Throughout the
Vereenigde Oostindische Company (‘Dutch East India Company’, VOC) empire, mobility and coercion were key elements in mobilizing labour and maintaining imperial order.
1 With the exception of the Cape of Good Hope, most attention has been devoted to the European workers, employed in wage labour relations in which sailors and soldiers were free to enter, but not free to leave before the end of their contract ranging between three and seven years.
2 Over several decades, a significant body of literature has excavated the work and lives of slaves, free Asians and free blacks at the Cape.
3 For other regions, the scale of such scholarship is more modest. Only recently are historians broadening their scope more systematically to include the thousands of Asians, Europeans and Eurasians working through systems of slavery,
corvee and convict labour.
4 Several studies have pointed out the importance of slave labour within the realm of the VOC empire and in Asia in general.
5 Other studies have started to explore the contours of the histories of
corvee and convict labour under the VOC.
6
Increasingly, slavery and other forms of coerced labour are seen less as ineffective ‘oriental’ modes of production and more as part of labour-intensive routes to economic development.
7 Slavery is claimed to have been an ‘integral’ and ‘dynamic part of a permanently developing, globally connected and increasingly capitalist economic system’.
8 Recent studies have pointed out that contemporaries similarly perceived slavery as a modern, dynamic economic system of production.
9 Coercion and confinement, however, were not the only key element crucial to these systems of labour. Especially for convict and slave labour, it is now increasingly accepted that transportation or mobility was one of the crucial elements underpinning these systems.
10
Throughout the Asian empire of the VOC, various circuits ensured the continuous mobility of coerced labour. Part of these networks of forced transportation of convicts has been studied by Kerry Ward.
11 Regarding slave labour, various studies, such as those by Marcus Vink and Richard Allen, have started to explore the dynamics and size of slave trade and slave transportation.
12 One crucial point is that the VOC engaged in relatively little slave trading in comparison to its involvement in the spice trade and later those in fabric, tea and coffee. Moreover, the majority of the enslaved population in the VOC empire was not owned by the Company, but by private slave owners, mainly VOC personnel and European, Eurasian and Asian inhabitants of VOC cities and rural regions. The VOC owned only a few thousand of the tens of thousands of slaves living in Company regions, in some cases hiring additional slave labour from local slave owners.
13
Several studies have dealt with the transportation of enslaved Asians and Africans by the VOC, often for its own use as Company slaves.
14 On the much larger transportation of slaves for private slave trade and ownership, less is known. Most studies have focused on the Company and private slave trade in and around Batavia and the Company slave trade from Madagascar to the Cape of Good Hope.
15 This transportation of slaves to the Cape by private persons and mid- to senior-level VOC employees has been dealt with to some extent by several authors such as Robert Shell, Kerry Ward and Karel Schoeman. Ward states that ‘individuals profited from their personal small-scale slave trade, particularly if they had access to the Company's transportation network in which to sell their slaves at sites where they could obtain higher prices’.
16 This access to the Company's transportation network could mean that slaves were ordered to be sent over from one settlement to the other with Company ships as illustrated by one of Van Riebeeck's slaves, Maria van Bengalen, who was sent to him from Batavia.
17 Slaves were brought over by owners for use as domestics on the return journey, even ‘in spite of official prohibitions’. They were also transported for sale at the Cape which was known to residents in the East to have a demand for slaves.
18 Private persons have been known to order slaves, sometimes expressing a preference for slaves with certain skills.
19 Despite this groundbreaking work, too little is known about these and other patterns of the private slave trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean world.
This article explores the patterns of
private slave trade in the VOC empire through the study of two crucial and partly interrelated nodes of the private slave trade that have received insufficient attention thus far: namely slaves transported
to the Cape of Good Hope and slaves transported
from Cochin. The Cape of Good Hope was, together with places such as Batavia, one of the main destinations for slaves. Cochin, on the other hand, was the most important settlement of the VOC on the Indian Malabar coast, which was one of the main regions of origin for enslaved subjects in the Asian and South African regions under Dutch control. This article also highlights the importance of circuits of private slave trade in general and studies the crucial role played by Company personnel in this trade. Their involvement in slave trading and slavery in different parts of the VOC world has remained largely invisible and understudied.
