Traders and Labourers

If there was a concentration of focus in mid-twentieth- century professional histories of the Indian Ocean it lay in debates about how to characterise the trading world of this sea.

For Das Gupta, the impact of Europe was said at first to be mini­mal. Rather the resurgence of ports and communities was tied to the restructuring of inter-Asian trade with the rise of newly centralised poli­ties - such as Travancore. Accordingly, ‘the maritime empire of Portugal gradually became a part of the structure of medieval Asian trade’ and the Dutch who followed, ‘carried on trade much as any Asian merchant with a substantial capital to invest would have done’.^[115] For Das Gupta, though the British played a role in explaining the end of this story, he was as keen to trace, for instance in his work on Surat, the breakdown of Indian polities, the changing profitability of trade and the impoverish­ment of merchant communities. In locating local agency, in contrast to Chaudhuri’s quantification and systematisation, Das Gupta turned to the human face of trade. In the case of Surat, Mulla Abdul Ghafur stood as a gauge of the whole: a ship-owner, merchant and Bhora, who might be compared in worth to a European company and who turned against the Dutch in the late seventeenth century by declaring a crusade against the firangis for the piracy and plunder of Indian ships, including his own and pilgrim ships too.^[116]

As he stretched back in time and filled out his schema, Chaudhuri took up the impact of Vasco da Gama and wrote of the Portuguese desire for systematic control of the spice trade, connected to the cartaz system of passes issued to Indian ships and ‘redistributive enterprise’, which was then followed by the Dutch who were drawn to South Asia for its cottons and also indigo, saltpetre, silk, cinnamon and pepper.

Despite their differences over the dynamic oftransition to European rule and the reasons for a resurgence in trade at the advent of the Europeans, both these scholars shared a commitment to the Indian Ocean world as a unit. Drawing on world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, and allegedly going beyond Braudel to a purer kind of structuralism, Chaudhuri wrote of a ‘life cycle’ in the capitalist world economy from the ‘rise of Islam to 1750’ linking ‘Indian ocean civilisations’. The equa­tion here pivoted on the spread of Islam from Alexandria to Canton, but also the migration of ‘nomads from Central Asia’ who founded Eurasian empires and the extending reach of China to the Indian Ocean.^[118] It was summarised as the combination of ‘Islam, Sanskritic India, the socie­ties of southeast Asia, and finally Confucian China’.^[119] Meanwhile, Das Gupta wrote of a ‘high medieval’ Indian Ocean. Picking up the resil­ient role played by merchants, he cast the period from 1500 to 1800 as an ‘age of partnership’.^[120] Relatedly, Southeast Asian historiography has presented the region as experiencing an ‘age of commerce’ from 1400 to 1650 followed by de-commercialisation, while others have looked to 1400 to 1800 as an ‘Asian age’, where global trade pivoted on the Indian ocean.^[121]

If the classification of the Indian Ocean as a terrain of globalisation, grew out of work on India, recent approaches seek to break it down into granular detail, moving away from the ‘system’ of the Indian Ocean.

Yet stretching chronology is not the only route. Another related method comes from shifting to new geographies and smaller seas. In the Bay of Bengal, for instance, prior connections were transformed but not in a singular fashion in the period after the ‘age of commerce’. For the second half of the seventeenth century saw an intensification of com­mercial relations with China, arising out of agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia.^[124] This intensification went together with a disconnection of the Malay courts from northern Indian Mughal ports as a result of the encroachment of European corporations. But Muslims from Southern India, such as the Maraikkayar, or indeed Afghans, connected the sub­continent to southeast Asia. At the northern end of the Bay of Bengal, Arakan and Pegu ceased to be points of transit between India and Southeast Asia turning to their hinterlands. The Dutch made inroads by taking Makassar or Banten, at the end of the seventeenth century, but further to the west their control continued to be less pronounced. Eric Tagliacozzo takes the story forward: ‘Well into the seventeenth century Southeast Asian rulers on the whole had to be much more concerned with their own internecine struggles than with European rivalry, but by the 1760s Anglo-Dutch competition in the region (punctuated by British demands for free trade) launched a new spectre of territorial conquest.’^[125]

A similarly layered story is now emerging out of the Persian Gulf.

Slaving in the Gulf takes us neatly to a related theme of debate in Indian Ocean studies. If Chaudhuri and Das Gupta were operating in the shadow of Mediterranean historiography, the push and pull of the Atlantic is evident in the contest over characterisations of labour in the Indian Ocean. The field began with an insistence that Indian Ocean slav­ery was distinct in form and character to the Atlantic. Accordingly, the difference between freedom and unfreedom was blurred in the Indian Ocean, and most labourers entered slavery through indebtedness. The range of work undertaken by slaves was said to be wider than in the Atlantic and often non-agricultural: ‘porters in Imperial Madagascar could sometimes earn an income that made them the envy of ordinary non-slaves’.^[128] This meant that major rebellions were exceptions and sought to reform rather than overthrow bondage.

Different work seeks to multiply the kinds of slavery in particular locales. Take for instance the Cape Colony. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cape, the rise of a capitalist order under the Dutch East India Company depended on large numbers of slaves brought from across the Indian Ocean, from Madagascar and Mozambique, Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Africa. Yet in popular memory this diversity was often lost, with the application of unitary labels such as ‘coloured’ or the essentialisation of ‘Cape Malay’, effacing the variety of people that lay beneath such categories. Contrary to the view of those who wish to qualify the extent of coercion experienced by slaves in the Indian Ocean: ‘the isolation of many farmsteads in a society in which male slaves greatly outnumbered male colonists led to a level of control and coercion which at local levels could be violent and extreme’.

