In 1873, on Reunion Island, an Indian with an iron collar around his neck and chains attached to his feet, knocked at the door of the Court of Appeals of Saint-Denis de la RĂ©union. He declared he was regularly beaten, shackled and thrown into jail by his master, even though he was theoretically free. He had already lodged several complaints with the Immigration Protection Society, which nevertheless refused to take legal action against the white planter. When the planter learned of the complaints , he had the laborer chained and flogged. It was several years before the court finally sentenced the planter to pay the Indian meager damages.1 Like him, more and more âcoolies â (Indian and Chinese immigrants) took their cases to court ; despite the indifferent and sometimes corrupt judges, the coolies persisted. Little by little, they began setting aside small amounts of money; after five, seven or sometimes ten or twelve years they went home to India. Disasters frequently befell them during these return voyages: the ships were old, often overloaded and exposed to the dangers of the crossing, and the white officers had no misgivings about abandoning the vessels along with their passengers. The scandals multiplied, but no real solution was found.2
Worse still, the expansion of European colonial empires led to violent treatment and coerced displacement of laborers. The port of Aden , a British protectorate located far from Reunion Island, was an important commercial center on the way to Marseille and London , which were henceforth connected to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal. Aden was also a haven for slaves escaping from Africa or from the Persian Gulf itself , where they were employed as pearl fishermen. In 1878, thirteen Africans landed in Aden , claiming to be Siddi sailors. Eleven of them worked as pearl divers for the same owner; they requested and were granted asylum.3 Later on, however, they were transferred as âfree servantsâ to new British masters in Aden or to other British possessions in India and southern Africa.
After the Indian Ocean, the African continent was in turn divided up during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The European powers had no scruples about raping, killing and torching villages in the name of progress and civilization. The extreme violence perpetrated on the indigenous populations was coupled with fear, solitude and the ruthless pursuit of profit that reigned in the concession companies . It was still a world in which men from the four corners of the globe crossed paths: ships sailed up the African rivers and along the coastlines, manned by slave labor from India, the Persian Gulf countries and China , along with Europeans, mainly commissioned and non-commissioned officersâRussians, Poles, Swedes, Germans and, of course, Britons. Some of them, like Joseph Conrad, had already served in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic . But the shipwrecks Conrad had experienced, which went virtually unnoticed by the public, were relatively insignificant compared with the villages burned down, the women raped and killed, and the men and children massacred in the Congo.4
We like to believe in the progress of civilizationâof our civilization. The abolitions of slaveries and serfdom in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were undoubtedly turning points that should not be overlooked.5 Starting in 1790, the number of abolition acts and slaves liberated by them was unprecedented. Some 500,000 slaves were emancipated in Saint-Domingue in 1790, a million Caribbean slaves between 1832 and 1840, 30 million Russian serfs in 1861, four million slaves in the U.S. between 1863 and 1865, and another million in Brazil in 1885. Abolitions in Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century affected an estimated 7 million people.6 One must also take into account the significant rates of manumission prior to general abolition in Russia and Brazil , as well as in the Ottoman Empire and Islamic societies in general from Africa to Southeast Asia.7
Yet in the Indian Ocean, Africa and the Americas, even after slavery was officially ended, the world of labor continued to be a world of unequal and sometimes extreme exploitation and violence , in which the boundary line between freedom and unfreedomâso clear-cut in theoryâwas far less obvious in practice. Only a thin, shadowy line separatedâor rather, unifiedâthem over time and space. This book explains why.
Labor and Freedom: Perspectives from the âOld Worldâ
In the past as well as today, debates about abolition have essentially focused on two interrelated questions: (1) whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century abolitions were a major break from previous centuries (or even millennia) in the history of humankind during which bondage had been the dominant form of labor and human condition8; and (2) whether they represent an achievement specific to the Western bourgeoisie and liberal civilization. Both questions are Eurocentric: they place the West at the origin of historical dynamics without examining the active role other actors and regions played in the process.
To avoid these pitfalls, we will assume first of all that so-called âfreeâ forms of labor and bondage were defined and practiced in relation to each other, not only within each country and region, but also on a global scale. Historians of slavery and abolition do not usually sit at the same table as historians of wage labor in Europe and the West; these historiographies operate as if they were completely disconnected histories. Over the last 20 years, a new historiography has stressed the connections between free and unfree labor in a global perspective.9 We will follow this perspective here in greater detail. The strength of global history lies not in collecting second-hand banalities common to a number of different worlds, but rather in arriving at a relevant representation of this multiplicity through local specificities.10 Connections, entanglements and overall structural dynamics do not necessarily demand a world synthesis11; instead, they address specific questions using multiple scales.12
This book focuses on specific areas in India, the Indian Ocean and Africa, a choice that requires some explanation. The Atlantic paradigm has largely shaped our interpretation of modernity, made up of discoveries, European supremacy, global capitalism , the passage from slavery to free labor and a rather distinctive chronology. Slavery and U.S. independence, followed by the French and Haitian revolutions and the abolitionist movementâall these events have informed our conceptions and practices of freedom up to the present day. The specificity of the Atlantic Ocean, particularly compared to the Indian Ocean-African perspective, has long been a subject of debate. Conventional historiography tended to use ideal types of slavery, sovereignty , colonialism and abolitionism , based more or less on the Atlantic experience, as models for the study of other regions.13 Hence the highly critical attitude towards the view expressed by specialists of Asian, Indian Ocean and African regions over the past twenty years.14 These specialists have contrasted the three areas with the Atlantic , starting with the chronology. Unlike the Atlantic perspective, which divides history into before and after the fifteenth century, we find in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) and Africa a long period stretching first from antiquity to the rise of Islam (the eighth to the tenth century); then from the global IOW-Africa of Islamic, Mughal and Ming-Qing powers to the coexistence of these polities with Western empires (the eleventh to the eighteenth century); and finally, the dominance of the West in the nineteenth century.15 This chronology is particularly relevant with regard to labor relationships: ...