves had just been landed & were got away, but this little woman, for woman she was, was much too weak to move and was left behind in the Dowh.” He also stated that she was the mother of two children. The shocking physical condition of the woman was graphically portrayed—her minute, childlike frame exaggerated by the skeletal shadow and the gifts of food lying before her on the deck of the naval ship. Finally, her infantilization was completed by her name: “Poor Little Polly Comoro.” The portrayal of Africans as childlike was widely employed in naval accounts of Indian Ocean suppression, and also represented a recycling of the rhetoric used by abolitionists in the transatlantic context.52 In a collection of freed-slave autobiographies recorded by Arthur Cornwallis Madan of the UMCA, nearly all the children described their route into slavery through stories of familial separation and long and fractured journeying. All this was seen to have been brought to an end by naval interception and arrival

Figure 6.1. “Poor Little Polly Comoro—In the land of plenty.” © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

111

at the mission station. Typical of the tone and style of the narratives within Madan’s collection is the way in which a Makua boy ends his tale: “This is the end of my story. These are my wanderings. It was God’s providence that I have come here [to the mission station]. This is the end.”53 Emancipation was overwhelmingly presented as the end point, as if everything previous had been leading to the moment of rebirth.

Subverting the Rhetoric of the Royal Navy’s Antislavery Campaign This benevolent rhetoric elided many of the more complex aspects of the encounter between the navy and enslaved Africans. Embedded within these apparently benign texts were a number of commonly invoked tropes, metaphors, and realities that spoke of the trauma and fear that Africans frequently appeared to experience during their rescue. An exploration of these can help challenge the stereotype that, for Africans, naval interception was a wholly positive experience or one unquestionably associated with a sense of liberty or salvation. When slave dhows were seized by the navy, a period of overt physical and mental distress appears to have ensued for enslaved Africans. But because so little is known of Africans’ experiences of enslavement before naval seizure, this may have been one in a continuing series of traumas. Official and unofficial records of naval suppression are littered with frequent accounts of bungled rescue attempts. Those often resulted in high rates of injury and mortality—principally among the enslaved (but also among naval personnel). The Admiralty return from January 1870 to March 1875, for example, recorded that of the 2,422 slaves captured by the antislavery squadron, 1,733 were emancipated. The difference between these two figures-–689 individuals—was attributed to the number who had died between naval seizure and adjudication at the vice-admiralty court (approximately 39 of this group were, however, “not condemned” on the basis of a legal ruling). The number of slaves who died at the point of seizure was not listed, principally because it was probably unknown. But some are likely to have been among those sometimes recorded as “slaves escaped.”54 In the many letters written to his family while serving on antislavery patrols, Dannreuther described numerous chaotic rescue attempts. In November 1887, while stationed at Zanzibar, he described, in his usual dispassionate tone, the consequences of one dhow chase: “The Arabs bolted and we lost them and ten of the slaves. Some of the slaves were picked up in the water and others over taken on the shore. Some of them and most of the baby’s were drowned.”55 A few months later, he described how two of his colleagues had

112

lindsay doulton

been awarded medals by the Royal Humane Society: “Lt. Pochin for jumping overboard after a mad slave at Lamu with a strong tide running . . . and Novis for jumping overboard after a pack of drowning slaves twice when a dhow capsized as we were boarding her in Pemba.”56 It is notable that Dannreuther described the actions of the slave as “mad.” Writing years later, he described a woman who had been injured during another rescue attempt in a similar tone: “They [the freed slaves] seemed insensible to pain. The writer saw a woman, who had been accidentally shot in the breast in a dhow action, smiling whilst being pierced repeatedly by a six-inch probe by the surgeon and apparently only pleased that he was doing the best to locate the bullet for extraction.”57 In his unpublished memoirs, Frederick Burrows appeared more sensitive to the trauma caused by naval interception: “Of course we used to fire a gun sometimes across there bow to frighten the slavers but that used to plunge the native people into agonies of terror and make them believe we were worse enemies than the Arabs. They would sometimes throw themselves over board and chance whether they got to shore.”58 Shooting at suspected slavetrading dhows was routine practice on antislavery patrols. This last example highlights not only the trauma of rescue, but also the desperate attempts to which Africans were prepared to go to escape the experience. Clearly, for the enslaved Africans, it was not always instantly apparent that the naval ships represented salvation, or in fact anything close to it. While the initial seizure may have been the most overtly distressing phase of rescue, some evidence suggests, unsurprisingly, that Africans continued to experience psychological disorientation while on board the naval ships. Naval officers reported that freed Africans were suspicious of the motives of the antislavery crews as a result of Arab slave traders creating rumors that Europeans were cannibals.59 Dannreuther, for example, described a group of Africans who were reluctant to eat the food offered by the crew of the Garnet for this reason.60 A typical description of this fear was narrated by a Nyasa boy who had been rescued by HMS Briton and whose account formed part of the collection of freed-slave autobiographies recorded by Madan in 1887. He stated: “On the ‘Briton’, when we were brought biscuit we were afraid to eat it, for we thought it was made of men’s bones and given to fatten us up.”61 In fact there may have been occasions when naval men not only made no attempts to assuage such fears, but in fact played on them as a source of entertainment. Another boy, for example, remembered that “every time the sailors brought out their swords and guns for drill, and pretended to attack us, ah! We were very much afraid and said: ‘To-day we shall certainly be eaten’ ”; but in a typically benign way, the boy quickly reassures the reader that “after all, they were only in play.”62 Dannreuther told his mother that when

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

113

freed slaves were on board the Garnet, “We used to make the children fight over bananas, which they considered a great luxury.”63 Such passing remarks tacitly highlight some troubling realities omitted from the sentimental British accounts of the antislavery patrols. The unusual nature of antislavery work produced among the naval crews a tension between the responsibility of having freed slaves on board and carrying out ordinary shipboard duties. At its mildest, this sense of conflict was characterized by frustration that the freed slaves impeded normal onboard routine. Walter Kingon, master-at-arms on HMS Thetis, for example, noted in his journal in 1874 the relief of landing a group of freed slaves at the Seychelles, since they were “a complete nuisance in the ship.”64 In most cases when the navy intercepted a cargo of slaves at sea, days or weeks often passed before the freed slaves could be landed ashore. During that interval, the Africans either lived on board the Royal Navy ship or were towed behind in the seized dhow. Official guidance on how freed slaves were to be treated on naval ships was glaringly brief. The Admiralty instructions issued to naval officers included one cursory paragraph on the subject: “If Slaves should be on board, every effort is to be made to alleviate the sufferings and improve their condition, by a careful attention to cleanliness and ventilation, by separating the sickly from those who are in good health, by encouraging the Slaves to feel confidence in Her Majesty’s Officers and men, and promoting among them cheerfulness and exercise.”65 Practical provision for accommodating freed slaves on board was, however, deficient. Naval crews tended to supplement the lack of provisions with items from their own stores or by pillaging the cargoes of seized dhows for items such as cooking utensils, food, matting, and calico, which was provided to freed slaves as clothing.66 The reality presented a sharp contrast to the accounts explored above, in which the naval ship was represented through tropes of domesticity and homeliness. One of the ways in which naval crews attempted to cope with the perceived disorder of having freed slaves on board was to introduce familiar shipboard rules and routines. James Juma Mbotela described how some of the freed slaves on board the Thetis were so scared by the pipe whistle used to give orders that they jumped overboard.67 Washing the liberated Africans took place in the morning, by means of the ship’s pump, and Captain Philip Colomb described how the Africans were fed in grouped “messes” at 7:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.68 In their efforts to “civilize,” the naval crews introduced Africans to what they perceived to be acceptable domestic arrangements. One of the first tasks undertaken when freed slaves came on board was to separate them into men, women, and children.69 According to Lieutenant John Challice, writing in 1872, the Africans remained largely separated throughout their time on the

114

lindsay doulton

ship, with the men and women living on either side of the quarterdeck.70 The unique situation of having large groups of women on board naval ships was no doubt part of the reason for gender separation; it also probably reflected European fears of the supposed sexual promiscuity of Africans. It is difficult to know how much the freed slaves understood these strange shipboard routines and alien surroundings. In theory, the interpreters employed on the antislavery squadron offered the necessary linguistic link between the naval crews and the freed slaves. In his autobiography, Petro Kilekwa portrayed the role of the interpreter in this idealized light: “A European and a black man peered down into the lower deck and saw us slaves, ever so many of us, and when we saw the face of the European we were terrified. We were quite sure that Europeans eat people but the European said to a black man: ‘Tell them not to be afraid but let them rejoice,’ and the European began to smile and laugh.”71 Kilekwa’s idealized account, however, was likely at odds with others’ experiences. In reality, interpreters rarely had full command of the many regional languages spoken by enslaved Africans seized in Indian Ocean waters.72 A single shipload of enslaved Africans probably consisted of people from many different ethnic backgrounds. Captain Sulivan noted that there were members of eleven tribes on board HMS Daphne, and only those who had some grasp of Swahili could be understood by the interpreter.73 Sulivan’s account of the freed slaves’ testimonies recorded on board reflects the potentially directed tone of the questions posed by the interviewer. They also highlight, however, an admission of the ambiguity of naval rescue. When asked, “Were you glad when this ship captured your dhow?” one woman answered that “she did not know she would be free.”74 How much the freed slaves initially understood of the unfamiliar environment of the naval ship can only be surmised. Their behavior, sometimes interpreted by naval offices as irrational, probably speaks of the physical and mental scars of enslavement. This was clearly intensified by the linguistic isolation and disorientation many must have felt on board the antislavery ships. This interpretation seems to be supported by the fact that missionaries often reported that groups of freed slaves who arrived at their settlements from the antislavery ships suffered from extreme physical and mental illnesses.75 When the two thousand liberated Africans living on the Seychelles chose the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee to present themselves as “a living memorial of the Queen’s glorious reign,” it seems likely that they hoped their gesture would be received with the deep symbolic meaning with which it was intended. Whether the administrator, Cockburn-Stewart, ever relayed to the Africans the queen’s reply, sent in a dispatch from Downing Street, that she was “deeply touched by the sentiments of loyal gratitude

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

115

expressed in the address” is unknown.76 Though this was an isolated episode on a relatively remote set of islands in the Indian Ocean, the actions of these former slaves, including their use of the Union Jack as a symbol of British antislavery, “the flag that sets us free,” reflected a wider imperial sentiment that underpinned Victorian Britain’s sense of moral and national superiority. Indeed, it is striking just how frequently, and in so many varied contexts, the British flag appears in antislavery accounts as an emblem of freedom. James Juma Mbotela described an onboard occasion in the following light: “The sailors brought those cruel trees that the slaves had borne on their necks, and piled them up in their presence; then the flag of the Union Jack was placed by them. At the sight of these bonds, which they thought had been thrown away before, some feared that the British intended to cast their bodies into the sea, as the cruel slave traders had sometimes done for no apparent reason. But it was the bonds that were thrown away into the sea in their presence. All the white people clapped their hands for joy, and the released slaves did the same. Then they were certain they were safe.”77 While such sources are less than useful in shedding light on the historical realities of slave-trade suppression, they do show that some freed slaves, at least, perceived the navy with extreme gratitude. Furthermore, as Edward A. Alpers notes, it is perhaps less a question whether such stories were true, than that they highlight the recurring nature of the rhetoric of abolitionism.78 In both these examples, the Union Jack was invoked as a symbol of Britain’s antislavery commitment. The British sailors whom the liberated Africans honored in their speech as “killed and wounded, fighting that we might be free” made the ultimate sacrifice to the nation’s devotion to freedom. Yet the history of naval slave-trade suppression was far more ambiguous than the rhetoric of antislavery allowed. The bungled captures described in the private letters of Midshipman Dannreuther were omitted from the heroic representations of the campaign published in British newspapers. Instead, suppression was presented as an unequivocal end point that brought unquestioned freedom to Africans. Yet not all naval officers believed that suppression alone could bring freedom. Officers extolled the benefits of missionary enterprise and imperial expansion and supported the idea that only under British tutelage could Africans experience “real” freedom. This analysis has highlighted that varying interpretations of freedom existed in the navy’s campaign. Clearly, it was not always obvious to enslaved Africans that naval rescue meant freedom. Moreover, as others have shown elsewhere, the lives of many liberated Africans settled in the region paralleled the lives of indentured laborers, raising further questions about the substantive outcomes of slave-trade suppression and once more emphasizing the ambiguous nature of freedom within the British antislavery campaign.79

116

lindsay doulton

Notes Research for this chapter was carried out as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, held at the University of Hull and the National Maritime Museum. 1. H. Cockburn-Stewart to the Right Honourable J. Chamberlain, MP, Seychelles, June 30, 1897, The National Archives (TNA), CO 167/708. Cockburn-Stewart notes that there were two thousand Africans in the procession. For figures of liberated Africans settled in the Seychelles, see Moses Nwulia, The History of Slavery in Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1810–1875 (London: Associated University Presses, 1981), 283. 2. Cockburn-Stewart to J. Chamberlain, June 30, 1897. 3. Nick Groom, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). 4. Raymond Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 220. 5. Figures for the total volume of the East African slave trade have been heavily debated; this figure is taken from Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It includes only the coastal exports, not the slave trade in the interior of East Africa. 6. Deryck Scarr, Seychelles since 1770: History of a Slave and Post-Slave Society (London: Hurst, 1999), 70. 7. Petro Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest: The Autobiography of Padre Petro Kilekwa, translated from Chinyanja by K. H. Nixon Smith (London: Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1937); A. C. Madan, ed. and trans., Kiungani; or, Story and History from Central Africa. Written by Boys in the Schools of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (London: Bell and Sons, 1887); James Juma Mbotela, The Freeing of Slaves in East Africa (London: Evans Brothers, 1956). 8. Joseph E. Harris, Recollection of James Juma Mbotela (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1977), viii. 9. See, for example, Catherine Hall’s study of Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 10. See Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1949); Reginald Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). 11. Joel Quirk and David Richardson, “Anti-slavery, European Identity and International Society: A Macro-historical Perspective,” Journal of Modern European History 7, no. 1 (2009): 68–92. 12. Ibid. 13. See, for example, Lloyd, Navy and the Slave Trade, 193–94; Howell, Royal Navy, 18. 14. John M. MacKenzie, “David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life: Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa,” in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, ed. John M. MacKenzie (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1996), 207.

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

117

15. National Maritime Museum (NMM), ZBA2590. 16. Commodore Heath to Consul Packenham, Seychelles, August 14, 1869, TNA, ADM 1/6402. There is strong resonance here to the Somerset case of 1772. The details of this well-known case had far-reaching implications for the early British abolitionist movement and debates surrounding the legal status of slaves in England. Somerset’s advocates argued that the air of England was too pure for slaves to breathe, for “the moment [slaves] put their feet on English ground, that moment they become free”; quoted in Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Mariner’s Books, 2005), 49. 17. Lloyd, Navy and the Slave Trade, 253. 18. Moses Nwulia, Britain and Slavery in East Africa (Washington: Three Continents, 1975), 134. 19. Joel Quirk, “Ending Slavery in All Its Forms: Legal Abolition and Effective Emancipation in Historical Perspective,” International Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 4 (2008): 529–54. 20. For a general history of liberated Africans in the western Indian Ocean region, see Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), and Nwulia, Britain and Slavery, 111–25, 150–60; for liberated Africans in Mauritius and the Seychelles, see Nwulia, Slavery in Mauritius and the Seychelles. 21. Edward A. Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (London: University of California Press, 2007), 20–38, 21. 22. This memorandum is quoted fully in Bartle Frere, Eastern Africa as a Field for Missionary Labour (London: John Murray, 1874), 38–40. 23. Charles Livingstone and David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries; and of the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyasa, 1858–1864 (London: John Murray, 1865), 21–22. 24. See, for example, an anonymous newspaper article probably written by Lieutenant Cecil Molyneux Gilbert Cooper of HMS Vulture in the early 1870s, in which the squadron was referred to as “the police of the seas” (NMM, BGY/G/5). Both the west and east coast squadrons have commonly been described as an “anti-slavery police force,” or as “policing” the slave trade; see, for example, Lloyd, Navy and the Slave Trade, ix. 25. Rear Admiral Cockburn to the Secretary of the Admiralty, undated, 1871, TNA, ADM 1/6190. 26. Captain Sulivan to Rear Admiral Macdonald, Zanzibar, November 17, 1875, TNA, FO 84/1457. 27. On trusteeship and British antislavery, see Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume 3: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198–221. 28. B. Sundkler and C. A. Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 510. 29. In particular, see the letters of Tristan Dannreuther, NMM, DAN/73; Reverend John Anderson Dougherty, The East Indies Station; or, The Cruise of HMS “Garnet,”

118

lindsay doulton

1887–90 (Malta: Muscat Printing Office, 1892); diaries of George King-Hall, Royal Naval Museum (RNM), 1995.150/1–2. 30. George Herbert Wilson, The History of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, (London: UMCA, 1936), 27. 31. Dougherty, East Indies Station, 41. 32. Tristan Dannreuther to Mrs Dannreuther, November 8, 1889, NMM, DAN/73. 33. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 344. 34. Dougherty, East Indies Station, 40. 35. Ibid., 41. 36. King-Hall, on board HMS Penguin, entry dated May 14, 1888, RNM, 1995. 150/1–2. 37. Church Missionary Intelligencer, January 1884, 25. 38. Nwulia, Britain and Slavery, 156. 39. Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest, ch. 5. 40. George Lydiard Sulivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa (1873; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968), 195. 41. King-Hall, on board HMS Penguin, entry dated May 14, 1888. 42. Church Missionary Intelligencer, March 1880, 167–69. 43. Roland Oliver, The Missionary Factor in East Africa, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1965), 93. 44. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 175. 45. Tristan Dannreuther, “Slave Cruising off Zanzibar and Pemba, 1887–1890–1892,” Naval Review 19 (1931): 50. 46. Robert A. Stafford, “Scientific Exploration and Empire,” in Porter, Oxford History of the British Empire, 3:315. 47. Mbotela, Freeing of Slaves, 46. 48. Ibid. 49. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 186 (Sulivan’s emphasis). 50. Ibid., 177. 51. Volume of sketches by Rear Admiral Arthur Hale Smith-Dorrien, NMM, SMD/6. 52. The infant stereotype was the prevailing representation attached to Africans in much late Victorian British literature. 53. Madan, Kiungani, 45. 54. “Return of vessels captured for being engaged and equipped for Slave Trade: 1870–1875,” Parliamentary Papers, 1875 (326). It is difficult to be completely precise with figures: some slaves were later returned to owners, and the figures are not always clear. The thirty-nine who were not freed were from a number of separate seizures. A variety of legal reasons prevented the cases from being condemned. The seizures that were not condemned were small, consisting of one or two slaves. In some cases slaves were returned to owners because they were believed to be part of the dhow crew, rather than intended for sale, and as a result did not contravene antislavery treaties. 55. Tristan Dannreuther to Mrs Dannreuther, Zanzibar, November 26, 1887, NMM, DAN/73. 56. Tristan Dannreuther to Mrs Dannreuther, Zanzibar, August 1888, NMM, DAN/73. 57. Dannreuther, “Slave Cruising,” 49.

“The Flag That Sets Us Free”

119

58. Memoirs of Service of Frederick Robert Burrows (1836–1920), NMM, MS79/091, 3. 59. William Creswell, Close to the Wind: The Early Memoirs, 1866–1879, of Admiral Sir William Creswell, K.C.M.G., K.B.E., ed. Paul Thompson (London: Heinemann, 1965), 159; Dougherty, East Indies Station, 30; account of service on HMS Briton on the east coast of Africa and Zanzibar in 1873, by George K. Gordon, NMM, FIE/43, 106. 60. Dannreuther, “Slave Cruising,” 49. 61. Madan, Kiungani, 32. 62. Ibid., 28. 63. Tristan Dannreuther to Mrs. Dannreuther, Bombay, November 8, 1889, NMM, DAN/73. 64. Walter Kingon, journal kept while on board HMS Thetis, 1874–76, during antislavery patrols around Zanzibar, RNM, 2008.11(1). 65. “Instructions for the Guidance of Her Majesty’s Naval Officers Employed in the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Parliamentary Papers, 1844 (577). 66. Philip H. Colomb, Slave Catching in the Indian Ocean: A Record of Naval Experiences (London: Longmans, 1873), 277–78; Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 180. 67. Mbotela, Freeing of Slaves, 46. 68. Colomb, Slave Catching, 278. 69. Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest, 16; Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 175. 70. Lieutenant J. A. Challice, “In Pursuit of Slavers,” Dark Blue, 4 (1872): 303–7. Gender separation was also implemented onboard transatlantic slave ships. 71. Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest, 15. 72. Edward A. Alpers and Matthew S. Hopper, “Parler en son nom? Comprendre les témoignages d’esclaves africains originaires de l’océan Indien (1850–1930),” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 63, no. 3 (2008): 799. 73. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 189. 74. Ibid., 185. 75. Fred Morton, Children of Ham: Freed Slaves and Fugitive Slaves on the Kenya Coast, 1873 to 1907 (Oxford: Westview, 1990), 64. 76. Draft Despatch, Downing Street, September 2, 1897, to Admiral Cockburn-Stewart, Seychelles, TNA, CO 167/708. 77. Mbotela, Freeing of Slaves, 47. 78. Edward A. Alpers, “Representations of Children in the East African Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (2009): 30. 79. See note 20 above.

7

“If You Catch Me Again at It, Put Me to Death”: Slave Trading, Paper Trails, and British Bureaucracy in the Indian Ocean mandana e. limbert

On September 6, 1872, the British ship HMS Vulture intercepted and captured the Yasmeen, a dhow travelling from the island of Pemba off the East African coast to Rass al-Hadd near the town of Sur on the Omani coast.1 On board were 169 slaves, 13 crew members, and 21 passengers.2 Upon its capture, British officials investigated and interrogated the crew, confiscated the ship, and imprisoned the ship’s captain and his son. The officials released the remaining passengers and crew and, in the end, transported the surviving slaves to Bombay.3 The ship was destroyed. This chapter focuses on the case of the Yasmeen documented in the ViceAdmiralty Court in Muscat. It seeks to expand our understanding of the journey of slave ships and slave-trade transactions at the end of the nineteenth century. It also illustrates some of the bureaucratic and legal methods British authorities employed to prosecute such cases. In so doing, it highlights the omissions, silences, and unevenness of the information contained in the file, suggesting what the British authorities may have taken for granted or considered insignificant in their investigation. Beyond the logistics of trade and the bureaucracy of capture, the case of the Yasmeen also makes evident that the intense British opposition to slavery and outrage at the treatment of slaves by “Arabs” in the Indian Ocean at the time did not translate into British attention to or care for actual slaves.4

120

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

121

Omani and East African accounts of slave life and slave trading between Oman and Zanzibar are relatively rare, though as Abdul Sheriff and Thomas McDow illustrate in this volume, manumission records from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide some information about slaves and slave traders. The case of the Yasmeen, however, reveals where slaves came from, where they were going, how much they cost, and how they may or may not have become integrated into nonslave economic and commercial life. The case also provides a glimpse into the practicalities of trading (including how money was transferred and how traders relied on letters to conduct their transactions), where and by whom trading occurred, and how slave traders attempted to circumvent British policing of the Indian Ocean. Some of the most fascinating material is to be found in the confiscated letters of slave dealers and their agents in East Africa and Oman. Beyond the complicated practicalities, it is in these letters that one senses slave dealers’ disputes, expectations, and even sentiments of the time. In addition to revealing more details about the Indian Ocean slave trade in the nineteenth century, the documents collected in the case of the Yasmeen illustrate the policing and bureaucratic methods used by British officials to limit the trade, even as they raise a series of questions. How were these legal procedures made explicit in the documentation of the case? What kinds of evidence did officials feel it necessary to provide in creating a case file that would encapsulate this event? What kinds of information and evidence were taken for granted, not attended to, or not documented? Though some information about slave trading can be gleaned from these and other British records, many questions are left unanswered. While certain aspects of the trade are noted in the records, others are omitted. And while the officials creating the record at times seemed to provide particular details indicating a level of attentiveness and expertise beyond that necessary to the construction of a solid legal case, such as diacritic marks for translated and transcribed terms or the specific dimensions of the ship, at other moments the officials seem less concerned with the documentation of details and instead provide either little or no information. Or they document the fact that there is no evidence or information. As Matthew Hull and others have pointed out, such documentary requirements and practices (sometimes despite—or aided by—their unevenness) can help maintain or establish administrative control.5 It should be noted that the documents for the Yasmeen case are not particularly voluminous, comprising about thirty folios, and are stored in a file of general correspondence pertaining to the Oman slave trade in the period 1847–72 housed in the British Library in the India Office Records.6 It should be noted also that the original documents in the case include the official testimonies and

122

mandana e. limbert

affidavits of British naval officers who captured the ship and the translation and transcription of the interrogation of the ship’s captain, his son, and two of the crew members, as well as the translation and transcription of extracts of letters found on board the Yasmeen.7 The original interviews and texts, presumably in Arabic, were not transcribed. And, unfortunately, the original letters from “Arabs” who were living in Zanzibar (or Pemba) and Oman that the British navy confiscated from the ship were not included in the file; only translations of excerpts of some of the letters are included. It is therefore impossible to know exactly what terms the ship’s captain, his son, the crew, and the letters may have used to describe their activities and the people with whom they were engaged. So even as it points to some of the practices of the Indian Ocean slave trade and the bureaucracy of its suppression, this chapter calls attention to the ways in which particular details become documented while others are neglected or silenced.

Pressures for Abolition The capture of the Yasmeen occurred during a period of intense British interest in and opposition to Indian Ocean slavery. The case evolved just before the promulgation of a third slave-trading treaty to be signed by the sultans of both Oman and Zanzibar with the British in 1873 and as British attention to slavery in the Indian Ocean mounted.8 With the British-brokered separation of Oman and Zanzibar into two distinct polities in 1861 (known as the Canning Award), British involvement in official Indian Ocean politics increased significantly, enabling the British government to exert even more pressure on the ruling families than they had previously. According to M. Reda Bhacker and others, ending or limiting the slave trade became a major feature of British policy in the region as a means to consolidate further imperial control there.9 The separation of Oman and Zanzibar into two polities, however, also meant that the British had to negotiate with two rulers rather than one. The antislaving treaty of 1873 was eventually signed with Sultan Turki bin Said al-Bu Saidi (ruled 1871–88) in Muscat and Sultan Barghash bin Said al-Bu Saidi (ruled 1870–88) in Zanzibar, after a British blockade of the island forced Sultan Barghash’s signature.10 By 1872, the Zanzibar slave trade had already been subject to a number of treaties, including the Moresby Treaty of 1822, which prohibited the sale of slaves from the Omani sultan’s territories to “Christians,” and the more restrictive Hamerton Agreement of 1845 by which Sultan Said bin Sultan al-Bu Saidi technically agreed to make illegal the export of all slaves from his African territories (though transport of slaves from one African port to another African

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

123

port was not made illegal).11 British officials and Omani sultans, however, rarely enforced these treaties, believing them to be impolitic because they disturbed the sensibilities of potentially powerful allies and opponents. Indeed, that these treaties were focused on the slave trade rather than slavery, which was not abolished in Zanzibar until 1897, suggests, too, the cautious approach to abolition preferred by the sultans and some British officials.12 When the Yasmeen was captured, the case was subject to the Hamerton Agreement, though negotiations for a new treaty were well on their way. By 1872, pressure from abolitionists in England to enforce the anti-slavetrade treaties as well as to abolish slavery itself in Zanzibar and the Arabian Peninsula was mounting.13 As John Martineau describes in his 1895 twovolume biography of Sir Bartle Frere, who was the British colonial administrator sent to Zanzibar to negotiate the 1873 treaty, the summer of 1872 served as a turning point in official English attention to the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean. A meeting at the Anti-Slavery Society in London received much public interest.14 And, undoubtedly, accounts of the fortuitous meeting of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley in East Africa in 1871, as well as the published reports in the summer of 1872 by Livingstone of the slave trade, attracted much public attention to the Indian Ocean.15 The popular interest in the Indian Ocean slave trade led to the publication in 1873 of two topical memoirs by young naval officers: George L. Sullivan’s Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and Philip Howard Colomb’s Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean.16 Opposition to the slave trade thus seems to have provided the impetus for British officials to broker a new treaty with the sultans of Muscat and Zanzibar and to increase naval patrols of the Omani coast. By 1872, the slave trade was being regularly interdicted in the Indian Ocean. It was during one of the patrols of the Omani coast that the crew of the Vulture spotted the Yasmeen and captured it.

Capturing and Documenting the Yasmeen One of the most striking aspects of the documents of the case is the emphasis on the ship rather than the slaves. This tendency is evident from the first page of the file. The captain of the Vulture provides the precise dimensions of the Yasmeen (length of upper deck, 100 feet; main breadth, 25 feet; girth, 35 feet; total tonnage, 188.64) and the precise location of the ship upon capture (latitude 22.54º north and longitude 59.21º east or thereabouts), but does not provide information about the slaves besides the fact that there were 169 of them (along with 13 crew members and 21 “ordinary passengers”).17 Only much later in the file do we learn that most of the slaves were women

124

mandana e. limbert

and children. And we never learn exactly how many women, men, or children there were, nor do we learn about their physical condition, circumstances of capture, or labor expectations. As with similar cases at the time, the first step was evidently to determine that this ship was in fact transporting slaves for trade and thus that it was legal for the British to take possession of it. In two other cases, discussed below, it was determined that the ship under investigation was not involved in the slave trade, though British authorities considered several people on the ships to be slaves or, more specifically, “domestic slaves.”18 In the case of the Yasmeen, however, it was determined that the ship was not carrying domestic slaves, but slaves for trade. Therefore, the British, in accordance with the Hamerton Agreement of 1845, had the right to take possession of it. The Hamerton Agreement, it should be noted, did not stipulate any punishment for slave dealers caught on board a ship, or for the owners of the slaves or for the crew. But since the focus of the agreement was on the illegal transport of slaves, the captains of vessels engaged in the trade were subject to arrest and prosecution. How was it determined that the Yasmeen was a slave-trading ship? There is no description of what the British naval officers saw when they boarded the ship. Beyond the numbers of presumed slaves, there is no description of where and in what condition the slaves were kept on the ship. One might presume that the slaves were all “obviously” African—perhaps from their skin color and dress—and confined to particular quarters together. None of that information is provided. In contrast to the documents in the file, the Times of India reported on this particular case in October 1872, with some chilling descriptions of the condition of the slaves on the Yasmeen: “The hold, from which an intolerable stench proceeded, was several inches deep in the foulest bilge-water and refuse. Down below, there were numbers of children and wretched beings in the most loathsome stages of small-pox and scrofula of every description. A more disgusting and degrading spectacle of humanity could hardly be seen, whilst the foulness of the dhow was such that the sailors could hardly endure it.”19 Even though a description of the ship was one of the first pieces of information included in the case file, none of these details, including the fact that there was a hold, was mentioned in the file. Rather than specifics about the slaves or their condition, proof of slavetrading activity was derived from the equipment on board as well as from written documents and interrogations of the ship’s captain and his son. An affidavit indicates that there were “2 large cooking apparatuses, 3 large tanks with water also two casks for water, provisions for slaves, and 169 slaves.” The Times of India provides some clarification, but the case documents leave

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

125

us wondering: Were the slaves confined to a separate area, and if so, how? Was there a separate cooking area on the ship where the slaves’ food was prepared? Or did the slaves prepare their own food where they were confined? Were there weapons on board? Why and how would food and cooking implements indicate slave trading? There is no mention of “equipment” that might have been used to confine the slaves. Instead, the naval officers documented the amount of money and valuables found on the ship—in this case, none. It is possible that a document attesting to the quantity of funds was an expected part of the case, even if the document itself indicated that there were none. But it is also possible that the claim that there were none pertained only to money directly related to the slave trade. The file does not make clear either of these possibilities, and therefore we do not know whether money or valuables were on board the ship, even though one might presume that the “ordinary passengers” and the ship’s captain may have had some. Although the India Office Records documents pertaining to the Yasmeen do not describe the slaves or their condition upon capture, there is more information about two other ships—one small and one large—stopped in October 1872, shortly after the Yasmeen was taken.20 As noted above, neither ship was confiscated, because the British consul concluded that the slaves were “domestic slaves” of the captain or families traveling on board and were not necessarily going to be sold. The British consul confirmed that on the smaller ship there were five slaves (three men, a boy, and a woman) and that the British commander who stopped the vessel initially believed that they were intended to be sold at Masirah. The only indication in the file of why the five were, at first, considered to be slaves is that they were “darkies.” Skin color alone could not be, of course, the only reason that the British commander believed the five to be slaves, since many free people of the western Indian Ocean shared the same skin tone and phenotypic features. Clothing and living quarters might also have been a factor, though the documents do not provide any indication of this. “Darkies,” therefore, was shorthand to signal a possible slave, suggesting either that the term included a range of conditions and features, or that skin color was the focus of this process of categorization. In either case, the ship’s captain determined that these five were slaves of a “domestic” form and therefore not intended for trade. Upon investigation, the British consul wrote: “Instead of being paid regular wages, they are paid 1/2 proceeds of sale of [?], dates, and fish. They were not maimed or confined in any way, but merely worked the dhow and the women were servants of the captain’s family which is equivalent to what are termed domestic slaves.”21 In the case of the larger ship, the consul mentions the presence of a boy

126

mandana e. limbert

who was the captain’s “boy or servant” and who, according to the ship’s captain, was at the British consulate in Zanzibar frequently. The captain stated that he fed and clothed the boy, but did not pay him. Clearly, in both cases, forms of servitude were being practiced, though in neither case was there enough evidence that the slaves or servants were to be sold upon landing on the Omani coast. In contrast, the case of the Yasmeen offers scant details about the living condition of the slaves, but provides ample evidence of slave trading.

Logistics of Trading Despite the silence regarding the conditions on the ship and the lack of concrete evidence of money and trading, in the interrogations of the ship’s captain and his son, as well as in a series of transcribed statements and letters from two crew members and those aboard, the file provides significant evidence of trading and the most detail about trading practices. In the first lengthy interrogation in the file, the ship’s captain is asked a series of questions, many of which the captain evades. Below is the full transcription. Examination: Question—What is your name and surname? Answer—Mohammed bin Ta‘eyb Q: Tribe? A. Salahi of Batineh Q: Residence? A: Soweyk [a coastal town between Muscat and Sohar] Q: Name of captured Buglah?22 A: Yasmeen Q: Owner of Buglah? A: Myself Q: When did the voyage commence and where did you proceed to? A: Sailed first from Soweyk, called at Matrah and went to Zanzibar. Was at Zanzibar about a month before the Hurricane.23 Q: What cargo did you take from Maskat? Matrah?24 A: Fish and passengers. Q: Did you go with the intention of bringing slaves? A: No. Equipped for slaves at Jeziret el Khadrah (Pemba) Q: Did any party in Oman order to bring slaves? A: No Q: When did you leave Zanzibar? A: About 22 days ago? Q: With what cargo? A: In ballast of Saud. [?]

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

127

Q: Where did you go first? A: To Pemba Q: Did you ship slaves there? A: Yes, about 200 slaves belonging to different persons. These were shipped at Bunder Chuk Chuk and Bunder Reyamee. Q: Who were the shippers? A: Arabs. Mostly of Soor and some of Batinah. I do not know their names. Some were people of Sohar. Q: Were there not Arab passengers on board your vessel? A: Yes. 21 or 22. Q: Were they the owners of the slaves? A: Six of them were. Q: Their names? A: I only remember the following: Ali and Salim and Said of Sohar and Hamad and Sulliman and another of Soor. The rest were passengers not slave dealers. Q: Where did you intend to land the slaves? A: At Soor. All of them at Soor. Some of them were for other places—Some were for Mutrah and for Seeb and Soweyk but they were all to be landed first at Soor and taken thence as opportunity occurred to their destinations. Q: What was the freight of the slaves? A: Three dollars without their food; to be paid on delivery at the port of landing. Q: What were the Zanzibar prices of the slaves? A: From 25 to 30 dollars.25 Q: Whence were they brought to Pemba? A: From several places. Many also are bought by Pemba people at Zanzibar and brought one by one to Pemba and thence exported. Q: What profit would be expected on each landed? A: Perhaps 10 to 20 dollars per head. Q: How many died on the passage? A: Up to the capture 15. I don’t know how many after that. Q: How many days were you on passage until capture? A: Sixteen days. Q: Were there any other slave dhows sailed before you? A: I don’t know of any. Q: Were any to sail after? A: Perhaps so I don’t know. Q: Was the Yasmeen Bugla built? A: Yes Q: Did you ever run slaves before? A: Not for many years before. Q: Have you gone before to Zanzibar as Nakhoda in other vessels? A: Yes.

128

mandana e. limbert Q: Was the Yasmeen entirely yours? A: Entirely. Q: What was its value? A: About 800 dollars. It was about 10 years old. Q: Did you sight any British steamers? A: No Q: What course did you take? A: Passed far out to sea Eastward of Socotra. Q: What is the course taken by slavers usually? A: They keep far out to sea out of sight of land. Many pass to East of Socotra at this season. Q: Were you aware carrying slaves to Arabia was forbidden by the British government and by the Sultan? A: Yes—why should I deny? Temptation to gain enticed me.

