Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean

Suppression and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century

Hideaki Suzuki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319598031
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book examines how slave traders interacted with and resisted the British suppression campaign in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean. By focusing on the transporters, buyers, sellers, and users of slaves in the region, the book traces the many links between slave trafficking and other types of trade. Drawing upon first-person slave accounts, travelogues, and archival sources, it documents the impact of abolition on Zanzibar politics, Indian merchants, East African coastal urban societies, and the entirety of maritime trade in the region. Ultimately, this ground-breaking work uncovers how western Indian Ocean societies experienced the slave trade suppression campaign as a political intervention, with important implications for Indian Ocean history and the history of the slave trade.

© The Author(s) 2017

H. SuzukiSlave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59803-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Slave Traders and the Western Indian Ocean

Hideaki Suzuki¹

(1)

Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan

Hideaki Suzuki

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The First Question: Who Profited from the Slave Trade?

This book addresses two main interrelated questions. The first deals with the slave trade, the second with the Indian Ocean world. More precisely, the first question is: ‘Who profited from the slave trade in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean?’ The question might seem absurd because many readers will instantly answer, ‘those who traded slaves’ or ‘slave traders’. These should include transporters, buyers, sellers and users. If we go on to ask for further detail on them, we find there are none, so we reach a dead end. Despite the increase in literature on slavery and the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean, surprisingly few studies focus on slave traders themselves. Thus, to answer the above question, we need to answer another question: ‘Who were slave traders?’

While three of the major components of the slave trade in the nineteenth century were slave traders , those who wished to suppress the trade and the slaves themselves, only the latter two have rich historiographies. The campaign of suppression has naturally been a traditional topic for naval historians; for example, Charles R. Low’s detailed study traces the progress of the campaign with reference to the Indian Navy , while Gerald S. Graham’s work does the same for the Royal Navy and John B. Kelly examines the activities of the Royal Navy in the Persian Gulf .¹ Furthermore, Christopher Lloyd gives the chronology of the campaign in the Indian Ocean.² With exception of Lloyd, the question of the suppression of the slave trade is not these authors’ main concern, but rather the entirety of the activities of the navies. Within that framework the campaign to suppress the slave trade is certainly important enough to be included. The studies mentioned vividly describe the progress of the campaign of suppression and locate it in the context of the history of each navy. As for the slaves, over the last twenty years or so much more scholarly attention has been paid to the variety of slavery in the entirety of the Indian Ocean world.³ One of the core disciplines in support of such increased attention is diaspora studies, and, since the 2000s, Edward A. Alpers, Shihan de Jayasuriya, Matthew S. Hopper and many others have brought to light this undiscovered feature of the slave trade; today the field is growing rapidly.⁴ In the literature, regardless of whether dealing with the suppressors or the slaves, slave traders are mentioned frequently; despite that, they are always given only a secondary role, so that the details of their activities are largely ignored. One contribution of this book will be to fill that gap in the existing literature. Moreover, in my opinion, this volume has greater importance outside that function. I believe that the three components of the slave trade referred to must have been interrelated and must have impacted on each other. This book therefore looks at slave traders in conjunction with the two other components of the slave trade, and particularly at how they inter-reacted with the suppressors. We shall thereby be able to consider those two other components from a different perspective. Indeed, in including all three, we shall be able to see whether slave traders should merely be portrayed as profiteers, and as we explore the interaction between slave traders and the suppression campaign, we shall come to a certain conclusion.

The time span covered here is principally the fifty or so years between the 1820s and 1870s—the classical era of the subject in the existing literature. The reason for the attention given to the 1820s is twofold, the first being the General Maritime Treaty of 1820, led by the Bombay Government , which was concluded by the Arabian shaykhs in the Persian Gulf , and the second the so-called Moresby Treaty of 1822, which was signed on behalf of Britain by Fairfax Moresby , Senior Officer on Mauritius, and by Sayyid Sa‘īd bin Sulṭān of the Bū Sa‘īd. Both treaties are recognized as making first steps towards the suppression of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean. The key significant event of the 1870s was the 1873 banning of the slave trade in Zanzibar —the most important entrepôt for the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean. In short, the five decades between the 1820s and the 1870s made up the period when the slave trade was, first of all, greatly shaken up and then had its fate largely sealed with the 1873 ban. When one considers the long history of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean world, that it took as little as 50 years for it to be so affected is indeed remarkable. How did that happen? Of course, slave trading continued in the western Indian Ocean region after 1873, but it was of a very different sort from what had gone on before, not least because it became entirely illegal and clandestine. The Sultan of Zanzibar declared the trade illegal in 1873 and surrendered his rights to control to the Royal Navy .⁵ That is in stark contrast with what happened about a couple of decades previously when actual seizures of slaving dhows along the East African coast finally began. Then, the Sultan’s secretary Aḥmad b. Na‘amān,⁶ protested to the British Consul, allegedly saying ‘Arabs have carried on the trade since the days of Noah, and they must have slaves.’⁷ Related to those events, East Africa gradually lost its supreme position as a slave-exporting region to the rest of the western Indian Ocean; as a consequence, export from Baluchistan to the Persian Gulf has significantly increased since the early twentieth century.⁸ Moreover, traffickers’ reduced the risk of capture by British patrols if they elected to move their cargoes of slaves by shorter routes.⁹ So, the 1873 ban on the slave trade must be marked as an important turning point in the history of slave trading in the region. However, without the actual conflict between slave traders and their suppressors over the preceding five decades, the legal steps towards the ban would not have been taken—and this book mainly examines that struggle. In other words, we must closely investigate the process by which the two sides became entangled. It is a complicated and multifaceted story and, to unravel it, instead of trying to trace a strict chronology from chapter to chapter, we shall consider it from various angles.

