Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants

Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914

A. Stanziani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137448446
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Slaves, convicts, and unfree immigrants have traveled the oceans throughout human history, but the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has narrowed our understanding of modernity. This provocative study contrasts the Atlantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex relationships in the Indian Ocean in the long 19th century.

1

Colonial Studies, Area Studies, and the Historical Meaning of the Indian Ocean

To understand the scope and aim of our study, it is important to discuss the main approaches and historiographies to which this book refers. We will then go on to present an overview of the environment, trade, shipbuilding, and institutions in the Indian Ocean to provide the background for the notions and practices of labor to be analyzed.

Conventional historiography neglected the importance of the Indian Ocean and put the accent first on the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic as the core of modernization. Pierre Chaunu dismissed the idea of the Indian Ocean as a unit,¹ while Braudel contrasted the fragmentation of the IOW with the unity of the Mediterranean.² Kirti Chaudhuri was the first to claim the unity of the IOW, but he argued that this unity was destroyed by the arrival of the Europeans and situated its breakup in the mid-eighteenth century.³ Sanjay Subrahmanyam has correctly observed that this interpretation opposes two static, ahistorical models, one before and another after European colonization. As such, these analyses prove to be deterministic and cannot account for historical changes.⁴ A discussion of Indian Ocean unity generally turns into an investigation of the respective roles played by the environment, religion, and markets. Some scholars have linked the unity of the IOW to the monsoons,⁵ others have insisted on the role of Islam,⁶ while followers of the world-system approach point to markets.⁷ This book will give these variables due consideration, but it aims to escape from traditional “colonial studies” as well as “area studies.” Colonial studies present a major limitation: they take colonial empire for granted and focus instead on evaluating the level of dependence and hierarchies and how they evolve over time. From this standpoint, anticolonial and subaltern studies reproduce the paradigm of classical “imperialistic” and liberal studies but simply reverse their main argument. In the wake of Gramsci, the authors claiming to adhere to subaltern studies maintained first of all that language was a component of power and a factor in hierarchies, and second, that subaltern classes and colonized peoples were not necessarily passive in their interactions with the colonizers. Hence, the British exercised their power in colonial India by controlling and modifying the language, as the case of the Zamindars clearly illustrates. The Zamindars, who were income tax administrators under the Mughals, were considered landowners by the British. This “translation” subsequently paved the way for British territorial control.

The same process can be easily discerned in other contexts, and indeed translations, the media, the circulation of legal rules, and the language used by international organizations have all been designated as instruments of power and domination of the “South” by the “North.” Notions such as market, trade, family, child, property, inheritance, peasant, worker, and so on thus acquired specific local features that were irreducible to a more general model.⁸ No doubt this approach was more nuanced and differentiated and allowed for a more complex arborescence of societies and cultures than monolithic analyses in terms of economic growth, progress, and “the rise of the West.” From then on, dependence became decompartmentalized, along with the history of elites and dominant groups.

These approaches are not without problems, however, starting with how they view the interaction between elites and subaltern groups. Fred Cooper has highlighted the fact that Africans, Indians, and other colonized populations were far less passive than subaltern studies would claim, in spite of their Gramscian premise. Colonized peoples had significant impact on their colonizers, whose violence and ambition did not always reflect real control over the colony.⁹

Subaltern studies and many other historical approaches encourage us to avoid thinking about non-European entities exclusively in terms of our own European categories. That is fine in theory, but in practice? Where is the boundary line separating Europe from other worlds? In the case of the Indian Ocean, in particular, when can we use European categories and when should we reject them? Were there differences between the state, the law, a profit-based economy, and economic ethics in, say, eighteenth-century India and Europe? Were those values homogeneous throughout an area called “Europe” or “India”?

Economic knowledge and legal models circulated along with people and goods. This circulation led not only to greater similarity among systems, but also to differentiation and hierarchies of areas and countries. Needham claimed that China was actually ahead of every other country in mapmaking. Yet we know Jesuit, Mongol, and Manchu travelers all contributed to Chinese geographical knowledge. There was an interweaving of influences even between East and West, with transmission in one direction of Renaissance cartography to China and in the other direction of geographical information from East Asia to Europe.¹⁰ All the same, when Ricci’s world map was brought to Japan in 1603, it set the stage for Japanese study and eventual production of world maps. At the same time, there is evidence of a great deal of borrowing and assimilation of world knowledge stemming from Japanese contacts with the Dutch.¹¹ Arriving in the archipelago from the Indian Ocean, like the Portuguese, the Dutch mapped the Maldives and Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, and Bali. However, it was not until the Magellan expedition that this zone became part of the Western geographical imagination. Encounters between civilizations undoubtedly played a major role, but they did not keep the European powers from trying to produce knowledge in order to establish hierarchies. In this case, mapping became the favorite tool for imposing a European conception of sovereignty and French or English notions of free trade, free labor, and so on were used to legitimize imperial hierarchies.

With this as our starting point, we must avoid another questionable approach (from the colonial point of view): so-called area studies. In universities, the Indian Ocean is often divided up into separate areas (Chinese studies, Southeast Asian studies, Indian studies, African studies), which reflect parochial academic stakes and interests far more than historical realities. The designation of well-defined area studies is to a certain extent a burdensome legacy of the colonial period, partly due to Orientalism and Oriental studies in the West and partly a result of growing nationalistic tendencies in China, India, and several African countries. All these phenomena would require lengthy discussion of historiographies, values, and polities in their local, regional, and transnational dimensions, which is beyond the scope of this book and has already dealt with elsewhere.¹² Instead, we identify areas and spaces according to their historical meanings. Chaudhuri identified four civilizations in the Indian Ocean—Islamic, Sanskritic Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian¹³ but he “forgot” East Africa. Generally speaking, the territories as well as the social and political hierarchies of imperial areas changed over time. Thus, the area between East Africa and China was surely connected in the fifteenth century, well before the arrival of the Portuguese. Some historians claim the fragmentation of the IOW took place after 1800, due to the increasing political and military presence of Europeans and conflicts among them.¹⁴ The question of IOW unity therefore depends not only on the period under investigation but also on the main variables we take into consideration—to begin with, the environment.