In this interrogation, the nakhoda, or captain, of the Yasmeen, Mohammed bin Tayeb al-Salahi, provides as little information as possible while appearing to be fully cooperative. His refusal to give the correct names of the slave dealers on board his ship or where they were from is especially striking given his son’s testimony, included below. What is also interesting is the story that he fabricates: that the slave dealers on the ship were presumably “Ali and Salim and Said of Sohar and Hamad and Sulliman and another of Soor.” He recites the most common names of people from the most obvious large coastal towns. As it turns out, the slave dealers were from towns in Oman’s interior as well as from its coast. And as is evident from the son’s testimony, the captain and his son knew much more than simply their first names. Despite the ship captain’s reluctance to divulge the names of the slave traders, perhaps out of loyalty to them or out of spite toward the British officials who arrested him, we learn that ships crossing the western Indian Ocean may or may not have sailed to Zanzibar with orders for slaves (though the nakhoda denies this was the case here), that vessels sometimes transported slaves and sometimes other cargo and people, that fish might be shipped from Oman to Zanzibar, and that the slave trade commonly included an intermediate stop at Pemba, meaning that slaves could be taken from Zanzibar to Pemba and then a new group of slaves transported from Pemba to Oman. Slave ships crossing the Indian Ocean therefore did not exclusively transport humans for trade. In addition, we get a sense of the economics of the trade. As the captain notes, he (the shipper) would receive three dollars (Maria Theresa) per slave, which would not include the cost of the provisions. The person receiving the slave in Oman would pay the captain the three dollars upon landing. It is not clear whether there would be an additional cost for the provisions or

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

129

whether the provisions would be provided some other way. And, presumably, since payment was made upon landing, any slave who did not survive the voyage would not be paid for, though this is also not completely clear from the interview. As for the cost of slaves and the potential profit in the sale, the Yasmeen’s captain says that slaves were being bought in Zanzibar and Pemba for about twenty-five to thirty dollars and that the slave trader could expect to make a profit of ten to twenty dollars upon the sale in Oman. It is not clear whether this would have included the cost of the shipment, whether the cost of shipment was excluded from the profit for the trader, and how the various middlemen involved in the trade would be compensated. One also presumes that the shipper did not profit from the actual sale, but was making the marginal money upon shipment. It appears that in this case, the shipper did not himself purchase and sell slaves. While the ship’s captain refused to give the names of the slave dealers, his son was more willing. The captain’s son also provided additional details about where and by whom trading occurred at the time. Examination of Sulliman bin Mahommed son of the Nakhoda of the Yasmeen. Question: Can you state the names, tribes, and residences of the owners of the slaves who were in the Bugla “Yasmeen”? Answer: Yes, the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ali of el-Souree Hamad bin Husein of Soweyk Salim bin Mohammed of Soweyk Khamis bin Mesood Salehi of Batha Khamîs Ya’d Sa’d Omar of Rostak Hameyd of Rostak Saeyyed el-Maskeri of Ibra Sayf el-Maskeri of Ibra Mohammed of Khabooreh Khalfan of Deyl Mosellim of Musnaah (wounded by Musket ball on capture) Salim Otshin of Shirs Hamad of Shirs Sulliman of Soweyk

All the above owned one or more slaves. Q: Do you know of any other slave dhows sailing from Pemba? A: Yes. I heard one Awaysee named Wullud Taba‘ landed slaves near Ras el-Hudd before we came up. It is a vessel of Soor. I do not know the owner. One other was about to sail after us. It was an Aweysee of Soor—I saw it.

130

mandana e. limbert Q: Where were the slaves to be landed from the Bugla Yasmeen? A: At their various destinations such as Soor, Karyat, Seda‘b. We would not land them ourselves but hire small boats from Karyat. Q: Have you been to Zanzibar? A: Four times. Q: With your father? A: Yes. Q: Were slaves brought on those occasions? A: On two previous occasions. Q: Where were they landed before? A: At Soor, Karyat, and the Batinah coast. Q: Is the slave carrying trade profitable? A: Not very profitable. Sufficient to fill our mouths. Q: If you were released would you return to it? A: If you catch me again at it, put me to death.

The son offers the names and place of residence of fifteen of the slave dealers on board. We learn that all the dealers named were men, that not all the “ordinary passengers” were necessarily slave dealers (six passengers are not listed here as dealers), and that the slave dealers came from towns both on the coast and from the interior of Oman. Slaves may have been going to Rustaq and Ibra as well as coastal towns. Concerning logistics, we learn that larger ships might rest out at sea (probably when there was no port or dock) and employ smaller boats to transport particular slaves to be unloaded at coastal towns. Presumably, the slave dealers traveling on the ship with the slaves would know which slaves they were transporting and would unload along with their slaves. We do not know how many slaves each dealer was transporting, though if there were originally 185 slaves and 15 dealers, then each dealer could have begun with at least 12 slaves each. Certainly, it is more likely that some slave dealers were transporting more and some less. We are not provided with this information, nor are we furnished with translations and transcripts of interviews with the “ordinary” passengers, never mind the slaves themselves. In addition to the interviews of the ship’s captain and his son, the case file includes statements from the head of the crew, or “syrang” (a British Indian term), and the cook.26 Again, these written statements were presumably translated from Arabic or Swahili, though we do not know for sure, since there is no indication of the original language used. We also do not know whether these statements were made in response to particular questions, but since both provide similar information, it is likely that the men were asked a series of standard questions: their names, where they were from, whether they

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

131

had been to Zanzibar before, where the ship boarded the slaves, and perhaps whether they were themselves slaves or had been slaves. Both crew members interviewed state that they themselves had been slaves, but had been freed. And it appears that both men had traveled to Zanzibar, probably in search of work, which they found on the Yasmeen. Whether the two men expected to be working on a slave-trading vessel is unclear. The practice of slave trading therefore clearly involved the hiring of former slaves. There is no expression of emotion, interest, or concern for the slaves themselves, or even any indication that the crew knew the Yasmeen was going to be embarking slaves at Pemba. Statement of Rubeyya late Syrang [native boatman or head of the native sailors] of the slave dhow Yasmeen before Lieutenant Colonel E.B. Ross on the 12th September 1872. My name is Rubeyya. I belong to (Amulgavinc) Umer el-Karvair.27 I went in a vessel belonging to that place to Zanzibar. The vessel was lost. It was not a slaver. I then shipped in the “Yasmeen.” We took in slaves at Pemba for different places on the Oman coast. I don’t know the details. There were some Arab passengers, but I don’t know who they were. I saw one other vessel at Pemba taking slaves. She also sailed before us and land slaves at Ashkharah. One was to sail after us. I was never at Zanzibar before nor in a slave vessel. I am the son of a slave and was freed when my father died. Statement of the Cook of the “Yasmeen” My name is Bilal. I was a slave, but am free now. I live at Kasbiyet yal Bereyk.28 I went to Zanzibar in another vessel and shipped in the “Yasmeen” at Zanzibar. We took slaves at Pemba. I know no particulars about the slaves. I was never at Zanzibar before this time.

In addition to these statements, the case includes the translations and transcriptions of extracts of letters found on board the ship. It is unclear where these letters were found or how the letters were to be distributed in Oman. They do, however, reveal a little more about the logistics of the slave trade as well as a few other aspects of the slave-trade experience. First, not all those involved in the slave trade in Oman were Arab or Ibadi. One letter recipient is described as a “Persian,” another appears to be an Ismaili Muslim (“alIsmaili”), and a third has the tribal name el-Mawali (a classic name for a client or the descendant of a client). From these letters, we learn that some slave owners or dealers preferred not to travel on slave-trading ships. Perhaps slave ships were less comfortable or less appealing in some way than ships not carrying slaves. Were the conditions of slave-trading ships appalling enough to make “ordinary” passengers either physically or ethically uncomfortable? It also appears that it was difficult to find a ship that was not carrying slaves at the time, suggesting that most ships

132

mandana e. limbert

traversing the Indian Ocean carried slaves—either for sale or as domestic servants. Thus, the fact that the British were catching so few ships reveals how easily the ships were evading capture at the time. We also learn from the letters below that on occasion slaves would get “lost.” One might presume that this means that slaves escaped, though we do not know for certain that this is what it means to be “lost.” The original wording is not provided.29 Other pieces of information that we learn: slaves were “dear” that year, as were many commodities. Indeed, not only had the region suffered from a devastating hurricane, but as Abdul Sheriff has noted, a cholera epidemic had “decimated the slave population of Zanzibar” at that time.30 In addition, there were sometimes disputes about who could take what slaves. And, interestingly, it seems that the entire slave-trading system relied on written instructions between slave dealers in Zanzibar and their contacts in Oman, who may have been relatives, servants, or friends. Extract 1 below, for example, indicates that without written instructions, a found slave might not be handed over to a third, albeit known, party. With no letter from the original “Persian” owner, the agent or middleman refused to hand the lost slave to anyone. The written word clearly carried much weight in the functioning of the trade. Extracts from letters found on board the slave dhow “Yasmeen” September 1872 From, Mohammed bin Rashid er Reyâmî (Tribe Beni Reyâm) To, Ghooloom bin Hassein Persian Musna‘ah. Extract 1. About the slaves which were lost last year. I have found one female of them and Mohammed bin Tayeb wanted to take her but I refused as he had no letter from you. Extract 2. Slaves are dear in Zanzibar this year. I wanted to return to Omán this eymánee (end of the SW Monsoon) but could not find a vessel without slaves and did not care to embark in a vessel in which were slaves. Extract 3. From Hamood bin Salim bin Khaloofeh el Jerrâdi (Tribe yâl Jerrâd) of Wudaîn. To, Ali bin Hamood (his son) al-Wudaîn During the Mowsim (March to April) I sent you a letter and a female slave by Salim bin Hashil. I heard that the Christians prevented Salim (probably the presence of a ship or boats) and he disembarked the slaves at the ports (Benadir meaning Brava Magduchi,31 Maskat) and sold the slaves at the ports. I don’t know for how much. Let me know what Salim may pay you. Everything is dear here. Slaves the same and there is danger about them from the Christians. But people live by such things otherwise a wise person would not embark them. Extract 4. From Sultan bin Hamud el Ismaîlî and Mohsin bin Marbûn er Reyâmî

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

133

To, Salim bin Hashil El Jerrâdî Seyf bin Mohammed el Mâwalî is going to you. Give him the price of the slaves and don’t hesitate. Let us know the amount. Extract 5. From Sultan bin Hamad bin Kâsim el Ismâîlî To, Seyf bin Mohammed el-Ma‘âwalî Barka Take from Salim bin Hâshil el Jerrâdî two slaves. They are for Mohsin bin Marhûn er Reyâmî. I hear Salim has sold his slaves now take the money from him. At this time no vessels are procurable except slave vessels.

Though there is little self-reflection or emotion in these letters, one writer, Hammoud el-Jerradi, comments on the dangers or problems, possibly even ethical, of the slave trade by suggesting that he is involved because of financial necessity. He writes: “People live by such things otherwise a wise person would not embark them.” In addition, we see that from the perspective of the slave dealers, their opponents were “Christians.” Instead of national, racial, or ethnic categories, the dealers refer to their adversaries in religious terms. Rather than learning about people’s views or feelings or the trade, we learn a bit more about the logistics of the trade, including matters of trust. In particular, we understand that for a transaction to succeed, two letters were sometimes sent and two intermediaries engaged. From extracts 4 and 5, for example, one letter appears to be addressed to an agent (or servant or client) in Oman of the slave owner and dealer, who is himself in Zanzibar or Pemba, while a second letter is sent to the slave trader, also in Oman. In this case, it appears that an agent (or servant or client) named Seyf el-Mawali is instructed to proceed to Salim el-Jerradi, who, it seems, has sold some slaves and owes another man (Sultan el-Ismaili) money, though el-Ismaili does not know how much he is owed.32 It is possible that el-Mawali is taking slaves from the slave ship Yasmeen to el-Jerradi, but there is no indication of that in these letters, and el-Mawali’s name does not appear on the list of slave dealers supplied by the ship captain’s son. Rather, it seems that the first middleman or agent (el-Mawali) is instructed to collect the money from the trader (elJerradi), who—it has been discovered—sold slaves earlier, possibly on behalf of el-Ismaili. At the same time, el-Mawali—the agent—is further instructed to take two slaves from el-Jerradi for someone else: er-Reyami. It is not clear whether this other person (er-Reyami) is in Oman or Zanzibar, though presumably in Oman, since it would certainly be too costly and inefficient to send slaves back to East Africa from Oman. In addition to the use of multiple middlemen and the reliance on letters, another interesting aspect of these documents is that the price of slaves is not discussed; sellers would be told after the fact how much they had received for the slaves. Prices, in other words, were not fully determined before embarking

134

mandana e. limbert

the slaves in East Africa. Finally, as in the case of the two crew members of the Yasmeen who were interviewed, slave trading not only relied on numerous middlemen, but the middlemen may themselves have been servants of other traders or may have been slaves.

Death Certificates and Other “Details” In addition to providing evidence of the slave trade (as well as documentation of the lack of evidence, as in the case of money), the file documents other incidents involving the capture of the ship. For example, the file refers to the fact that, in addition to the fifteen who, according to the captain of the Yasmeen, died before capture, six more slaves died between the time of the ship’s capture on September 6 and the arrival of the slaves (who had been transported to the Vulture) in Muscat three days later. Some form of accounting for these individuals seems to have been required. Though these deaths are documented, no details are provided about their causes. Thus, on the one hand, the British officials seem to have taken some care to adhere to legal standards of evidence and testimony, documentation and compilation, responsibility and accounting, as indicated by the death certificate (figure 7.1). On the other hand, neither the death certificate nor any other document in the file provides information about the deceased or how they died, though discussion of smallpox appears as part of the explanation for the quarantine of the slaves later in the file. Instead, all six are mentioned together on one notice, included in the file as “Enclosure 12 7” and “Annex H.”33 There is no formal letterhead for the certificate, nor are the names of the deceased included. We never learn whether the six were men, women, or children. Ultimately, the death of six slaves while in British custody does not seem to have warranted much attention in the file, except for an official—albeit general and without letterhead—death certificate. While no details are provided in this certificate, other documents in the file illustrate evidence of attention to local specificities. At times, the transcriber and translator of the interrogation and documents attempted to provide an accurate representation of the language of those being interviewed and the documents being translated by including occasional diacritical marks for transcribed words and names. At other times, however, the transcriber provided different spellings for the same name, not to mention omitting much information. For example, the translator and transcriber of the extracts of the letters confiscated from the Yasmeen included diacritical marks and accents for some of the personal and place names and indicated recognition of what are known as “sun” letters. In spoken Arabic, a “sun” letter is one that requires

Figure 7.1. “Certificate of death of six slaves captured in the slave vessel ‘Jasmine.’ ” British Library, India Office Records R/15/6/5, Enclosure 12 7, Annex H.

136

mandana e. limbert

a preceding article to replace the “l” sound with the sound of the “sun” letter. The transcriber therefore notes that in one name, one would hear el-Jerradi, while with another it would be er-Reyami. The transcriber was also attuned to the Arabic letter ayn, which may go undetected in English, but when noted is often transcribed into Latin script with an ‘. The transcriber, however, also reveals inconsistencies, sometimes writing the same name as “Hamood” and sometimes as “Hamud,” sometimes writing “Ismâîlî” and sometimes “Ismaîlî,” sometimes writing “Hâshil” and other times “Hashil.” On the one hand, the translator and transcriber indicates an expertise both in Arabic and in scholarly transcription and, on the other, reveals the unevenness of his attention.

On to Bombay Once the evidence was compiled and sufficient proof of trading amassed, the case was adjudicated and concluded. Four final documents close the file. These include correspondence among the British consul in Muscat, the commander of the Vulture, and the commissioner of police in Bombay pertaining to the shipping of the released slaves to Bombay, as well as letters between the consul in Muscat and the British Resident at Bushire in which the consul summarizes the proceedings and asks for suggestions about the handling of the two prisoners: the ship’s captain and his son.34 It is in these final documents that we learn that the Vulture would be transporting the liberated slaves to Bombay, though again there is no indication why this course was chosen or what would happen to the former slaves once they were there, including whether they would eventually be sent back to East Africa.35 Sullivan’s Dhow Chasing refers to the practice at the time of sending liberated slaves to Bombay, where they were to find employment, though this plan was not considered successful, especially once the numbers of slaves transported to Bombay increased and it became more difficult to secure employment. According to testimony by Sir Bartle Frere, as cited by Sullivan, numerous former slaves were reported to have been “kidnapped” or to have become prostitutes.36 In the file, the documents indicate that the commissioner of police would organize the slaves’ arrival in Bombay, that smallpox has broken out on board the Vulture, and that the proper sanitary “rules” should be applied once the freed slaves were landed.37 Otherwise, there is no indication of what might have been in store for these freed slaves once in Bombay, never mind their condition during transport from Oman to India. The synopsis of the proceedings for the British Resident in Bushire provides some additional information—most notably, that most of the slaves on board the Yasmeen were women and children, though exact numbers are not

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

137

provided.38 We learn too that all the “ordinary” passengers were landed on the coast, as were most of the ship’s crew, except the ship’s captain, his son, the cook, and the syrang, who were all imprisoned at Fort Jalali in Muscat.39 We learn that it was the commander of the Vulture who decided to take the freed slaves to Bombay, though we do not know why, nor do we learn from this file about their eventual fate there. And we find out that because there was smallpox among the slaves, they were quarantined in Bombay (and most likely during their stay in Muscat as well).40 In many ways, the documents pertaining to the capture of the Yasmeen reveal more about British attempts at suppressing the slave trade in 1872 in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf than about the slave trade itself. We learn how cases were organized, what kind of evidence was deemed necessary, how affidavits were taken, and how hierarchies of reporting and documentation were preserved. And we learn what kind of information was deemed unimportant, including the identity and disposition of the slaves. Information about the dimensions of the ship and the location of its capture were important to note, whereas details about the slaves, besides their total number, were not. Evidence of slave trading could be ascertained from the presence of cooking apparatus, water containers, and sheer numbers as well as from the confessions of the ship’s captain and his son. The condition of the slaves upon the capture of the ship, including where they were or how they might have been detained, was unnecessary to recount. Similarly, though no money or valuables were apparently found on board that might suggest the buying or selling of slaves, an affidavit to this effect was included in the file, as was a certificate testifying to the death of six slaves once in British custody. As components of a legal case, and despite their unevenness, the documents demonstrate a significant level of local knowledge, the authority to deal systematically with the slave trade, and an apparent objectivity befitting the seriousness of the crime. The slave trade, whatever else its complications, made possible a deeper British presence in the Indian Ocean, which was maintained by an uneven legal bureaucracy. In its daily practice, its aim often seems to have been as much to display its power to document, compile, and exhibit expertise as to rescue slaves. Nonetheless, some details about the experience of trading do emerge, particularly with regard to the personal exchanges between the middlemen involved in the trade: owners in Zanzibar, the crew of the slave ship, the ship’s owner, those accompanying the slaves (themselves sometimes owners as well), agents and clients in Oman, and the dealers there. The slaves themselves, unfortunately, were not interviewed, or at least, no interviews with slaves were included in the case file. Apparently, it was not considered necessary to

138

mandana e. limbert

solicit testimony from the slaves. Nor does it appear to have been considered necessary to interview or detain the slave traders on board the ship, all of whom were released, as was the ship’s crew. We cannot know whether the slave dealers ultimately continued to trade despite their encounter with the British authorities and despite the multiple treaties outlawing trade. And we cannot know whether any of them felt like the ship captain’s son, who, when asked whether he would engage in the slave trade again if released, insisted: “If you catch me again at it, put me to death.” The documents of this case file, however, with its interrogations, confiscated letters, affidavits, reports, and testimonies, offer new details about the operation of the Indian Ocean slave trade and provide a window into its broader dynamics and tensions on the cusp of a new suppressionist authority.

Notes 1. India Office Records, British Library, London, R/15/6/5. Though most of the documents in the file refer to the ship as a “dhow,” which is a generic term for sailing vessel, during the interrogation, as will be evident below, the ship is also described as a “buglah,” or more accurately a “baghlah.” For more details about types of ships sailing the Indian Ocean, see Clifford Hawkins, The Dhow: An Illustrated History (Lymington, UK: Nautical Publishing, 1977), and Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce, and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 3. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. By September 18, 1872, the British consul at Muscat was sending a synopsis of the case to his immediate superior, the British Resident at Bushire in Iran. 4. I have placed “Arabs” in quotes because although the British referred to those who came from Arabia as “Arabs,” many such people did not consider themselves to be Arabs, nor did other members of their communities. For a discussion of notions of Arabness, see Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 5. Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 251–67. 6. A folio refers to a large sheet of paper that is often folded in half and, like a modern book, includes writing on both the left- and right-hand sides of the folded paper. Thirty folios, therefore, would have sixty pages of writing. 7. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 8. For further discussion of this and other treaties, see Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: Currey, 1897); Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997); Reginald Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (London: Faber and Faber, 1939); R. J. Gavin, “The Bartle Frere Mission to Zanzibar,” Historical

“If You Catch Me at It, Put Me to Death”

139

Journal 5 (1962): 122–48. See also John Martineau, The Life and Correspondence of Sir Bartle Frere, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1895). 9. The award was named after Lord Canning, who arbitrated the agreement by which the Zanzibar sultan would compensate Muscat with an annual subsidy of MT$40,000. See M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination (New York: Routledge, 1992), 189–93, for an excellent discussion of the negotiations of the Canning award and its implications for increased British influence. 10. For details on Omani political intrigues and disputes at the time, see John Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia, Volume I (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1915). 11. See R. W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of East Africa: A Collection of Documents (London: Rex Collings, 1976). 12. See Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997). 13. See Moses D. E. Nwulia, “The Role of Missionaries in the Emancipation of Slaves in Zanzibar,” Journal of Negro History 60, no.2 (1975): 268–87, for an account of negotiations around the Moresby and Hamerton treaties with Sayyid Said bin Sultan al-Bu Saidi, sultan of Muscat and Zanzibar from 1804 to 1856. See also Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory, as well as Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, for excellent accounts of the late nineteenth-century trade and the politics of abolition. 14. Martineau, Sir Bartle Frere, 2:65–71. 15. For an account of the meeting, see The Times, July 3, 1872. 16. George Lydiard Sullivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa (1873; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Captain Colomb, Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean (London: Longmans, Green, 1873). Note that the Cambridge University Press’s cover has printed the author’s name as “Sullivan,” though the original text, reprinted within the new Cambridge University Press cover, has the author’s name as “Sulivan.” I will refer to the author as “Sullivan” simply to maintain consistency and ease of reference to the newly reprinted text. 17. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 18. For a discussion of the categories of slaves, including the “domestic slave,” see Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). See also Gwyn Cambell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York: Frank Cass, 2004). 19. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. 1, pt. 2, 2494. Appendix L (pp. 2475–2516) of Lorimer’s Gazetteer pertains specifically to the slave trade in the Persian Gulf region, with most of the attention on the trade between Zanzibar and Oman. 20. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 21. Ibid. 22. See note 1 above for mention of the “Buglah.” 23. For a discussion of the hurricane of 1872, see Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 234. 24. Editing in the original.

140

mandana e. limbert

25. The Maria Theresa dollar, originally minted in Austria, was a common silver-based currency in the Indian Ocean region in the nineteenth century. Its value fluctuated, but was about 80 percent silver. See Ronald W. Bailey, ed. Records of Oman, 1867–1947, 7 vols. (Farnham Commons: Archive Editions, 1988); Limbert, In the Time of Oil. 26. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 27. Unclear where this is. 28. Unclear where this is. 29. For an interesting article on escaped slaves in the Indian Ocean, see Edward A. Alpers, “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1750–1962,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 51–68. 30. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 236. 31. “Brava coast” refers to Somalia; “Magduchi” is most likely Mogadishu. 32. For the sake of simplicity, I have excluded diacritic marks and accents. 33. Editing in the original. 34. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 35. Ibid. 36. Sullivan, Dhow Chasing, 273, 287n2. 37. India Office Records, R/15/6/5. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid.

PART

Economic and Social Mobility of Slaves

IV

This page intentionally left blank

8

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery: The Strange Career of Sultan bin Aman abdul sheriff

It is not often in the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean that we can go beyond the endless disputation about numbers or the imposition of generalizations borrowed from the better-known but inappropriate Atlantic model to look at the human face of Indian Ocean slavery. The problem facing a historian of slavery in the Indian Ocean is partly the inadequacy and partiality of sources, since most of them are the creations of owners, rulers, and imperial powers who had a direct interest in representing their own views on the subject rather than giving a voice to the slaves themselves. One of the rare exceptions to this phenomenon is a large batch of manumission documents created in the Persian Gulf region by British imperial authorities during the early decades of the twentieth century.1 This was not the first set of manumissions in the region, for the voluntary and juridical manumission of slaves was a built-in feature in Islamic law. Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, according to J. G. Lorimer’s survey, there was a large class of manumitted slaves in the Persian Gulf region, constituting nearly a third of the people of African as well as Baluchi and other origins.2 Since manumission under Islamic law was not always imposed by state authority, but rather was the product of a voluntary act by the slave owner, it tended to create a class of people who were freed more amicably because of an intimate relationship that had developed during servitude. The relationship was transformed into

143

144

abdul sheriff

a sort of dependency between former owners and former slaves.3 This class of manumissions is still difficult to study because of a scarcity of documentation and the sensitivity of the subject in an area where slavery was abolished only half a century ago. Further research, utilizing the qadi’s (Islamic judge) court records and personal papers, if they have survived, or oral research, may yield some results. The other class of manumissions arose out of the British antislavery movement in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf region beginning in the nineteenth century, which was part of Britain’s imperial expansion into this strategic and important commercial area. The Persian Gulf was dotted with British Residencies and political agents established to protect and extend British and Indian interests there. Through treaties with local rulers, British consular officials acquired the right to grant manumission certificates to slaves who could prove ill-treatment by their owners. Since such manumission had to be based on allegations of abuse by owners, and was imposed by an imperial authority on slave owners and reluctant local potentates, it created a class of freed people whose relations with their owners were often conflictual, and social integration of the freed into the local society may have been rendered more problematic. Hundreds of such manumission certificates were granted in the 1920s and 1930s at centers of British influence in the Persian Gulf, such as Muscat, Sharjah, Bahrain, and Bushire, creating a class of freed people who were inevitably dependent on the British for protection thereafter, but as we shall see, that protection was not always dependable. These manumissions were not a general movement of abolition and emancipation, as in Zanzibar in 1897, but a set of individual cases in which slavery had become utterly unbearable and a slave could sustain a charge of maltreatment against an owner. In each case, the British insisted on a short biography that was supplemented by additional information from the British political agents. This process gave some voice to the discontented slaves. But the biographies were not written by the slaves themselves, instead being recorded by British officials, which inevitably colored what was produced. Unlike a similar process of manumission in the Red Sea, where printed questionnaires were used, the system in the Persian Gulf appears to have used a set of questions, judging from the information recorded in these short biographies. In almost all cases, there was an average of three or so documents per slave, and the information gleaned about each case was often meager, although taken collectively they give a lot of details about enslavement and slavery in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the twentieth century. The case of Sultan bin Aman, an Ethiopian slave, is unusual in that it occupies nearly a hundred pages in the India Office Records.4 He may have

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

145

been freed under the abolition of slavery decree of Zanzibar of 1897, but was reenslaved when he went to the Persian Gulf. It is a case of an enterprising slave who showed enough business acumen to operate a successful commercial venture at Dubai, initially for his owner, but later on his own account while still a slave. He was able to borrow large amounts of money from local financiers and to maintain estimable relations with some of the local ruling authorities. Yet he was still operating under the shadow of slavery, despite the manumission that he obtained from the British, and was ultimately reduced to bankruptcy and utter desperation. It is a case exhibiting the possibility of social mobility in an Islamic society, but also the fragility of that freedom in an environment of commercial rivalry, British imperial intervention, and local resistance to manumission.

Origin Sultan bin Aman bin Abdullah was born into slavery in Zanzibar sometime in the mid–1880s, although “Sultan,” which means a ruler, is a strange name to be given to a slave child. Moreover, since Muslims cannot legally be enslaved by other Muslims, although they may become Muslim after enslavement, the Muslim or Arabic names of Sultan’s father and grandfather suggest he was a third-generation slave. By his own account, his father belonged to Sayyid Barghash bin Said, sultan of Zanzibar (ruled 1870–88). He says that he was ten years old when his father died, in the time of Sultan Hamed bin Thuwaini (ruled 1893–96),5 and he remained with Sultan Hamud bin Muhammad (ruled 1896–1902) for nine years, until he was nineteen years old.6 As one of the sultan’s slaves, he may have been among the earliest to be freed when slavery was abolished in Zanzibar in 1897. According to Sultan’s account, after his emancipation, he negotiated with an Omani nakhodha (captain) of a dhow, Thabit bin Said bin Thabit al-Jenebi from Sur, to take him as a servant for thirty rupees a month. The latter allegedly double-crossed him and tried to sell him on the Batinah coast of Oman, but nobody offered to buy him, because, in his words, “they took me to be a Somali.”7 Eventually, he was purchased in Dubai by Thani bin Khalaf (or Khalifah) with whom he remained for sixteen years.8 Thus, by the time his story begins in Dubai in the early 1920s, he was about thirty-five years old.

Manumission A similar confusion persists regarding his status at this time. According to the resident agent at Sharjah, Thani bin Khalaf gave Sultan a manumission

146

abdul sheriff

certificate in 1917 “so that he should enjoy liberty and not be molested by his [master’s] sons.”9 But according to Sultan’s own statement, given in July 1924, he had been given only a written permission to work for his living ten months previously. He repeated in 1926 that his master had not actually manumitted him, but only given him a written permit signed by the qadi, the sheikh of Dubai, and others saying that he could carry on business on his own account. According to Sultan, Thani bin Khalaf stated before the qadi that Sultan would be freed only on the owner’s death.10 If this report is accurate, Sultan was not manumitted by his owner under Islamic law. Nevertheless, since he was skilled as a trader, he was allowed to trade on his own account, which is an interesting case of occupational mobility of slaves in an Islamic society, although it was not common, judging from the numerous other cases of slaves in the Persian Gulf. The British resident agent at Sharjah appears to have had second thoughts about the status of Sultan. He argued in September 1924 that if Sultan had been a slave, the merchants would not have dealt with him and the sheikh of Dubai would not have given him a letter of recommendation, “because a slave is under command and has no authority to do business.”11 A year later the sheikh of Dubai also wondered why the Indian trader Rajah gave him so much money, though he was neither a diver nor a pearl merchant. Therefore, the resident agent went on to allege that the Indian trader must have conspired with Sultan to steal pearls belonging to his master, “otherwise a slave would not be given so much money,” but he produced no evidence.12 The confusion about the exact status of Sultan probably arose from the fact that he was no ordinary kind of slave, and his case was very unusual among slaves in the Persian Gulf at that time. It is hard to contradict his own admission, repeated twice, that he was not manumitted by his owner, but was allowed to trade, even on his own account. It is also clear that he was considered a reliable enough trader for the tightfisted Indian as well as Persian and Arab traders in Dubai to lend him large amounts of money. Sultan may have realized his unusual and precarious position. In July 1924, he had reported that three months previously, when his master left for Ghamza, his master’s sons, who were angry with him, had stopped him from working. He had therefore escaped, leaving his wife behind.13 He apparently continued with his private trade, for in December 1924, while he was away, one of the sons of his owner carried away his dates. When he complained to the sheikh of Dubai, the owner’s son merely refused to return the dates. Moreover, the owner and his sons tried to arrest him and force him to continue to serve them as before, which Sultan resisted.14 He therefore decided to take additional steps to secure his freedom by getting a manumission certificate from the British.

Figure 8.1. Sultan bin Aman’s manumission certificate. British Library, India Office Records, R/15/1/216, “Manumission of Slaves at Muscat: Individual Cases, 1921–1929,” 170.

Figure 8.2. Sultan bin Aman’s deed, with his signature in Arabic, “Sultan bin Aman Khadim Thani bin Khalifah.” British Library, India Office Records, R/15/1/216: “Manumission of Slaves at Muscat: Individual Cases, 1921–1929,” 191.

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

149

Sultan applied for a manumission certificate from the British political resident in the Persian Gulf at Bushire through the resident agent at Sharjah, and approached Sayyid Hamad bin Faisal, the governor of Batinah, where he used to trade for dates and palm materials, for a letter of recommendation. The governor wrote a very strong letter to the resident agent at Sharjah, indicating that Sultan was not considered a mere slave, but possibly also pointing to a desire of local chieftains to seek enterprising subjects. He wrote: “Sultan slave of Thani bin Khalaf resident of Debai has come to me and has requested that he should be permitted to live in my estates and under my protection. I cannot but welcome anybody who wants to be near me . . . and has asked me to write you a letter of recommendation asking your assistance for him in case he will need it. I therefore request you not to neglect him and give him assistance in the matter he is about to effect.”15 The manumission certificate from Bushire arrived just after Sultan had left for the Batinah. He therefore wrote to the British political agent at Muscat to obtain a manumission certificate there. He eventually got the manumission certificates from both Muscat and Bushire (see figures 8.1 and 8.2). He wrote to the political resident in the Persian Gulf in January 1925, “It makes me very happy to think that I am free.” But strangely enough, he still signed his letter in Arabic as “Sultan bin Aman Khadim [slave or servant of] Thani bin Khalifah,” perhaps out of habit.16

Sultan’s Business Armed with those two certificates, Sultan may have felt more confident in carrying on with his own businesses and better able to resist falling under the control of his former master and his sons. According to the resident agent at Sharjah, he had been entrusted by his former owner with his business and house until 1917. He added in 1924 that “as Sultan was known to the merchants since he was with his master and they became aware of his freedom and he knew to do business, he used to take money from the merchants on credit and to repay them.”17 His forte was apparently the date trade with the Batinah coast, where he had established good contacts with the governor of the district. For example, in September 1924 he returned to Sharjah from Batinah with four hundred baskets of dates and other goods and opened a shop where he sold his merchandise, including rice and presumably other provisions. He also dealt in pearls. Later he shifted to Dubai, where he opened a shop. He leased a plot of land with one godown (warehouse) on it for five years and went on to expand it at his own cost by building two more godowns. His trading activities extended to Ajman.18

150

abdul sheriff

Table 8.1 Sultan bin Aman’s Borrowings (Rupees) Raja Lakhu, an Indian merchant and moneylender Jabu Shamu, an Indian merchant and moneylender Haji Abdul Qadir Muhammad Abbas, apparently a Persian, described as a British protégé Abdullah bin Saif, a bedouin Total

2,520 2,800 910 780 7,010

Source: Summary of Sultan bin Aman’s case, n.d. [January 1926], 188–89; Statement of Sultan bin Aman, n.d., 185.

Table 8.2 Sultan bin Aman’s Outstanding Loans to Arabs in Dubai (Rupees) Isa bin Thani, Sultan’s master’s son Abdullah bin Thani bin Khalifa, another son Juma bin Khalifa, brother of his master Mohamad bin Khalifa bin Nassar [Nazar], a diver Said bin Ubaid Swaidi, a diver or captain of a pearl dhow Total

3,551 270 498 100 405 4,824

Source: Summary of Sultan bin Aman’s case, n.d. [January 1926], 188–89; Statement of Sultan bin Aman, n.d., 185.

He was apparently so successful even before formal manumission that by 1924 he had borrowed from a number of Indian, Arab, and Persian traders amounts totaling more than 7,000 rupees, but also had outstanding loans of more than 4,800 rupees. Sultan’s financial position was not precarious, since his debts exceeded his loans to others by only about 30 percent. His most significant debtor was Isa bin Thani, his master’s son. This debt included pearls that Sultan had bought from Said bin Zahi and Muhammad bin Rashid bin Jorish, but they had been taken by Isa and sold at a profit of 1,020 rupees. Isa had previously repaid part of his debt through a draft of 800 rupees on Muhammad bin Ahmad Dalmuk, a prominent local Arab merchant in Dubai, which was honored, but there was still an outstanding debt of 3,551 rupees. Sultan also claimed 270 rupees from another son of the owner, Abdullah, and 498 rupees owed by Juma bin Khalifa, his owner’s brother. The total amount owed by his owner’s family members amounted to nearly 90 percent of the total. Because of the strained relations between Sultan and his master’s family, which were partly due to Sultan’s effort to obtain manumission from the British and maintain his autonomy, he was not in a position to demand repayment when in need.19

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

151

The list of debtors also shows he was making advances, probably of provisions, to captains and pearl divers, such as Said bin Abeid Swedi, who owed 405 rupees on account of advances to be refunded after the diving season. In a majlis (meeting at the ruler’s court), Said agreed to pay 250 rupees and gave an order for payment on Muhammad bin Ahmed bin Dalmuk, but the latter refused to honor it. Muhammad bin Khalifa bin Nazar, probably a diver, owed 100 rupees on account of advances. Pearl-diving debts, however, were famously difficult to collect, since divers were rarely able to repay their debts on time, which often required them to be carried forward to the next diving season.20 Sultan was therefore not able to call for repayment when he was in greatest need.

