Trafficking, Slavery, Peonage: Dilemmas and Hesitations of Colonial Administrators in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia

Bosma, Ulbe

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-95957-0_6

Ulbe Bosma³

412 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter explores and compares the dilemmas and hesitations colonial authorities in nineteenth-century island Southeast Asia (present-day Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia) faced while implementing abolitionist principles. For most of the nineteenth century, Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial authorities in Southeast Asia confined their abolitionist policies to outlawing human trafficking. They staged major maritime operations to suppress the widespread slave raiding by pirates. This struggle against human trafficking and kidnapping guided British and Dutch colonial authorities in their design of indentured migration contracts to ensure that migrant workers from China, India, and the region itself came to plantations and mines with their consent. That these contracts legitimized coerced labour relations was taken for granted. Regarding forms of slavery and bondage that were not the direct result of kidnapping, the colonial governments in island Southeast Asia were even more condoning. They were inclined to consider indigenous forms of slavery as mild, underrating its obvious economic importance and its role in state-building in the region. They were equally reluctant to outlaw systems of bondage that the emerging plantation conglomerates in island Southeast Asia relied on. This chapter submits that precisely because of the pivotal economic and political importance of human bondage in the region, the Dutch, Spanish, and British authorities did not address this issue with a straightforward agenda.

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Notes

1.
Gareth Austin, ‘Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa, International Review of Social History 54, no. 1 (2009): 1–39.
2.
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3.
A similar mixture of planters’ interests in freeing up labour and humanitarian concerns was behind the ‘abolition of slavery’ in 1855 by the Madras Presidency. Paul E. Baak, ‘About Enslaved Ex-Slaves, Uncaptured Contract Coolies and Unfreed Freedmen: Some Notes about “Free” and “Unfree” Labour in the Context of Plantation Development in Southwest India, Early Sixteenth Century-Mid 1990s,’ Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 130.
4.
Likewise, the US military administration that governed parts of the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century resorted to compulsory labour for road construction. See Justin F. Jackson, ‘“A military necessity which must be pressed”: The U.S. Army and Forced Road Labor in the Early American Colonial Philippines,’ in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016), 127–58.
5.
‘More atrocious piracies,’ Singapore Chronicle and Commercial Register (25 August 1831), 3; ‘More Piracy,’ The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (13 April 1837), 2; Warren, Iranun and Balangingi, 193.
6.
See Sven Beckert, ‘From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,’ Journal of American History 92 (2005): 498–526.
7.
Lovejoy, Transformations, 9.
8.
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9.
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10.
Reid, ‘Closed and Open Slave Systems,’ 163.
11.
The large slave populations in Burma and Siam, for example, who enjoyed some legal protection in the nineteenth century as debt slaves, were still property and could be sold from one master to another. Andrew Turton, ‘Thai institutions of slavery,’ in Formes extrêmes de dépendance contributions à l’étude de l’esclavage en Asie du Sud-Est, ed. G. Condominas (Paris: Ed. de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998), 423, 435–6.
12.
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13.
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14.
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15.
This is what the British civil servant F.A. Swettenham observed in Perak, but it was definitely not confined to this particular sultanate. This custom, common to all Malay countries, consisted of the forcible detention of persons said to be indebted. Very often, there was no real debt; the creditors invented one, or inflicted a fine for an offence never committed, and then compelled the reputed debtor, with his wife and family, to enter his service, and treated them all as chattels. Of course, the supposed debt was never paid because according to the creditor, it always kept increasing. Very often, the original circumstances surrounding the claim were lost in the obscurity of past generations; the debt slaves were pesdka, an inheritance, like any other property. Swettenham, F.A., British Malaya: An Account of the Origin and Progress of British Influence in Malaya (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1948), 195–6.
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20.
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21.
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22.
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23.
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28.
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29.
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30.
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31.
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32.
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33.
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34.
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35.
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36.
See Emmanuel Terray, ‘La captivité dans le royaume abron du Gyaman,’ in L’esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, ed. Claude Meillassoux (Paris: Maspero, 1975); Reid, Slavery, Bondage, 3; Lovejoy, Transformations, 276.
37.
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38.
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39.
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40.
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41.
Hoadley, ‘Slavery, Bondage and Dependency,’ 93.
42.
The effects of these slave raids on the population of lower Bengal must have been devastating. See Jadunath Sarkar, ‘The Feringi Pirates of Chatgaon,’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (New Series) 3, no. 6 (1907): 419–25; Charney, ‘Crisis and Reformation,’ 204–205; D.G.E. Hall, ‘Early days of European trade with Burma,’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 92, no. 4660 (1944):175.
43.
Clarence-Smith mentions the figure of two million, but since this would amount to 10,000 per annum over two centuries, this might be an exaggeration. W.G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 15.
44.
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45.
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46.
Joseph Prentiss Sanger, Henry Gannett, and Victor H Olmsted, Census of the Philippine Islands, taken under the direction of the Philippine Commission in the year 1903, in four volumes (Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1905), 1: 331; Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 32.
47.
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48.
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49.
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50.
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51.
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52.
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54.
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55.
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56.
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57.
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73.
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74.
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76.
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77.
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78.
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79.
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80.
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81.
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82.
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83.
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84.
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85.
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86.
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87.
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88.
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89.
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90.
Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, 77–8.
91.
While the problem was particularly pressing in the Moro province, presented in the animist tracts and among Catholic Filippinos, it occurred, in fact, throughout the Philippines. In the northern Philippines, slavery had never completely disappeared. As discovered by Dean Worcester, the Secretary of the Interior of the Government of the Philippines, it existed among the non-Christian tribes, and Christian landowners were among the purchasers of slaves. See Dean Worcester, Slavery and Peonage in the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1913); Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, 161.
92.
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93.
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94.
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95.
Middendorp, Twee achterlijke arbeidssystemen, 49.
96.
H.J. Langeveld, ‘Arbeidstoestanden op de ondernemingen ter oostkust van Sumatra tussen 1920 en 1940 in het licht van het verdwijnen van de poenale sanctie op de arbeidscontracten,’ Economisch- en sociaal-historisch jaarboek 41 (1978): 320. See also ‘Een Delische idylle,’ De Tribune. Revolutionair Volksblad. Orgaan Communistische Partij Nederland Sectie Communistische Internationale, 9 June 1927.
97.
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98.
Ulbe Bosma, ‘Dutch imperial anxieties about free labour, penal sanctions and the right to strike’ in Labour Constraints in Asia and Europe, 17th–20th century, ed. Alessandro Stanziani (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 78.
99.
Herbert S. Walker, The Sugar Industry in the island of Negros (Manila: Bureau of printing, 1910), 20.
100.
Filomeno V. Aguilar, Clash of Sprits. The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), 137–138; Fedor Jagor apparently had chosen to side with the hacenderos with their complaints that the indios took their advances and disappeared. Jagor quoted in McLennan, ‘Land and Tenancy,’ 675.
101.
Alfred W. McCoy, ‘A Queen Dies Slowly: The Rise and Decline of Iloilo City,’ in Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Ed. C. de Jesus (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982), 131–53; Alfred W. McCoy, ‘Sugar Barons: Formation of a Native Planter Class in the Colonial Philippines,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, nos. 3–4 (1992): 118.
102.
Worcester, Slavery and Peonage, 4.

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International Institute of Social History/Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ulbe Bosma

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Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
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École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
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Bosma, U. (2019). Trafficking, Slavery, Peonage: Dilemmas and Hesitations of Colonial Administrators in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. In: Campbell, G., Stanziani, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95957-0_6

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