Environment and Historicity

Recent historiography on the Indian Ocean often quotes Braudel and starts from historical geography and the environment to identify the specificity of the IOW.¹⁵

Indeed, monsoon, cyclones, and the great variety and abundance of river landscapes along an immense coastline running from the Zambezi in East Africa to the Irrawaddy and the Mekong are all distinctive features of the IOW; we might add river instability, volcanoes and earthquake intensity. Various subregions can also be distinguished.

In contrast to trade wind regions like the Atlantic, the pattern of monsoons is quite regular. These were the winds that largely determined when and where people could sail. Regional specificities have to be considered as well. The northeast monsoon starts in November and one could leave the Arabian coast at that time and sail at least as far as Mogadishu. However, the eastern Arabian Sea has violent tropical storms in October and November, so for a voyage from India to the coast, it was best to leave in December. By March the northeast monsoon is beginning to break up in the south, and by April the prevailing wind is from the southwest. This was the period to sail from the coast to the north and east. During the northeast monsoon, November to April, a weak counterclockwise gyre produces a westward current. During the southwest monsoon period, this current reverses, going east. In the far south we are out of the monsoon system and the southwest monsoon becomes weak and unpredictable.

The situation is different between the Red Sea and western India. Ships left Calicut in January and arrived there from the Red Sea between August and November. Moving west, the western coast of Malaysia becomes a lee shore during the southwest monsoon, making it very difficult to sail or land. The monsoon pattern dictated the passage from the west of the ocean, for example the Red Sea, to Malacca in the Far East. This voyage could not be completed in one go; at least one stop was necessary and it was most likely in southern India. Yet access from Bengal to the coast of China, Siam, and Anam was possible through the Malacca and Sunda straits. In the seventeenth century, Indian ships used the Sunda Strait, whereas Arab ships preferred to travel through Malacca. Indeed, the China Sea has a monsoon pattern that does not exactly correspond to the timing of the Western Indian Ocean. Ships on the way to and from Canton or ports further north needed a lengthy stay in Southeast Asia before favorable winds set in. Chinese junks trading with Malacca from the beginning of the fifteenth century followed the mainland coast to Indochina and then crossed over to the Malay Peninsula.

A fourth area is located south of the monsoon region; it connects the Cape of Good Hope to southern Madagascar. In this region, as in the previous ones, ocean currents combine with winds to create constraints as well as opportunities for travel by sea. Off the East African coast, during the northeast monsoon from November to April, the weak counterclockwise gyre produces a westward current that travels as fast as one knot. During the southwest monsoon, this current reverses, going east and then north along the coast of Somalia. Below the monsoon zone, there is a steady anticyclonic gyre and the south equatorial current flows west and divides at Madagascar. One arm goes north to Madagascar, then south between Madagascar and Africa. The other branch goes south to the east of Madagascar, then curves back toward South India. Winds and currents largely influenced seafaring as well as piracy, trade and fisheries.¹⁶

At the same time, in pointing out the differences and specificities of the IOW and its subregion, we must not fall into the trap of environmental determinism. First of all, the environment itself evolves and the same is true for our understanding of it. Let us take the example of cyclones, which played a major role in shaping the history and images of the Indian Ocean. Cyclones are also crucial variables in this history insofar as they affected shipbuilding, trade, and emigration, as its cause (damage to crops, famines), during the voyage and upon arrival at destination (lack of food and wages). The southwest area of the Indian Ocean, located in the intertropical zone, is one of the world’s seven cyclogenesis basins. Tropical cyclones make their appearance at the beginning of the austral summer, around November 15. The cyclone season generally lasts until the 15th of April.¹⁷ Winds can reach up to 300 kilometer per hour, with the released energy quadrupling when wind speed doubles. The northeastern and extreme southern zones are the most exposed.¹⁸ The first problem is that of obtaining sufficiently accurate information on the cyclones. Even today, the various weather stations name and classify hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons in different ways.¹⁹ It is therefore easy to see why there was so much uncertainty and inaccuracy regarding cyclones in the nineteenth century. The scientific identification of tropical hurricanes developed at a slow pace. In the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, most information came from travel narratives and nautical logs. At the time, meteorologists were seldom taken seriously in France or in England. Scientific circles viewed meteorology as akin to popular prophecy, or at best the professional know-how of sailors and planters.²⁰ Its rise was further impeded in the colonies, owing to limited knowledge of the local environment and the high cost of obtaining such knowledge. In the Indian Ocean in particular, meteorological analysis remained the preserve of scientists and explorers; the British and French navies gradually compiled charts for currents, tides, and winds, but their analyses focused on the northern Indian Ocean, leaving its southern areas relatively neglected. As a result, progress in the understanding of cyclones was slow. It was mainly officers and seafarers who made the first attempts at gathering information from logbooks to arrive at more gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Colonial Studies, Area Studies, and the Historical Meaning of the Indian Ocean
• 2   Seamen in France and the French Empire: Heirs to the Galley Slave or Forerunners of the Social Security System?
• 3   Sailors in the British Empire
• 4   Slaveries and Emancipation
• 5   Immigrants and Planters in Reunion Island
• 6   From British Servants to Indentured Immigrants: The Case of Mauritius
• 7   General Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index