Calamity and Bankruptcy With his financial position so precariously balanced, a disaster struck Sultan in the middle of 1924. He had earlier sent some of the borrowed money to Batinah to purchase date sticks, firewood, oil, leather, etc. The goods were shipped in a dhow that sank in the Ajman creek. According to Sultan, the nakhodha (captain) sold what was salvaged from the sea and took the money to Batinah. On hearing this, Sultan carried a letter of recommendation from Sheikh Said bin Maktum, the ruler of Dubai, to the governor of Batinah, asking for assistance in recovering his property.21 He also appealed to Sheikh Humaid bin Abd al Aziz, the ruler of Ajman, who summoned Ahmad bin Abd al Rahman and Khasif bin Ali, who had salvaged the goods. They admitted that they had sold the goods, including twelve bundles of leather, ropes, palm tree trunks, and wood, totaling 314 rupees. The sheikh added a curious statement, that Sultan “has a share in the wood,” suggesting that the rest could be claimed by the salvagers. According to the account, a total of 190 rupees were due Sultan, and were paid in smaller amounts at different times personally or through a servant of the ruler of Dubai. The balance of 124 rupees was apparently shared by the others.22 Unfortunately, the two reports do not give an indication of the total loss that Sultan had suffered from the disaster, except to say that he recovered only about 65 percent of what was salvaged. It seems that the calamity brought down Sultan’s business. He wrote in 1926: “Two years ago I suffered great losses in the trade. I was leading business at Debai and therefore contracted heavy debts say for Rs.11,000.”23 The resident agent at Sharjah instituted inquiries about Sultan’s possessions to determine whether he could pay off his debts, but found that he had none in Dubai. He therefore convened a meeting, according to local commercial practice in the Persian Gulf, of Iranian, Arab,

152

abdul sheriff

and Indian merchants, in the presence of an Iranian and an Indian creditor, Haji Abdul Qadir Muhammad Abbas and Raja bin Lakhu, as well as Sultan, the debtor. They came to the conclusion that Sultan was bankrupt and had no money to pay his debts. They therefore declared him a bankrupt with immediate effect, adding: “Whoever desires to do business with Sultan anew in order to obtain something of his debt he is at liberty to do so.”24 Sultan later protested that the meeting was forcibly convened against his will, and it declared him bankrupt and defamed his reputation.25 Nevertheless, he repeatedly acknowledged his debts and expressed willingness to repay gradually in installments as much as he could afford to pay.26 One issue that was to bedevil Sultan’s case was the claim by the Indian merchant Raja bin Lakhu that Sultan had mortgaged a house with him in order to secure the repayment of a loan, and Raja demanded that it be handed over. But the ruler of Dubai stated that the house did not belong to Sultan but to one of his subjects, and that Sultan had merely rented it for a year. Moreover, the ruler’s brother Sheikh Maktum denied that there had been any reference to the mortgage when he sealed the original bond. Sultan confirmed that when he contracted a bond with the Indian, there was no mention of the house in the original document, but that the Indian had insisted that Sultan give him a mortgage on some piece of property.27 An undated minute by the secretary of the political resident in the Persian Gulf, but probably dating to January 1926, noted, “When on his last tour, the Political Resident was shown this document on which Raja bin Lakhu’s claim is based and it was found that the mortgaging of property has been inserted in the document six days after the document was originally drawn up, and the mention of the mortgage was in quite different handwriting.”28 It turns out that the alleged mortgage was a rather complicated deal: It consisted first of a plot of land with one godown in it. Sultan rented same for Rs.190 a year for a period of 5 years. He has built two godowns in the land which have cost him Rs.598/4/-. Deducting one year’s rent . . . there remains Rs.375/4/-. As the owner owed Sultan this sum and the Bania arranged with Sultan to let the property on an annual rent of Rs.600 to another trader while Sultan could pay Rashid [the owner] Rs.190/- a year for the remaining period of 4 years, Sultan has therefore mortgaged the property with the Bania. Sultan says the above balance of Rs.375/4/- has been paid to him [Sultan] when his account were lately looked into at Debai, and it, in turn, been paid to Raja b Laku.29

While this may not have legally absolved Sultan of the charge of fraud, it does suggest full knowledge of the exact proprietorship of the plot and the pressure applied by the Indian moneylender to commit the fraud from which

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

153

he recovered part of his loan. For some reason, Sultan apparently did not present this information to the committee of merchants that determined his bankruptcy, and they ruled that it was “a fraud by Sultan for which he deserves punishment” to prevent him from doing similar thing in the future. They did not indicate what that punishment should be. The charge was levied against Sultan alone, and not the Indian trader who had colluded in the fraud.30 While the committee of merchants came down heavily on Sultan, it did not inquire into another matter that should have been considered part of his assets and therefore relevant to the bankruptcy. Nor did Sultan himself present evidence of his claims against Arabs in Dubai, which amounted to 4,800 rupees. A very large part of the claim was against the sons of his former owner, as mentioned above. Sultan stated in January 1926 that he had “complained to the Residency Agent at Sharjah, who wrote three letters to the Sheikh for recovery of my claim”; in another undated statement by Sultan, he said that “the Resident Agent had the knowledge of the claims against the above, had referred them to the Sheikh of Debai, who had called the creditors and they agreed to pay me a part of my debts but had later on refused to pay anything to me.” He added, “Isa bin Thani, the son of my master interfered in the case telling me that I should give him my Manumission Certificate and serve him; he would then allow that my claim be paid to me. I reported the case to the Resident Agent who advised me to withdraw the case.”31 Thereafter Sultan repeatedly appealed to the resident agent at Sharjah for the recovery of his funds, but the latter advised him not to speak of his claims, lest Isa bin Thani forge some new debts against him. In February 1926, the secretary to the political resident in the Persian Gulf suggested, “We may send Sultan to Debai with letters to the Sheikh of Debai requesting him to form a Committee of Merchants with the Qazi of Debai (whom Sultan considers a very and impartial man) to investigate his claims and to recover the sums for payment to his creditors after leaving a little money for himself to continue his trade,” but no action seems to have been taken.32 By May the secretary was recommending that “Sultan’s claims against his master’s son had better be dropped as they will either perjure themselves that Sultan owes them money or else they will pass witnesses to that effect and Sultan will not succeed to prove his case against them.” The resident agent at Sharjah warned Sultan that if he wanted to remain in Dubai, he should keep quiet about his claims against Isa bin Thani and Juma bin Khalifa.33 Sultan’s claims were thus swept under the carpet for the sake of amity with the local ruler and his former owner. Most of the local creditors, on the other hand, were more sympathetic. In November 1928, the resident agent at Sharjah reported that “when the Arabs and Ahwazi [Iranian] merchants came to know the insolvency of the slave

154

abdul sheriff

Sultan bin Aman, they let him go,” except for one of the moneylenders.34 Like Shylock, Raja bin Lakhu did not drop his claim to a pound of flesh, although the other Indian moneylender, Jabu bin Shamu, who was owed an even larger amount, seems to have accepted the judgment of the committee of merchants. Although Raja had been present at the meeting of the committee that declared Sultan bankrupt, over the next few years he repeatedly petitioned the British authorities either personally or through his law firm, Kalumal & Co. in Karachi, for the recovery of his loan. In 1926 the law firm tried to goad the British authorities into action against the ruler of Dubai by suggesting that since the political resident in the Persian Gulf had declared that the ruler’s brother had countersigned the tamsak (bond), the ruler was equally liable to honor the mortgage, despite it having been shown that the reference to the mortgage was added later. One of the lawyers provocatively added, “It seems that Your Excellency’s decision is not final and binding but is sought to be reviewed or opened up again and left to the Majlis.”35 In October 1928, Maghanmal Lakhmidas Rajani, apparently a descendant of Raja bin Lakhu, again claimed the repayment of his 2,500-rupee loan and the surrender of the mortgaged property. But the British refused to reopen the judgment, having ruled in 1926 that “the decree of the Merchants’ Committee declaring Sultan bankrupt cannot be altered now.”36

The End of the Business Career of Sultan bin Aman In a desperate attempt to gain sympathy and support for his cause, and to array the British against his former owner and the resident agent at Sharjah, Sultan alleged (in January 1926) that in 1911 he had been instrumental in exposing arms smuggling by his former owner. He claimed that he gave regular information to the “negro” interpreter for the British about rifles in his owner’s house. Sir Percy Cox, the British officer in charge, had ordered the rifles be surrendered to the resident agent, but Sultan alleged that the resident agent was colluding with Thani bin Khalifah to shift the rifles to another place. When a British warship arrived, fighting ensued in which the Arabs were subdued. His master’s son Isa was fined 4,000 rupees, which he took from Sultan, but refunded only 1,000 rupees. Sultan said that Cox had asked the resident agent to summon him in order to give him a reward, but the resident agent had replied that Sultan had died. Instead he was imprisoned and banished from the Oman coast to the interior and then to Iran for a long time. The secretary to the political resident in the Persian Gulf noted the claims and suggested an investigation, but the British, not wishing to be pushed into another major investigation, dropped the case.37

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

155

Thereafter, Sultan’s business career came to a pathetic end. He stated in January 1926 that he was not permitted by the ruler of Dubai to go to Bushire. He was blown to Bahrain, where he informed the political agent that he had been starving for three days and begged for the cost of a shirt, “as I have no money myself to buy one.” He was forced to pawn his personal property, including his valuable account book, which contained all the evidence of his claims against the Dubai Arabs, for eight rupees with Haji Ali bin Haji Hussein, a shopkeeper.38 In March he wrote to the political resident in the Persian Gulf, apparently in English for the first time, although with poor handwriting—the signature is not legible. He asserted that he had left his wife behind in Dubai, but there is no mention of any children. He said he had been in Bushire for three and a half months and had written three letters to his family in Dubai but had not received any reply from them. He was perplexed and worried about any injury that might have been done to them by the Arabs and the resident agent. Claiming that his family had “no money for their expenses,” he begged for some money to remit to them, since he could not return to Dubai without British protection.39 When he was completely down, his enemies in Dubai, including the resident agent at Sharjah and the ruler of Dubai, decided to strike the final blow, perhaps partly in response to his accusations against them in the alleged arms case. The tone of the inquiry changed after February 1926, when Khan Bahadur Abdur Razzaq was appointed the new resident agent at Sharjah. Asked to review the whole case, he “concluded that his [Sultan’s] statements . . . are all unfounded. . . . All the actions of the slave are fraud.” He considered Sultan’s admission that he had not been manumitted by his master a lie, and his approach to the governor of Batinah was deemed improper. He said Sultan thought that with the support of the manumission certificates, “he would be able to swallow the dues of the people . . . [and] mortgag[e] other people’s building with the Bunnia”; Sultan’s failure to advance his claims against the Dubai Arabs was considered another “great fraud.”40 The committee of merchants had said in December 1925 that Sultan deserved punishment for the fraud regarding the mortgage of the house that did not belong to him. In January 1926, therefore, the resident agent decided to use this weapon to finish Sultan’s career. He “consulted His Excellency Sheikh Said bin Maktum in regard to the punishment of Sultan for his cheating Raja and other Bunnias in obtaining from them money”; the sheikh agreed that “Sultan should be imprisoned until the next diving season and then he may be sent to do diving and whatever he would get by God’s grace shall be divided proportionately between Raja & others.”41 This was intended to be Sultan’s ultimate humiliation. But the British did not have the stomach for vengeful action against a slave they had manumitted, and

156

abdul sheriff

wanted to reach closure quickly on a question that had dragged on for so many years. In May, therefore, the secretary of the political resident in the Persian Gulf had a talk with the resident agent at Sharjah, and came to a final conclusion: 1. The decree of the Merchants’ Committee declaring Sultan bankrupt cannot be altered now. 2. Sultan’s claims against his master’s son had better be dropped as they will either perjure themselves that Sultan owes them money or else they will pass witnesses to that effect and Sultan will not succeed to prove his case against them. 3. That he should be allowed to go to Debai and work for his livelihood in the service of Muhammad bin Ahmad Dalmuk [a prominent local merchant]. 4. Sultan has agreed. . . . The above seems to bring an end to this case and appears to be somewhat favourable to Sultan also.42 Matters did not end there. Four years later, Sultan was still in Bushire and writing to the political resident and consul general in the Persian Gulf, asking for British protection and help to go to Dubai to bring his family to Bahrain. He added: “You are aware that a woman has heavy rights on the husband. Every year I am sending expenses for my wife. Now I have received news from her that she is anxious to see me. But I am unable to go. The Qadhi informs me to divorce her. I do not wish this.”43 In a minute, the secretary of the political resident in the Persian Gulf noted: “Sultan might get into trouble if he visits Debai: his creditors may also grumble that he is now able to work and pay up his debts but that the Residency helps him in getting his family away from Debai. He should therefore appoint an agent to do this for him.” Another minute expressed exasperation: “This Abyssinian slave was manumitted in 1924 and ever since we have been settling his affairs.” The secretary wanted the case closed once and for all.44 The career of Sultan bin Aman is unique among the five hundred or so slave manumission cases recorded in the Persian Gulf in the 1920s, but it must be remembered that administrations typically spent a lot of time solving intractable problems, whereas simple cases may have pass unrecorded. In cases of manumission by the British, problems arose from the breakdown of amicable relations between slave owners and slaves, forcing the latter to resort to intervention by the imperial power instead of working within the Islamic system of manumission and appealing to local authorities when there was a hitch. So there may have been many unrecorded cases of enterprising, business-savvy slaves who made it in the world under slavery.

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

157

Nevertheless, the short career of Sultan was remarkable. In the seven years from the time he was given written permission to operate a business on his own account in 1917, while still a slave, and 1924, when things fell apart with the shipwreck in Ajman, Sultan established a successful business against all odds. He showed enterprise and promise, importing dates and sugar from the Batinah coast and trading as far as Ajman. He made advances to pearl divers and dhow captains, and even traded in pearls. He must have been able to prove his worth if tightfisted Indian, Arab, and Iranian merchants and moneylenders agreed to lend him large amounts. In the problematic case of the alleged mortgaging of a house, he showed that he could take a little-developed property with one godown, for which he was paying an annual rent of 190 rupees for five years, and develop it by building two additional godowns, which could yield a rent of 600 rupees and thereby help him reduce his debts. He must have been able to prove his worth to the local political authorities in order to have the ear of the rulers of Dubai and Ajman. The governor of the Batinah coast was willing to write letters of recommendations for him, and the British authorities in the Persian Gulf granted him two manumission certificates. The case, however, also exposes the broad penumbra between slavery and freedom in the Persian Gulf, which seems to have befuddled even the British resident agent at Sharjah and the ruler of Dubai. How could a slave operate a business on his own account while still a slave without a manumission certificate from his master? But equally, how could the former owner and his sons continue to exercise their dominance over him, with the connivance of the local ruler and the local British representatives, even after he had been granted manumission certificates by the powerful British imperial authorities? The latter failed to protect him against his local enemies and shied away from demanding repayment for his counterclaims against them with the same vigor that they had earlier sought his bankruptcy and infamy. This is the shadow under which freed slaves seem to have operated in the zone between slavery and freedom in the early years of piecemeal manumissions in the Persian Gulf. Throughout the hundred pages of the consular correspondence, Sultan is described, and indeed even signs his own name, as khadim (slave) or, at best, tabei (dependent) of Thani bin Khalifah, even after his double manumission by the British.45 These circumstances destroyed not only the business career of Sultan bin Aman, reducing him to mortgaging even his bedding and account book, but also his family, since he was separated from his wife for many years. The case is interesting too in that it shows the legal pluralism regarding the laws of both slavery, Islamic and British, and bankruptcy at that time.

158

abdul sheriff

Notes 1. Slaves were manumitted case by case based on specific grounds of ill-treatment before a more general emancipation that came about in the Persian Gulf in the middle of the twentieth century. Manumission certificates therefore had to be accompanied by brief biographies of the freed slaves and the grounds for their manumission. They are now preserved in the India Office Records at the British Library in London. 2. For a discussion of slavery in Islam, see Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 218–22, and J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1908–15). 3. See Abdul Sheriff, “The Twilight of Slavery in the Persian Gulf,” in ZIFF [Zanzibar International Film Festival] Journal 2 (2005): 35–45; Fredrik Barth, Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). A slave who had been kidnapped by bedouins eventually returned to his owners. He offered to buy his freedom, but they replied that he had served them long enough, and freed him without any payment. 4. India Office Records, R/15/1/216: “Manumission of Slaves at Muscat: Individual Cases, 1921–1929.” All archival references are to this volume, so I give only page numbers in the following notes. 5. Although he wrongly names him as Ali bin Thuwaini. 6. Statement by Sultan bin Aman, July 22, 1924, 136. But the British political agent at Sharjah said he was fourteen years old when he was brought to Dubai: Resident Agent, Sharjah (hereafter, RAS) to Political Resident in the Persian Gulf (hereafter, PRPG), September 21, 1924, 142. 7. As Muslims, Somalis were not supposed to be enslaved, although sometimes they were. Moreover, Somalis had a reputation of being difficult people to control. 8. Statement by Sultan bin Aman, July 22, 1924, 136; see Sheriff, “Twilight of Slavery.” 9. RAS to PRPG, September 21, 1924, 142. 10. Statement by Sultan bin Aman, July 22, 1924, 136; Further Statement Made by Sultan bin Aman, n.d. [January 1926], 192–95. 11. RAS to PRPG, September 21, 1924, 144. 12. RAS to PRPG, August 24, 1925, 164–65. 13. Statement by Sultan bin Aman, July 22, 1924, 136. 14. Further Statement Made by Sultan bin Aman, n.d. [January 1926], 192–95. 15. Sayid Hamad bin Faisal, Wali of Sohar, to K. B. Abdul Latif, RAS, August 25, 1924, 149. 16. RAS to PRPG, January 14, 1925, 151; note by Khan Bahadur Abdur Razzaq, February 22, 1926, 212–13; Sultan bin Aman, Abyssinian, to PRPG, January 25, 1925, 152. 17. RAS to PRPG, September 21, 1924, 142–44. 18. RAS to PRPG, September 25, 1924, 148–49. 19. Summary of Sultan bin Aman’s Case, and His Statement, n.d. [January 1926], 188–89. 20. See Sheriff, Dhow Cultures, ch. 4, on the pearl industry. 21. RAS to PRPG, September 21, 1924, 142–44.

Social Mobility in Indian Ocean Slavery

159

22. Sh. Humaid bin Abdul Aziz, Chief of Ajman, to Abdur Rahman bin Muhamad Khalu, June 22, 1924, 209. 23. Statement of Sultan bin Aman of Dubai, January 21, 1926, 184. 24. Signed by Isa bin Abdullah Sumaiah, Haji Ahmad Khuri, Dhamanmal Isardas, Jaffer Ali Hayderabadi, and Kalluh Bunnia; RAS to PRPG, December 14, 1925; translation of Procès-Verbal and the merchants’ decision, December 12, 1925, 173–74. 25. Sultan bin Aman to Political Resident and Consulate-General (hereafter, PRCG) December 28, 1926, 210. 26. RAS’s certificate, September 23, 1924; RAS to PRPG, September 25, 1924, 148–49. 27. RAS to PRPG, August 24, 1925, 164–65; translation of Procès-Verbal and the merchants’ decision, 12.12.1925. 28. Minute by Secretary, n.d., 183. 29. Further Statement Made by Sultan bin Aman to Explain His Case, n.d. [January 1926], 192–95. 30. RAS to PRPG, December 14, 1925; Procès-Verbal and the merchants’ decision December 12, 1925, 173. 31. Statement of Sultan bin Aman of Dubai, January 21, 1926; Statement of Sultan bin Aman, n.d., 184–85. 32. Memorandum by Secretary, February 28, 1926, 198–99. 33. Summary of Sultan bin Aman’s Case, n.d. [January 1926], 192–95; minute by K.B.(?), May 3, 1926, 220. 34. RAS to PRPG, November 28, 1928, 230–31. 35. Kalumal & Co. to HBM Consul & Political Agent, Bushire, Karachi, January 8, 1926, 179–80. 36. Maghanmal Lakhmidas Rajani to PRPG, October 21, 1928, 221; minute by K.B., May 3, 1926, 220. 37. Sultan bin Aman to HBM Consul General, January 26, 1926; memorandum by Secretary, February 28, 1926, 198–99, 215. 38. Further Statement Made by Sultan bin Aman to Explain His Case, n.d. [January 1926], 192–95; Sultan bin Aman to HBM Consul General, Bushire, January 26, 1926, 215. 39. Sultan bin Aman to Political Agent, Bushire, March 19, 1926, 216. 40. Note by Khan Bahadur Abdur Razzaq, February 22, 1926, 212–13. 41. RAS to PRCG, April 6, 1926, 219. 42. Minute by K.B., May 3, 1926, 220. 43. Sultan bin Aman to PRCG, December 13, 1929, 235. 44. Minute of December 22, 1929, 240. 45. RAS to PRPG, September 21, 1924, 138; all the acknowledgments of debts by Sultan on 142; Sultan bin Aman to PRPG, January 25, 1925, 152; Sultan’s bond, 1342, 170; Kalumal & Co. to British Political Agent, Bushire, August 24, 1925, and January 8, 1926, 158, 179.

9

Deeds of Freed Slaves: Manumission and Economic and Social Mobility in Pre-Abolition Zanzibar thomas f. m c dow

Said bin Muhammad al-Aghbari, an Omani governor in Zanzibar in the 1820s, “possessed the entire monopoly of the traffic” in slaves.1 Beyond this very public role as a slave trafficker, however, he also freed many of his slaves, founded a mosque, and dedicated houses and farms to support both the mosque and his freed slaves. To the European visitor in the nineteenth century who noted al-Aghbari’s monopolistic practice, and to other outsiders, slavery and the slave trade on the western shores of the Indian Ocean were obvious. Processes of manumission and the roles of freed slaves, though, were nearly invisible. In the period before European pressure ended the slave trade in 1873, manumitted slaves, like those freed by this Omani governor, owned urban and rural property, undertook trading missions on land and sea, and played significant roles in the social and economic world of nineteenth-century East Africa. This essay outlines manumission from social and religious perspectives in Zanzibar in the mid-nineteenth century and details the integral yet hidden roles of freed slaves in the region’s economy. In the Indian Ocean, slaves were not simply property, and the distinction of slave versus free is not always the best way to understand the position of slaves. Slaves, like free individuals, existed in hierarchies of dependency. Household or personal slaves bound to their masters through mutual obligations were likely to gain great independence or legal freedom. Plantation slaves in the

160

Deeds of Freed Slaves

161

western Indian Ocean, on the other hand, like slaves in plantation systems in the Atlantic, were unlikely to be freed by their masters. People sought to better their position in the hierarchy by securing powerful patrons under whom they had the greatest degree of autonomy. Across such continua, freedom as an ideal was not always preferable to slave status, and some people were content to remain slave clients to powerful patrons.2 The growth of plantation economies on oceanic islands and the African mainland in the nineteenth century undercut older Indian Ocean notions of slaves as dependents and clients, creating new demands for slaves as a distinct category of labor. In 1844, Atkins Hamerton, the British consul, estimated that one-third of the population of the Zanzibar archipelago was enslaved, perhaps as many as 150,000 people. The proportion of slaves in the population had grown quickly in the previous decade as Arab planters profited handsomely from clove cultivation and thus became able to procure more slaves. At least 20,000 captives a year came from the African mainland for the first four decades of the century, enabling a scaling-up of the economy, most notably in plantation agriculture. The lives of agricultural slaves were extremely difficult: their mortality ranged from 22 to 30 percent annually. The expanding plantation sector bifurcated the slave population, creating a new category of agricultural slaves distinct from the older forms of client servitude characteristic of the western Indian Ocean. Hamerton claimed that among the latter, “The slave is well fed generally and ill-treatment of the slave on the part of the master is of very rare occurrence.” These slaves were also more likely to be freed.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, slaves gained their freedom through internal or local processes of manumission in line with Islamic practices of freeing slaves. These individuals, identified as sarı-h. in Arabic business documents, used property holdings and ties to Arab families to leverage their participation in East Africa’s expanding economy by producing cloves, procuring ivory, or dealing in property. The freed slaves and their descendants later took on important roles in the social and political changes of early twentieth-century Zanzibar, but the nineteenth-century origins of this group and their pivotal place in the western Indian Ocean and its hinterland require greater attention.4 Freed slaves from the middle of the nineteenth century have existed for researchers mainly as disembodied names on lists of African slaves captured at sea and released to missions or members of consular staffs, as was European practice in Zanzibar.5 Many of these individuals, like the freed woman Swema in the 1860s or the children of the Kiungani mission in the 1880s, were enslaved but never worked as slaves before they were freed. Captured on the African mainland, they were, but for European intervention, destined for the lowest

162

thomas f. m c dow

rungs of the coastal social hierarchy as plantation labor. Their memories of their lives before slavery and of their capture were fragmented, and their accounts passed through the filter of European missionaries.6 Missing from the picture are the freed slaves who came from the more refined categories of servitude, such as those who had been born as slaves on the coast (Swahili: wazalia) and perhaps worked for wages outside their master’s ambit, or were accomplished traders or tradesmen (mafundi) who might compete in status with freeborn individuals. New evidence from contracts and business deeds in Zanzibar has brought these previously unknown or overlooked slaves and former slaves to life as members of lineages and as people linked to Arab clans in both East Africa and Arabia. These documents demonstrate that freed slaves were active in vital sectors of the economy, and illuminate the unappreciated role that freed slaves had in the growth of cities and suburbs.

Voluntary Manumission Freedom for slaves in the western Indian Ocean came in three forms during the nineteenth century: European intervention, African resistance, and Muslim manumission. The first two represent their own historiographical categories and are well attested in scholarly work. The first modern historians writing about East Africa viewed slavery and the slave trade as the central theme of the region’s history—Coupland called it a “scarlet thread” that ran through the history of East Africa—and their accounts detailed European intervention motivated by and striving for the end of the slave trade. Such views have come under great scrutiny, in part because in both British and German East Africa, colonial governments were slow to end slavery—if they did at all—and those governments worked hard to maintain local economies and comfortable relations with elites even as they disrupted the social relations of labor. Subsequent generations of scholars, drawing on nationalist histories, neo-Marxist ideals, and the insights of subaltern studies, focused on the roles of slaves themselves in creating greater degrees of autonomy for themselves.7 Neither the “Europeans freed the slaves” nor the “slaves freed themselves” model accounts for local practices of manumission and the role of slave owners in the process. Slavery in Islam has not been as straightforward as most scholars assumed, but manumission has been recommended from the earliest days of the faith. Ghislaine Lydon points out that since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, scholars and commentators have reinterpreted sources of Islamic law to justify enslavement. More recently, some scholars have argued that the sources of

Deeds of Freed Slaves

163

Islamic law in fact do not justify enslavement. Manumission, on the other hand, has always been endorsed. The Qur’an directs Muslims to write contracts of emancipation when slaves seek them and encourages Muslims to bestow a portion of their God-given wealth when they free slaves. Freeing slaves was also considered a pious act, so Islamic mechanisms for manumission provided both justification and reward. It is also worth noting that in classical jurisprudence, manumission did not sever the relationship between master and former slave, but created a new tie (wal ’ al-’itiq) between the parties as patron and client as a consequence of the manumission. Thus, freed slaves had a prescribed legal relationship of rights and obligations, not with the state or a lineage, but with an individual. Although early Islamic legal sources laid out normative rules for manumission, they did not create a “single, coherent ideology” that structured interactions in East Africa.8 Local practices of manumission were invisible to outside observers because they required no state mediation and took place in the private sphere between masters and their dependents. In the few instances when Islamic manumission did fall under the purview of European observers in Zanzibar after 1845, it was employed insincerely to subvert the escalating British treaty regime, as is shown below. The evidence for most manumissions, however, is available only indirectly through incidental accounts and the Arabic-language contracts and business dealings of the freed slaves themselves. Although well-to-do individuals were more likely to own large numbers of slaves and to leave behind documents, people in every stratum of society owned slaves in Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, and fragmentary evidence suggests that voluntary manumissions took place within every social class. For instance, a man named Baraka who himself was a freed slave of an Indian Muslim granted his slave Songoro freedom in October 1877 through a deed of manumission.9 On the other hand, Said bin Muhammad al-Aghbari, the monopolistic slave dealer with whom this chapter begins, and Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi both freed numerous slaves. These men were powerful Arabs who had served as governors of Zanzibar in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although it is difficult to pin down their motivations, patterns of influences on manumission emerge. The three primary influences on manumission were Islamic piety, slave owners’ circumstances, and the actions of slaves themselves. As noted above, Islamic law encouraged manumission and provided both incentive and justification for freeing slaves. While broader notions of Islamic piety and atonement influenced individual masters, incidents in their own lives and their own social standing also affected manumission. Slaves themselves shaped practices of manumission through their own accomplishments.

164

thomas f. m c dow

Islamic piety offered a justification for freeing slaves, and testamentary manumission occurred alongside other acts of religious charity. Wills offered Muslims a last chance to demonstrate piety, and freeing slaves was one way of doing this. The explorer John Hanning Speke, who visited Zanzibar in the late 1850s and early 1860s, noted that while he considered testamentary manumission an obligation under “the Mohammedan creed,” such acts were rarer in Zanzibar than in Arabia. Another British visitor at the end of the decade observed, however, that manumission at an owner’s death was a common occurrence intended “to give themselves a lift into the next world.” The fact that slave owners saw their slaves who were autonomous clients as a different category than agricultural slaves may explain the discrepancy in the two opinions. Said bin Sultan, who ruled Oman and Zanzibar, provided in his will (written in 1850, six years before his death) that all his slaves—except those who worked on his plantations—be freed at his death.10 Some of the slaves of the governor Said bin Muhammad bin Said al-Aghbari also seem to have been freed at his death and were bequeathed property both in and out of town. In addition to freeing slaves, testators sought to perform other pious acts, such as offering money for individuals to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca on their behalf or sponsoring people to fast for set-aside periods to atone for any failings during their lifetime. Like his father, the later sultan, Barghash bin Said (d. 1888) freed slaves in his will and provided funds to pay people to fast for a total of fifty months on his behalf.11 Manumission occurred at other times as well, in accordance with the religious calendar or the rhythms of a slave owner’s life. The end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, was the most prominent time for Muslims to free slaves. When the freed slave Baraka manumitted his servant Songoro in 1877, the deed of freedom was dated the sixth day of the month Shawwal, less than a week after the end of fasting, and only a few days after the end of the festival of celebration. The same impulse that compelled some to write wills freeing slaves may have affected aging residents of East Africa in the nineteenth century. As people grew older, they were more likely to free slaves, either for the sake of doing good or to acknowledge long service.12 Slaves themselves influenced decisions on manumission. Accomplished slaves were sometimes granted freedom. Hamess Wodin Tagh, who had been a slave as a young man, demonstrated unusual prowess as a trader on the African mainland and was freed sometime before 1872. He met success along the northern Masai caravan routes into what is now Kenya and in the slave-rich area of Lake Nyasa near what are now the borders of Tanzania, Mozambique, and Malawi before he became “the principal Arab” of a settlement in the eastern Congo.13

Deeds of Freed Slaves

165

Female slaves could influence their manumission by, among other acts, bearing the child of the master. Such children were born free and were not sold or called slaves. But not all female slaves bore children, and it is also important to recall that not all slaves in the western Indian Ocean were African. While most slaves in the plantations of Zanzibar and the East African mainland were born in or could trace their origins to Africa, urban centers were also home to captured people from the Middle East and South Asia. Some of these gained freedom. One was an Indian woman named Mariam who came to the attention of British officials in 1846. She had been born in Baroda, Guajrat, in the 1820s or 1830s to Hindu Rajput parents. After they died, she was sold in Bombay’s Bhendi Bazaar to an Arab man who took her first to Mukulla, in the Hadramawt region of Arabia, and eventually to Zanzibar. A succession of Arab Muslim and Indian Khoja men bought her and sold her, and she moved between Zanzibar, Kilwa, and Bombay with her masters, one of whom emancipated her, perhaps to make it easier to travel with her to India. In Bombay she came to the attention of British officials, but they did not know what to do with her. Mariam had become a Muslim and did not want to return to Baroda, her region of origin. She was willing to return to Zanzibar or remain in Bombay so long as she would be provided for.14 Mariam, like other slaves, had been manumitted, but state intervention disrupted her position as a client. She sought not freedom, but a guarantee of support. To the surprise of nineteenth-century observers, some slaves in Zanzibar did not wish to be free. In the 1860s, a man identified as Buckett (perhaps properly Bhukh t) worked as an interpreter for the British navy and dressed well in crimson and fine linen. Although he was the slave of an old Arab woman, he did not seek to free himself from slavery. Buckett had clearly achieved a degree of autonomy that transcended a dichotomous relationship of free and slave. Indeed, as Jonathon Glassman has pointed out, slaves on the Swahili coast “did not struggle for ‘freedom’ and a complete break with slavery,” but for “powerful patrons who would give them the opportunity to participate vigorously and autonomously in coastal society.”15 On the other hand, freedom without autonomy marked insincere manumission.

Antislavery Treaties and Insincere Manumission British treaties with the Arab rulers of Zanzibar tightened restrictions on the transport and trade of slaves incrementally in 1822, 1839, 1845, 1873, and 1890 while promoting British trade. Much of the slave trade from the Swahili coast had been oriented toward the plantations of the Indian Ocean islands Île de France and Île de Bourbon since the 1770s. Even after the Brit-

166

thomas f. m c dow

ish took control of Île de France in 1814, following the Napoleonic Wars, and renamed it Mauritius, the demand for labor on both islands remained high. The Moresby Treaty of 1822 attempted to limit the flow of slaves in this direction, and the 1845 treaty outlawed the export of slaves from Zanzibar but did not end slavery in the sultan’s domain. This created an easily exploitable loophole. Said bin Sultan had already agreed that willing free laborers in his dominions could become contract laborers on Mauritius or Bourbon. He did not anticipate, however, that slaves would be bought and freed specifically for that purpose.16 In September 1851, the sultan’s forces stopped a French brig as it sailed from Zanzibar, discovering twelve men on board who had recently been bought in the Zanzibar market. Surprisingly, in the brief time since their purchase, the slaves had been manumitted and engaged for a five-year labor contract in Mauritius. An investigation revealed that the French traders and their local agents in Zanzibar had used local practices of manumission to create “free” labor. Muslims agents in Zanzibar—some Arab and some Swahili, some free and some slave—bought and freed slaves, and since French recruiters paid them for each manumission, pecuniary motivations likely overshadowed pious ones.17 The British representative Hamerton feared that Persian Gulf Arabs who traded seasonally in Zanzibar would exploit the same loophole, rendering the 1845 treaty moot. These so-called “Northern Arabs” sailed with the monsoon winds each year in October or November from the Persian Gulf ports and the coastal Omani town of Sur to the Swahili coast. Said bin Sultan, the Omani ruler in Zanzibar, was intimidated by their seasonal presence, and British consuls viewed them as the prime culprits in the slave trade. Earlier in 1851, Hamerton had written to the commander of British naval forces in the Indian Ocean, pleasantly surprised that slave brokers had heeded the sultan’s admonition against selling slaves to the Northern Arabs: “This is the first time I have ever known the Imam’s orders strictly obeyed by any of his people.” Half a year later, the implications of the manumission loophole and the “free” labor worried him immensely. He predicted that the Northern Arabs “will furnish these Free labourers in thousands because it will be the best and indeed almost the only market open to them in the dominions of the Imam of Maskat—for the sale of slaves.”18 Among the Arab elite in Zanzibar, however, opposition to the insincere manumission scheme was morally and religiously based. Said bin Sultan and “all of the respectable Arabs” opposed the French maneuvers on Islamic grounds, claiming that “man may call it what he likes but God knows what it really is.” Three years later, the practice had not abated, and the sultan

Deeds of Freed Slaves

167

himself wrote to the British secretary of state for foreign affairs to complain about the recruiters from Île de Bourbon paying Arabs to buy and free slaves. He explained, “Such business is at variance with the Mahammedan religion.”19 The sultan did not elaborate upon his opposition to the practice, but it may have offended a moral economy of manumission as much as any Islamic tenet. Freeing low-status, unacculturated slaves who were unable to function as clients did not fit local practices of manumission. Indeed, slave owners may have seen such slaves as unfit for wala-’ al-’itiq and undeserving of their good intentions. These were a different class of slaves, bound for plantation labor. From the point of view of some local traders and their French partners, however, this moral economy of manumission mattered less than the certification of freedom. With the imposition of the treaty regime, older forms of writing took on new degrees of authority.