Map 1.1

Western Indian Ocean

Map 1.2

East Africa and Madagascar

Map 1.3

North-Eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Subcontinent

The Second Question: Did the Indian Ocean World Collapse?

The other main question addressed in this book is about the Indian Ocean world. There is a varied literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean world, and over the last 10 years or so particularly a great deal has been published on this topic. Many writers have emphasized that knowledge of that particular maritime sphere offers a great opportunity to reconsider the conventional view of slavery, which has largely been influenced by case studies from the Atlantic world.¹⁰ While such literature does, of course, portray the Indian Ocean world as an ‘alternative version’ of slavery studies—which I fully understand—the challenge I have taken up here is to approach the slave trade in the Indian Ocean world rather differently. This book will attempt to examine what happened in the western Indian Ocean while principally focusing on the transformation in the circumstances of the slave traders. But first, I must explain the logic of my approach, and to do so I must take us back to the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: ‘Who were the slave traders?’

In the existing literature we can find terms such as ‘slave traders’, ‘slavers’, ‘slave ships’, but nowhere do we find any further explanation or definition. More particularly, the terms ‘Suri Arab’ and ‘Northern Arab’ are frequently found in the contemporary documents as slave traders and modern scholars use those terms in the same manner, but neither those original documents nor today’s scholars can enlighten us as to who those people really were. Nevertheless, the terminology used and the descriptions found in the modern scholarly literature create the impression that the slave business was carried out by traders who dealt only in slaves. Within the framework of a study of the suppression campaign and of the slaves themselves, further information on slave traders is perhaps not strictly necessary, but a lack of concern with that aspect of the subject certainly greatly limits the historical value of the slave trade in the context of Indian Ocean history. The conventional wisdom concerning the slave trade, according to the Atlantic model, always includes such things as large ships specifically adapted for conveying large numbers of bodies and auctions where slaves were forced to endure the indignity of being paraded under the critical gaze of the masses in the slave market. However, such markets were by no means the only spaces for slave transaction in the western Indian Ocean. Moreover, as one naval officer wrote, ‘there is no such thing as a slaver [slave ship]’¹¹ in slave trafficking between Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf ; this statement can be applicable to most of other parts of the western Indian Ocean also, where the ships engaged in slave transport were generally smaller than those in the Atlantic. Moreover, the movement of slaves was not carried out separately from other traffic; indeed, as is discussed further in Chap. 2, it can reasonably be claimed that slave traffic in this area was in fact inseparable from other traffic. When we see the reality of slave trafficking in the region, there is no evidence for the frequently repeated claim that slave traffic was a specialized trade. Rather, designating certain groups of people as slave traders leads to serious misunderstanding. Slave auctions were held, but as Chap. 5 shows, small-scale, individual and private slave dealing outside the realm of the ‘professionals’ was an important feature of the trade we simply cannot afford to ignore. The slave trade was part of the complex whole of Indian Ocean trading in general and most certainly was not isolated from other trading activities. That being so, it follows that attempts at its suppression had effects that were barely distinguishable from those on general trade.

The other advantage for understanding the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean region’s focus on the slave trade is that there is an abundance of sources to explore, while, surprisingly, we lack sufficient sources to examine even the actual volume of general trade in the ports that were under the control of local polities. Ports like Stone Town in Zanzibar might appear to be exceptions, but even for Stone Town those records, although at least available, are only fragmentary. Needless to say, we face further difficulties in trying to explore the detailed activities both of local traders and transporters. Local documents currently available to scholars are indeed scarce, and although there are rich archives of the communications between Salem merchants an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Slave Traders and the Western Indian Ocean
• 2. The Slave Trade in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean: An Overview
• 3. Resistance of Transporters and Insufficiency of the Indian Navy’s Suppression Prior to 1860
• 4. “They are Raising the Devil with the Trading Dows:” Reconsidering the Royal Navy’s Anti-Slave Trade Campaign from the Slave Trader Perspective
• 5. Chains of Reselling: Reconsidering Slave Dealings Based on Slaves’ Own Voices
• 6. The Transformation of East African Coastal Urban Society with Regard to the Slave Distribution System
• 7. Consulate Politics in the Scramble after Sa‛īd: How Did the British Consulate Secure Superiority over the Sultan of Zanzibar?
• 8. 1860: The Rigby Emancipation and the Rise of the Indian Resident Nationality Problem
• 9. Beyond the Horizon: The Agency of Dhow Traders, L’Acte de Francisation and International Politics in the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1860–1900
• 10. General Conclusion: Slave Trade Profiteers
• Back Matter