European Slave Trading, Abolitionism, and “New Systems Of Slavery” in the Indian Ocean

Richard B Allen

doi:10.5130/portal.v9i1.2624

Abstract

Recent scholarship on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean highlights the need to explore structural connections between pre- and post-emancipation migrant labour systems in the colonial world. Europeans purchased and transported a minimum of 431,000-547,000 slaves of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian origin to destinations in the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1850. These data, coupled with recent research on European abolitionist activity in the region and the movement of convict and indentured labourers throughout and beyond this oceanic basin, point to the development of an increasingly integrated global movement of migrant labour during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Highlights

In April 1827, the captain of the Dutch brig the Swift retained Mahomet, a native of Surabaya on the north coast of Java, to recruit workers from the countryside around the city
‘free’ from ‘unfree’ labour during an era that witnessed the demise of the legal British and French slave trades, the abolition of slavery in the British and French empires, and the emergence of a purported ‘new system of slavery’ that led to the migration of millions of indentured African, Asian, and other non-European labourers throughout the colonial plantation world and beyond during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
The ambiguities surrounding the status of the Javanese men and women on the Swift are an early illustrative case in point. These individuals apparently knew what they were doing when they agreed to work as wage labourers in Singapore or Batavia and did so of their own accord

Summary

Introduction

In April 1827, the captain of the Dutch brig the Swift retained Mahomet, a native of Surabaya on the north coast of Java, to recruit workers from the countryside around the city. Another consequence is a frequent failure to examine other important aspects of the indentured experience such as the place and activities of women in these systems, the role of gender in shaping local socio-economic relations, and the extent to which indentured workers exercised agency on their own behalf.[7] A review of studies of these labourers in Australasia (Shlomowitz 1982; Graves 1993; Shineberg 1999), the Caribbean (Adamson 1972; Mandle 1973; Schuler 1980; Look Lai 1993; Laurence 1994; Hoefte 1998; Kale 1998), South Africa (Tayal 1977; Richardson 1984), the South Pacific (Gillion 1962; Mayer 1963; Lal 1983), and Southeast Asia (Jain 1970, 1984; Breman 1989; Ramasamy 1992) highlights an attendant failure to view the indentured experience in individual colonies in larger global and comparative contexts (Allen 2001b).

Results

Conclusion