Words in Deeds At the center of the act of manumission for both owner and slave was a deed of manumission. These deeds shed light on the role of freed slaves in shaping the evolution of Zanzibar town and their participation more broadly in all sectors of the economy. Deeds of manumission were written in Arabic, generally following a prescribed formula to establish the slave’s freedom. Although some slave owners wrote such documents themselves, the technical nature of the deeds meant that most owners enlisted a qadi (Islamic judge) or scribe to write for them. For instance, the qadi Abdallah bin Ali bin Muhammad al-Mundhrı- wrote the deed when Baraka, himself a freed slave, manumitted his servant Songoro in 1877. The value of these documents was greatest for the freed slaves, since they established them as autonomous individuals and protected them from being reenslaved. Some freed slaves even stored these “writings,” as they called them, in small silver boxes worn about their necks.20 Another set of Arabic deeds in Zanzibar record business transactions. These business deeds have been vital in identifying slaves and freed slaves in midnineteenth-century Zanzibar. In these documents, freed slaves positioned themselves in relation to their former owners and identified themselves by following Arabic naming practices, with first names, lineages, an indication of status, and clan membership. Such discursive practices should not be read solely as signs of subordination. As noted above, when slaves became free, they assumed wala-’ al-’itiq, a legal category of patronage and clientship. Such ties formalized the kinds of reciprocal demands individuals could make on each other.21 Slaves and freed slaves identified themselves formally in writing as part of their master’s lineage and clan, a practice that dates to the period of voluntary

168

thomas f. m c dow

manumission. In her study of the records of the early twentieth-century qadi courts that operated in the immediate aftermath of the British protectorate government’s ending of slavery in 1897, Elke Stockreiter argues that slaves and freed slaves chose to link themselves with their masters in court proceedings and elsewhere because they hoped “to be recognized through their owner’s respected social status.” In fact, that process of identification can be traced more than fifty years further back and seems to apply equally to slaves and freed slaves whose owners were not prestigious. In 1846, for example, Mgingira, the freed slave (sarı¯ h.) of Gharib walid Musa, the slave of Sultan Arshad al-Ghaythi, sold his farm at Bonde la Mzungu, Zanzibar, to the customs master Jairam Sewji.22 On the business deed that recorded the transaction, Mgingira included all of the above names and associations, indicating his own status as the freed slave of a slave and his seemingly distant tie to an Omani clan active in Zanzibar. While scholars should not be seduced into believing that identities revealed in legal documents were the slaves’ only identities, the documents offer more detail and context by which to identify slaves and freed slaves than was previously available. Scholars have argued convincingly that slaves’ names and identities were unstable. People—both slave and free—on the coast changed their own names to disguise their identities or create new ones. Owners and abolitionists gave slaves and freed slaves new names, and freed slaves refashioned names and identities to suit their own purposes.23 Against the fluidity of identity, the fixity of documents remains important as one of the few ways to identify individual freed slaves and their actions. Because of the legal formulae for listing names, Arabic-language business deeds provide a wealth of information about slaves and allow them to be seen with a personal past embedded in social and economic processes of the western Indian Ocean.24 They list an individual’s first name, followed by his or her lineage. The terms bin (son of) or bint (daughter of) introduce the lineage and also reveal the gender of slaves in cases of unusual names. Following the first names and lineages, individuals are identified by their status and relationship to others. Statuses included sarı-h. (manumitted slaves), kha-dim (slaves or servants), wakı-l (representatives), and dala-l (agents), and preceded the name of the person to whom they are linked. That individual is also identified by a name, a lineage, and an adjective that revealed his or her clan’s origins. For example, a freed slave named Twakali sold a plot of land in 1847 to a prominent merchant firm for $23.50. The name and identifying details of the seller as translated from Arabic are Twakali sarı-h. Haramil bin Sa’ı-d alGhaythı-. Thus Twakali listed no father or lineage information. Instead, it is clear that Twakali was the freed slave of a man named Haramil, the son of

Deeds of Freed Slaves

169

Said. Haramil bin Said himself was a member of the al-Ghaythi clan, a group that originated in Oman, and many members of which arrived in Zanzibar during the reign of Said bin Sultan. Although it is difficult to conclude much more about Twakali from this brief contract, such information makes larger patterns more apparent. For instance, few details about Twakali’s property itself emerge, but from the location of the property sold and the clan name, it appears that several freed slaves and minor members of the al-Ghaythi family sold land in the 1840s, indicating perhaps a death in the family.25

The Freed Slaves of al-Aghbari This essay began with reference to Said bin Muhammad al-Aghbari, a governor of Zanzibar in the 1820s who was said to have monopolistic control over the slave trade. What did not survive in any European accounts, however, is the degree to which he liberated his slaves. While his pious endowments became some of the most important (and fought-over) land in Zanzibar town in the first part of the twentieth century, his manumission of slaves in the middle of the nineteenth presents clear evidence of the economic activity of freed slaves in shaping the development of Zanzibar town and its suburbs. The actions of al-Aghbari’s freed slaves as property owners both in and out of town fit well with the economic activities of freed slaves in the Indian Ocean and on the African mainland. Al-Aghbari served as a governor of Zanzibar in the period before Said bin Sultan relocated his capital from Arabia to Africa. Little is known of his life, but documents attest to his pious endowments, property holdings, and manumissions, and these form his legacy. He built a mosque that bears his name in the Forodhani neighborhood of Zanzibar town and dedicated seven houses and a plot of land for its upkeep. The al-Aghbari clan has its roots in Oman and is considered part of the larger al-Ruwehi grouping. Said bin Muhammad al-Aghbari seemed to maintain his connections with Oman. Shortly after he served as governor of Zanzibar, a time when others suggest he enriched himself through the slave trade, al-Aghbari’s family gave their name to a mosque built in Oman’s Sumayl Valley. One of the inscriptions on that mosque quotes a verse from the Qur’an urging men to not let merchandise or sales beguile them in their faith.26 Perhaps both financial success and religious piety motivated al-Aghbari to manumit his slaves. It is impossible to reconstruct his entire household and its dependents, but records indicate that Said bin Muhammad liberated at least five of his slaves and gave them allotments of land both beyond and within urban Zanzibar. His freed slaves owned property across the creek outside town

170

thomas f. m c dow

where other slaves and freed people lived, but they also possessed houses in town near members of well-respected religious and trading families.27 In the 1850s, Fundi Warya bin Makabangi, a freed slave of al-Aghbari, owned a house in the Baghani section of Zanzibar town. “Fundi” as a name or title suggests that Fundi Warya had desirable skills and had likely already gained a degree of autonomy. He may have, like other talented men in his position, bought this property on his own in order to assert his authority and attract clients. The fact that he was the son of Makabangi, presumably an African man not born a Muslim, suggests he was born at the coast and thus was more acculturated than raw or low-status slaves. Baghani was one of the town’s most prosperous quarters, home to the Zanzibar branch of the al-Barwani clan, an illustrious group with prominent roles in the history of Zanzibar and Oman. In this period, as profits from plantations and trade grew, Arabs built imposing stone houses in Zanzibar and took great pride in their dwellings. These giant stones houses, fronted with elaborately carved doors, served as warehouses, reception halls, and dwellings. A visitor to Zanzibar in 1856 commented on the competition between merchants: “The higher the tenement, the bigger the gateway, the heavier the padlock, and the huger the iron studs which nail the door to heavy timber, the greater is the owner’s dignity.” One of the grandest stone houses at the time was a seafront building not far from Baghani called, tauntingly, “Mambo Msiige,” Swahili for “Something Not to be Imitated.”28 Fundi Warya was in no position to imitate it. In 1857 his nearby house was wattle and daub, topped with a thatched-palm roof. Fundi Warya’s dwelling was typical for Swahili settlements and represented the heterogeneous makeup of Zanzibar’s “Stone Town” in this early period. A recent historian has called for more work that “brings the mud huts back into [town] history, alongside the patrician palaces,” as a way to integrate the analysis of town and country in East Africa. Indeed, in the early 1870s a resident of Zanzibar observed that “negro huts” were in every part of the city, though in greater concentrations in the Malindi neighborhood and across the creek in Ng’ambo. Houses such as Fundi Warya’s in Baghani were valuable for their location, though a fraction of the value of their thick-walled neighbors. When Fundi Warya sold his house in 1857, he earned $730 from Jairam Sewji, the customs master. For comparison’s sake, from a slightly later period, a large stone house adjacent to Fundi Warya’s plot sold for $8,000 in 1877.29 Other freed slaves of al-Aghbari owned property nearby in the commercial quarter of Zanzibar called Sokomuhogo. The house of Amur bin Swedan, another sarı-h. of al-Aghbari, neighbored that of Salim bin Bu-ru-t, also a freed slave of al-Aghbari, as well as that of Ahmad bin Sayyid Ahmed Jamal al-Layl.

Deeds of Freed Slaves

171

The Jamal al-Layl clan was originally from the Hadramawt region of Yemen and had spread to all parts of the Indian Ocean, from Borneo to the Swahili coast and farther south to Madagascar. Noted for their religious learning, the family included scholars and poets renowned in East Africa from the sixteenth century. Migration of the Jamal al-Layl within East Africa and from the Hadramawt increased in the nineteenth century because of the favorable conditions for both trade and religious learning that al-Busaidi rule fostered. This Ahmad Jamal al-Layl may have been more closely involved in commerce than religious teaching, since the neighborhood was a thriving commercial center. Freed slaves controlled property in the heart of the city in the middle of the nineteenth century, but based on the small amount of evidence available, they sold off those houses as the century progressed. The heterogeneous composition of town in this earlier period indicates the vitality of the economy and the fluid lines within it. Slaves could gain their freedom through their own efforts or their master’s inclinations, and freed slaves could live close to and associate with some of the most elite members of society, suggesting older Indian Ocean forms of layered sovereignty that later colonial governments sought to stifle and realign.30 Freed slaves also controlled property outside the town, and the settlement of these lands shaped the growth of the city. The peninsula of the old town was separated from the mainland of the island by a tidal creek. The area across the creek and east of town came to be called Ng’ambo (literally, “the other side”). Because of changes in land tenure and the expansion of Zanzibar during the economic boom of the late nineteenth century, Ng’ambo became the African quarter. Slaves freed by Islamic means played a central role in this transition, and by the early twentieth century, as Laura Fair has shown, freed slaves and their descendants were at the forefront of political organization and demands for rights of people living in Ng’ambo.31 In the early nineteenth century, Omani Arabs acquired large tracts of land in Ng’ambo through claims, grants, and seizures. The plantations they established on that property were known in Swahili as viunga (singular kiunga), denoting landholdings close to town. These were used for cultivating fruit trees. Over time, as property passed from Arab landowner to manumitted slaves and their descendants or to Indian creditors, kiunga came to mean “suburb” or “outskirt.” Some of the largest holders of kiunga lands were Omani Arabs. Sultan bin Muhammad bin Habis al-Muharmi, for instance, had extensive fields in the Welezo area of Ng’ambo. Those with ties to the royal family and political power did even better. Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi, a powerful chief minister whose freed slaves traveled the Indian Ocean and the African interior, had served as governor of the island, and used that position to confiscate land.

172

thomas f. m c dow

Before Sulayman bin Hamed took on the governorship, al-Aghbari held the office. Outside observers noted that he used his position to profit from the slave trade, and he also likely leveraged the governorship to acquire large viunga landholdings. Part of his viunga was a few miles from town in Welezo, and when he manumitted his slaves or when he died (the first likely a result of the second), al-Aghbari divided this property among his slaves.32 The transformation of Welezo was indicative of the change in ownership and occupancy in Ng’ambo as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1895, an English visitor described Welezo and its hill as “one of the most beautiful sites on the island.” She noted, “In the morning light, with the sunshine full on it, the town looked like a city full of palaces set in the bluest of blue settings. The native quarter is hardly visible, but we could see the Cathedral spire and the Sultan’s Clock Tower.”33 By 1895, Zanzibar had been a British protectorate for five years, and the abolition of slavery was still two years away. The transformation of both the city and its suburbs, however, had been underway for some time. In the early 1870s, when at least three of al-Aghbari’s slaves sold their plots in Welezo, the sultan’s clock tower and the cathedral spire had not yet been built, and the “native quarter” was just coming into being. Although the ruling elite strengthened the early links between the town and Ng’ambo in the 1840s, efforts by petty traders and small-scale property owners like al-Aghbari’s manumitted slaves made Ng’ambo a central site of commerce and residence. When the sultan built a bridge over the tidal creek that separated Stone Town from the rest of Zanzibar in the 1840s so that he could reach his palace in Mtoni by road, he also made it much easier for people to move between town and its periphery. The area on the other side of the bridge became an important commercial center where petty merchants rented small shops and lived above them or nearby. During the same period, the viunga areas nearest town became residential neighborhoods of slaves and freed slaves who worked in town as contract laborers or as domestic laborers in houses. Some lived rent-free in property of their masters; others owned small plots of their own. With the acceleration of the Zanzibar economy in the 1870s, Indian merchants began to invest in land as a way to generate income for other ventures. Fair has pointed out that property ownership in Zanzibar was not usually based on deeds of title, but in fact freed slaves held paper titles to their properties in Ng’ambo more than a quarter century before the abolition of slavery. While some of these sold their land in the 1870s and afterward, many others retained their rights to it. Indeed, Fair demonstrates that in the twentieth century, freed slaves and their descendants were vital to the social and political development in Ng’ambo, being the first to challenge

Deeds of Freed Slaves

173

the depersonalization of tenancy and the leaders of the ground-rent strike in the 1920s.34 The roots of these associations, however, were in the nineteenth century, when freed slaves such as those of al-Aghbari gained control of their property in Ng’ambo. Freed slaves’ economic activities affected not only Zanzibar town and its suburbs; they were part of circuits of trade and migration that connected Zanzibar to Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Freed Slaves in the Indian Ocean and the African Mainland Manumitted slaves from Zanzibar traded across the Indian Ocean and along the caravan trails of mainland Africa, taking advantage of their relationships with their former masters or their ability to mortgage property they owned. Patronage networks enabled freed slaves to expand the scope of their activities. Indeed, since manumission most often accrued to elite slaves whose efforts had won favor with their masters, it is not surprising that these people continued as valued clients to their patrons. Sulayman bin Hamed alBusaidi (c. 1782–1873) was a cousin and adviser to Said bin Sultan and one of the most important and powerful men in East Africa. The sultan himself was wary of Sulayman’s power in the 1840s, and Sulayman went on to be principal adviser to the sultans Majid (ruled 1856–70) and Barghash (ruled 1870–88). Sulayman had good relations with foreign dignitaries—Queen Tsiomeko of Nosy Be in western Madagascar singled him out for greetings— and with local indigenous rulers; the Mwinyi Mkuu, Zanzibar’s traditional ruler, and his family had several ties to him.35 In Zanzibar, Sulayman possessed urban houses, rural plantations, and many slaves. The number of slaves he manumitted is unknown, but two of them used their relationship with their powerful patron to access unusual wealth and power, one in Indian Ocean trade, one as an autonomous ruler on the mainland. Shorkah bin Omah, a trusted representative and former slave of Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi, amassed great wealth through his Indian Ocean trading activities. After manumission, Shorkah undertook trading expeditions to Madagascar in the late 1830s. While in Tamatave, Madagascar, in late 1840, Shorkah died and left property there. The extent and value of the property is not completely known, but in late 1840 or early 1841 the sultan sent Shorkah’s brother, Membec, in the ship of a British trading concern to recover what he could. It is not clear whether Membec himself had been a slave, though it seems likely. He recovered the handsome sum of $75,000, which was split between two people, Shorkah’s former master and a son of the sultan, who may have been the investors bankrolling Shorkah’s ventures. The sultan chartered another ship to dispatch Membec again, but Membec had other ideas

174

thomas f. m c dow

and fled to the coast of Africa, where he hid.36 The mobility of freed slaves allowed them to take advantage of patronage but also, like Membec, to chart their own course when they wished. Farhan, another client of Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi, ruled a large settlement on the African mainland in the 1870s near a crossroads for coastal and interior traders. In 1873, Farhan, the autonomous ruler of a large village near Rehenneko, brought a goat and fowls to a European visitor and identified himself as a slave of the Zanzibari chief minister. Although it is not clear from the sources whether Farhan had been manumitted, his acknowledged relationship and his degree of independence suggest that he had. Farhan’s location near Rehenneko, at the base of the Usagara Mountains, was not a surprising place to find freed slaves from Zanzibar. Earlier, an independent Zigua leader named Kisabengo had established a chiefdom near the Uluguru Mountains through a strategic alliance with Sulayman bin Hamed, Farhan’s patron. Sulayman supplied arms and troops (not to mention his powerful reputation) to Kisabengo and helped him expand his rule. The area under Kisabengo became an important stop on the east-west caravan route that connected Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean ports to the far interior, and Kisabengo acknowledged an ongoing debt to Sulayman. By the early 1870s near Rehenneko, one found settled Omani Arab traders, disgruntled mixed-race caravaners trying to collect debts, and an African population “all well-dressed after the fashion of the slaves at Zanzibar.”37 Whether Farhan alone was the model for such fashion is doubtful, but his dual role as local patron connected to the important caravan sector and as client of a powerful patron demonstrates the centrality of freed slaves in East African economic and social networks. Even without powerful patrons, freed slaves participated in procuring one of Zanzibar’s biggest exports, ivory, by leveraging property to raise capital. Msabah, the freed slave of Talib bin Adbullah al-Mauli, mortgaged his property through time sales, a common tool for finance in which property was sold for a fixed period of time within which the original owner could reclaim it by repaying the debt. In Msabah’s case, his debt was in ivory, and he pledged his farm in Mzambaruni, Zanzibar, for a debt of 700 pounds of elephant tusks over two years. Other ivory traders used similar mechanisms. Msabah stands out, however, because he was able to borrow large sums and because he mortgaged property both in Zanzibar and in the interior. Several months after mortgaging his Zanzibar farm, Msabah took out a huge loan to be repaid with 6,650 pounds of ivory, but this time he mortgaged all his property in Unyamwezi, the caravan hub in the interior, for a period of two years. The deed specifies all property, both human and material, suggesting that Msabah held slaves at Unyamwezi. Msabah’s former master may have

Deeds of Freed Slaves

175

been an ivory trader as well, because another of his freed slaves, Songoro, also mortgaged property in Zanzibar to finance his ivory trading. Although Msabah never repaid his debt (he died while on the mainland), his case offers strong evidence for the role that freed slaves played in the broader commerce of the region by securing credit, trading in ivory, and establishing themselves trans-locally in Zanzibar and the interior.38 Although the growth of the plantation sector subsumed a growing number of slaves who had diminishing opportunities for freedom, slaves born at the coast who were clients of their masters could achieve a degree of autonomy by becoming a sarı-h., or freed slave. This freedom fit an older social order of the western Indian Ocean, and insincere acts of manumission offended this, drawing opprobrium at midcentury from local Muslims. Those within the moral economy of manumission, however, parlayed their positions as trusted clients and property owners into positions of influence that allowed them to take part in the expansion of Zanzibar town, sail to foreign ports, and establish themselves as traders and chiefs on the African mainland.

Notes I am grateful to Robert Harms, Abdul Sheriff, Fahad Bishara, and Justin Beckham for feedback on an earlier version of this chapter, and to the African Studies Seminar led by Pier Larson and Sara Barry at Johns Hopkins University. 1. Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia Performed in His Majesty’s Ships “Leven” and “Barracouta” from 1821 to 1826, under the Command of Capt. F. W. Owen, R.N., 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1835), 224. 2. Jonathon Glassman, “The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast,” Journal of African History 32, no. 2 (1991): 277, 296–97, 309; Gwyn Campbell, introduction to The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xxii. 3. Hamerton, “Details of Population and Extent of Slave Trade,” January 2, 1844, Zanzibar National Archives (henceforth, ZNA), AA 1/3; C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast, 1796–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 207–8. 4. The three most important books on the rise and context of the plantation economy are Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of An East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey, 1987); and Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995). For freed slaves in the twentieth century, see Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), especially ch. 3.

176

thomas f. m c dow

5. Register of Freed Slaves, 1860–74, 1871–88, ZNA, AA 12/3; released slave register, ZNA, AB 71/9. 6. Edward A. Alpers, “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century East Africa,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire Robertson and Martin Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 186; A. C. Madan, Kiungani; or, Story and History From Central Africa (London: Bell, 1887). 7. For the centrality of Europeans and the slave trade, see Reginald Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (1938; reprint, London: Faber, 1968), 4; see also Roland Oliver, The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London: Longmans, 1967); Oliver, Sir Harry Johnstone and the Scramble for Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959); R. N. Lyne, An Apostle of Empire: Being the Life of Sir Lloyd William Mathews, K.C.M.G. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936). On British and German attempts to mitigate the end of slavery: Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, c. 1884–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). For the agency of slaves, see Glassman, “Bondsman’s New Clothes”; Fred Morton, The Children of Ham: Freed Slaves and Fugitive Slaves on the Kenya Coast, 1873–1907 (Boulder: Westview, 1990). 8. Ghislaine Lydon, “Slavery, Exchange, and Islamic Law: A Glimpse from the Archives of Mali and Mauritania,” African Economic History (2005): 121, 142nn17–18. She cites, particularly, Ulrike Mitter, “Unconditional Manumission of Slaves in Early Islamic Law: A Hadîth Analysis,” in The Formation of Islamic Law, ed. W. B. Hallaq (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004). For contracts of emancipation, see Qur’an 24:33. For the status of freed slaves, see Eduard Sachau, Muhammedanisches recht nach schafiitischer lehre (Stuttgart: Spemann, 1897), 125–27, and Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially ch. 3. For a critique of Crone’s overall thesis, and further insight into wal ’ al-’itiq, see the review by Wael B. Hallaq, Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 1 (January–March, 1990): 79–91. On single ideology, see Glassman, “Bondsman’s New Clothes,” 279, which challenges the functionalist assumptions upon which the Miers and Kopytoff thesis is built. 9. Registered Deed 303 of 1877, 6 Shawal 1294 / 14 October 1877, ZNA, AM 3/1. 10. ‘Umar al-Naqar, “Arabic Materials in the Government Archives of Zanzibar,” History in Africa 5 (1978): 379; John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1863), xxvi; W. Cope Devereux, A Cruise in the “Gorgon”; or, Eighteen Months on H.M.S. “Gorgon,” Engaged in the Suppression of the Slave Trade on the East Coast of Africa (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 107. 11. Al-Naqar, “Arabic Materials,” 379. 12. Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa (London: Hurst, 2001), 72; Registered Deed 303 of 1877, 6 Shawal 1877 / 14 October 1877, ZNA, AM 3/1; Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, The Customs of the Swahili People, trans. and ed. J. W. T. Allen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 176. 13. David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, ed. Horace Waller (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875), 173, 422.

Deeds of Freed Slaves

177

14. Mtoro, Customs of the Swahili People, 175; “Statement of Mariam,” March 6, 1846, included in Hamerton to Willoughby, April 23, 1846, National Archives of India, FD-13/6/1846-F.C.-138. 15. Devereux, Cruise in the “Gorgon,” 107; Glassman, “Bondsman’s New Clothes,” 311, 304. 16. Nicholls, Swahili Coast, 197–99; Hamerton to Palmerston, September 24, 1851, ZNA, AA 1/3. 17. Hamerton to Palmerston, September 24, 1851, ZNA, AA 1/3. 18. Hamerton to Aberdeen, April 23, 1846, ZNA, AA 1/3; Hamerton to Uyvile, March 13, 1851, ZNA, AA 01/03; Hamerton to Palmerston, September 24, 1851, ZNA, AA 1/3. 19. Arab opinion reported in Hamerton to Palmerston, September 24, 1851, ZNA, AA 1/3.; Said bin Sultan to Clarendon [Hamerton’s translation], n.d., enclosed in Hamerton to Earl of Clarendon, April 13, 1854, ZNA, AA 1/3. 20. Mtoro, Customs of Swahili People, 177; Devereux, Cruise in the “Gorgon,” 107–8; Registered Deed 303 of 1877, 6 Shawal 1877 / 14 October 1877, ZNA, AM 3/1. Prestholdt has compared this practice of carrying writings to the amulets worn by Swahili people to protect themselves from harm; see Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 135. For the commingling of Islamic and African traditions in the nineteenth-century amulets of the Swahili coast, see Mtoro, Customs of Swahili People, 60–62. 21. Nimtz shows a good example of this from mainland Tanganyika in a later period when a slave freed in the ninteenth century by a prominent family was able to claim support in the 1930s; see August H. Nimtz, Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 99–100. 22. Elke Stockreiter, “Tying and Untying the Knot: Kadhi’s Courts and the Negotiation of Social Status in Zanzibar Town, 1900–1963” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2008), 271–72; Registered Deed 242 of 1877, ZNA, AM 3/1. 23. Mtoro, Customs of Swahili People, 15; Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, ch. 5, “Symbolic Subjection and Social Rebirth.” 24. A published collection of such deeds from Barawa, Somalia, in the late nineteenth century is a treasure trove; see Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed M Kassim, eds., Servants of the Sharia: The Civil Register of the Qadis’ Court of Brava, 1893–1900, (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 25. Registered Deed 221 of 1877, 29 Dhu al-Qa’da 1263 / 7 November 1847, ZNA, AM 3/1; Sa’ı-d b. Alı- al-Mughayrı-, Juhaynat al-Akhba-r fiTta’rı-kh Zinjiba-r, 4th ed. (Muscat, Oman: Ministry of National Heritage and Culture, 2001), 77; Registered Deed 237 of 1877, 3 Safar 1263 / 21 January 1847; Registered Deed 241 of 1877, 22 Rajab 1262 / 15 July 1846; ZNA, AM 3/1. 26. [Wakf information sheet], n.d., Ledger Folio 10, ZNA, HD 4/34. Although his name is properly al-Aghbari or al-Aghbri, based on the Arabic, the mosque and his pious endowments have been recorded as “Lagbri” in the English-language records; caretaker of the al-Aghbari mosque, interview by the author, Forodhani, Zanzibar, January 7, 2010; Paola Costa, Historic Mosques and Shrines of Oman (Oxford: Archeopress, 2001), 222, quoting Qur’an 24:37.

178

thomas f. m c dow

27. The people attested in the documents as freed slaves of al-Aghbari (and the year they concluded contracts) include Maktub (1857), Rajab (1857), Fundi Warya bin Makabangi (1857), the brothers Juma bin Swedan (1869) and Amur bin Swedan (1870–71), Salim bin Barut (1870), Fatma bin Khairi (1871), and Salim bin Maktub (1871). In some cases, it is not clear whether the person listed was freed or his or her parent was freed. That is, in the generic case of A the son of B freed slave of C the son of D, there is some ambiguity between [(A the son of B) freed slave of C the son of D] and [A the son of (B freed slave of C the son of D)]. The patterns of land ownership—the former slaves often owned plots adjacent to each other—suggests that Said bin Muhammad or his heirs followed a common practice of subdividing larger properties to grant smaller plots to slaves upon manumission. 28. Registered Deed 215 of 1877, 15 Sha’ban 1273 / 10 April 1857, ZNA, AM 3/1; Glassman, “Bondsman’s New Clothes,” 292. Some al-Barwani identified themselves as belonging specifically to this neighborhood, calling themselves “Awlad Baghan,” or the Sons of Baghani. For additional information on the al-Barwani clan and its connections to Oman, see Thomas F. McDow, “Arabs and Africans: Commerce and Kinship from Oman to the East African Interior, c. 1820–1900” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008); Richard Francis Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), 1:86; Abdallah Salih Farsy, Seyyid bin Sultan: Joint Ruler of Oman and Zanzibar, 1804–1856 (New Delhi: Lancers, 1986), 49. 29. Registered Deed 215 of 1877, 15 Sha’ban 1273 / 10 April 1857, ZNA, AM 3/1; Felicitas Becker, “Cosmopolitanism beyond the Towns: Rural-Urban Relations in the History of the Southern Swahili Coast in the Twentieth Century,” in Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean, ed. Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 263; James Christie, Cholera Epidemics in East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1876), 303; Registered Deed 149 of 1877, 6 Sha’ban 1294 / 16 August 1877, ZNA, AA 12/19. 30. Registered Deed 276 of 1877, 4 Dhu al-Qa’dah 1286 / 2 May 1870, ZNA, AM 3/1; Anne K. Bang, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London: Routledge, 2003), 25–27; Anne Bang, “Cosmopolitanism Colonised?,” in Simpson and Kresse, Struggling with History, 170–171; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), ch. 1. 31. Fair, Pastimes and Politics, ch. 3. 32. Farsy, Seyyid bin Sultan, 51; Johann Ludwig Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London: Trübner, 1882), 163, 328; Garth Andrew Myers, “Early History of the ‘Other Side’ of Zanzibar Town,” in The History and Conservation of Zanzibar, ed. Abdul Sheriff (London: James Currey, 1995), 44n33), 36. Krapf is explicit in differentiating kiunga (fruit trees) and shamba (land cultivated with grains). The words meaning “plantation close to town” changed over time and came to mean “suburb” or “outskirt”; see A. C. Madan, English–Swahili Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 268, 399. Freed slaves who received property: Salim bin Maktu-b, Registered Deed 226 of 1877, 20 Jumada al-Awal 1288 / 9 July 1871, ZNA, AM 3/1; Fatima bint Khairi, Registered Deed 231 of 1877, 14 Jamada al-Akhir / 31 August 1871; Amur bin Swedan, Registered Deed 284 of 1877, 20 Jamada al-Awal / 9 July 1871.

Deeds of Freed Slaves

179

33. Emily Key, “A Drive through the Island,” Central Africa: A Monthly Record of the Work of the Universities Mission 154 (1895): 160. 34. Myers, “Early History of Zanzibar Town,” 36–38. Myers suggests that the relationship between large kiunga plots in Ng’ambo that belonged to the wealthiest merchants and largest slave owners meant that the owners used the properties “for labor control and the reproduction of slave labor in the town”; Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 110–18. 35. Farsy, Seyyid bin Sultan, 36–37. Said bin Sultan was wary of Sulayman’s power: “His Highness fears him much but he is not at present in a situation to openly displease him in the event of its pleasing God to call the Imam,” that is, if Said were to die; Hamerton to Aberdeen, October 25, 1845, ZNA, AA 1/3; Queen Smeka of the Sackalavas to Said bin Sultan, September–October 1841, ZNA, AA 12/1A; Registered Deed 8 of 1865, ZNA, AM 1/1; Registered Deed 177 of 1877, ZNA, AA 12/19. 36. Hamerton to Mauritius, October 4, 1841; Said bin Sultan to Mauritius, October 9, 1841, FO 54/5. 37. V. L. Cameron, Across Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 61, 67–73; Alexandre Le Roy, A travers le Zanguebar: Voyage dans l’Oudoé, l’Ouzigoua, l’Oukwéré et l’Ousagara (Lyon: Bureaux des Missions catholiques, 1884), 84–85; Andrew Roberts, “Political Change in the Nineteenth Century,” in A History of Tanzania, ed. I. N. Kimambo and A. J. Temu (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 63; Norman R. Bennett, Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in Nineteenth-Century East Central Africa (New York: Africana, 1986), 65. 38. Registered Deed 1280 of 1887, 14 Ramad.an 1282 / 1 February 1866, ZNA ARC 3/19; Registered Deed 167 of 1867, 4 Jumada al-Akhir 1284 / 3 October 1867, ZNA, AM 1/1; Registered Deed 8 of 1866, 15 Dhu al-Qa’da 1282 / 1 April 1866, ZNA, AM 1/1; Civil Case 141 of 1887, ZNA, HC 7/265.

This page intentionally left blank

PART

The Changing Face of Slavery

V

This page intentionally left blank

10

Slave Trading, Abolitionism, and “New Systems of Slavery” in the Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean World richard b. allen

In April 1827, the captain of the Dutch brig Swift retained Mahomet, a native of Surabaya on the north coast of Java, to recruit workers from the countryside around the city. Mahomet, who already knew the brig’s captain, soon secured the services of a number of men and women by giving them twenty rupees as two months’ advance wages and telling them they would be going to work in Singapore or Batavia. After the ship left Surabaya, however, its Javanese passengers learned that they were actually bound for the French colony of Île Bourbon (Réunion) in the southwestern Indian Ocean, a discovery that led them to demand that they be returned to Java. Not unsurprisingly, their demands fell on deaf ears, and the nine Javanese who survived the ship’s subsequent wreck at Rodrigues, the easternmost of the Mascarene Islands and a dependency of the British colony of Mauritius 350 miles away, ended up in Mauritius, where their ultimate fate remains unknown.1 The story of the Swift’s passengers highlights some of the problems inherent in assessing the status of migrant laborers in the Indian Ocean World during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Prominent among these are the difficulties of distinguishing “free” from “unfree” laborers during an era that witnessed not only the abolition of the British and French slave trades in 1807 and 1818, and the abolition of slavery in Britain and France’s colonial empires in 1834 and 1848, but also the development of a purported “new system of slavery”

183

184

richard b. allen

that led to the migration of millions of indentured African and Asian laborers throughout the European colonial plantation world and beyond during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ambiguities surrounding the status of the men and women on board the Swift are an illustrative case in point. On the one hand, they apparently knew what they were doing when they agreed to work as wage laborers in Singapore or Batavia and did so of their own accord. On the other hand, the fact that they were deceived about their real destination and that their demands to be returned to Java were ignored was consistent with the deceptive and coercive practices used to procure some contract laborers in the nineteenth-century colonial world. The fact that the Swift sailed at the same time when French ships actively transported illegal cargoes of slaves from the Indonesian archipelago to Réunion,2 when Britishflagged vessels could reportedly be found occasionally carrying slaves near the Seychelles,3 and when British and Dutch vessels frequented Diego Garcia with “Malays” of uncertain legal status on board4 underscores the difficulties of assessing the impact that British and French abolitionist activity had on migrant labor systems in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere in the colonial world. The origins of the indentured labor system in which the Swift’s Javanese passengers became enmeshed date to the second half of the 1820s, when the first unsuccessful attempts were made to use free Chinese and Indian workers on Mauritius and Réunion.5 The arrival in Mauritius on November 2, 1834, of 75 privately recruited Indian workers is commonly regarded as marking the advent of the modern system of migrant contract labor. More than 24,000 of these Indian immigrants reached the island during the next four years. The Mauritian experiment with indentured labor has long been acknowledged as the crucial test case for the use of free labor in the colonial plantation world after Britain’s formal abolition of slavery in 1834.6 The success of this experiment led to more than two million Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Javanese, Melanesians, and other non-European peoples leaving their homes to work on plantations and in other enterprises in the Caribbean, eastern and southern Africa, southern and Southeast Asia, the southwestern Indian Ocean, Australasia, the central and southern Pacific, and Central and South America between the mid-1830s and the 1920s.7 Indentured labor also became an important component of regional political economies in parts of India, especially Assam and adjacent areas, during this period.8 Nineteenth-century British abolitionists first advanced the argument that the deception and coercion used to recruit these laborers and the exploitation and oppression to which they were subjected during their indentures made these men and women victims of a “new system of slavery.” The experience of the first indentured Indians in Mauritius gave substance to these suspicions,

“New Systems of Slavery”

185

and the public outcry in Britain and India about their mistreatment led to the suspension of the so-called coolie trade to the island in 1838. When Indian immigration to Mauritius resumed late in 1842, it did so under governmental supervision intended to limit further abuse of these workers. Hugh Tinker echoed these abolitionist sentiments in his classic study of 1974 on the exportation of Indian labor after British slave emancipation,9 a work that continues to influence studies of the indentured experience. The Tinkerian paradigm has not been without its critics; several scholars have argued that characterizing indentured labor in these terms is at least something of a misnomer.10 At the heart of this historiographical tradition is a preoccupation with assessing whether indentured laborers were really “free” or “unfree” and with ascertaining the extent to which they exercised control over their own lives and destinies. The nature and dynamics of labor control and an attendant focus on the legal and quasi-legal dimensions of workers’ lives figure prominently in these assessments. While this approach has shed substantial light on various aspects of the indentured experience, it has also limited our understanding of these migrant labor systems and their role in the development of the modern global economy. One consequence is widespread acceptance of the notion that indentured workers were little more than the hapless and helpless victims of unscrupulous labor recruiters, plantation owners, and colonial officials. Another consequence is a frequent failure to examine other important aspects of the indentured experience more fully, such as women’s place and activities in these systems, the role of gender in shaping socioeconomic relations in postemancipation plantation colonies, and the extent to which indentured workers exercised agency on their own behalf. A review of studies of indentured labor in Australasia, the Caribbean, South Africa, the South Pacific, and Southeast Asia highlights an attendant failure to view the indentured experience in individual colonies as part of larger regional or global systems or in comparative contexts. Last, few attempts have been made to explore structural or other ties between pre-and postemancipation labor systems in the colonial world. Studies of British slave-plantation colonies, to cite a prominent example, usually end with the abolition of slavery in 1834, while those that deal with postemancipation labor systems pay little or no attention to the slave regimes that preceded them. Discussions of conceptual and interpretative issues surrounding indentured labor also reflect this propensity to draw a sharp dividing line between the pre- and postemancipation eras in the colonial plantation world.11 Recent scholarship on migrant labor in the Indian Ocean underscores the need to explore connections between these pre- and postemancipation labor systems more fully. Mauritian archival sources, for example, confirm the

186

richard b. allen

existence of the kind of structural links between slave systems in India and the exportation of Indian indentured labor first proposed by Benedicte Hjejle more than forty years ago. In her seminal article on slavery and agricultural bondage in southern India, Hjejle argued that the recruitment of some Indian indentured workers cannot be understood without reference to indigenous systems of slavery, and that a significant number of the migrant workers who reached Ceylon between 1843 and 1873 came from among the ranks of South India’s praedial slave population.12 The registers that recorded the arrival of indentured Indians in Mauritius confirm that the laborers who arrived on the island from southern India during the late 1830s included persons of “slave” caste status.13 Unfortunately, it is unclear how many such persons reached the island during or after the mid-1830s or may have been among the indentured immigrants who reached other plantation colonies during the nineteenth century. Comparable structural links are also a hallmark of the engagé system, widely regarded as the old slave trade in new garb, which entailed the recruitment of ostensibly liberated slaves and free contractual laborers along the East African coast and in Madagascar to work on Mayotte in the Comoros, Nosy Bé off Madagascar’s northwest coast, and Réunion following France’s abolition of slavery in 1848.14 We currently know little about the details of indentured labor recruitment in India before 1842, when governmental regulation of this system began. Information about servile agricultural labor in early nineteenth-century southern India, the exportation of slaves from the subcontinent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the indigenous migrant labor systems that supplied indentured Indian workers to Mauritius before 1838 provide additional, albeit often indirect, evidence of structural links between the slave and indentured labor trades in the Indian Ocean. An official inquiry during 1819 into slavery in the Madras Presidency, for instance, reported that masters in some areas in southern India had a relatively free hand in disposing of their servile dependents if they chose to do so. Such was the case in Trichinolopy, where “Pullers” (Pulayas) were frequently sold independently of the land in question,15 a development that invariably raises questions about how individuals such as Vyavry, age twenty-eight and a “Puller” by caste, reached Mauritius in 1838.16 Men, women, and children were reported to be sold indiscriminately also in Malabar, a region well known to European and Arab slavers operating along the Indian coast during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.17 The movement of slaves from Malabar to the French comptoir at Mahé and the Dutch factory at Cochin was a subject of considerable concern to British authorities immediately after their acquisition of the province in 1792.18 Official consternation about the Malabar slave trade

“New Systems of Slavery”