Thinking with the 1830s, allows another lineage for debates about slavery in the Indian Ocean and one which precedes the push and pull of Mediterranean and Atlantic historiography. In this period, humanitari­ans questioned whether Indian indentured labour constituted a new kind of slavery. More than one million Indian indentured labourers serviced plantations such as sugar, coffee, cocoa, rubber and tea in the period between 1826 and 1920. The comparison with slavery echoed in histo­riographical terms down into the 1970s, most notably in Hugh Tinker’s A new system of slavery (1974), generating ‘a degree of conceptual com­placency’.^[135] In this framework labourers were victimised like slaves and they filled the gap left by slavery in the Caribbean, and a further revision urged that the model of their contracts paralleled the use of European indentured servants in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and saw rather the exercise of some consent.^[136] Yet it is now clear that the test case for indentured labour was not in the Atlantic, but Mauritius, the colony that received the largest number of indentured labourers through the entire period: Mauritius has seen a concentra­tion of historical scholarship on indenture.^[137] Here South Asian models of slavery, caste and agricultural bondage fed into indenture. In addition, emerging work shows how the East India Company had experimented with the use of Chinese labour in the late eighteenth and early nine­teenth century, via Penang and Canton and stretching to St Helena and Trinidad, establishing a template for South Asian indenture. This once again stretches the history of labour practice in the Indian Ocean further east rather than into the Atlantic.

Instead of comparing and contrasting Atlantic slavery and indenture, newer work brings to light the intermediate spaces between types of labour: recovering freed slaves and apprentices, the migratory patterns, ship-board journeys, gendered lives and ‘subaltern voices’ of indentured labourers and lascars and convicts.^[138] The turn away from discussions of consent, rights and victimhood towards discourse, governance, experi­ence and culture has allowed the intriguing argument that convicthood and indenture operated in a shared mental world for Indians: the ocean journey was kala pani or black water, denoting caste pollution, through the necessity for shared eating and living on ships. The use of this term to describe indentured journeys out of India came via its currency as a descriptor of Indian convict transportation.^[139] From a different per­spective, seeking not to blur categories but to work beyond the slavery/ indenture dichotomy, Megan Vaughan’s history of labour in eighteenth­century Mauritius ends with a recovery of apprenticeship, where slaves were tied to their masters after abolition in 1834 for six years and then became small-holders of land, before becoming a marginalised or ‘cre- olised’ community, in the midst of the surge of numbers of Indian inden­tured labourers and the forgetting of African and Malagasy pasts. Just as with work on the Cape, this is an attempt then to pluralise the cultural spaces of labour - in a landscape where indentured historiography can easily cover too much ground or be taken to stand for everything.^[140]

In place of a concern with quantification, and reminiscent of how Das Gupta focussed on individuals in the history of trade, these approaches recover what has recently been termed ‘subaltern biography’ critically set in maritime context. The ability of workers to move between cat­egories and to exercise creative agency, shifting from docks to ships and from farms to ports is now of interest.^[141] Spatial and cultural geogra­phy is being turned inside out. Historians are both breaking away from or moving towards the Atlantic or shifting histories of connection by swapping nodal points in the network, replacing India with China, or emphasising South Asia instead of Southeast Asia, or re-centring Africa instead of South Asia as a cultural resource for labourers’ memory. The plantation is seen less as a singular complex, while the sea is coming into closer view as a scape of labour. Across the Indian Ocean and elsewhere lascar sea-men manned ships, ranging from Pacific whalers to convict transportation ships to Bengkulu, Penang and the Andaman islands or ships of war in the Napoleonic wars. In the age of sail, this included vessels which were East Indiamen and ‘country’ or India-built ships. In the age of steam and into the world wars, the Indian maritime worker, recently described as ‘India’s earliest global workers’ travelled across the world, navigating and defining race, nation and empire and interrogating the terms of globalisation.^[142] It is their political voice and protest which is proving to be of recent interest: between the 1780s and the Indian Rebellion there were about thirty serious disturbances aboard merchant vessels which could be classed as lascar mutinies.^[143] More spectacular in turn was the sight of ships burning in Indian ports as the reported result of lascar action in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1847, in a list of burnt ships appeared this entry:

The ship Bombay Castle, Capt. Frazer, burnt off Sangor Island, 27th May 1846, burnt till daylight, captain, passengers, and most of the crew saved by vessels in company. - Bound to China; cargo cotton, fire discovered about midnight; every reason to believe the loss of this fine ship was owing to the diabolical conduct of some the crew. Several lives lost - Lascars took a raft.^[144]

To summarise, those who write the economic history of commodities such as Indian cloth or Persian Gulf pearls or labourers on the move, have sought at times to unite the Indian Ocean as a system, or to unify the trades and labourers of this ocean, but others have pulled the ocean apart, dividing it and its peoples, insisting on the need to decentre par­ticular networks, to return to a focus on violence and rebellion, or in turn to look out from the Indian Ocean to newer routes. The excitement of interpreting a source like that above could stand for the broader ques­tions in Indian Ocean histories of trade or labour: colonial vision and impact or plural geographies, agencies and times? There is in accounts of trade and labour, a characteristic restlessness, evident elsewhere too in Indian ocean histories.