187

resurfaced no later than 1812, when British authorities considered how they might bring an end to “the nefarious traffic in Slaves which has prevailed on the Malabar Coast.”19 The large number of slaves exported by Europeans from India during the latter part of the eighteenth century likewise points to this trade’s laying the foundations, even if not establishing some of the institutions, upon which the indentured-labor trades subsequently rested. As many as twenty-four thousand Indian slaves were exported to the Mascarenes between 1670 and the late eighteenth century, 75 percent of whom reached the islands between 1770 and 1793, when the British seizure of France’s Indian possessions following the onset of war in Europe effectively ended the large-scale exportation of Indian slaves to the southwestern Indian Ocean.20 Areas in southern India such as Malabar, Tanjore, and Tinnevelly nevertheless continued to function as slave-trading centers, which attracted the attention of British officials not only in 1812, but also in 1819, 1825, and the early 1830s. This continuing concern about the exportation of slaves from the Coromandel and Malabar coasts becomes more comprehensible in light of the fact that the mid- and late 1820s witnessed French attempts to recruit indentured Indian workers for Réunion, attempts in which the former slave-trading enclaves of Pondicherry, Karikal, and Yanam figured prominently.21 What little we currently know about indentured-labor recruitment in India before 1838 likewise points to structural connections between the slave and indentured-labor trades. Marina Carter notes that the labor exporters who supplied Mauritius with indentured Indians before 1838 tapped into indigenous migrant-labor systems to do so, and that approximately one-third of the seven thousand Indians who arrived in Mauritius during 1837–38 were dhangars, or tribal hill people from the Chota Nagpur plateau in southern Bihar.22 Hill tribesmen figured prominently among those who were enslaved in other parts of the subcontinent. A report of 1811 about the trafficking of Nepalese into British territories23 and one of 1816 on the movement of enslaved children from Assamese tribal areas to Bengal24 suggest that the presence of people from the Himalayan or Assamese foothills among these early indentured recruits cannot be discounted, pending further research. The need for such research is highlighted by a report of 1825 that famine had induced some Assamese to sell themselves into slavery.25 The depth and extent of the links between the slave and indentured-labor trades is also suggested by the magnitude of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean basin, especially during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders are estimated to have purchased and transported a minimum of 431,000–547,000 slaves to

188

richard b. allen

their Indian Ocean establishments between 1500 and 1850. The information currently at our disposal also points to a four- or possibly fivefold increase in the volume of this activity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with much of this growth occurring after 1770, and indicates that Europeans continued to trade large numbers of slaves within this oceanic basin well into the nineteenth century.26 The volume of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean becomes even more impressive when note is taken of Portuguese and French exports from the western Indian Ocean during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the updated Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database attests, the number of slave exports from Mozambique and Madagascar increased steadily, rising from 11,825 during the seventeenth century to 58,180 during the eighteenth century, and then soaring to 324,871 between 1801 and 1860.27 These figures are indicative of the minimum number of such exports; in comments on the revised database, David Eltis and David Richardson estimate that southeastern Africa exported 31,715 slaves to the Americas during the seventeenth century, 70,931 during the eighteenth century, and 440,022 during the nineteenth century.28 Limited and problematic data on the number of French slaving voyages to Mozambique and along the Swahili coast make it difficult to gauge the volume of French exports from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, thirty-three Mascarene-based voyages are known to have delivered some 6,700 Mozambican and 1,700 East African slaves to French colonies in the Caribbean (especially Saint-Domingue) between 1772 and 1790.29 These figures, when added to those on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading within the Indian Ocean noted earlier, suggest that Europeans were involved in the purchase and transportation of at least 826,000 and perhaps as many as 1,089,700 slaves within and beyond the confines of the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1850. Future research will undoubtedly lead to further refinement of these estimates. When viewed in its totality, this activity points to the existence of increasingly integrated networks of free and unfree or forced migrant labor within and beyond the confines of the Indian Ocean basin by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ways in which these networks were intertwined can be illustrated in other ways. Recent scholarship reveals that significant numbers of Indian and Southeast Asian convicts were transported across the Indian Ocean to satisfy the relentless demand for inexpensive labor in European administrative centers, factories, and colonies. Dutch authorities first shipped convicts from Batavia and Ceylon to the Cape of Good Hope no later than 1688, and a small but steady flow of such convicts continued

“New Systems of Slavery”

189

to reach the Cape during the eighteenth century.30 British authorities, already well versed in conveying large numbers of convicts to their American colonies, began transporting Indian convicts to British possessions elsewhere in the Indian Ocean during the late 1780s and continued to do so throughout the nineteenth century.31 Indian convicts were first sent to the British East India Company’s factory at Bencoolen (Benkulen, Bengkulu) on the west coast of Sumatra in 1787, the same year that witnessed the departure from Britain of the first of the more than 160,000 convicts who reached Australia between 1788 and 1868. Overall, British authorities shipped some 30,000 Indian convicts overseas between 1787 and 1858, while perhaps another 60,000 suffered the same fate during the second half of the nineteenth century.32 Events at Bencoolen provide a vantage point from which to begin considering the ways in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century attempts to abolish slave trading and even the institution of slavery itself in parts of the Indian Ocean world may have influenced the development of the abolitionist movement in Britain and the ultimate recourse to indentured labor. The first shipment of Indian convicts to Bencoolen in 1787 followed in the wake of a plan developed by Governor-General Lord Cornwallis and his council to emancipate those of the company’s slaves at the factory capable of supporting themselves, “on Condition that they give their Labors to the Company when called upon as day Laborers.”33 This plan soon foundered in the face of opposition from Bencoolen. Although officials at Fort Marlborough appreciated the humanitarian sentiments that underpinned this proposal, they were quick to argue that implementation of such a recommendation would greatly impede the company’s business, since, they opined, local Malays were neither mentally nor physically capable of hard work.34 The economic rationale for keeping the factory’s slave workforce intact had been articulated explicitly during the 1760s when requests for additional Malagasy and East African slaves to work at the factory noted repeatedly that maintaining these “Coffree” slaves cost much less than the services of free Malay workers.35 The realities of operating a far-flung commercial empire likewise helped undercut implementation of this nascent abolitionist scheme. Late in December 1786, the need for workers at the company’s newly established settlement at Prince of Wales Island (Penang) prompted Calcutta to order Bencoolen to send as many of their slaves to Penang as could be prevailed upon to go willingly.36 The proposal in 1787 to emancipate Bencoolen’s slaves, although abortive, was not an isolated or unique event. Thirteen years earlier, Governor-General Warren Hastings and his council had attempted to control slave trading in Bengal. Hastings concluded that this “savage commerce” was so extensive that there appeared to be no effective way of “Remedying this calamitous Evil”

190

richard b. allen

but to abolish “the Right of Slavery altogether.”37 Aside from these public pronouncements, the archival record is frustratingly silent about the motives behind these regulations, which also seem to have fallen quickly into disuse.38 Slavery and slave trading in Bengal became the subject of official interest again no later than 1785 when Matthew Day, collector at Dacca (Dhaka), informed William Cowper that “many hundreds” of children had been sold into slavery because of the famine then ravaging the surrounding countryside; they were being transported to other European settlements near Calcutta, from whence they were shipped to various regions.39 Day’s report prompted Cowper to write to Governor-General John Macpherson, requesting his prompt intervention to stop this “pernicious Trade . . . which is also as inhuman as it is illegal.”40 This concern about slavery and slave trading in Bengal continued after Lord Cornwallis became governor-general in 1786, and culminated in his proclamation of July 22, 1789, banning the exportation of slaves from the Bengal Presidency.41 The Madras Presidency followed his lead on March 8, 1790.42 The early 1790s found British authorities taking steps to prevent children from being sold into slavery and to impede the exportation of slaves from their Indian territories.43 Cornwallis’s ban becomes that much more significant in the annals of abolitionism because it appears to have been part of a more comprehensive attack on the institution of slavery itself in India. Less than two weeks after issuing his proclamation, Cornwallis informed the court of directors in London that he was considering a plan to abolish slavery, apparently by a process of gradual emancipation, throughout the company’s Indian territories.44 Unfortunately, no copy of his plan survives in the archival record,45 and the origins and depth of his abolitionist sentiments and the motives behind the 1789 ban on slave exports from Bengal and his plan to abolish slavery in India remain hidden from our view. What is clear is that the governor-general acted during a period of intense agitation in Britain (1788–92) to abolish the British slave trade, a fact that raises the question whether Cornwallis’s actions were a response to metropolitan political pressure or an attempt to influence the outcome of the growing debate at home about abolishing the British slave trade, or both. Similar questions are raised by what we know about Charles Grant. Grant, who first reached India in 1773 as an East India Company employee, worked closely with Cornwallis before returning to England in 1790. Back in England, Grant, an evangelical Christian, joined the London Abolition Committee and was deeply involved in the almost-successful attempt in Parliament in early 1793 to ban the British slave trade.46 Elected to the company’s court of directors in 1794, he served as a director until 1813 and as the company’s chairman or deputy chairman six times between 1804 and 1815. H. V. Bowen notes that

“New Systems of Slavery”

191

the few directors who attempted to apply moral, philosophical, or religious principles to their work often encountered deep hostility and suspicion from their more conservative colleagues. Yet Bowen also describes Grant as a very influential director,47 a characterization that raises the question whether the court’s formal approval in 1796 of the measures taken to suppress slave trading in Malabar48 reflected abolitionist sentiments at the highest levels of company management. The argument by Grant’s fellow director David Scott that same year about the need to free Bengali salt workers from compulsory labor because “slaves cannot work so cheap as free men, [and] besides we ought to give all our subjects liberty” does likewise.49 Questions about the extent to which abolitionist sentiments shaped company policies or influenced its employees are raised by other developments during the early nineteenth century: the decision by Frederic North, the company’s governor of recently conquered Ceylon, to ban the importation and exportation of slaves from that island in 1800;50 a proposal in 1805 to abolish slavery at Penang;51 the ban on the importation and sale of foreign slaves in the Bengal Presidency’s territories in 1811;52 and Sir Stamford Raffles’s call in 1813 for immediate emancipation of governmental slaves in Java (recently captured from the Dutch) on the grounds that their labor “may be superseded by granting a more liberal allowance to ordinary coolies.”53 Events in the Mascarenes likewise illustrate the need to consider the extent to which developments in the Indian Ocean influenced abolitionist agenda and activities in Britain, the formulation and implementation of imperial policies to suppress slave trading and abolish slavery, and the subsequent recourse to indentured labor. The islands became the center of a notorious clandestine trade in slaves after their capture by a British expeditionary force in 1810.54 An estimated 123,400–145,000 men, women, and children were exported from Madagascar, Mozambique, the Swahili coast, and the Indonesian archipelago to Mauritius and Réunion between 1811 and 1848, mostly before 1831.55 The regional importance of the illegal trade to the Mascarenes is suggested by the fact that it may have consumed 33.3–42.6 percent of an estimated 340,100–371,800 transoceanic slave exports from eastern Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century.56 The size of this illegal trade and the depth of the British commitment to suppressing it made the southwestern Indian Ocean a theater of operations for anti-slave-trade patrols by the Royal Navy well before the British government established an independent naval squadron in November 1819 to conduct such patrols off the West African coast. The navy’s activities in the Indian Ocean during the 1810s and early 1820s were an important, and often overlooked, precursor to British attempts later in the nineteenth century to suppress the East

192

richard b. allen

African export trade.57 The extent of this activity is indicated by the number of captured slave ships and “prize Negroes” condemned by vice-admiralty and colonial courts.58 The vice-admiralty court at the Cape of Good Hope condemned twenty-seven slave ships captured by Royal Navy cruisers between December 1808 and December 1816 and funneled more than 2,100 Malagasy and Mozambican prize Negroes into the Cape Colony’s workforce as “apprentices.” Additional seizures during the 1840s swelled the ranks of the Cape’s prize Negro population by more than 3,000.59 Colonial and vice-admiralty courts in Mauritius were even busier, condemning forty-eight captured slave ships between 1811 and 1825, thirty-nine of which were seized between 1815 and 1819.60 The number of adjudications handled by Mauritian-based courts during this fourteen-year period exceeded those dealt with by the mixed or joint anti-slave-trade commissions at Rio de Janeiro (forty-four) and Suriname (one) between 1819 and 1845, and almost equaled the number of cases (fifty) handled at Havana.61 As at the Cape, the overwhelming majority of the 4,526 prize slaves landed on Mauritius were “apprenticed” to local estate owners for fourteen years. This commitment to suppressing the illegal trade to Mauritius and its dependencies also led to increasing British involvement in regional polities, the impact of which resonated for years. As early as April 1816, Robert Farquhar, the governor of Mauritius, initiated negotiations with Radama I, the ruler of the Merina kingdom, which controlled much of Madagascar, to end slave exports from those areas of the Grande Île under Merina control. Radama was induced to sign such a treaty in October 1817, and again in October 1820, after the first treaty had been unilaterally abrogated by the acting governor, Major-General Gage Hall, in 1818. Because it forced slave traders who had supplied the Mascarenes to shift the center of their operations from Madagascar to the East African coast, the 1820 Anglo-Merina accord set the stage for greater British involvement along that coast. In April 1821, Farquhar signaled his intention to secure a treaty with the sultan of Oman, nominal ruler of Zanzibar and other parts of the Swahili coast, similar to the one he had made with Radama.62 The following year, Captain Fairfax Moresby, acting on Farquhar’s instructions, negotiated a treaty with Sultan Sayyid Said in which the Omani ruler banned the external traffic in slaves from his East African dominions and prohibited the sale of slaves to any Christian.63 Like the 1820 treaty with Radama, the Moresby Treaty had a significant impact on the sultan’s finances.64 According to Abdul Sheriff, the loss of revenue from slave exports spurred Sayyid’s interest in developing the clove industry on Zanzibar and Pemba,65 an industry that soon consumed thousands of East African slaves each year. The traffic in chattel labor to these islands became

“New Systems of Slavery”

193

the focal point of an escalating conflict between Britain and the sultan (and his heirs) that culminated in the establishment of a British protectorate over Zanzibar in 1873. Events in Mauritius after the illegal slave trade came to an end there circa 1827 had a significant impact not only locally and regionally but also beyond the Indian Ocean’s confines. The increasing inability of Mauritian planters to obtain the labor they needed during the 1820s to sustain the island’s rapidly expanding sugar industry, together with local resentment over slave-amelioration policies introduced during the late 1820s, erupted into armed insurrection in 1832 after the appointment of John Jeremie, a known abolitionist, as the colony’s attorney general. Although often dismissed as little more than a tempest in a small colonial teapot, the so-called Jeremie Affair is credited with exposing the false premises and defective administrative structures upon which the imperial policy of slave amelioration rested, thereby hastening the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.66 Developments in the Indian Ocean highlight the need for those studying the overthrow of slavery to look beyond the confines of the Atlantic world when they do so. The need to transcend this Atlantic-centrism is also suggested by the existence of a small but expanding corpus of work on abolition and its aftermath in the Indian Ocean world,67 and by a growing awareness of the problems that can result from a reliance on inflexible geographically-defined units of historical analysis. As some historians of empire appreciate, there were important similarities between the British experience in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, not just significant differences.68 Scholarship on the impact that public knowledge about and perceptions of empire had on British politics,69 the politics and ideology of the early British East India Company state,70 and the geography of color lines in colonial Madras and New York71 likewise demonstrate the value of approaching European activities in these two worlds from a pan-oceanic perspective. To argue the need to study the origins, dynamics, and impact of abolitionism within a truly comprehensive imperial context is one thing; to actually do so is, of course, something else. More than thirty years ago, Hubert Gerbeau discussed the problems inherent in any attempt to reconstruct the history of slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean, not the least of which is the dearth of archival materials compared to those that exist for the Atlantic.72 Attempts to reconstruct abolitionist activity in the Indian Ocean and assess its impact on abolitionist discourse and policies face the same problem. The British East India Company archives, for example, contain only sporadic and widely scattered references to the company’s involvement in slave trading during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.73 This fact helps to explain why

194

richard b. allen

histories of the company make little or no mention of its trafficking in and reliance on chattel labor in many of its Indian Ocean establishments. Studies of Portuguese activity in India, the Dutch and French East India companies, and Indo-European trade and commerce do likewise. Under such circumstances, coming more fully to grips with the dialogue between the forces of abolitionism in the Indian Ocean and those in the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century will require the adoption of research strategies that allow us to explore the complex and often nuanced web of socio-political relationships that linked colonial officials with their counterparts not only in London, but also elsewhere in the imperial world. Recent work on imperial careering during the nineteenth century provides a possible template for doing so.74 The applicability of such an approach to studying abolitionism and its impact not only in the Indian Ocean, but also in the Atlantic, is suggested by Robert Farquhar’s career. In 1805, Farquhar, lieutenant governor of Prince of Wales Island, recommended the abolition of slavery at Penang on the grounds that this institution was “the greatest of all evils, & the attempt to regulate such an evil is in itself almost absurd.”75 A decade later, as governor of Mauritius, Farquhar would be deeply enmeshed in efforts to stamp out a notorious illegal trade that funneled tens of thousands of slaves to Mauritius and its dependencies, the impact of which would resonate far beyond the confines of the southwestern Indian Ocean.

Notes Abbreviations: CO—Colonial Office records, The National Archives (TNA), Kew; MGI—Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Moka, Mauritius; IOR—India Office Records, British Library, London; PP—British Parliament Sessional Papers. 1. CO 415/9/A.221, Documents relating to the Dutch Brig Swift which was wrecked at Rodrigues in Augt 1827 with Malays on board. 2. CO 415/1, 15, 17, W. M. G. Colebrooke and W. Blair to Earl Bathurst, October 25, 1826; CO 415/7/A.164, Memorandum from Captain Ackland for Mr. Finniss [written after September 13, 1826]. 3. IOR, F/4/1331/52588, 70, Statement of the Master of the Brig “Hebe” / as related to the Captain of the Pecheur Schooner at Mahé, October 20, 1830. 4. CO 415/1, 27, W. M. G. Colebrooke and W. Blair to Earl Bathurst, November 21, 1826. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the descriptor “Malay” could refer not only to persons from Malaya and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such as the Indonesian archipelago, but also to those from India or the Maldives; see Hubert Gerbeau, “Des minorités mal-connues: Esclaves indiens et malais des Mascareignes au XIXe siècle,” in Migrations, minorités et échanges en océan indien, XIXe–XXe siècle, IHPOM Études et Documents No. 11 (Aix-en-Provence, 1978), 160–64.

“New Systems of Slavery”

195

5. Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984), 14–17; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60; Marina Carter and James Ng, Forging the Rainbow: Labour Immigrants in British Mauritius (Mauritius: [Alfran], 1997), 4–5; Jacques Weber, “L’émigration indienne à La Réunion: ‘Contraire à la morale’ ou ‘utile à l’humanité’? (1829–1860),” in Esclavage et abolitions dans l’Océan Indien, 1723–1860: Actes du colloque de SaintDenis de La Réunion, ed. Edmond Maestri (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 309–10. 6. I. M. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 85. 7. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 156–57. 8. Rana P. Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “Tea and Money versus Human Life: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,” Journal of Peasant Studies 19, nos. 3–4 (1992): 142–72. 9. 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). 10. 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. 11. Colin Newbury, “Labour Migration in the Imperial Phase: An Essay in Interpretation,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 3, no. 2 (1975): 234–56; Shula Marks and Peter Richardson, introduction to International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives, ed. Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (Hounslow: Temple Smith, 1984), 1–18; E. Van Den Boogaart and P. C. Emmer, “Colonialism and Migration: An Overview,” in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Pieter C. Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 3–15; Doug Munro, “The Pacific Islands Labour Trade: Approaches, Methodologies, Debates,” Slavery and Abolition 14, no. 2 (1993): 87–108; Doug Munro, “The Labor Trade in Melanesians to Queensland: An Historiographic Essay,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 3 (1995): 609–27; Verene A. Shepherd, “The ‘Other Middle Passage’? Nineteenth-Century Bonded Labour Migration and the Legacy of the Slavery Debate in the British-Colonized Caribbean,” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa, and the African Diaspora, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 343–75. 12. Benedicte Hjejle, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 106. 13. MGI, PE 1. The men in question included some belonging to the Palin and Pulaya castes. 14. See François Renault, Libération d’esclaves et nouvelle servitude: Les rachats de captives africains pour le compte des colonies françaises après l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1976); Jehanne-Emmanuelle Monnier, Esclaves de la canne à sucre: Engagés et planteurs à Nossi-Bé, Madagascar, 1850–1880 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). 15. IOR, F/4/919/25850, 134, C. M. Lushington to A. D. Campbell, July 1, 1819. 16. MGI, PE 1, No. 2415.

196

richard b. allen

17. IOR, F/4/919/25850, 174, J. Vaughan to Board of Revenue, July 20, 1819. 18. [Jonathon Duncan, William Page, Charles Boddam, and Alexander Dow], Reports of a Joint Commission from Bengal and Bombay, Appointed to Inspect into the State and Condition of the Province of Malabar in the Years 1792 and 1793 (Bombay, 179?), 1:164–65, 2:35–36. 19. IOR, P/322/68, 2850, Wm Thackeray to Judge and Magistrate Zillah, North Malabar, May 29, 1812. 20. Richard B. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2004), 33–50; Richard B. Allen, “Carrying Away the Unfortunate: The Exportation of Slaves from India during the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Le monde créole: Peuplement, sociétés et condition humaine, XVIIe–XXe siècles, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005), 285–98. 21. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 60; Weber, “L’émigration indienne à La Réunion,” 309–10. 22. Carter, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers, 104. See also J. C. Jha, “Early Indian Immigration into Mauritius (1834–1842),” in Indian Labour Immigration, ed. U. Bissoondoyal and S. B. C. Servansing (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1986), 9–19. 23. IOR, F/4/369/9221, Relative to the Measures adopted for the prevention of the Trade in Children carried on between the Upper Provinces and the Territories of Napaul. 24. IOR, F/4/566/13970, 32–33, J. W. Sage to Shearman Bird, James Rattray, J. M. Rees, and G. Hartwell, February 12, 1816. 25. IOR, F/4/1115/29887, 7–8, Mr. Acting Secretary Stirling to D. Scott, April 3, 1825. 26. Richard B. Allen, “Satisfying the Want for Labouring People: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1 (2010): 45–73. 27. Accessible at http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces. 28. David Eltis and David Richardson, “A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 46–47. 29. Richard B. Allen, “The Constant Demand of the French: The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of African History 49, no. 1 (2008): 59–60, 62–63. 30. James C. Armstrong, “The Ceylon Connection: Convicts and Exiles from Ceylon Sent to the Cape of Good Hope during the Dutch East India Company Period,” paper presented at the conference “Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: Penal Transportation in Global Context, c. 1600–1940,” University of Leicester, December 9–10, 1999. My thanks to the author for permission to cite his paper. A total of 1,025 convicts arrived at the Cape between 1722 and 1757. 31. For an overview of this activity, see Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 32. Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher, introduction to Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Christopher, Pybus, and Rediker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 9.

“New Systems of Slavery”

197

33. IOR, G/35/156, fol. 55v, Minutes of Council the 20th March 1786 [at Fort William]—Reconsidered the Governor General’s Minute on the Subject of reducing according to the Orders of the Court of Directors the Establishment of Fort Marlbro’ to what it was in the Year 1757. 34. Ibid. 35. IOR, G/35/13, fol. 4v, 2d Goods from Europe &ca [referencing General Letter of October 18, 1762]; G/35/13, fol. 273v, para. 73, Roger Carter, Robert Hay, and John Hebert to Court of Directors, April 19, 1765. 36. IOR, G/35/156, fol. 114v, Public Consultation, Fort William, December 22, 1786. 37. IOR, P/49/46, 1484–85, Regulations issued May 17, 1774. 38. Amal Kumar Chattopadhyay, Slavery in the Bengal Presidency, 1772–1843 (London: Golden Eagle, 1977), 81. 39. IOR, P/50/60, M. Day to William Cowper, March 2, 1785, following L.R. No. 311, Wm Cowper to John Macpherson, March 14, 1785, in Fort William proceedings of September 9, 1785. 40. IOR, P/50/60, Wm Cowper to John Macpherson, March 14, 1785—L.R. No. 311. 41. IOR, P/3/46, 488–93; see also Calcutta Gazette, Extraordinary, July 27, 1789. 42. IOR, P/241/17, 644, 682. 43. Richard B. Allen, “A Traffic Repugnant to Humanity: Children, the Mascarene Slave Trade, and British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 2 (2006): 227; Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 4 (2009): 873–94. 44. PP 1828 XXIV [125], 13, Extract of a Letter from Lord Cornwallis, Governor General of India, to the Court of Directors; dated 2d August 1789. 45. PP 1828 XXIV [125], 13, notation at the end of “Extract of a Letter from Lord Cornwallis, Governor General of India, to the Court of Directors; dated 2d August 1789.” 46. Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 67, 81–82. 47. H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130–32. 48. IOR, E/4/1011, 411–12, Answer to the Letter in the Political Department dated 25th Septr 1794. 49. Cited in H. R. C. Wright, “Raffles and the Slave Trade at Batavia in 1812,” Historical Journal 3, no. 2 (1960): 184. 50. CO 54/2, fol. 95r, Frederic North to Court of Directors, August 30, 1800. 51. IOR, F/4/279/6417, 11, Extract General Letter to Prince of Wales Island Dated 18th February 1807. 52. IOR, F/4/403/10115, 1–2, A.D. 1811. Regulation X. 53. IOR, G/21/64, [section headed “Slavery”], Notes of the Arrangements made by Lord Minto for the Occupation and Administration of the Affairs of Java; and of the principal Subjects treated of in the Despatches from the Lieut Governor of that Island [written by B. J. Jones, October 7, 1813].

198

richard b. allen

54. Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 43, no. 1 (2001): 91–116. 55. Allen, “Mascarene Slave-Trade,” 41. 56. Allen, “Satisfying the Want for Labouring People,” 68. 57. On suppression of the East African slave trade, see Raymond Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). 58. “Prize Negroes” or “Liberated Africans” were slaves freed from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy or colonial cruisers. 59. Christopher Saunders, “Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 2 (1985): 223–39. 60. CO 167/141, Return No. 19, Return of the Number of Prize Negroes Apprenticed in the Colony of Mauritius From the Year 1813 to 1827 inclusive. 61. Leslie Bethell, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 84. The mixed commission based in Sierra Leone dealt with 528 such cases during the same period. 62. PP 1825 XXV [244], 37, R. T. Farquhar to Earl Bathurst, April 14, 1821. 63. John Milner Gray, The British in Mombasa, 1824–1826 (London: Macmillan, 1957), 24–29; R. W. Beachey, A History of East Africa, 1592–1902 (London: Tauris, 1995), 17–22. 64. Estimates of these financial losses vary. According to R. W. Beachey, the sultan lost £11,250 a year, or 56,250 piastres ($) at an exchange rate of £1 = $5 (History of East Africa, 22). Deryck Scarr puts this figure at no more than $30,000 a year (Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean [New York: St. Martins, 1998], 132). Abdul Sheriff reports that the sultan claimed losing MT$40,000–50,000 each year, or £8,421–10,526 at the exchange rate of £1 = MT$4.75, which prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century (Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar [London: James Currey, 1987], 50). 65. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 50. 66. Peter Burroughs, “The Mauritius Rebellion of 1832 and the Abolition of British Colonial Slavery,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 4, no. 3 (1976): 243–65. 67. Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005); Allen, “Traffic Repugnant to Humanity”; Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic.” 68. See, for example, P. J. Marshall, “The Caribbean and India in the Later Eighteenth Century: Two British Empires or One?,” in P. J. Marshall, “A Free though Conquering People”: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 10. 69. See, for example, J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade (London: Manchester University Press, 1995); Jeremy Osborn, “India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 201–21;

“New Systems of Slavery”

199

Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 70. 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. 71. Carl H. Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 48–71. 72. Hubert Gerbeau, “The Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean: Problems Facing the Historian and Research to be Undertaken,” in The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), 184–207. 73. Jill Louise Geber, “The East India Company and Southern Africa: A Guide to the Archives of the East India Company and the Board of Control, 1600–1858” (PhD diss., University College London, 1998), 101. The relative scarcity of references to slave trading by the British East India Company is readily apparent in William Foster’s eleven-volume The English Factories in India, 1618–1669 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–27), and Ethel Bruce Sainsbury’s equally voluminous A Calendar of the Court Minutes, Etc. of the East India Company, 1668–1679 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907–38). 74. See David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 75. IOR, G/34/9, fol. 64v, Appendix No. 13, Report of the Lieutenant Governor of Prince of Wales Island, enc. in R.T. Farquhar, Late Lieut Governor of Prince of Wales Island, to John Lumsden, Chief Secretary to Government, Fort William, September 30, 1805.

11

African Bondsmen, Freedmen, and the Maritime Proletariats of the Northwestern Indian Ocean World, c. 1500–1900 janet j. ewald

At the end of August 1878, eleven African fugitives made their way to the British port of Aden on a boat that they admitted stealing. Until they reached British territory, the owner of the boat had also owned the thieves: they were his slaves. The ten men and boys dove for mother-of-pearl and probably also crewed the boat; the woman among the eleven likely cooked for them. These bondspeople sought freedom in Aden, stating that their owner had mistreated them. British officials found such claims both familiar and credible. The previous May, two enslaved African boys had paddled canoes to the Royal Navy vessel Wild Swan in the Red Sea. In addition to enduring the dangers of diving, the boys reported that they had been hung by their hands or feet, beaten, and starved when they failed to produce their daily quota of shells. One of the boys bore the marks of recent wounds from beatings. Both groups of fugitives received legal freedom. The boys who fled to the Wild Swan joined that vessel as wardroom servants for the officers. The other eleven Africans became charges of the government, which then turned them over to “respectable, well-to-do” Adeni households. In return for working as household servants, the freedpeople would receive care, food, and clothing.1 Ten days after the eleven fugitives arrived in August, two other Africans followed them to Aden. Both were freedmen who had received manumission from the owner of the boat on which the eleven bondspeople fled; after

200

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

201

gaining legal freedom, both then worked for their ex-owner. Mubruk Mubarak served as captain of the stolen boat, which he had come to Aden to retrieve. In contrast to Mubruk but apparently without objection from him, the second freedman, Abd al-Khayr, stated his intention to remain in Aden. He announced that he had traveled to the British port “after the rest of the Sidis who came . . . the other day as he could not remain behind without them.”2 The stories of the thirteen escaped bondspeople and the two manumitted freedmen evoke questions about the complexities of African slavery and freedom in the northwestern Indian Ocean World. These fifteen Africans obtained legal freedom in two ways: escape and manumission. One of the manumitted bondsmen remained with his former owner. A second manumitted bondsman chose to move away.3 The mobility of their work at sea gave bondspeople the means of escape to British enclaves on sea and land. But after receiving legal freedom, such fugitives sometimes found themselves bound in other forms of service. The two boys served officers on board the Wild Swan. The eleven other freed people similarly worked as servants in Adeni households; that they were to receive general care as well as food and clothing suggests that they became low-status household dependents who earned minimal, or no, wages. The stories prompt several questions. Why did manumission and escape both present themselves as paths to emancipation? And why did some manumitted slaves continue to work, as freedmen, for their ex-masters, while other freedmen moved away? Did receiving emancipation from British authorities set freed people on particular paths? And did the lives of freedpeople differ from the lives of other members of the laboring class? Adding a historical layer to the complexity, African captives had crossed the northwestern Indian Ocean for centuries before the fifteen bondspeople whose stories are related above had made their voyages of enslavement. These fifteen Africans fell into bondage during the height of the Indian Ocean African slave trade in the nineteenth century.4 Yet during that same century, abolitionist pressure also reached its peak. Indeed, such pressure allowed people who had fallen into bondage—such as the escapees to Aden and to the Wild Swan—to gain emancipation. During the nineteenth century, too, slavery and preindustrial endeavors coexisted with wage labor and industrial transport. The juxtapositions of a flourishing slave trade and abolitionist ideology, bondspeople and wage workers, and sailing and steam vessels elicit other questions. Why did African enslavement peak during this time? And how did the lives of nineteenth-century African bondspeople compare to those of their counterparts in previous centuries? This essay addresses these questions by teasing out a detail in Abd al-Khayr’s story. He, or perhaps the official who recorded his words, spoke of the eleven

202

janet j. ewald

fugitives who had stolen the boat as “Sidis.” This term carried multiple meanings in relation to Africans.5 The essay elaborates how the word and its variations had circulated in the maritime life of the northwestern Indian Ocean for centuries, first to describe the rulers of Janjira Island, off the west coast of India, and then applied widely in India to seafarers, and more generally to communities, of African origins. In the mid-nineteenth century, African freedmen laboring in Aden or on British steam vessels became known as “seedies.” By the end of the nineteenth century, “seedie” combined both a racial and occupational definition: African workers “in the ports and on the shipping of Western India.”6 The meanings of “sidi” (“seedie”) offer a palimpsest that accrued new meanings even as it retained older ones. The palimpsest reveals both continuities and changes in African bondage over almost four centuries in the Indian Ocean.

Commanders, Communities, and Common Sailors: African Bondsmen and Freedmen in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1500–1830s Europeans voyaging into the Indian Ocean encountered forms of bondage that enslaved both Africans and Asians. Various institutions of bondage in South Asia continued well after 1500.7 Bondsmen of African origin entered historical records by name when they belonged to the fortunate few who obtained high positions. About the same time that Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean, an elite of African and African-descended Muslims ruled the island of Janjira off the west-central Indian coast. Having arrived in India as captives and been entrusted with naval duties, they became known as “sidis,” from the Arabic sayyid, or “lord.” Even as Europeans carved out enclaves on the coast of India, the sidis of Janjira continued to wield sea power; other captive Africans continued to disembark in India. The most renowned of these new arrivals was Malik Ambar, an enslaved Ethiopian who gained manumission and then became the de facto ruler of an inland kingdom from about 1600 to 1626.8 Malik Ambar also dispatched vessels sometimes commanded by Africans. A list of ship masters who received maritime passes from the Portuguese in 1618–22 included a number of men designated as sidis, all under the aegis of the king of Ahmadnagar.9 Another Ethiopian-born seafarer, Malik Seto, commanded a large ship that sailed between western India and Arabia in 1616; a European voyaged under his command.10 By regarding enslavement as legitimate and adapting to existing regional power networks, early Europeans helped sustain the slave trade and slavery among Indian Ocean peoples. Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean availed

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

203

themselves of English shipping. Early seventeenth-century vessels belonging to the East India Company carried enslaved Hindus and Parsis, the property of Persian merchants, from India to the Persian Gulf.11 In 1608, an Arab war captive who had been enslaved on the island of Socotra ran away to the company ship Dragon. The English commander of the ship gathered intelligence from the slave—then returned him to his owner.12 Europeans themselves enslaved war captives. Following the practice of Muslims and Christians at war in the Mediterranean, they put captives to work on sea vessels.13 In the Indian Ocean, the precise origins of the captives did not matter as long as they came from enemy ranks. In 1621, an official on board the Hart, which had returned to India from a voyage to Arabia, listed thirty-eight slaves who could man the company’s ships; it appears likely that these slaves came from the “Arabians and Portingall blackes” whom the fleet had captured from a Portuguese ship.14 The company also sent prisoners of war from India to serve on its vessels in the seas around the islands of southeastern Asia, and held them until it could recruit enough free Indian seafarers to take their places.15 At least one English captain captured seafarers by simple maritime plunder. Sailing along the coast of India in convoy, he dispatched small boats to intercept coasting vessels and capture their crews. More than eighty captured “blacks” were put to work on the ships of the convoy.16 But Europeans also changed slavery and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. First, they pulled more Africans than ever before, and from a wider expanse of Africa, into forced journeys across the Indian Ocean. Beginning with the Portuguese, Europeans stretched the networks of the northwestern Indian Ocean world to the south and southwest, and even into the Atlantic. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope on their way to India, Portuguese vessels made regular stops on the southeastern coast of Africa that lay beyond the range of the regular monsoons. Mozambique became the main Portuguese enclave in Africa as well as a new, southern outpost of the western Indian Ocean network. Similarly, the Dutch established Cape Town as a link between their Indian Ocean possessions and the Atlantic. Before taking Cape Town from the Dutch, English ships called regularly at St. Helena; in the early years, occasionally in West Africa; and until the eighteenth-century, sometimes at Madagascar. For their part, in the mid-eighteenth century the French brought the previously isolated Mascarene Islands into their Indian Ocean network.17 As never before, captive Africans left the Mozambique and Madagascar coasts, then the Swahili coast, for voyages across the Indian Ocean.18 (For their part, the Dutch sent prisoners from the islands of Southeast Asia into exile and bondage at Cape Town.)19 With the Portuguese Estado da India claiming a monopoly of the Mozambique trade, the East India Company sought slaves

204

janet j. ewald

for India mostly in Madagascar.20 In the last half of the eighteenth century, new waves of enslaved Africans, with increasing numbers from Mozambique and the Swahili coast, arrived at plantations in European-held islands to work in the coffee and sugar fields of the French Mascarenes and the less successful company attempts to grow pepper on Sumatra.21 As had Asian elites, Europeans exploited African bondspeople in households and military units. Unlike Asian elites, however, Europeans did not entrust any of their bondsmen with significant power or wealth. In the households of Portuguese enclaves, enslaved Africans performed a variety of functions, including service in armed entourages and wage labor outside the household; for the latter, they turned their earnings over to their owners. In addition, African bondsmen served the Estado da India in the infantry and as auxiliary forces. Because maritime labor was in short supply, the Estado da India called on seafarers of many origins, occasionally including bondsmen.22 Although enslaved Africans occasionally helped sail vessels to Portugal, more commonly they worked on vessels voyaging within the Indian Ocean. A Portuguese frigate bound from India to the Persian Gulf in 1643 carried sixty-three seafarers: among them were Muslim Indians, men of mixed race, and African bondsmen. Enslaved Africans also helped man the small vessels owned by Portuguese based in the southwest Arabian port of Muscat.23 Like the Portuguese, the British East India Company put bondspeople to work in the military. In 1740, the court of directors in London decided that bondsmen from Madagascar were to be employed in the Bombay garrison because of their supposed expertise “in the use of small arms.” 24 Twelve years later, the court issued similar instructions. Writing that Muslim Indians “dreaded” soldiers from Madagascar, it dispatched a ship to purchase three hundred slaves in Madagascar and deposit them in Bombay. In 1780, company directors in London directed its agents in Sumatra to send surplus African slaves to Bombay, where some of them would become soldiers.25 Captive Africans labored in East India Company maritime endeavors. Indian Ocean bondsmen seldom sailed company ships on the long voyages between India and England; instead, they sailed vessels from one part of the Indian Ocean to another. In 1640 a dozen or so captive Africans, the survivors of a smallpox outbreak on the ship that had carried them from Madagascar, entered service on English vessels. All forty-six African men who arrived at Bombay on the Harrington in 1736 became seafarers. Bondsmen also linked port facilities with ocean vessels, manning harbor boats that carried cargo and other goods to ships anchored off the port of Madras. In Bombay, where the company maintained its naval forces, it also employed bondspeople. Some of them performed jobs on land that supported vessels at sea. Enslaved boys

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

205

from Madagascar served as artisans in the marine yard. The women and girls who had arrived with them worked in the powder house or at other labor on company facilities. Bondsmen helped crew vessels belonging to the Bombay marine. But their numbers remained low. In 1754, a list of sailors in the Bombay marine included only twenty-eight “Madagascar slaves” out of a force of 1,262 men. Eighteen years later, the marine superintendent at Bombay suggested, probably unsuccessfully, that men from Zanzibar serve as soldiers on board marine vessels. Similarly, in 1768 the marine yard suffered a shortage of slaves.26 The small number of bondsmen serving in the Bombay marine or its shipyards testifies to the difficulty of obtaining, maintaining, and controlling African captives. Evidence suggests that eighteenth-century slave markets in Madagascar provided far fewer captives—especially sturdy men—than the numbers desired by East India Company officials in India. The forty-six enslaved men who became seamen in 1736, noted above, landed in Bombay as part of a human cargo of 164 captives. That number of enslaved Africans fell well short of the numbers requested by the company. The Harrington had been charged with taking on 250 slaves at Madagascar, over 125 of them to be men. Fewer men than demanded arrived from Madagascar, and maintaining bondsmen proved more expensive than simply paying low wages to local Indian workers.27 Captive men resisted work as seafarers or laborers in the marine yards by simply not working effectively, openly refusing to work, or escaping. In the 1740s, the African bondsmen working in Bombay were deemed useless: supposedly because they lacked a “constitution robust enough” for labor.28 A little over ten years later, recently disembarked men from Madagascar so disliked work on board marine vessels that they tried to escape whenever they could. The marine superintendent ordered them to serve in the marine yard. But when put to work there, the African bondsmen caused so many “great disorders” that they were required to work in chains until they promised to change their behavior.29 From all European enclaves, enslaved Africans who escaped, received formal manumission, or were simply let go by their owners joined the motley “drifting sea proletariat” that worked on ships and in the ports of India and elsewhere.30 The Madagascar bondsmen of Bombay, regarded as useless by the English, were sent away to a small coastal settlement where the company intended them to grow their own food and serve as soldiers if needed. Still legally enslaved, these men likely exercised effective autonomy; nothing prevented them from “drifting” away. The seventeenth-century presence in India of numerous European national interests allowed former bondspeople to flee

206

janet j. ewald

from one enclave to another, or to form communities in the interstices among Indian polities and European posts. Enslaved men from Mozambique fled the Portuguese for the Dutch settlement at Vengurla, where they lived with Indian seafarers and soldiers. In English Masulipatnam, Africans—including fugitive slaves—and people of mixed race formed a “great consort” whose members enlisted not on English but rather Danish vessels. Portuguese “renegades,” including Africans, lived in Muscat, which had reverted from Portuguese to Arab rule in 1650.31 African members of the drifting sea proletariat also joined country ships: that is, vessels based and built in India that were not under company command, but had licenses from it and carried cargo on voyages within the Indian Ocean. African and African-descended mariners gained renown for their maritime skills as they earned the sobriquet sidis. The wife of a British naval officer voyaging from Bombay to Ceylon on one such ship wrote that “the best lascars [sailors] are Siddees, a tribe of Mahometans, inhabitants of Gogo in Guzerat” [northwestern India].32 Country ships and their crews, including “siddees,” became even more important to the company during the eighteenth century, when regional trade expanded.33 Indian Ocean African seafarers began to sail into the Atlantic when the India-England trade was opened to country ships in 1795. In that year, and in response to the commodity shortages caused by the Napoleonic Wars, the company for the first time allowed country ships to carry cargoes to England. Just as they formed the majority of crew members on country ships sailing within the Indian Ocean, non-Europeans constituted most of the seafarers on country ships voyaging to Europe. Men of African origins sailed on just under two-thirds of thirty-five such voyages to England.34 Africans and Asians on India-based country ships bound for England endured much harsher conditions than did the Indian seafarers who had helped crew company ships on their return voyages to England. These Indian mariners, known as lascars, almost always formed a minority—albeit a vital minority—when they served on company ships during the voyage home. Nine of forty-two voyages of company ships with lascars among the crew recorded the deaths of lascars. Of the approximately nine hundred Indian seafarers who sailed on these company voyages, twenty-four perished.35 In contrast, on a single voyage of a country ship from Bengal to England in 1796, twenty-three non-European seafarers died. African, Indian, Chinese, and Malay seafarers died on more than half of the sampled voyages that recorded fatalities during the passage to England.36 By at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, people of African descent in the Asian Indian Ocean World had formed various religious and

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

207

cultural identities. The descendants of many Africans who arrived in India on Portuguese vessels melded into Luso-Indian communities: becoming Roman Catholics, taking Portuguese names, and marrying into local communities. Bondspeople and their children gradually assimilated into Arab society in Muscat and other parts of the Omani domains, either by manumission or by inheriting the status of a free father.37 Other Muslim African or Africandescended people retained an African identity, especially in northwestern India, where, in the eyes of the Englishwoman cited above, they formed a “tribe” of sidis.38 In the 1830s, a new wave of African captives arrived in the Muslim polities of northwestern India. Around 400–500 African slaves reportedly disembarked at Mandvi, the main port of Kutch, every year. Ship owners and captains put enslaved boys from Zanzibar and Mozambique to work on ocean vessels. Some of the bondsmen rose in the maritime hierarchy, even becoming captains. African bondspeople arriving in northwestern India also married into the communities of the numerous “Sudhees (negroes).”39 The enslaved Africans who joined sidi communities in the 1830s made their forced journeys when the Indian Ocean African slave trade began its most active decades, from about 1825 to 1875.40 The African slave trade in the northwestern Indian Ocean thus peaked when Britons gained more hegemony, ranging from formal rule to informal influence, than ever before over the region. In contrast to the previous centuries, by 1835 British officials were ideologically—if not always in practice—committed to abolition of the slave trade and, in their own territories, slavery itself. Captive Africans not only received manumission from their Muslim masters, but also could gain emancipation by fleeing to British enclaves. Many of these freedpeople formed part of a new maritime proletariat.

Slaves, Seedies, and Other Sojourners: African Bondsmen and Freedmen in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1830s–1900 The mid-nineteenth-century Indian Ocean was a “world in motion.”41 The forced voyages of captured Africans represented only one current in a sea of migrants. Indian Ocean migrants numbered in the millions: many—but unquantifiably—times higher than in previous centuries. Most of them, captive Africans included, contrasted with the people who had earlier crossed the ocean. Before the nineteenth century, traders, officials, soldiers, and the seafarers who transported them represented a large proportion, perhaps most, of the sojourners and migrants.42 But by the nineteenth century, the demand for manual laborers pulled millions more into oceanic voyages. At the same

208

janet j. ewald

time that more bondspeople crossed the Indian Ocean in larger numbers than ever, the end of slavery in European-ruled domains set in motion other laborers. From Indian ports, perhaps two million indentured laborers embarked for plantations formerly worked by bondspeople in the Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean. Other indentured Indian workers opened new plantations in Fiji, Australia, and South Africa.43 Whether indentured workers or bondspeople, most labor migrants left their homelands under various degrees of coercion. Indians entered indentures because of poverty, whether brought on by a combination of natural disaster, debt, or other causes.44 In eastern Africa, from the headwaters of the two Niles to the Mozambique coast and Madagascar, commercialization and state formation produced violence that set people on forced journeys of enslavement.45 African bondspeople and other migrants made their voyages as a result of the greater integration of the African and Arabian Indian Ocean world into global commercial and political networks.46 These networks demanded more numerous and more mobile workers who could move or be moved from job to job and from place to place. Exports, ocean traffic, and cities, especially port cities, grew in the African and Arabian Indian Ocean. The population of Zanzibar doubled between about 1835 and 1857; the three Hijazi cities (Jiddah, Mecca, and Medina) grew by similar proportions during the last half of the nineteenth century.47 A fivefold increase in exports—slaves, cloves, and coconut products—drove Zanzibar’s growth.48 The Hijazi cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing numbers of pilgrims who arrived in Jiddah, often on steam vessels. The number of steam vessels visiting Jiddah grew from 38 in 1864 to 205 in 1875, six years after the Suez Canal opened.49 Aden experienced tremendous growth after the British took it over in 1839, ostensibly as a coaling station but also for strategic purposes. The many migrants who arrived at the newly active port increased its population sixteen-fold between the British takeover and 1856. The opening of the canal made Aden even busier, since it acted as a service station for the surge of vessels steaming from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.50 But figures of the overall growth in populations and commerce conceal considerable variations: seasonal, cyclical, and sporadic. Yearly cycles in weather and ritual life brought seasonal floods of people to African and Arabian ports. During the annual monsoons in mid-century, Zanzibar received merchants who swelled its population and buoyed its trade.51 Muslim pilgrims began to arrive in the Hijaz during the eighth month of the lunar Islamic calendar; by the eleventh month, they surged into the holy cities; activities peaked in the twelfth month. Then they departed.52 The laws of the market also prevented unbroken expansion. When Zanzibari cloves saturated the market, the price

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

209

of that spice fell and production leveled off. Clove prices then rose because of an unpredictable event. In 1872, a hurricane destroyed Zanzibar’s clove trees.53 If pilgrims feared political instability or epidemic disease, they tended not to travel. Imperial ventures created sporadic bursts of activity. The British rushed to build a city and port at Aden after 1839; together with the French, they oversaw the massive endeavor of constructing the Suez Canal. Military expeditions summoned nonmilitary activity. Termed an “engineer’s war,” the 1867 Abyssinian Expedition resulted in British attempts to build a market and other infrastructure at their base at Massawa on the Red Sea, as well as a railway and road into the interior.54 Whether controlled by regional elites or Britons, work sites required laborers. Steam vessels and sailing ships needed crews, and overland caravans required porters and guards. Bustling waterfronts and busy merchant households needed artisans, trading agents, porters, dockworkers, messengers, domestic servants, water carriers, construction workers, and cleaners of streets and other public facilities. Military expeditions deployed not only soldiers but also myriad other workers to provide services and to manage supplies. Employers wanted a mobile labor force, available to move from job to job and place to place. Compared with the inhabitants of British India, relatively few free people from the coasts or hinterlands of Arabia or Africa presented themselves for wage work. Instead, migrants—many crossing the water—filled the need for labor in the African and Arabian northwestern Indian Ocean. Migrant workers built and maintained the British port of Aden: at first, convicts and others from India; but then, mostly Yemeni and Somali free men as well as African freedmen. Likewise, British military expeditions used Yemeni and Somali workers to construct infrastructure and load vessels. Free men from southern Arabia migrated to the Hijaz and Zanzibar, where many worked as porters. In the Muslim holy cities of the Hijaz, impoverished pilgrims sold their labor to support themselves.55 But in realms where slavery remained legal, captive Africans formed a substantial part, and sometimes the majority, of workers.56 Bondspeople were available because self-sustaining cycles of violence in the hinterlands continued to funnel a stream of new captives to the coast. The mobility and flexibility of slave labor made it compatible with cyclical or irregular demands for labor. Owners moved bondspeople from their original tasks to ones they deemed more profitable: for example, from serving within their enterprises or households to working for wages, a portion of which were then turned over to the owners. If they no longer needed the labor of bondspeople, owners might profit by selling them. Or they might simply loosen the ties that bound, allowing slaves more autonomy but also casting upon them the responsibility

210

janet j. ewald

for maintaining themselves. Owners might grant manumission, thus performing a religiously sanctioned act of charity.57 But like any gift, the donation of freedom reinforced the superior status of the donor. After manumitting slaves, masters might bind the same people to them—but as clients and dependents.58 Bondspeople produced export commodities, sustained commerce, and supported urban populations. In Zanzibar, bondspeople not only cultivated cloves but also packed goods for export and constructed buildings.59 Serving as porters, bondsmen carried those export goods to warehouses and ships.60 African captives worked in the overland caravans that linked the ports of the Swahili coast with the interior.61 In Mecca, bondsmen quarried stone, mixed cement, and constructed buildings and other infrastructure.62 Enslaved African men also worked on the water. Like many of the thirteen fugitives who introduced this essay, some dove for pearls and mother-of-pearl.63 Others served as sailors. As early as 1838, 150 African seafarers, probably a mixture of bondsmen and freedmen, manned a large oceangoing Omani ship.64 In 1873, enslaved African seafarers often formed entire crews on Omani vessels along the coast of India.65 Some reports indicate that the proportion of enslaved Africans who manned Red Sea sailing vessels increased over the course of the nineteenth century until they formed the majority of crew members.66 Other captive Africans served industrial transport. The men who loaded coal and cargo onto steamships anchored off Zanzibar were probably slaves whose owners had hired them out.67 Lightering vessels crewed by bondsmen carried cargo, ballast, and passengers to steam vessels in the Jiddah harbor until the early twentieth century.68 Bondspeople mixed with workers of other origins who had made less coerced journeys to Arabian and African ports. Bondspeople, freedpeople, and others lived together in the “straw towns” of port cities: that is, neighborhoods where mobile workers lived in dwellings constructed of ephemeral materials. By the 1830s in the southern Arabian port of Makulla, the section of the town where sailors and other trade workers lived included African slaves and freedmen, Somalis, and Arabs.69 In the early 1850s, the poor in Muscat included “negroes,” at least some of them certainly slaves and many of whom made a living as “coolies” in the port.70 The mingling of slaves and freedmen made it difficult to distinguish bondspeople from poor free people in Zanzibar.71 In 1843, a visitor lumped together “sailors, slaves, and others” as a group whose members mingled in wedding ceremonies and entertainment, and frequently landed in jail together.72 Some enslaved Africans, particularly young men, used physical mobility and connections to other workers to escape their owners. In Jiddah, for example, a bondsman hired out for wages by his master learned from his fellow

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

211

laborers that the British consul would help him receive manumission. Acting on that knowledge, the bondsman gained manumission through consular intervention.73 Like the thirteen fugitives at the beginning of this essay, other bondspeople also rowed, sailed, or swam to Aden, Royal Navy cruisers, or British commercial vessels.74 Even more importantly, British naval vessels on anti-slave-trade patrols liberated captive Africans when they intercepted boats carrying them as cargo.75 As they had in slavery, many freedmen in British domains of the northwestern Indian Ocean worked in ports and at sea. In the early 1840s, men identified as “Zanzibari”—but interestingly, not as seedies—worked steadily, “night or day,” to load coal onto a steam vessel in Aden.76 In 1846, a British official in Aden noted that escaped slaves (again, not seedies) as well as sons of free men and slave women worked with Yemenis from mountain villages to coal steam vessels.77 Newly freed, mobile African workers entered the British records in India as seedies shortly after the Royal Navy deposited confiscated African captives at Bombay in the mid-1840s.78 The term spread to Aden. In 1857, a member of the Aden administration reported that the port’s population and workforce consisted mainly of Arabs, “Seedes, Somalees,” and others.79 In the same way that bondsmen and freedmen mingled with other poor workers in Zanzibar and elsewhere, so too the seedies of Aden mixed with Indian, Yemeni, and Somali migrant laborers. In the mid-nineteenth century, many seedies lived with other migrants, especially Somalis, in the “straw town”—or, perhaps more appropriately, “mat town,” after their housing material—of the Maala quarter in Aden.80 Deposited temporarily in Aden, some freed African women likely found husbands or partners from Aden’s multiethnic migrant workers. An African freedwoman and an Indian lascar, an employee of Aden’s Harbour Establishment, petitioned for permission to marry and then make yet another move: this time, together and to Massawa, an Egyptian-controlled port on the African shore of the Red Sea.81 In port work and neighborhoods, freedpeople and bondsmen rubbed shoulders with migrant workers who had never experienced enslavement; but at sea, seedies occupied a special labor niche on board steam vessels. At first glance, it appears that sidis, Somalis, and Yemenis performed much the same work on British steam vessels. Men from all three migrant groups worked below deck, in stokeholes, with the coal that powered steam vessels. But seedies worked in a particular segment of maritime industrial transport. They served on British Indian Ocean steam liners, which carried passengers and mail between England and India on set schedules and to predetermined ports. Significantly, the first liner company to pioneer industrial transport in the Indian Ocean relied on freedmen to work with coal. African “seedy coolies” labored in the stokehole

212

janet j. ewald

of a Peninsular and Oriental steam liner by the 1850s.82 From the 1870s until the end of the century, seedies formed a majority of stokehole workers on board P&O liners.83 In contrast, Yemeni and Somali mariners served relatively rarely on British steam liners. Instead, those migrants tended to join the crews of a different type of steam vessel: tramp steamers.84 The tramps began to ply the Indian Ocean, and link it to other oceans, in the 1870s, when submarine telegraph cables enabled faster communication among ports. Unlike liners, tramp steamers voyaged without set schedules from port to port according to news of available cargoes and markets. The specializations of these two types of steam vessels resulted in very different working conditions for seedies on liners and African or Asian workers on tramps. Cost effectiveness dictated that liner companies own a fleet of many large liners; such liners thus required numerous crew members, who could be moved en masse to other vessels belonging to the same fleet. Voyaging between established termini, British Indian Ocean liners recruited their European crew mainly at one British port, and their African and Asian crew at one Britishruled Asian port. The P&O, for example, regularly took on Asian and African crew at Bombay. These men entered en masse, often working with men of similar origins. On P&O liners, seedies represented the majority of stokehole crews, which sometimes numbered more than sixty mariners.85 When they joined in Asian ports, seedies and other non-European sailors worked under a special contract called “Asiatic [or “East India”] Articles of Agreement.” Among other special stipulations, this contract required mariners to return to the Asian port where they joined the liners.86 They could not leave the ship elsewhere. The requirements of the Asiatic contracts thus legally restricted the mobility of seedies and other Asian and African seafarers on British Indian Ocean steam liners. In contrast, tramp steamers took on smaller crews, who joined in various ports of call. Somali and Yemeni seafarers likely made their first entry onto a steam vessel from a Red Sea or Persian Gulf port, where they joined individually or with a few other men.87 They then worked with a relatively small stokehole crew, consisting of mariners of many origins. Seafarers on tramp vessels—Britons, foreigners, colonial subjects—served under standard articles of agreement. They might leave their vessels, by discharge as well as desertion, in ports as varied as Marseilles, Hamburg, Norfolk (Virginia), Charleston (South Carolina), Constantinople, Rangoon, Rosario (Argentina), and Cardiff.88 In the last city, as well as other British ports that served as centers for tramp steamers, Yemeni and Somali mariners formed diaspora communities.89 Yemeni and Somali seafarers, then, both entered an international maritime proletariat and implanted themselves in British cities, where they demanded

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

213

“British justice.”90 In contrast, as described above, seedies on British liners remained restricted to the British circuits linking Asia with the United Kingdom. They fell under the control of British government and British industry, without the ability to gain British residence or claim British rights. Seedies filled a particular segment of commercial maritime life, separate from other migrants, because freedmen bore a particular relationship to British officials.91 In British vessels and ports, emancipated slaves fell under the protective wing of these officials, such as the commander of the Wild Swan and the political resident at Aden. Almost as soon as they began to receive escaped or manumitted slaves, Britons lodged them in the hierarchies of household or shipboard work. As related at the beginning of this essay, the commander of the Wild Swan recruited the two fugitive boys as wardroom servants; the Aden authorities distributed the eleven escaped bondspeople as domestic servants. Like the two boys, other freedmen labored in the naval services of the Indian government or the United Kingdom. By the 1840s in Bombay, seedies worked on steam vessels belonging to the East India Company.92 By the 1870s, freedmen entered steam vessels of the Royal Navy’s East India Station as supernumerary crew: that is, men beyond the normal complement of seafarers. Receiving discharges in ports large and small, naval seedies dispersed through the northwestern Indian Ocean.93 More than other migrants, freedpeople moved—or were moved—along channels created by the close relations between government and business, as well as among various liner companies. Government needed transportation; liner companies needed government subsidies.94 In addition, the managers of steam vessels required a controllable labor force that included men who worked with coal. For their part, governmental officers regarded themselves as to some degree responsible for freedpeople in their realms. Many freedmen had already worked on steam vessels, whether those belonging to the government of India or to the Royal Navy. Some seedies clearly moved from governmental service to commercial employment. Upon receiving their discharges from a Royal Navy vessel, at least one group of freedmen enlisted on a British commercial steam liner.95 Elsewhere, the evidence implies not only cooperation between government and private interests, but also among steam liner companies. One liner company, which specialized in voyages within the Indian Ocean, received a government contract to carry freedpeople to Bombay. It appears likely that that company might have directed suitable bondsmen to agents of the P&O, which recruited its crews in Bombay.96 Like migrant workers in general in the northwestern Indian Ocean, seedies filled a labor gap during a time of fast commercialization. Between the 1850s and about 1900, they labored in stokeholes: a new, industrial work

214

janet j. ewald

site shunned by men accustomed to working with sails. Cutting and hauling coal and then shoveling it into furnaces was hard, dangerous work. But it was essential. African seedies thus bore the burden of sustaining steam transport in the Indian Ocean during its crucial early decades. But they did so at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy.97 Several centuries and vastly different lives separated the elite sidis of Janjira from the seedies who served in the stokeholes of nineteenth-century British steam liners. Yet tracing the different meanings of “sidi” and “seedie” suggests an obvious continuity: both sidis and seedies bore the heritage of African enslavement; both worked at sea. In his essay on another powerful African bondsman turned freedman, Malik Ambar, Richard Eaton offered conclusions that suggest deeper continuities. According to Eaton, African military slavery in the Deccan—most famously represented by Malik Ambar—flourished only under the very particular circumstances of a period of transition in the region.98 Although the specific conditions described by Eaton applied only to the Deccan from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, a comparable situation arose in a wider region during a later century: that is, the northwestern Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. The rapid growth of commerce and port cities created labor gaps that were filled by migrant workers of African and Arab origins. Slavery and the slave trade rose to unprecedented levels. During the same era, expansion of the British presence, with its abolitionist ideology, provided enclaves on land and sea where slaves could find legal freedom. Whether bondspeople fled or remained with their owners likely depended on both the possibility of successful flight and the calculations of risk in remaining with their owners. Some bondsmen, such as Mubruk, whose story appeared at the beginning of this essay, regarded it as being in their interest to stay with owners, receive manumission, and obtain positions of some authority. In this, Mubruk resembled the military slaves of the Deccan who became integrated into the households of their owners.99 But households did not always offer comfortable, or even benign, conditions. Perhaps the owner of the two young slave boys who fled to the Wild Swan regarded them as household members; nonetheless, he put the boys to dangerous work and beat them. The boys decided to escape. So did the bondspeople on board the pearling vessel that Mubruk commanded. Finally, Eaton described the “fluidity” of slavery in South Asia.100 Slavery itself continually evolved; on a smaller scale, individual bondsmen moved to freedom, sometimes almost seamlessly, with no evidence of formal manumission. The theme of fluidity applies also in many ways to slavery in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean: a world in motion. The form of slavery that evolved in that world represents one variation of the fluidity posited by

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

215

Eaton. In addition, bondspeople and other migrants led fluid, mobile lives. They made journeys, by coercion or relatively voluntarily. Even when they remained in one place, they might have moved from task to task. Bondspeople sometimes received manumission or emancipation. But here the theme of fluidity diverges from that described by Eaton. Although they had moved from slavery to freedom, the seedies on board British steam liners did not become incorporated into the society of their masters. Rather, they remained a separate and segregated workforce.

Notes 1. The sources for the stories of the two fugitives who arrived in May 1878 and the eleven who arrived the following August can be found in the British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers (IOR), Aden Records, R/20/508, Slave Trade Compilation, 1878; the two sources are Gardiner, Senior Lieutenant, to Captain Hunter, Aden, May 21, 1878, and enclosing Stuart to Powlett, Commander of Wild Swan, May 21, 1878; and Loch, Political Resident, Aden, to Secretary to Government, Bombay, September 21, 1878. 2. IOR, R/20/508, Political Resident, Aden, to Secretary to Government, Bombay, September 21, 1878. 3. IOR, R/20/508, Gardiner to Hunter, May 21, 1878, and enclosing Stuart to Powlett, May 21, 1878; Political Resident, Aden, to Secretary to Government, Bombay, September 21, 1878. 4. Here and below, for the trajectory of the slave trade from the east coast of Africa, I use Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially 77–82. 5. One of the meanings of the term sidi not used in this essay refers to communities of African descent living in India. See, for example, Helene Basu, “Slave, Soldier, Trader, Faqir: Fragments of African Histories in Western India (Gujerat),” in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Shihan Da Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003), 223–49. See also Amy Catlin-Jairabhoy and Edward A. Alpers, eds., Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (Trenton, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 2004). 6. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, 2nd ed. (originally 1886; 2nd ed., 1903; reprint, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 806. 7. For forms of bondage in South Asia, from c. 1000 to the early twentieth century, see Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 8. Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 91–94; Richard M. Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery and South Asian History, 115–35. 9. M. N. Pearson, Coastal Western India: Studies from the Portuguese Records (New Delhi: Concept, 1981), 145.

216

janet j. ewald

10. C. G. Brouwer, Al-Mukha: The Profile of a Yemeni Port as Sketched by Servants of the Dutch East India Company, 1614–1640 (Amsterdam: Defluyt Rarob, 1997), 35; Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 491. 11. William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, vol. 3, 1624–1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 187. 12. Clements R. Markham, ed., The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to the East Indies, with Abstracts of Journals of Voyages to the East Indies, during the Seventeenth Century, Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., no. 56 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1877), 118. 13. Robert C. Davis, White Slavery in the Mediterranean, Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 73–82. 14. William Foster, ed., English Factories in India, vol. 1, 1618–1621 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 284, 313. 15. William Foster, ed., English Factories in India, vol. 5, 1634–1636 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 111–12, and vol. 7, 1642–1645 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 37. 16. Foster, English Factories in India, 3:83. 17. The earliest East India Company ships to enter the Indian Ocean called at Madagascar; they continued to do so, apparently resurging in the 1740s and 1750s, then decreasing and ending; see Anthony Farrington, Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs, 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 1999). Within that volume, see, for example, the alphabetical entries for the vessels Ascension, 1600–1601; Dragon, 1600–1601; Hector 1, 1600–1601; Susan, 1600–1601; Ilchester, 1749, 1750; Swallow 2, 1749–50; Grantham 3, 1749, 1750; Hardwicke, 1750, 1751; Delaware, 1751, 1752; Oxford, 1751, 1752; Pelham 2, 1751, 1752, 1754, 1755; Dragon 5, 1752–53; Prince Edward, 1752, 1753; many other voyages also appear. See also C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969); C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire (London: Hutchinson, 1965); Stephen A. Royle, The Company’s Island: St. Helena, Company Colonies, and the Colonial Endeavor (London: Tauris, 2007); Margaret Makepeace, ed., Trade on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1666: The Correspondence of the East India Company (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1991); Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Labor in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), introduction and ch. 1. 18. Manning, Slavery and African Life, 77, 82; Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans–Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: A Historical Outline,” in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 295–96. Because they cover only exports from the African Indian Ocean coast, these figures do not include the captives from the interior who flooded into towns on that coast and its offshore islands. In my analysis, I include Zanzibar and other east African ports. 19. Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 20. See, for example, William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, vol. 6, 1637–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 226; Government of India, District and Provincial Gazetteers, Bombay, vol. 26, Town and Island, 256, 258–60, 262, 263–65.

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

217

21. Richard B. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 34–36, 41. For English efforts in Sumatra, see Robert J. Young, “Slaves, Coolies, and Bondsmen: A Study of Assisted Migration in Response to Emerging English Shipping Networks in the Indian Ocean, 1685–1765,” in Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects of Migration (Cologne: Böhlau, 1989), 391–402; Government of India, District and Provincial Gazetteers, Bombay, 26:263–65. 22. M. N. Pearson, “Indo-Portuguese Society,” in The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 94–96, 112; Jeanette Pinto, Slavery in Portuguese India (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1992), 26–28, 50–52; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 13, 52, 57, 211–15, 301–2; R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2002), 44, 92, 310–14; Pearson, Coastal Western India, 50. 23. Barendse, Arabian Seas, 310, 314. 24. IOR, General Correspondence, E/3/108, Court to President and Council of Bombay, March 28, 1740. 25. Bombay (Presidency), Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. 26, Bombay, Town and Island (Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation, 1970), 259, 267. 26. Foster, English Factories in India, 6:296; Young, “Slaves, Coolies, and Bondsmen,” 396; Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 26:230–32, 245, 248–49, 262, 266. 27. IOR, E/3/106, Orders and Instructions by the Court to Captain Robert Jenkins, December 12, 1735; Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 26:258. 28. Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 26:258. 29. Ibid., 26:258, 262–63. 30. The phrase “drifting sea proletariat” comes from Barendse, Arabian Seas, 109, 112. 31. Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 26:258; Barendse, Arabian Seas, 48, 311–312; Foster, English Factories in India, 6:71–72. 32. Maria Graham (Lady Callcott), Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh: Constable, 1813), 85. 33. John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (Hammersmith, UK: HarperCollins, 1991), 235; Anne Bulley, The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833 (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2000), 5. 34. The East India Company kept partial records for voyages beginning in India, usually on India-built ships not chartered by the company, if those ships carried any company goods. Between 1795 and 1833, 167 voyages occurred. I sampled records of thirty-five of them from IOR, L/MAR/B; see also Farrington, East India Company Journals and Logs, 761–63. 35. The 42 voyages belong to a large sample of 150 voyages from the IOR, L/MAR/B series. 36. Thirty-five sampled voyages beginning in India; see IOR, L/MAR/B 359A, Journal of the Caledonia. 37. Freedmen and escaped slaves from Portuguese enclaves joined other adventurers, deserters, and fugitives in the Luso-Indian presence beyond the realm of the Estado da India, including the port of Muscat after Omani Arabs seized it from the Estado da

218

janet j. ewald

India; see Pearson, Coastal Western India, xxii–xxiii; Barendse, Arabian Seas, 311–12; Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 34–37. 38. Graham, Journal of a Residence, p. 85; James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, vol. 3 (London: Cochrane and White, 1813), 167. 39. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) online, 1837–38 (697); Burnes to Secretary to Government, December 29, 1835; Pottinger to Chief Secretary to Government, October 13, 1834, 115; IOR, L/P&S/9/22, Colonel Ross, memorandum, January 11, 1873, enclosed in Colonel Ross to Duke of Argyll, January 25, 1873. 40. Manning, Slavery and African Life, 82; Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans–Indian Ocean World,” 295. 41. The phrase comes from Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1988), 1. 42. Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans–Indian Ocean World”; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 72–79. 43. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25, 37, 38. 44. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 43, 60, 64–65. 45. Janet J. Ewald, “East Africa,” in A Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 41–46. 46. Gwyn Campbell noted the association between the increase in commerce and rise of the slave trade; see his introduction to Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005), 2–5; see also Ewald, “East Africa,” 42–43. 47. On the basis of his own observations and the reports of earlier travelers, Richard Burton wrote that the population of Zanzibar increased from 12,000 in 1835 to 25,000 in 1857 in the off-trade season. When merchants arrived during the monsoons, the population increased to 40,000 or even 45,000; see Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley Bros., 1857; reprint, 1967), 1:81. The Hijazi cities grew from perhaps 75,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century to 150,000 by 1900; see William Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840–1908 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 17. 48. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 87–10; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, 144, 187, 232; Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), 61–62, 70, 74–75, 87, 94, 110. 49. For numbers of steamships visiting Jiddah in the last half of the nineteenth century, see William Ochsenwald, “The Commercial History of the Hijaz Vilayet, 1840–1908,” Arabian Studies 6 (1982): 70–72. 50. R. J. Gavin, Aden under British Rule, 1839–1967 (London: Hurst, 1975), 179, 445. 51. Burton, Zanzibar, 1:81. 52. Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State, 16–17. 53. Cooper, Plantation Slavery, 54–55, 60, 117, 123, 130, 137, 148. 54. Thomas E. Marston, Britain’s Imperial Role in the Red Sea Area, 1800–1878 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1961), 341, 346, 353–54; Ghada Talhami, Suakin

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

219

and Massawa under Egyptian Rule (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1979), 85–86. 55. The Aden Records are full of references to migrant workers from India and the interior of Yemen; see, for example, IOR, R/20/A/4, Haines to Willoughby, n.d. [between March 17, 1839, and April 13, 1839] and October 7, 1839; R/20/A/17, Willoughby to Haines, November 11, 1841; R/20/A/58, Haines to Malet, September 2, 1846, and December 5, 1846. See also Captain F. M. Hunter, An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia (1877; reprint, London: Cass, 1968), 28, 31–33, 35–36; University of Durham, Palace Green Library, Archives and Special Collections, Sudan Archive, Sarsfield-Hall Papers, 682/14, “History of Mr. Angelo Capato”; Paris, Archive du Ministère des Affaires etrangères, Correspondance Consulaire et Commerciale Djeddah, t. 3, 1869–1874, Buez to MAE, 27; C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century: Daily Life, Customs, and Learning, trans. J. H. Monahan (Leiden: Brill, 1931), 5–6; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, 184. 56. Although precise numbers, which would allow for a fuller comparison, remain unknown, it appears probable that African bondspeople formed an important but not a majority proportion of workers in the Hijaz, where almost all laborers and artisans came from elsewhere. In contrast, bondspeople and freedpeople likely formed the majority of workers in Zanzibar and other parts of the Swahili coast, if for no other reason than the proximity of the coast to the sources of captives; see Hurgronje, Mekka, 4–6; Burton, Zanzibar, 1:462–64. 57. See, for example, W. F. Baldock, recorder, “The Story of Rashid Bin Hassani of the Bisa Tribe, Northern Rhodesia,” in Margery Perham, ed., Ten Africans, 2nd ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press), 98–106. 58. An Arabic proverb states, “He who frees a slave fetters a hand”; see R. Brunschvig, “Abd,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E. Levi-Provencal, and J. Schacht, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:24–40; Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam (1957; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 80–81; Daniel Pipes, “Mawlas: Freed Slaves and Converts in Early Islam,” in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, ed. John Ralph Willis (London: Cass, 1985), 1:199–227; William John Sersen, “Stereotypes and Attitudes towards Slaves in Arabic Proverbs: A Preliminary View,” in Willis, Slaves and Slavery, 1:97. 59. James Christie, Cholera Epidemics in East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1876), 312, 330; Burton, Zanzibar, 1:80. 60. Burton, Zanzibar, 1:80, 466–67; Norman Bennett, “William H. Hathorne: Merchant and Consul in Zanzibar,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 99 (1963): 127; Christie, Cholera Epidemics, 312, 330. 61. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 87–109; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, 144, 187, 232; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 61–62, 70, 74–75, 87, 94, 110. 62. Hurgronje, Mekka, 11–12. 63. The National Archives, United Kingdom, Foreign Office (FO), FO 78, Kemball to Robertson, July 13, 1842, enclosing extract of letter from Wilson to Gov’t, January 28, 1831; FO 84, Beyts to Derby, March 5, 1878. 64. J. R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, 2 vols. (London, 1838), 1:28. It remains unclear, however, whether these African sailors were bondsmen or freedmen.

220

janet j. ewald

65. IOR, L/P&S/9/22, Ross to Bartle Frere, January 11, 1873, enclosed in Ross to Duke of Argyll, January 25, 1873. 66. Shortly after 1810, crews of small Red Sea vessels calling at Jiddah included African slaves among crews of Somali, Hadhrami, and Yemeni seafarers. By about midcentury, the majority of crews of Egyptian ships were reported to be slaves. And by the 1880s, slaves constituted the majority of all Red Sea crews. John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (London: H. Colburn, 1829), 23; Charles Xavier Rochet d’Héricourt, Second Voyage sur les Deux Rives de la Mer Rouge, dans le pays des Adels, et le royaume de Choa (Paris, 1846), 19; FO 84/1849, Jago to Secretary of State for the Foreign Office, July 9, 1887. 67. Burton, Zanzibar, 1:467; Christie, Cholera Epidemics, 330, 408. 68. For an example of bondsmen serving on a lighter, see FO 84/1482, Deposition of Murjan, December 11, 1876 enclosed in Wylde to Derby, February 11, 1877; on the continuing use of bondsmen in the harbor, see Jan Schmidt, Through the Legation Window, 1876–1926: Four Essays on Dutch, Dutch-Indian, and Ottoman History (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1992), 71. 69. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, 2:428. 70. Joseph Osgood, Notes of Travel; or, Recollections of Majunga, Zanzibar, Muscat, Aden, Mocha, and Other Eastern Ports (Salem, Mass.: George Creamer, 1854), 92, 93. 71. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 149. 72. J. Ross Browne, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (New York: Harper, 1850), 371. 73. FO 84/1510, Beyts to Derby, February 20, 1878, enclosing Deposition of Suedo, February 18, 1878. 74. IOR, Perim Compilation, Commander at Perim to Political Resident, Aden, August 5, 1865; FO 84/1544, Zohrab to Salisbury, March 15, 1879; IOR, R/20/A/523, Slave Trade Compilation, 1879, Edwards, Commander of Ready, to Loch, Political Resident, Aden, February 4, 1879; IOR, R/20/A/523, Slave Trade Compilation, Dickens, Commander of Arab, to Loch, May 19, 1879, enclosing Dickens to Corbett, Rear Admiral and Commander in Chief, May 13, 27, and 28, 1879; W. Caius Crutchley, My Life at Sea (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912), 140. 75. IOR, R/20/A/397, Slave Trade Compilation, 1872, Murdock, Emigration Board, to Herbert, October 19, 1871. 76. George Darby Griffith, A Journey across the Desert from Ceylon to Marseilles (London: H. Colburn, 1845), 1:19, 21. 77. IOR, R/20/A/58, Haines to Malet, September 9, 1846; Robert Lambert Playfair, A History of Arabia Felix or Yemen (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1859), 15. 78. HCPP online, 1852 (357), Correspondence between Colonial Office, Foreign Office, Colonial Land and Emigration Board, and Eastern Archipelago Company, images James Motley, “Report on the Coal of Labuan,” May 24, 1849; O’Riley, “Report on the Coal Mines,” enclosed in O’Riley to Shaw, November 25, 1851; O’Riley, “Diary of Occurrences at Labuan,” enclosed in O’Riley to Shaw, November 25, 1851, images 15–17. 79. IOR, R/20/A/155, Anderson to Coghlan, July 27, 1857. 80. Hunter, British Settlement of Aden, 36. 81. IOR, R/20/A/395, Petition from Lighthouse Lascar Syed Rumzan requesting permission to marry Khadjee bin Ali liberated slave girl residing at Perim, Commander Outpost Perim to Ass’t. Pol. Res., Aden, June 8, 1872.

African Bondsmen and Maritime Proletariats

221

82. F. R. Kendall, cited in Peter Padfield, Beneath the House Flag of the P&O (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 35–36. 83. Memorial University, Newfoundland, Maritime History Archives (MUMHA), Crew Lists and Agreements (CLA) for Brindisi 81478, China 27199, Kaisar-i-Hind 76182, Peshawur 65641, Poonah 45786, Rohilla 81798, Rome 81820, and Surat 54738. 84. In twenty voyages between 1881 and 1888, for example, the liner Brindisi employed 788 firemen and stokers: 423 seedies and 5 Adeni Arabs (MUMHA, CLA for Brindisi). The business organization of tramp steamers makes it much more difficult to trace the crews of these vessels. Less direct evidence, however, strongly suggests that Yemenis and Somalis joined the crews of tramp steamers; see Archibald Hurd, The Triumph of the Tramp Ship (London: Cassell, 1922), 178; Hunter, British Settlement of Aden, 36; Richard Lawless, From Ta’izz to Tyneside: An Arab Community in the North-East of England during the Early Twentieth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 9–46. 85. MUMHA, CLA for Brindisi 81478, China 27199, Kaisar-i-Hind 76182, Peshawur 65641, Poonah 45786, Rohilla 81798, Rome 81820, and Surat 54738. 86. IOR, Proceedings and Consultations [P], P/741, Proceedings of the Government of India, Marine Department, Fort William, 1873, including “Agreement for Foreign Going and Home Trade Ships employing Asiatic Seamen.” 87. IOR A/20/422, Assistant Political Resident to Political Resident, August 25, 1874; IOR R/20/444, Captain Hunter’s Report, December 1874; Ibrahim Ismaa’il, “An Early Somali Autobiography, Part 2,” presented and annotated by Richard Pankhurst, Africa (Rome) 32, no. 3 (1977): 366, 368. 88. Ismaa’il, “Early Somali Autobiography,” 370, 373–76; Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada, vol. 3, 1 percent sample of CLA for non-Canadian British vessels, searchable database on CD-ROM, records for vessel 28439, owned by Mohamed Issa Hadin; vessel 96682, Abdul Adjes; vessel 97387, Ali Awad, Alvola Bulola. 89. Lawless, From Ta’izz to Tyneside; Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 140. 90. Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice.” 91. For a more detailed analysis, see Janet J. Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation, c. 1840–1900,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 2 (2010): 451–66. 92. Motley, “Report on the Coal of Labuan”; O’Riley, “Report on the Coal Mines”; O’Riley, “Diary of Occurrences at Labuan.” 93. For seedie supernumeraries discharged in Aden, see The National Archives, Admiralty (ADM) 117/163, ledgers of the HMS Briton, July 1, 1874–April 12, 1876; ADM 117/240, ledgers of the HMS Daphne, January 1–June 30, 1874; ADM 117/1014, ledgers of the HMS Vulture, 1 January 1–March 31, 1873. 94. For a detailed study, see J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire: Sir William MacKinnon and His Business Network, 1823–1893 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003). 95. MUMHA, CLA for Galatea, 63698, September 7, 1876.

222

janet j. ewald

96. Stephanie Jones, “The Role of the Shipping Agent in Migration: A Study in Business History,” in Maritime Aspects of Migration, ed. Klaus Friedland (Cologne: Bohnau, 1989), 339. 97. Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Transportation,” 462–63. 98. Eaton, “Military Slavery in the Deccan,” 128–30. 99. Ibid., 129–130. 100. Ibid., 130.

12

Slaves of One Master: Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire matthew s. hopper

At the turn of the twentieth century, a six-year-old boy named Ismail bin Mubarak was kidnapped from his hometown of Mkokotoni in Zanzibar and carried away to Arabia. Ismail’s kidnapper took him to Batinah, a stretch of the coast of northern Oman, where he sold him to a man from Hamriya (near Dubai). Five years and two owners later, Ismail found himself the slave of Salim bin Sultan of Sharjah, who sent him to the pearl banks to dive each season. In March 1931, when Ismail was nearly forty years old and had spent two decades of grueling work as a pearl diver, he stole one of his master’s boats and fled with four other enslaved divers to the British naval depot at Bassidu on Qishm Island off the coast of Persia.1 There, Ismail and his companions were taken aboard HMS Hastings, where sailors recorded their diverse stories: a twenty-six-year-old Zanzibari diver who, as a boy, served in the German East Africa campaign had been tricked by a dhow operator who promised to take him from Zanzibar to Mombasa but instead took him Dubai and sold him as a slave; a twenty-year-old Swahili pearling crewman who was born to slave parents in Persian Mekran and sold at age ten to slave owners in Oman; and two pearl divers of mixed Swahili-Baluchi ancestry in their early twenties who had been kidnapped and sold to slave owners in Oman in the early 1920s. Ismail and his fellow runaways were a cross-section of the slave divers of the Persian Gulf.2

223

224

matthew s. hopper

In the context of the conventional Indian Ocean historiography, Ismail’s story seems out of place. The standard histories of Indian Ocean slavery tell us that the slave trade from East Africa to Arabia was eliminated by the diligent work of the Royal Navy in the second half of the nineteenth century and should have been, at the very least, cut to only a trickle by the last decades of the century, yet Ismail and his companions were all kidnapped in the twentieth century.3 With a few notable exceptions, much of the conventional literature on Middle Eastern slavery (sometimes mislabeled “Islamic” or “Arab” slavery) tends to emphasize nonproductive labor outside the economic sector, promoting the stereotype that most slaves in the region were elite slaves or domestic slaves; yet Ismail was clearly part of a labor force geared toward export production.4 Economic historians tell us that the Persian Gulf should have been too poor following the region’s loss of trade after the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of competition from steam ships, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 to account for any demand for slaves.5 Historiography produced within the gulf has tended to further reinforce an image of a region long impoverished before the development of oil under the benevolent tutelage of the region’s sheikhs and sultans.6 Ismail’s story is not an isolated case. Hundreds of similar stories of Africans who were kidnapped in their youth and sent to work in the gulf are preserved in the archives from British outposts in the region. Ismail and his companions were sold into slavery during a period when the gulf economy was expanding dramatically. Between the 1860s and the 1920s, two industries in particular— dates and pearls—underwent rapid expansion and created new demand for slave labor. Ismail’s capture coincides with the peak of the boom in the gulf production of pearls, and his emancipation corresponds to that industry’s collapse. Ismail’s story is not out of place; instead, the existing historiography is insufficient to contextualize it. Conventional interpretations of slavery and the economy in the gulf and the western Indian Ocean have been at pains to explain the growth of enslaved populations. This chapter argues that the growth of African communities in the gulf must not be seen as part of an isolated “Islamic slave trade,” but rather as part of a labor system that—like its predecessor in the Atlantic—was structured around global economic forces.

The Slave Trade and the African Diaspora in Eastern Arabia The slave trade from East Africa increased dramatically in the eighteenth century, with European expansion in the Indian Ocean, and grew exponentially in the nineteenth century, peaking around the 1870s. One widely accepted estimate concludes that the number of East Africans captured in the Indian Ocean slave trade reached 100,000 in the seventeenth century; 400,000 in

Slaves of One Master

225

the eighteenth century; and 1,618,000 in the nineteenth century (in the final period, about half that number were sent overseas, with the other half retained on the East African coast).7 Wars, famines, epidemics, raids, and disruption from European colonialism in East Africa contributed to the supply of these captives, while the spread of capitalism and the expansion of global markets for Indian Ocean commodities influenced demand for their labor. But the economics of the slave trade masks the lived experiences of individuals. Edward Alpers reminds us that the middle passage these captives experienced began not when they were placed aboard a ship, but when they were first captured or sold.8 The stories of this process that have survived illustrate his point. One Ngindo woman named Salama was about eighteen years old when war came to her town in southeastern Tanzania in 1869. Her father was killed and her home was destroyed, and she and her sister were sold to slave traders, who forced them to walk a month’s distance to the coastal city of Kilwa. From there, Salama and her sister were sent by boat to Zanzibar, where they were separated and sold to slave traders. A British naval patrol stopped the dhow carrying Salama, and a sailor recorded her story; the fate of her sister is unknown.9 Demand for slave labor in the Indian Ocean grew for a host of reasons, most notably the expansion of commodity production for global consumption in the nineteenth century. On the East African coast, growth in demand accompanied the development of a massive plantation complex which produced cloves, coconuts, grain, copra, oil, and sugar for both domestic and global consumption.10 Likewise, in Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the rise in demand for slaves accompanied the expansion of production of commodities like dates and pearls for global markets. But these commodities have received considerably less attention in the historiography, perhaps because trends in the existing historiography have tended to obfuscate the connections between slavery and global commodity chains in the Middle East. Imperial Britain, which nominally controlled much of eastern Arabia and made abolition of the Indian Ocean slave trade a centerpiece of its nineteenth-century imperial policy, tended to see slavery as a permanent fixture of Arab society and therefore missed the connection between the growth of the slave trade and the growing global demand for gulf products. As Abdul Sheriff poignantly argued, British imperial agents and their early historians regarded Arabia as “a convenient bottomless pit that allegedly consumed any number of slaves that their lively imagination cared to conjure up.”11 Arabs were assumed to demand slaves simply because they were “averse to hard work” and partisans of a religion or culture that “condoned” slavery—not for any economic reason. Until very recently, scholars of “Islamic slavery” could argue that slavery in the Middle East differed fundamentally from Atlantic slavery in three timeless

226

matthew s. hopper

ways: an overwhelming preference for women over men, a preponderance of “elite” slavery (soldiers, eunuchs, harem workers, and retainers) over manual labor, and labor limited to the nonproductive sector.12 Although the Atlantic historiography could debate the extent to which slavery in the Western Hemisphere was the by-product of European economic expansion or may have contributed to it, slavery in the Middle East was frequently regarded as a timeless and fundamental element of Islamic civilization or the Arab character.13 In Orientalism, Edward Said noted, “Whereas it is no longer possible to write learned (or even popular) disquisitions on either ‘the Negro mind’ or ‘the Jewish personality,’ it is perfectly possible to engage in such research as ‘the Islamic mind,’ or ‘the Arab character.’ ”14 Said’s criticism might be applied to studies of “Islamic slavery,” since historians tend not to label slavery in the Atlantic world as inherently “Christian” or “European.”15 Islam regulated who could be enslaved, how slaves were treated, and encouraged the manumission of slaves for religious purposes, but the demand for slave labor in nineteenthcentury eastern Arabia was driven by economics rather than religion.16 Not long ago, the historiography on slavery in the Middle East was so limited that older stereotypes about Middle Eastern slavery could be accepted uncritically. More recently, however, historians of the Middle East, led foremost by scholars of the Ottoman Empire, have presented far more sophisticated and nuanced histories of slavery in the region.17 Methods of enslavement, sources of slaves, and use of slave labor differed widely throughout the empire’s history and within its vast territory. Elite slavery and domestic slavery typified the slave experience in some but not all of the region’s history. At times, slave labor was employed in agriculture and industry.18 For much of the region’s history, slave populations were drawn largely from Eurasian populations, were predominantly female, and were probably engaged primarily in domestic labor or were acquired as “symbols of conspicuous consumption, to reflect the power and wealth of slaver owners,” yet new research by historians of Indian Ocean slavery has made clear that dramatic quantitative and qualitative shifts in slavery occurred in the nineteenth century as a result of a confluence of economic forces.19 By the late nineteenth century, slavery in the gulf was typified by African males laboring in pearling or date farming. Older modes of slavery persisted, but they were augmented or overwhelmed by new ones. As the Middle East, including the Persian Gulf, was drawn into the expanding global economy in the nineteenth century, regional dependence on global markets subjected the gulf economy to the whims of international consumer tastes, and supply and demand.20 In the nineteenth century, the gulf experienced a boom in date exports, fueled in part by new markets in North America and Europe. The

Slaves of One Master

227

lucrative American date market grew as Salem (Massachusetts) and New York merchants expanded American trade to Indian Ocean cities such as Muscat, Zanzibar, and Aden.21 Likewise, the pearl-diving industry expanded dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century as pearl fashion experienced a revival in Europe. Pearl exports skyrocketed in the first decades of the twentieth century as the desire for pearls spread beyond royal and aristocratic classes in Europe and North America. As early as 1863, Sheikh Muhammad bin Tha¯nı¯ of Doha, Qatar, could remark to William Palgrave, “We are all from the highest to the lowest slaves of one master, Pearl,” lamenting the growing dependence of the region on the whims of global markets.22 Growing demand for labor in the date-farming and pearl-diving sectors of the gulf economy created increased incentives for importing slave labor. In the nineteenth century, the primary (although not exclusive) source of this labor became East Africa. Arabia’s longstanding trade connections with coastal East Africa facilitated early Arab participation in indigenous slave-trading networks in the Mozambique Channel and in supplying African captives to French plantations on the Mascarene Islands in the eighteenth century. The collapse of extensive European demand following British abolition and the Napoleonic Wars drove prices down and led Arab traders to begin employing large numbers of enslaved Africans on plantations on the coast of East Africa and transporting them to Arabia.23 By the 1820s, European visitors described sizable populations of enslaved Africans in gulf port cities.24 By 1900, the demographics of the African diaspora in the gulf were clearly visible. In 1905, Africans reportedly accounted for 11 percent of Kuwait’s population, 22 percent of Qatar’s population, 11 percent of Bahrain’s population, 28 percent of the Trucial Coast’s population (today’s United Arab Emirates), and 25 percent of Muscat and Mutrah’s population. J. G. Lorimer estimated that Africans made up roughly 17 percent of the total population of coastal eastern Arabia under British protection between Hormuz and Kuwait.25 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the gulf’s date and pearl industries grew rapidly when global demand for these products was high, but collapsed when more developed regions found ways to mimic or exceed gulf production by using industrial technology. During the boom years, labor demand was high, and incentives to import labor—often slave labor—grew in tandem. With the collapse of the date and pearl industries, the region’s economy ground to a halt, followed by a corresponding rise in the abuse and flight of enslaved workers, and the wholesale turning out of slaves to fend for themselves. It is thus no coincidence that Ismail and his companions chose to flee in 1931 in the midst of the gulf’s economic crisis. The experiences of these runaways cannot simply be regarded as part of a timeless “Islamic”

228

matthew s. hopper

slave trade, but should be seen as part of a slave system that—like Atlantic slavery—was structured around global economic forces.

African Labor and the Expansion of the Gulf Economy In the Persian Gulf, as in many parts of the Middle East, the expanding global economy absorbed and augmented a trade that already existed on a regional level. Date growers between Muscat and Basra shared similar experiences to those affecting producers of silk and tobacco in Anatolia, grain in Iraq, olives in Tunisia, oranges in Palestine, and cotton in Egypt and Sudan.26 At the turn of the twentieth century, more than half the world’s estimated ninety million date palms were grown in the countries touching the gulf, with an estimated thirty million grown in Iraq alone. Oman’s share of the world’s date palms was relatively small, perhaps four million trees.27 Yet it was Oman that contributed most to the creation of global markets for dates in the nineteenth century, particularly the lucrative market in the United States. American ships carrying cotton cloth from Massachusetts mills visited Zanzibar annually beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century, and within a few decades came to dominate international trade to that island.28 Following the seasonal monsoon winds of the western Indian Ocean, American ships visited Arabia on these voyages to exchange cotton cloth, piece goods, and specie for coffee, hides, and dates.29 Muscat was the center for Arabian date exports, and Oman was home to particularly hardy varieties of dates that could survive lengthy sea voyages and that ripened earlier than most dates on account of Oman’s southern latitude and intense summer heat. The fardh variety of dates ripened in August, which allowed American ships enough time to load dates at Muscat, trade at Zanzibar, catch the monsoon winds, and make the hundredday journey home in time for the winter holidays. Since American ships frequently returned from their voyages in the autumn, the arrival of Arabian dates in New York before Thanksgiving became an American tradition.30 Although fardh dates were not highly regarded in Arabia, Americans loved the sweet, sticky variety, and grocers stocked and sold millions of pounds of the fruit annually as a holiday confection. Grocers would use an ice pick to chisel off portions of blocks of sticky dates and sell them by the pound. With the arrival of steam ships in the mid-nineteenth century and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the voyage from the gulf to New York was cut to sixty days, and merchants began to add varieties of dates from Basra to their annual imports of fardh dates from Muscat. By 1885, Americans were importing more than 10,000,000 pounds of dates annually, valued at $382,267.31 A British observer in Oman noted that it was “from the labors of the date

Slaves of One Master

229

cultivator that the country derives most of such wealth as it has.”32 American date imports grew from an average of 10,000,000–20,000,000 pounds annually between 1893 and 1903 to an average of 20,000,000–30,000,000 pounds between 1903 and 1913. Date imports had soared to nearly 79,000,000 pounds by 1925.33 Omani dates had whetted America’s appetite for dates, but its appetite was increasingly satisfied by Iraqi produce. By 1929, 83 percent of the dates imported into the United States came from Iraq.34 By 1899, shipping companies competed in an annual “date race” from Basra to New York in order to land the first shipment of “golden dates” for the holiday season.35 Readers could follow the progress of the ships through wire reports in local papers, and the arrival of the first ship was heralded with some fanfare. The winner of the “date race” received a bonus, since the first shipments of dates sold at higher prices. In 1912, the winning ship earned $120,000.36 The growth of the date industry sharply influenced labor demands in the gulf. The primary area of nineteenth-century date expansion in Oman, Batinah—the 150-mile stretch of coast on the Gulf of Oman north of Muscat—became home to a large population of enslaved Africans. As the densest area of vegetation in eastern Arabia, Batinah had a bigger population and more agricultural production than any other part of the gulf south of Iraq. But Batinah differed from the other date-producing areas in the region in that it required intense human effort to irrigate the palms. Although it has some of the richest soil in Oman, Batinah receives no consistent flow of water from the inland mountains and relies entirely on well water for irrigation.37 Batinah farmers employed the zijrah, a massive wooden framework with a crossbar holding a pulley wheel called a manju¯r, connected by rope to a bull to lift water from twenty feet below the surface in leather bags that were poured into cement-coated holding tanks that further drained into irrigation channels, afla¯j, to water several acres of date palms. The labor-intensive process used a male laborer, a bida¯r, to work in shifts around the clock in order to water approximately every hundred trees. The work of irrigation frequently fell on the shoulders of enslaved Africans. By 1927, it was estimated that there were at least fifteen thousand wells of this kind operating in Batinah.38 Bertram Thomas, who worked as wazı¯r (minister) of finance under Sultan Taimur bin Faisal in Oman between 1925 and 1930, estimated that there were “tens of thousands of oxen daily” working these water wheels in 1929.39 “The cacophony from many wells operating at one time is really not unmusical,” he wrote. “The effect is that of a weird assortment of stringed instruments.” Thomas added, “‘Oil the wretched thing,’ says a European impatient of its creaking and whining, but the owner has another view, for every well has a different note and he, from the far end of

230

matthew s. hopper

his garden, may thus know whether all goes well with his own.”40 Another observer echoed: “Throughout the Batinah, is heard the plaintive shrieking of the pullies. To a suggestion that the axils might be oiled, the reply comes that the noisy wheel was better.”41 Thomas added that runaway slaves were often punished with long hours in chains working in irrigation: “The metallic chink of ankle-chains, heard, perhaps, from the bull-pit of a well within the date grove, is an indication of some such ill-fated escapade.”42 Date palms also have to be pollinated by hand, offshoots (suckers) removed, dead branches cut off, extra date bunches removed, stocks kept clean, and—when the fruit is ripe—there is the enormous task of harvesting. Large parties of workers were required to boil the Maseybili and Khameyzi varieties in large copper cauldrons and dry them in the sun before shipping these popular varieties to India.43 Dates also needed to be packed or pressed and conveyed overland or by sea to ports of export. Palm-frond bags had to be woven to hold the dates, and they had to be loaded onto boats and conveyed to their destination. Much of this work was performed by enslaved East Africans. With the extra labor required for date production, Batinah was the primary destination of slaves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was home to Oman’s largest population of Africans and their descendants.44 In 1885, S. B. Miles noted that in contrast to the interior behind Sur, where demand for slaves was limited, in Batinah slaves were “in high request,” and consequently most slaves were eventually landed there.45 In 1930, the British consul at Muscat remarked that “apart from the Batinah Coast, the method of irrigation does not demand slave labour.”46 The testimonies of enslaved Africans who received manumission certificates at British consulates and agencies in the gulf between 1907 and 1940 almost universally describe spending at least three years in Batinah before being sold to final destinations elsewhere in the gulf. For young African boys, who made up a considerable percentage of those imported in the late nineteenth century, the time passed between arrival in Batinah and eventual sale was often equal to the time required to mature to the age of an apprentice pearl diver (early teens).47 Even more lucrative than the date industry was the gulf’s pearling industry. Arabia was only one of many regions that experienced a boom in export production of pearls between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, but it was the world’s largest pearl producer. By the turn of the twentieth century, the value of gulf pearls was greater than that of all other regions combined.48 The rapid growth of the gulf’s pearl production accompanied the global boom in consumption of gems and precious stones beginning in the 1870s and the rise of a class of consumers able and willing to pay for them. As global demand for pearls increased in the late nineteenth

Slaves of One Master

231

century, prices rose and production expanded from Venezuela and Mexico to Australia, Ceylon, and the Philippines. In the gulf, the value of pearl exports rose steadily throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1873 and 1906, the value of pearl exports from Bahrain increased more than 800 percent.49 The rise in pearl production required additional labor and made the importation of slave labor profitable. Originally, this labor came from East Africa; later it also came from Baluchistan and Persian Mekran. In the late nineteenth century, slave traders increasingly exported young boys from East Africa for work in the pearl industry. By the 1870s, the ratio of male to female slaves among captured slave dhows on the Arabian coast reversed historical trends, shifting overwhelmingly in favor of young males. In 1872, HMS Vulture captured a large slave dhow off the coast of Ras Al-Hadd at the entrance to the Gulf of Oman. It was carrying 169 captives from Pemba to Sur and Batinah; 124 were males, 45 were females, and the majority were children.50 HMS Philomel captured a dhow in 1884 that had 77 men, 14 women, 51 boys, and 12 girls aboard. That dhow was bound for Batinah from Dar es Salaam, having collected the slaves by canoe between Ras Ndege and Kunduchi in East Africa.51 In November 1885, HMS Osprey captured a forty-two-ton dhow around Ras Madraka in Oman bound from Ngao in East Africa to Sur with 49 male and 24 female slaves (8 men, 12 women, 41 boys, and 12 girls).52 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of any dhow captured off the Arabian coast carrying more female captives from East Africa than males. The assumptions of the “Islamic slavery” literature clearly do not apply to the gulf in this period, when slave imports overwhelmingly favored males over females and labor was focused on production. During the annual diving season, enslaved divers labored alongside free divers and spent months away from shore engaged in extremely difficult work.53 Diving began each morning and continued until sunset, with only an hour break in the afternoon. Pearling depended in large part on the relationship between the divers and pullers, who worked together in pairs. Divers descended to the sea floor with the aid of a heavy stone weight attached to a rope and fitted with a loop to the diver’s foot. With the aid of the hauler, the diver would slip his foot into the loop, inhale, and descend rapidly to the sea floor.54 Typical dives would take a diver to depths of between 50 and 80 feet and would last between one and two minutes. For as long as he could hold his breath, the diver collected oysters and placed them in a basket tied around his waist. Then, he would signal to the hauler that he was ready to resurface by tugging a second rope fastened around his waist. Divers would rest for only a few minutes before repeating the process.55 Diving crews heaped the oyster

232

matthew s. hopper

shells into a pile in the center of the boat and made no attempt to determine which divers collected which oysters. The shells were allowed to sit through the heat of the day and then overnight. Each morning the crews would sit around the pile of shells and, under the supervision of the na¯khudha (captain), pry open the oysters and search the smelly flesh inside for pearls. The process continued in this way for 130 days until the end of the season.56 In the pearl industry—just as in the date industry—free men and slaves worked side by side, but while free divers kept the proceeds from each pearl season, enslaved divers surrendered all of their earnings to their masters. But not even free divers were completely free in the gulf pearl-diving industry. Pearling captains and wealthy merchant boat owners controlled free divers via a credit system designed to ensure their loyal service year after year. Diving crews were consistently lent amounts in excess of their earnings in order to keep them indebted. Since debts were recorded in debt diaries, which illiterates could not read, captains and boat owners found ample opportunity for abuse and exploitation. Enslaved Africans and free men of African ancestry accounted for a large portion of gulf pearl divers. Captain E. L. Durand in 1878 noted that while most haulers in the gulf were bedouin or Persians, the divers were generally “sedees” (Africans) and sometimes “sedee domestic slaves.”57 Lorimer, in his comprehensive gazetteer of the gulf in 1907, stated that the divers were “mostly poor Arabs and free Negroes or Negro slaves; but Persians and Baluchis are also to be found among them, and in recent years, owing to the large profits made by divers, many respectable Arabs have joined their ranks.”58 Paul W. Harrison recalled in 1924 that many divers on the Trucial Coast were slaves, but “they do not number over one-half the divers.” “Most of these slaves are Negroes from Africa,” he explained. “A few are Baluchees from the Makran coast between India and Persia.”59 Charles Belgrave recalled that while most divers abstained from eating much during the dive season and were relatively gaunt, “the pullers were stalwart specimens; many of them were negroes with tremendous chest and arm development.”60 In 1929, the British senior naval officer in the gulf estimated that there were twenty thousand slave divers (roughly a quarter of the total) in the gulf in each season.61 Also in 1929, Bertram Thomas reported that a fifth of the “army” of thousands of divers that Batinah sent to the diving banks each year were enslaved.62

New Competition and the Collapse of the Gulf Economy Just as quickly as the expanding global economy created vibrant export industries in the gulf, it ushered in their demise. The gulf’s two leading industries collapsed in tandem in the late 1920s, both victims of competition from

Slaves of One Master

233

more developed countries, which used technology to mimic and exceed the gulf’s production. In 1902, David Fairchild, an agricultural explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Plant Industry, visited the gulf to acquire offshoots of the best varieties of dates for propagation in California. He visited Muscat, Bahrain, Basra, and Baghdad and collected specimens of the region’s best date varieties.63 More than three decades later, Fairchild was pleased to report that several of the varieties he brought from the gulf were being grown in the Coachella Valley in California around Mecca.64 After extensive study, the USDA determined that the best soil and climate for date production in the United States was in the Salton Basin in California. In 1905, water from the Colorado River, which was being diverted to the Imperial Valley for irrigation, broke through its canal system and produced a rush of water into the Salton Basin. The breach flowed for two years and formed the Salton Sea, now a permanent feature of the California landscape. The accidental flooding created the perfect environment for growing date palms.65 Paul Popenoe, a horticulturalist with a stake in a farm at Thermal, visited the gulf in 1912, purchased offshoots of the most desirable varieties, and brought back nine thousand more young date palms, including the fardh variety.66 When the trees procured from the gulf and several varieties from North Africa reached maturity a decade later, California began to replace the gulf as America’s primary source of dates. By 1914, two hundred thousand palms had been planted in the Coachella Valley in California.67 With an additional injection of cash from the Gillette Company in the 1920s and a flurry of speculation among Southern California landowners, the California date industry took off. For the gulf, the development of California’s date industry meant the loss of the region’s largest export market. Date exports to the United States declined precipitously after 1925 with the development of a domestic industry in California. As quickly as California dates destroyed the gulf date export market to the United States, the Japanese cultured pearl destroyed the gulf’s pearl markets. In 1894, a Japanese noodle-shop owner named Kokichi Mikimoto perfected the ancient Chinese practice of producing cultured pearls by inserting a spherical piece of mother-of-pearl into oyster shells and inducing the oyster to produce a pearl. Mikimoto leased a small island and began producing cultured pearls from oysters grown in cages. He received a ten-year patent on the process in 1896, and set a goal of producing one million pearls by 1902. His first crop of 4,200 semiround pearls was harvested in 1900 by a group of exclusively female employees, and he set out to market his new product to the world. Mikimoto proved to be a master of publicity. He invited Emperor Meiji’s popular cousin Prince Komatsu to visit his pearl-growing operation in 1900,

234

matthew s. hopper

and when the prince was selected by the emperor to represent the Japanese royal family at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, he presented some of Mikimoto’s pearls to the royal family, generating headlines in London and Paris. By 1905 he had one million oysters planted in his pearl beds, and his perfect cultured pearls began to enter the global pearl market in 1908. Mikimoto soon opened a store at London and appointed agents at Paris and New York.68 By 1913, Mikimoto had perfected the cultured pearl to the point that it could not be distinguished from natural pearls, and he offered his product at a quarter of the market price. He was known to say: “I want to live long enough to see the day when we have so many pearls we can sell necklaces for two dollars to every woman who can afford one and give them away free to every woman who can’t.”69 By the end of the First World War, cultured pearls made inexpensive pearl necklaces available to working-class women in Western countries. Pearl consumption rose, but demand for more expensive natural pearls declined sharply. The decline devastated the gulf, in addition to European dealers in natural (“oriental”) pearls. The value of gulf pearl production declined steadily from 1919 to 1929; then, with the onset of the Depression in 1929, the gulf’s pearl industry collapsed completely.70 After 1929, revenues from pearl exports were reduced to levels below even mid-nineteenth-century levels, and never recovered.

Conclusion There was little that was “Islamic” about the “Islamic slave trade” from East Africa to Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, the slave trade was driven—just as it had been in the Atlantic—by global economic forces. As demand for the gulf’s commodities rose, so did demand for the labor to produce these products. Western countries increased their demand for the commodities produced by slave labor in the gulf at the very moment they increased their pressure on the region to end the slave trade and slavery. The mass production of cultured pearls in Japan destroyed the pearl industry of the gulf. In Bahrain, the annual revenue from pearl exports in 1906 was over 12 million rupees, and the industry employed over 17,000 men and 900 boats. By 1936, pearl revenue was below 700,000 rupees, with 9,800 men from the island employed in the industry and 364 boats.71 Pearl captains and merchants who had formerly benefited from the labor of slave divers now found them burdens. Slaves were turned out in large numbers in areas hardest hit, such as Bahrain. In 1936, the British political agent at Bahrain reported the following story.

Slaves of One Master

235

An unusual attitude to slavery came to my notice not long ago. An old man in Hidd was talking to the Agency Medical Officer and mentioned that he was a slave. The Medical Officer said that this was quite impossible, so the old man went off and brought—his manumission certificate! The Medical Officer said that this document did not show that he was a slave at all, but on the contrary that he had been freed by the order of the Government whereupon the old man flew into a towering rage—“You lie! I know that it really says that I am the slave of so and so and it is proof that he must feed me—and no one shall cast doubt upon it!”72

The lives of enslaved divers like Ismail and his companions aboard HMS Hastings help us understand the influence of global economic pressures on the lives of the Africans who were caught up in the vicious process of enslavement in the western Indian Ocean. For Ismail and the thousands of Africans like him who were kidnapped to provide labor for the industries that boomed with the growth of global markets in the late nineteenth century, globalization was not an impersonal force, but a lived experience. When Sheikh Muhammad called the residents of the gulf “slaves of one master” in 1863, he could never have envisioned the rapid growth and sudden collapse that globalization would bring a few decades later, but his words aptly describe the stranglehold that global markets would come to have on the gulf and much of the world. For enslaved Africans like Ismail, whose story introduced this chapter, the conditions were particularly dire. Having been enslaved to produce products that later lost their demand, they were turned out to fend for themselves. Following the 1920s, the trade in slaves from East Africa to Arabia ceased. Until the exploitation of oil later in the twentieth century, the gulf’s enslaved and free populations lived together through an era of extreme poverty, and it is perhaps this common experience—and not religion, race, or culture—that best explains the differences between the legacy of gulf and Atlantic slavery for today.

Notes 1. Statement of Ismail bin Mubarak, Swahili, aged 40 years, recorded at the Political Agency, Bahrain (May 23, 1931), India Office Records (IOR), British Library, R/15/1/209. 2. Telegram from HMS Hastings, Henjam Radio, to Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, No. 1501 (March 30, 1931); “Summaries of Declarations of Refugee Slaves” (April 1931). IOR, R/15/1/209. 3. Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 271; Erik Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860–1970 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), 63.

236

matthew s. hopper

4. For conventional narratives, see Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989); Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). A notable exception is Y. Hakan Erdem’s account of agricultural and industrial slavery in the Ottoman Empire, especially in textile production in Bursa and sharecropping near Istanbul in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; see Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800–1909 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 1–17. 5. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey, 1987), 37–41; Robert G. Landen, Oman since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). 6. Donald Hawley, Oman and Its Renaissance (London: Stacey International, 1977); Mohamed Al-Fahim, From Rags to Riches: A Story from Abu Dhabi (London: London Centre of Arab Studies, 2004); F. A. Clements, Oman, the Reborn Land (New York: Longman, 1980); Sergey Plekhanov, A Reformer on the Throne: Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said (London: Trident, 2004). 7. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–62, 155–58. See also Ralph A. Austen, “The 19th-Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith (London: Cass, 1989). 8. Edward A. Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 20–38. 9. Captain Colomb, Slave Catching in the Indian Ocean (1873; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), 30. 10. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory; Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995). 11. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 35. 12. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World; Lewis, Race and Slavery; Bernard Lewis, “Other People’s History,” in Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Murray Gordon theorized that slavery in Arab countries was linked to a natural Arab disinclination for work. “Household slavery,” he wrote, “was an indispensable form of labor in Arab society, where the people were ill-disposed to doing menial work.” Arabs, he explained, were “too proud” to work as servants or “too independent in spirit to serve a master” (58). Ronald Segal explained, “Slaves in Islam were directed mainly at the service sector—concubines and cooks, porters and soldiers—with slavery itself

Slaves of One Master

237

primarily a form of consumption rather than a factor of production” (Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001], 3–4). Bernard Lewis stated that “the most important slaves” were “domestic and commercial, and it is they who were the characteristic slaves of the Muslim world” (Race and Slavery, 13–14). 13. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (New York: Cambridge University Press; reprint edition, 1993); Eric E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, reprint edition, 1994). 14. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978), 262. 15. Ralph A. Austen, “From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean: European Abolition, the African Slave Trade, and Asia Economic Structures,” in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 117–40. 16. R. Brunschvig, “‘Abd,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E. Lévi-Provençal, and J. Schacht, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:24–40; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (London: Oxford University Press, 2006); Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96–152. 17. For an excellent overview of the development of this historiography, see Ehud Toledano, “The Concept of Slavery in Ottoman and Other Muslim Societies: Dichotomy or Continuum,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study, ed. Miura Toru and John Edwards Philips (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000), 159–75, and Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 135–68. 18. Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 96–152; Ehud Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Toledano, Slavery and Abolition; Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire; Eve M. Troutt Powell, “Will That Subaltern Ever Speak? Finding African Slaves in the Historiography of the Middle East,” in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, ed. I. Gershoni, A. Singer, and Y. H. Erdem (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno, eds., Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010). 19. Gwyn Campbell, introduction to The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xix–xx; and Campbell, “Slavery in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Routledge History of Slavery, ed. Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard (London: Routledge, 2011), 56–61. 20. James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35–46, 73–87; Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Resat Kasaba, “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World Economy,” in The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, ed. Huri Islamoglu-Inan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 88–97; Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (New York: Tauris, 1993), 180–88.

238

matthew s. hopper

21. Matthew S. Hopper, “The African Presence in Arabia: Slavery, the World Economy, and the African Diaspora in Eastern Arabia, 1840–1940” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2006), 101–61. 22. William Gifford Palgrave, Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862–63 (London: Macmillan, 1883), 387. 23. Thomas Vernet, “Le Commerce,” Azania 28 (2003): 69–97; Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory, 48–49, 64–69. 24. See, for example, Robert Mignan, A Winter Journey through Russia (London: Bentley, 1839), 2:240–45; George Keppel, Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England (London: Colburn, 1827), 19–23. 25. J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908), 2:238–41, 489–90, 1058–77, 1382–1451; Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Working Paper Series no. 56 (September 2002), http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/ twps0056.html. By contrast, African Americans accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. population in the censuses of 1900 and 1910. 26. Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), and Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (New York: Tauris, 1993); Charles Issawi, “Middle East Economic Development, 1815–1914: The General and the Specific,” in The Modern Middle East, ed. Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury, and Mary C. Wilson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Victoria Bernal, “Cotton and Colonial Order in Sudan: A Social History, with Emphasis on the Gezira Scheme,” in Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), 96–118; José Morilla Critz, Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “‘Horn of Plenty’: The Globalization of Mediterranean Horticulture and the Economic Development of Southern Europe, 1880–1930,” Journal of Economic History 59, no. 2 (June 1999): 316–52. 27. Paul Popenoe, “The Distribution of the Date Palm,” Geographical Review 16, no. 1 (1926): 117–21. 28. Gilbert, Dhows, 33–36; Norman Robert Bennett, New England Merchants in Africa: A History through Documents, 1802 to 1865 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1965); Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory; Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 755–82. 29. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (New York: Routledge, 1992), 109–13, 136–37. 30. Calvin Allen, “Sayyids, Shets and Sulta¯ns: Politics and Trade in Masqat under the Al Bu¯ Sa’ı¯ d, 1785–1914” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1978), 140–56. 31. Oscar Willoughby Riggs, “The Fruit-Ships at New York,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 21, no. 5 (May 1886): 599. 32. Bertram Thomas, Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), 142.

Slaves of One Master

239

33. United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1894–1935. 34. United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 958. 35. David G. Fairchild, “Persian Gulf Dates and their Introduction into America,” USDA Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin no. 54 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903), 24. 36. “Turkistan Wins Date Race” New York Times, November 10, 1912. 37. John Craven Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj of Oman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 47–51. 38. “Report of Mr. Dawson, American Manager of the Iraq Date Company Following a Visit to the Batina in 1927,” IOR, R/15/1/460; see also Mandana E. Limbert, “The Senses of Water in an Omani Town,” Social Text 68 (Fall 2001): 35–55. 39. “The Word of Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman,” reprinted in Whitehead Consulting Group, Sultanate of Oman Economic Survey, 1972 (London: Harold Whitehead and Partners, 1972), appendix 2. 40. Thomas, Alarms and Excursions, 125–26, 142. 41. “Report of Mr. Dawson, American Manager of the Iraq Date Company.” 42. Thomas, Alarms and Excursions, 238. 43. Administration Report of the Political Agency, Muscat, for the year 1876–77, 79–82, CDR ND1/H. 44. Secretary to Government of Bombay to Political Resident, Persian Gulf, October 31, 1889, IOR, R/15/1/200; Maj. Saddler, “Report on visit to Sur” (April 1895, nos. 5–11), IOR, L/PS/20/C245, quoted in J. A. Saldanha, Précis of Maskat Affairs, 1892–1905 (Simla, 1906), pt. 1, 53. 45. S. B. Miles to E. C. Ross, December 7, 1885, IOR, L/PS/20/C246. 46. Political Agent, Muscat, to Political Resident, Persian Gulf, January 21, 1930, IOR, R/15/1/230. 47. Hopper, “African Presence in Arabia,” 162–218. 48. George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York: Century, 1908), 80. 49. Hopper, “African Presence in Arabia,” 195. 50. Senior Naval Officer in Persian Gulf (and Commander HMS Vulture) to Rear Admiral Arthur Cumming, Commander in Chief, East Indies, September 10, 1872, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Admiralty (ADM) 1/6230; Lt. C. M. Gilbert Cooper, “Capture of a Slave Dhow: Or the Vulture and Its Prey,” n.d., Lt. C. M. GilbertCooper Papers, National Maritime Museum, London (NMM), BGY/G/5. 51. Commander HMS Philomel to Commander in Chief, East Indies, October 15, 1884, ADM 1/6714. 52. Herbert W. Dowding, Commander HMS Osprey, to Rear Admiral Frederick W. Richards, Commander in Chief, East Indies, September 19, 1885, ADM 1/6758. 53. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, 1:2227. 54. Allan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad: An Account of Sailing with the Arabs in their Dhows in the Red Sea, around the Coasts of Arabia, and to Zanzibar and Tanganyika (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 393–96.

240

matthew s. hopper

55. E. L. Durand, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agent for the year 1877–78, 32, FO 78/5108; Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 1, and Villiers, Sons of Sinbad. 56. Charles Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 43. 57. E. L. Durand, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agent for the year 1877–78, 32, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Foreign Office (FO) 78/5108. On the use of the word Sidi, see Janet J. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 83. 58. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, 1:2228. 59. Paul W. Harrison, The Arab at Home (New York: Crowell, 1924), 88. 60. Belgrave, Personal Column, 44. 61. Senior Naval Officer, Persian Gulf Division, HMS Triad, to Commander in Chief, East Indies Station, September 12, 1929, no. 27G/56/1, IOR, L/PS/12/4091. 62. “Notes on the Slave Trade by Wazir Thomas, August 1929,” P. 7418/29, IOR, L/PS/12/4091. 63. Fairchild, “Persian Gulf Dates.” 64. David G. Fairchild, The World Was My Garden (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 226–44. 65. Roy Nixon, “First Dates Imported 78 Year Ago,” in Coachella Valley’s Golden Years: The Early History of the Coachella Valley County Water District and Stories about the Discovery and Development of this Section of the Colorado Desert, ed. Ole Nordland (Coachella, Calif.: Coachella Valley County Water District, 1968), 50–51. 66. Paul Popenoe, Date Growing in the Old World and the New (Altadena, Calif.: West India Gardens, 1913), xiv, 64, 92, 256. 67. W. M. Carne, “Notes on Date Culture in America with Some Consideration of its Possibilities in New South Wales,” Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, September 2, 1914, 805. 68. Robert Eunson, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1965). 69. Ibid., 23–24. 70. Hopper, “African Presence in Arabia,” 209–18. 71. Ibid., 216. 72. Political Agent, Bahrain, to Political Resident, Persian Gulf, January 16, 1936, IOR, R/15/1/226.

Contributors

Richard B. Allen is professor of history at Framingham State University, Framingham, Massachusetts. Edward A. Alpers is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Gwyn Campbell is professor of history and the Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History at McGill University, Montreal. William Gervase Clarence-Smith is professor of the economic history of Asia and Africa in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Lindsay Doulton recently completed her PhD in History (2011) at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, in partnership with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Janet J. Ewald

is associate professor of history at Duke University.

241

242

Contributors

Bernard K. Freamon is professor of law and director of the Program for the Study of Law in the Middle East and the Zanzibar Program on Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking at Seton Hall University School of Law. Robert Harms is the Henry J. Heinz Professor of History and African Studies at Yale University. Matthew S. Hopper is assistant professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. Mandana E. Limbert is associate professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York. Thomas F. McDow is assistant professor of history at Ohio State University. Abdul Sheriff is currently an independent scholar and recently served as executive director and secretary of the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute. Until his retirement in 1996, he was professor of history at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Index

Personal names beginning with “al-” or “el-” are alphabetized by the following part of the name. Abbas, Haji Abdul Qadir Muhammad, 152 Abbasid Caliphate, 4, 5, 65 Abd al-Khayr, 201–2 ‘Abduh, Muhammad, 70, 72, 85 Abolition: defining, 14; in Indian Ocean World, 34–36; Islamic law on, 73–74, 81–97; and maritime slave trade, 122–23; movement for, 8–12; plural abolitions, 68–73 Abolition Decree of 1897 (Zanzibar), 11–12 Abu Bakr, 62 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 24 Abyssinian Expedition (1867), 209 Aden: British control of, 52; migrant labor in, 209; population of, 208 African diaspora: as labor source for economic growth, 228–32; in

Middle East, 202–15, 223–40; racial discrimination against, 74; and slave trade, 224–28 Aga Khan III, 83–84 al-Aghbari, Said bin Muhammad, 160, 169–73, 178n27 Agrestic servitude, 28 Agricultural slaves. See Plantation labor Agriculture, Department of (U.S.), 233 Ahmed bin Sumayt, 72 Akbarabadi, Mawlana Sa‘id Ahmad, 84 ‘Ali, Mawlwi Chiragh, 83 ‘Ali, Sayyid Amir, 92; A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed, 82–83; Spirit of Islam, 82–83 Allen, Richard B., 9, 14, 16, 183 Alpers, Edward A., 2, 8, 15, 104, 115, 225

243

244

index

Ambar, Malik, 202, 214 Amin, Qasim, 86 Amur bin Swedan, 170, 178n27 Anderson, Clare, 33 Anglo-Dutch Treaty (1824), 54 Anglo-Egyptian Conventions (1877, 1895), 69 Anglo-Turkish convention for abolition of African slave trade (1880), 10 Antislavery: Royal Navy campaign, 101–19; treaties, 165–67 Anti-Slavery Society (Britain), 123 Arabian Peninsula: labor demand in, 225; slave trade in, 7, 68, 77n19 Artisans, 13, 205 Asiatic Articles of Agreement, 212 al-‘Aziz, Faysal bin ‘Abd, 92 al Aziz, Humaid bin Abd, 151 “Badges and incidents” of slavery, 74 Baer, Gabriel, 69 Bahrain: pearl diving in, 231, 234; slaves in, 4 Bankruptcy, 151–54 al-Banna, Hasan, 87 Baraka (slave), 167 Barghash bin Said al-Bu Saidi (sultan): and abolition, 10, 71, 72, 74, 122; and Islamic law on slavery, 74, 90; slaves of, 145, 164 al-Barwani clan, 170, 178n28 Beachey, R. W., 198n64 Belgrave, Charles, 232 Bencoolen, 189 Bengal, slave trade in, 190, 191 Benmilh, Abdelilah, 75n2 Bey, Ahmed, 73 Bhacker, Reda, 48, 122 Bhimani, Mowjee, 47 Bilal ibn Rabah, 62 Blunt, Wilfrid, 85 Bombay: British control of, 52; trade networks in, 47; Yasmeen (slave ship) taken to, 136–38

Bonded labor systems, 28–30, 32–34. See also Indentured labor; Slavery Bose, Sugata, 2–3 Bowen, H. V., 190–91 Braudel, Fernand, 2 Breach of Contract Act of 1859 (Britain), 35 Brindisi (ship), 221n84 Britain: abolition policies of, 2, 8–12, 32, 33, 34–36; in Indian Ocean World, 6, 45–58; and international economy, 29; as maritime power, 45; and Mascarene Islands, 9; population growth in, 27, 29 Briton, HMS, 112 Brunschvig, Robert, 89 Buckett (slave), 165 al-Bulaqi, Muhammad Ahmad, 86 Bureaus of Manumission (Egypt), 69, 70, 85 Burma, abolition policies in, 35 Burrows, Frederick, 112 Burton, Richard, 218n47 al-Busaidi, Sulayman bin Hamed, 163, 171, 173, 179n35 al-Busaidi, Turki bin Said, 122 al-Busaidi family, 47 Businesses of slaves and freed slaves, 14, 149–51 Cabral, Pedro, 5 Caledon Code (1809), 33–34 California, date farming in, 233 Campbell, Gwyn, 2, 12, 14–15, 23, 50, 66–67, 76n13, 218n46 Canning, Lord, 139n9 Cape Town, 46, 52, 203 Caravan routes, 67 Carter, Marina, 187 Caste social structures, 25, 28, 36 Ceylon: abolition policies in, 68; British control of, 46, 52; pearl diving in, 231 Challice, John, 113 Chattel slavery, 25, 28, 63–64, 192–93

Index Chatterjee, Indrani, 30 Chaudhuri, K. N., 2, 24 Cheng Yao-I (Cheng I), 53 Children: freeborn, 13, 14, 162; Islamic law on enslavement of, 81, 82, 86; and maritime labor, 205; and Royal Navy antislavery campaign, 109; as slaves, 68, 190 China: labor migration from, 30; and maritime slave trade, 31; population growth in, 27; trade with Britain, 52, 53; trade with East Africa, 4 Cholera epidemic, 132 Christian missions, 102–3, 105–11 Christie, James, 12 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 106–7 Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, 14, 15, 73, 81 Clients. See Patron-client relationship Closed bondage systems, 25 Clove plantations, 2, 6, 161, 192, 208–9 Cockburn, James, 105 Cockburn-Stewart, H., 101, 102, 114 Coffee, 51 Colomb, Philip, 113, 123; SlaveCatching in the Indian Ocean, 123 Colonialism: in Indian Ocean World, 34–36, 45–58; and Islam, 63; plural imperialisms, 65–68; and population growth, 26; and renaming of slaves, 108 Concubines, 13, 29–30, 72, 73 Constitution, Egyptian (1923), 78n38 Contract laborers, 183–84. See also Indentured labor Coolie trade, 185, 211–12 Cooper, Cecil Molyneux Gilbert, 117n24 Cooper, Frederick, 13, 65; Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, 13 Cornwallis, Lord, 189, 190 Coupland, Reginald, 162 Cowper, William, 190

245

Cox, Percy, 154 Cromer, Lord, 70 Curtis, George William, 67 Curzon, Lord, 48 Dala¯l (agents), 168 Dalmuk, Muhammad bin Ahmad, 150 Dannreuther, Tristan, 106, 108, 111–13, 115 Daphne, HMS, 114 Date farming, 16, 225, 226–32 Day, Matthew, 190 Death certificates, 134–36 Debt bondage, 28, 35–36 Delegalization, of slavery, 11–13, 72, 73, 79n62 Demographic transition theory, 26. See also Population growth Dependency, 14, 16, 25, 144, 160 Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters (Sulivan), 123, 136 Dhows, 3–6, 102, 138n1 Diaspora communities: as labor source for economic growth, 228–32; and maritime laborers, 212–13; in Middle East, 202–15, 223–40; racial discrimination against, 74; and slave trade, 224–28 Domestic slaves, 124, 125, 160 Dougherty, John, 106 Doulton, Lindsay, 11, 14, 15, 101 Dragon, HMS, 107 Dunn, Ross, 5 Durand, E. L., 232 Dutch East Indies, 33, 35 Earl, George Windsor, 52 East Africa: abolition policies in, 9; chattel slavery in, 25; population growth in, 27; slaves from, 191; slave trade in, 6–8, 224–25; trade with China, 4 East India Company: abolition exemption for territories managed by, 11; China’s trade relationship with, 53; and coffee

246

index

East India Company (continued) trade, 51; and Indian textiles trade, 47; and Islamic law, 82; in Madagascar, 216n17; and penal labor, 33; slave trade involvement of, 66, 193–94, 199n73, 203–4 Eaton, Richard, 12, 214–15 Eclipse, HMS, 109 Economic growth. See International economy Economic mobility, 143–79; of alAghbari’s freed slaves, 169–73; and insincere manumission, 165–67; and manumission deeds, 13, 160–79; and voluntary manumission, 162–65 Edward VII (king of England), 234 Egypt: abolition policies in, 32, 64, 68–69, 78n38, 84–88; imperialism in, 66; Islamic law in, 5, 84–88; maritime laborers in, 220n66; nationalism in, 70; slaves in, 66 Elites: abolition policies among, 34; and demand for slaves, 29; and freed slaves, 172; and insincere manumission, 166 Eltis, David, 188 Emancipation. See Freedom and freed slaves; Manumission Emancipation Act of 1833. See Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (Britain) Engagé system, 186 Ethiopia, abolition policies in, 32 Europe: and abolition policies, 33; and clove and ivory trade, 7; and international economy, 26; and maritime power, 3; and slave trade, 188; and voluntary manumission, 162. See also specific countries Ewald, Janet J., 11, 16, 200 el Fadl, Khaled Abou, 92 Fahmy, Mansour, 86 Fair, Laura, 172 Fairchild, David, 233 Farquhar, Robert, 33, 49, 192, 194

Fatma bin Khairi (slave), 178n27 Festival of the Dhow Countries, 3, 5 Flags, use of, 101–2, 115 Foodstuffs, maritime transport of, 51 Foster, William, 199n73 France: abolition policies in, 33, 35; indentured labor recruited by, 187; as maritime power, 45, 47; and Mascarene Islands, 1–2, 8–9; slave trade by, 188 Frank, Andre Gunder, 24 Freamon, Bernard K., 15, 61 Freeborn, 13, 14, 162 Freedom and freed slaves: of al-Aghbari, 169–73; and Christian missions, 105–11; economic and social mobility of, 160–79; in northwestern Indian Ocean, 202–15; as property owners, 169–70, 171; as Royal Navy’s goal for interception, 104; in trade networks, 173–75; working on slave ships, 131. See also Manumission Frere, Bartle, 11, 71, 123, 136 Fundi Warya bin Makabangi (slave), 170, 178n27 Garnet, HMS, 103–4, 106, 112 Gerbeau, Hubert, 193 Germany, population growth in, 27 Gharib walid Musa (slave), 168 al-Ghaythi, Arshad, 168 al-Ghaythi, Haramil bin Said, 169 al-Ghaythı¯, Twakali sarı¯h Haramil bin ˙ Sa‘ı¯d, 168–69 Ghazal, Amal, 70, 72 Gilsenan, Michael, 76n12 Glassman, Jonathan, 13, 14, 165; Feasts and Riot, 13 Globalization. See International economy Gordon, Murray, 236n12 Graham, Gerald, 52, 53, 54 Grant, Charles, 190, 191 Groom, Nick, 102 Guha, Sumit, 27

Index Hadrami network, 51 Hall, Gage, 192 Hamad bin Faisal, Sayyid, 149 Hamed bin Muhammad (Tippu Tip), 6–7 Hamed bin Thuwaini, 145 Hamerton, Atkins, 10, 52, 161, 166 Hamerton Treaty (1845), 10, 122, 123, 124 Hamud bin Muhammad, 90, 145 Harem women, 13, 29–30, 72, 73 Harms, Robert, 1 Harris, Joseph E., 102 Harrison, Paul W., 232 Hastings, HMS, 223, 235 Hastings, Warren, 189 Hawkins, Clifford W., 5; The Dhow: An Illustrated History of the Dhow and Its World, 5 Hazell, Alastair, 72 Heath, Leopold, 10, 104 Helal, Emad Ahmed, 75n2 Hidaya code, 82 Hilmi, Abbas, 69 Hjejle, Benedicte, 186 Hong Kong, British control of, 52, 53 Hopper, Matthew S., 8, 16, 223 Hull, Matthew, 121 Husayn, Dilawar, 83 Hussein, Haji Ali bin Haji, 155 Ibadi Empire, 90–92 Ibn Battuta, 5 Identification with master’s family, 168 Île Bourbon. See Mascarene Islands Île de France. See Mascarene Islands; Mauritius Imerina. See Merina kingdom Imperialism. See Colonialism Indentured labor, 14, 16, 33–34, 183–99, 208 India: abolition policies in, 35, 64, 68, 73; indentured labor from, 185, 186, 187, 208; Islam in, 5; and maritime slave trade, 31; population growth in, 27; slave trade in, 77n19

247

Indian Mutiny (1857–58), 82 Indian Ocean World: abolition in, 34–36; bonded labor systems in, 28–30, 32–34; colonialism in, 34–36, 45–58; and international economy, 26, 29; Islam as cultural commonality in, 5; maritime slave trade in, 30–32; in nineteenth century, 23–58; population growth in, 26–28; servitude and demand for labor in, 23–44; traditional forms of bondage in, 25. See also specific countries Indonesia: contract laborers from, 184; and maritime slave trade, 31; population growth in, 27; slaves from, 191 Industrialization, 26, 29, 69 Insincere manumission, 14, 165–67 International economy: and African diaspora in Arabia, 228–34; and European imperialism, 26; and Indian Ocean World, 26, 29; and labor demand, 23, 26 Iqbal, Muhammad, 84 Iran: African diaspora in, 74; imperial policies in, 65–66; and maritime slave trade, 31 Iraq: African diaspora in, 74; date farming in, 228, 229; slave rebellion in (869), 4, 78n34 Isa bin Thani, 150, 153 Islam: and colonialism, 63; as cultural commonality in Indian Ocean World, 5; and egalitarianism, 63; and voluntary manumission, 162–64, 210 Islamic law, 61–97; on abolition, 73–74, 81–97; and Egyptian abolitionism, 84–88; and Ibadi Empire, 90–92; and Muslim sense of history, 62–65; and plural abolitions, 68–73; and plural imperialisms, 65–68; and Shi‘i attitudes in Persia, 88–90; on slavery, 13; and South Asian abolitionism, 82–84 Isma’il (khedive), 69, 72, 74

248

index

Ismail bin Mubarak, 223 el-Ismaili, Sultan, 133 Ivory trade: with China, 4; freed slaves participating in, 174–75; in international economy, 7; and slave trade, 2, 6, 7, 50–51 al-Jabarti, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 84 Jabu bin Shamu, 154 Jamal al-Layl, Ahmad bin Sayyid Ahmed, 170 Jamal al-Layl clan, 171 Japan, pearl cultivation in, 233–34 Java: abolition policies in, 32, 191; British control of, 46, 52; population growth in, 27 al-Jenebi, Thabit bin Said bin Thabit, 145 Jeremie, John, 193 el-Jerradi, Hammoud, 132, 133 el-Jerradi, Salim, 133 Juma bin Khalifa, 150, 153 Juma bin Swedan (slave), 178n27 al-Kawakibi, Abd al-Rahman, 70, 72 Kha¯dim (slaves or servants), 168 al-Khalassi, Sheikh ‘Ali bin Msellum, 91 Khalil, Muhammad, 88 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, 83, 89, 92 Khan, Siddiq Hasan, 84 Khasif bin Ali, 151 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 89 Kifayatullah, Sayyid Muhammad, 84 Kilekwa, Petro, 107, 114 King-Hall, George, 106, 107 Kingon, Walter, 113 Kirk, John, 71 Kisabengo, 174 Komatsu (prince of Japan), 233–34 Korea, abolition policies in, 32, 35 Krapf, Johann Ludwig, 178n32 Labor demand: and African diaspora in Arabia, 228–32; and date farming, 227, 229; in Indian Ocean World,

23–44; and international economy, 23, 26, 225; and pearl diving, 227 Labor migration. See Indentured labor; Migrant labor Lascars, 206, 211 Lateen sails, 5 Lewis, Bernard, 81, 88 Limbert, Mandana E., 15, 120 Livingstone, David, 103, 123 Logistics of slave trading, 126–34 London Abolition Committee, 190 London Missionary Society, 50 London Treaty (1814), 52 Lorimer, J. G., 143, 227, 232 Lydon, Ghislaine, 162 Macpherson, John, 190 Madagascar: abolition policies in, 32, 49; British control of, 203; East India Company in, 216n17; indentured labor in, 186; independence of, 47; and maritime slave trade, 31; population growth in, 28; slaves from, 188, 191, 204 Madan, Arthur Cornwallis, 109 Maktub (slave), 178n27 Maktum, Said bin, 151, 152, 155 Malacca, British control of, 46 Manning, Patrick, 27 Manumission: deeds, 143–44, 167–69; and economic and social mobility, 13, 145–49; on grounds of ill-treatment, 158n1; insincere, 14, 165–67; and Islamic law, 67, 91, 210; at owner’s death, 164; patron-client relationships after, 14, 156; of Sultan bin Aman bin Abdullah, 145–49; in Zanzibar, 12, 13, 160–79 Maria Theresa dollars, 140n25 Maritime laborers, 202–15. See also Lascars; Seedies Maritime slave trade, 101–40; and abolitionist pressures, 122–23; bureaucracy of, 120–40; in Indian Ocean World, 30–32; logistics of,

Index 126–34; Royal Navy antislavery campaign, 101–19; Yasmeen capture, 120–38 Martineau, John, 123 Mascarene Islands: abolition policies in, 49, 191; British control of, 46; chattel slavery in, 25; French plantations on, 1–2; and insincere manumission, 165–66, 167; and maritime slave trade, 31; slave trade in, 8–9, 77n19, 188 al-Masudi, 4 al-Mauli, Talib bin Adbullah, 174 Mauritius: abolition policies in, 9, 11, 192; British control of, 46, 52; indentured labor in, 14, 184–85, 193; and insincere manumission, 166; and maritime slave trade, 31; slave trade in, 191 el-Mawali, Seyf, 133 Mawdudi, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la, 84, 92 Mbotela, James Juma, 108, 113, 115 McDow, Thomas F., 14, 16, 121, 160 McPherson, Kenneth, 54 Merina kingdom, 32, 33, 49–50, 192 Mgingira (slave), 168 Middle East: African diaspora in, 74; and maritime slave trade, 31. See also Arabian Peninsula; Persian Gulf; specific countries Middlemen, 133 Migrant labor, 185, 209. See also Indentured labor Mikimoto, Kokichi, 233–34 Miles, S. B., 230 Military slaves, 30, 68, 204, 214 Ming Dynasty, 45 Mirzai, Behnaz, 73 Monk, Thelonious, 61–62 Monogamy, 86 Monsoon winds, 3–4, 24 Moresby, Fairfax, 192 Moresby Treaty (1822), 9, 49, 90, 122, 166, 192

249

Mortality rates: on caravan routes, 67; for plantation slaves, 161; on Royal Navy antislavery patrols, 111–12, 134–36; on slave ships, 31 Mozambique: abolition policies in, 49; maritime laborers from, 207; Portuguese control of, 203; slaves from, 1, 188, 191; slave trade in, 50 Msabah (slave), 174 Mu‘awiya, 83 Mubruk Mubarak, 201, 214 Mughal Empire, 5, 66 Muhammad (Prophet), 62 Muhammad Ali, 7, 32, 66, 84 Muhammad bin Ahmed bin Dalmuk, 151 Muhammad bin Khalifa bin Nazar, 151 Muhammad bin Rashid bin Jorish, 150 Muhammad bin Thani, 227 Muhammad Shah, 88 al-Muharmi, Sultan bin Muhammad bin Habis, 171 Mumbai. See Bombay al-Mundhrı¯, Abdallah bin Ali bin Muhammad, 91, 167 Muslim Brothers, 87 Muslims. See Islam; Islamic law al-Na‘im, ‘Abdullahi, 87 Na‘ini, Muhammad Husayn, 89 Naming of slaves, 108, 168 Napoleonic Wars, 46, 206 Nepal, indentured labor from, 187 Netherlands: abolition policies in, 35; Cape Town controlled by, 203. See also Dutch East Indies Ng’ambo, 171 Nimtz, August H., 177n21 North, Frederic, 191 Oman: British control of, 48; date farming in, 228, 229; and ivory trade, 51; and Qawasim, 49; slaves in, 66; trade networks in, 47 Open bondage systems, 25

250

index

Orientalism (Said), 226 Osprey, HMS, 231 Ottoman Empire: abolition policies in, 32; imperial policies in, 66; slavery in, 12, 13–14, 226 Owen, W. F. W., 46 Palgrave, William, 227 Parwez, Ghulam Ahmad, 83 Paternalism, 108, 109 Patron-client relationship: and bonded labor, 13–14, 29; and freed slaves, 173; Islamic manumission creating, 163 Patterson, Orlando, 67 Pawnship, 28, 36 Pearls, 16, 210, 223, 226, 227–28, 230–32; cultured, 233–34 Pearson, Michael, 45, 54 Pemba: clove plantations in, 192; and maritime slave trade, 31 Penal labor, 33, 188–89 Penguin, HMS, 106 Perpetual Maritime Truce (1853), 48 Persian Gulf: abolition policies in, 64; imperialism in, 66; labor demand in, 225; manumission in, 143–44; piracy in, 47, 48; slave trade in, 10, 68, 77n19, 228; trade networks in, 8 Philippines: abolition policies in, 34; population growth in, 27 Philomel, HMS, 231 Piracy, 45–46, 53 Plantation labor: chattel slavery as, 25; demand for, 165–66, 225, 226; indentured, 185, 208; and manumission, 160–61; slaves vs. indentured laborers, 14 Plural abolitions, 68–73 Plural imperialisms, 65–68 Popenoe, Paul, 233 Population growth: in Aden, 208; in Indian Ocean World, 26–28; and labor demand, 23; in Zanzibar, 208, 218n47

Portugal: and ivory trade, 51; as maritime power, 45, 47, 203; and Mozambique slave trade, 50; penal labor used by, 33; and Royal Navy antislavery campaign, 8, 49; slave trade by, 188 Prestholdt, Jeremy, 177n20 Prize slaves, 33, 192 Prostitution, 30, 136 Pulayas (Pullers), 186 Qabus, Sultan, 92 Qasimi pirates, 47, 48 Qawasim, 46, 48, 49 Qing Dynasty, 53 Quasi abolitionists, 81 Quirk, Joel, 103 Qur’an, 63, 71, 83, 90, 163 Qutb, Muhammad, 87 Qutb, Sayyid, 87 Racial discrimination, 74 Radama I (ruler of Merina kingdom), 49, 192 Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 52, 191 Rajab (slave), 178n27 Raja bin Lakhu, 152, 154 Rajani, Maghanmal Lakhmidas, 154 Ramadan, 164 Ramiyya (slave), 91 Ranavolana (queen), 50 Ray, Rajat Kanta, 3 Razzaq, Khan Bahadur Abdur, 155 Red Sea: imperialism in, 66; maritime laborers in, 210; slave trade via, 77n19; and trade networks, 51 Reid, Anthony, 29–30, 76n12 Renaming of slaves, 108 Repression of Slave Trade Department (Egypt), 70 Réunion: contract laborers from, 184; indentured labor in, 14, 186; and maritime slave trade, 31; slave trade in, 191 Richardson, David, 103, 188

Index Rida, Muhammad Rashid, 70, 71, 72, 85–86; The Muhammadan Revelation, 71 Royal Navy antislavery campaign, 101–19; bureaucracy of, 120–40; and Christian missions, 105–11; domestic order on ships, 109; East Indies Command, 10; fleet for, 10; and Portuguese ships, 8; realities of, 111–15; representations of, 102–4; West Africa Squadron, 1, 191 Rumaliza, 91 Rural field hands, 13 Safavid Empire, 66 Sa‘id, Ahmad, 82 Said, Edward, 226 Said bin Muhammad, 169–70 Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi, Sayyid, 9, 47, 49, 52, 90, 122, 139n13, 164, 166, 173, 175n35, 192 Said bin Zahi, 150 Sailing ships, 5 St. Helena, 203 al-Salahi, Mohammed bin Tayeb, 126–28, 132 al-Salahi, Sulliman bin Mohammed, 129–30 Salama (slave), 225 Salih, Habib, 91 Salim bin Bu¯ru¯t, 170, 178n27 Salim bin Maktub (slave), 178n27 Salim bin Sultan of Sharjah, 223 al-Salimi, ‘Abdallah bin Hamid, 91 al-Saltana, Taj, 88 Salton Sea (U.S.), 233 Sarı¯h. (manumitted slaves), 168 Scarr, Deryck, 102, 198n64 Scott, David, 191 Seafarers, 202–15. See also Lascars; Seedies Seedies, 16, 202, 214. See also Sidis Segal, Ronald, 236n12 Servile labor, 12, 86, 87

251

Servitude and demand for labor, 23–44. See also Indentured labor; Slavery Seto, Malik, 202 Sewji, Jairam, 168, 170 Sexual slavery, 30. See also Concubines Seychelles, freed slaves in, 101, 114 Shafiq, Ahmad, 86 Shah, ‘Ali, 89 Shah, Riza, 89 Sharecropping, 35 Shari’a law. See Islamic law Shari‘ati, ‘Ali, 89 Sheil, Justin, 88 Sheriff, Abdul, 11, 13, 14, 15–16, 48, 121, 132, 143, 192, 198n64, 225 Shih Hsiang-ku (Shih Yang), 53 Shi‘i attitudes on slavery in Persia, 88–90 Shorkah bin Omah, 173 Sidis, 202, 211, 214. See also Seedies Singapore: British control of, 46, 52; and maritime slave trade, 31; sexual slavery in, 30 Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean (Colomb), 123 Slave rebellions, 4, 78n34 Slavery: bonded labor systems, 28–30, 32–34; categories of, 13; defining, 12–14; and economic and social mobility, 143–79; and Islamic law, 61–97; maritime slave trade, 101–40; as patron-client relationship, 13–14; as survival strategy, 28. See also Slave trade Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (Britain), 1, 11 Slave soldiers, 30, 68, 204, 214 Slave trade: and African diaspora in Arabia, 224–28; coolie trade, 185; logistics of, 126–34. See also Maritime slave trade; Slavery Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807 (Britain), 1, 8 Smith, Adam, 29 Smith-Dorrien, Lieutenant, 109

252

index

Social mobility, 143–79; of al-Aghbari’s freed slaves, 169–73; and businesses operated by slaves, 149–51; and insincere manumission, 165–67; and manumission, 145–49; and manumission deeds, 13, 160–79; of slaves, 13; and voluntary manumission, 162–65 Somalia: abolition policies in, 34; manumission in, 91; and maritime slave trade, 31; Somali maritime workers, 211–13 Somerset case (1772), 117n16 Songoro (slave), 167, 175 South Asia: fluidity of slavery in, 214; Islamic law and abolitionism in, 82–84; and ivory trade, 51. See also specific countries South China Sea, 53 Southeast trade winds, 24 Speke, John Hanning, 164 Square sails, 5 Stanley, Henry Morton, 123 Steam vessels, 202, 211–12, 214 Steere, Edward, 105 Stockreiter, Elke, 168 Strait of Malacca, 52, 53 Sudan: abolition policies in, 35; Muslim Brothers in, 87 Suez Canal, 8, 52, 209, 224, 228 Sufism, 82, 91 Sugar plantations, 8–9 Sulivan (Sullivan), George Lydiard, 105, 107–8, 114, 123, 136, 139n16; Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters, 123, 136 Sultan bin Aman bin Abdullah, 143–59; bankruptcy of, 151–54; business of, 14, 149–51; end of career, 154–57; manumission of, 13, 145–49; as slave, 145 Sulu Empire, 67 Sumatra, population growth in, 27 “Sun” letters, 134, 136 Sunni Muslims, 48, 88

Swahili coast: abolition policies in, 9; chattel slavery in, 25; slaves from, 191. See also East Africa Swedi, Said bin Abeid, 151 Swift (ship), 183–84 Tabandeh, Sultanhussein, 89 Tabataba‘i, Sayyid Muhammad, 89 Tagh, Hamess Wodin, 164 Taha, Mahmud Muhammad, 87 Taimur bin Faisal, 229 Taleqani, Sayyid Mahmud, 89–90 Temperley, Howard, 11 Thailand, abolition policies in, 32 Thani bin Khalaf (Khalifah), 145–46, 154 Thetis, HMS, 113 Thomas, Bertram, 229, 230, 232 Times of India, on Yasmeen case, 124 Tinker, Hugh, 185 Tippu Tip (Hamed bin Muhammad), 6–7 Toledano, Ehud, 12, 13–14 Trade networks: freed slaves in, 173–75; and maritime power, 46; and monsoon winds, 4; and slave trade, 6–8 Tramp steamers, 212, 221n84 Transatlantic slave trade, 1, 188 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 188 Treaties, 165–67. See also specific treaties Treaty of London (1814), 52 Trucial Coast, 48 Tsiomeko (queen), 173 al-Tunisi, Sheikh Muhammad bin ‘Umar, 84 Tunisia, abolition policies in, 64 al-Turabi, Hasan ‘Abdallah, 87 United Missions to Central Africa (UMCA), 105

Index United States: cloves and ivory exports to, 7; date demand in, 228–29; date farming in, 233; population growth in, 27 Urban wage laborers, 13 Voluntary manumission, 162–65 Vulture, HMS, 117n24, 120, 123, 231 Wahhabis, 48, 66, 84 Wakı¯l (representatives), 168 Warren, James Francis, 67 Watson, James, 25 West Africa Squadron, 1, 191 Wild Swan (ship), 200, 201, 213 Wills, 164 Wink, André, 24, 66, 67 Women: as domestic slaves, 29–30; as freed slaves, 70; and Islamic law, 70, 86; manumission, influence of, 165; and maritime labor, 205; on Royal Navy antislavery patrol ships, 114 Worden, Nigel, 34 World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), 11

253

Yasmeen (slave ship), 120–38; in Bombay, 136–38; capturing and documenting, 123–26; and death certificates, 134–36; logistics of slave trading, 126–34 Yemeni maritime workers, 211–13 Zanzibar: abolition policies in, 10, 11–12, 32, 68, 71–72; British control of, 47–48; cholera epidemic in, 132; clove plantations in, 2, 6, 192; date exports from, 228; Festival of the Dhow Countries in, 3, 5; insincere manumission in, 165–67; manumission in, 12, 13, 160–79; maritime laborers from, 207; and maritime slave trade, 31; population of, 6, 208, 218n47; property ownership in, 172; slave trade in, 6, 122–23; treaty with Britain banning exports of slaves, 10; voluntary manumission in, 162–65 Zaribas (fortified trading settlements), 7 Zheng He, 45 Zia ul-Haq, 84 al-Zubayr Pasha, 7