20 In this way, the article contributes to the growing knowledge on the slave trade and slavery in early modern Dutch Asia, providing insight into the origins and backgrounds of the slave traders as well as the enslaved and scrutinizing the extensive nature of networks of the private slave trade. In order to do so, we first assess the existing literature on slavery and slave trade at the Cape of Good Hope, in Southeast Asia (especially Batavia) and in South Asia. The article will then analyse new data for the private slave trade to the Cape of Good Hope and data on slave transactions in Cochin.
Slavery and shipping in Dutch Asia
The study of Indian Ocean slavery is not only complicated by the paucity of written sources, but also by its multi-directionality and the many players involved. The supply of slaves was often determined by catastrophes, both natural and manmade, indebtedness and more powerful polities raiding weaker ones expressly for enslavement.
21 These dynamics of slavery and the slave trade seem to have existed before European powers arrived in South and Southeast Asia.
22 The arrival of the Portuguese, the Dutch and other European trading companies meant the intensification of long-range slave trading networks. The trading companies of the Dutch, English, French and other European nations started to build upon existing trading patterns throughout the Indian Ocean area and Southeast Asia. In this way, European demand for both slaves and Asian commodities resulted in the intensification of the slave trade throughout the Indian Ocean world.
23
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slave trade in Asia was conducted by both European and Asian traders. Gujarati merchants transported enslaved Mozambicans to Daman and Diu.
24 The two major players in Maluku trade, including slavery, were the Chinese and the Bugis.
25 As in Maluku, Chinese slave traders were the major players in the export of Balinese slaves, mostly to Batavia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
26 Indian slaves were exported by European powers to their colonies in the eastern and western Indian Ocean colonies.
27 High-ranking VOC officials – merchants, administrators and governors,– were sometimes able to fit out their own private ships to engage in the slave trade.
28 Lower- and middle-ranked personnel employed in intra-Asiatic shipping, used the opportunity of their voyages in Asia on board Company ships to transport slaves.
29
Slavery was widespread throughout the VOC empire. As the main centre of the VOC empire, Batavia played an important role in both the logistical and trading network of the Company, as well as slave ownership, slave-based production and the slave trade. The enslaved population in the city and its
ommelanden (surroundings) grew from almost 26,000 in the late seventeenth century to roughly 40,000 in 1780. The share of the enslaved population in the total number of inhabitants nevertheless slowly declined from about 40% (around 1690) to 24% (around 1780).
30 Slaves were hired out or employed in Company work places, by artisans, in sugar mills, in agriculture and in households.
31
Similar patterns can be discerned for other parts of the VOC empire. At the Cape, for example, slaves were used in urban production by artisans and the VOC, but also in the growing agricultural production in the greater Cape area. The number of slaves at the Cape rose from nearly 1000 around 1688 to 3000 at the beginning of the 1720s. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the enslaved population had risen to more than 15,000 in Cape Town and the rural hinterland.
32 The VOC owned several hundred enslaved Asians and Africans, and hired slaves from Company personnel or local
vrijburgers when the need for an augmented workforce arose.
33 Stereotypes were important in the trade and employment of slaves. They could be reflected, for instance, in the price that slaves fetched, or in the type of labour that they were assigned to do. Bengali women had a reputation as skilled needlewomen while Malays were reputed to be excellent craftsmen. Forty per cent of slaves in the service sector were from the Indian subcontinent, while Africans were often put to labour in the fields.
34 The effects of these stereotypes would become less marked as the supply of Asian slaves to the Cape dwindled towards the end of the VOC period. This period saw the majority of slaves coming from the western Indian Ocean, particularly Mozambique.
35
The importance of slave labour and slave-based production could vary significantly for different parts of the VOC empire. While the Banda islands depended almost entirely on the work of slaves, this could be less so in other regions. In Ceylon, for example, obligated
corvee labour was an important source for much of the agricultural production of cinnamon and areca nuts, as well as many of the logistical tasks of the VOC. Such regions could, however, be intimately linked to slavery and the slave trade systems of the VOC world. The Malabar Coast (southwest coast of India), for example, was an important producer of pepper but little is known about labour relations in this region. The Malabar region and its main VOC port, Cochin, were, however, strongly connected to the slave system as one of the most important slave exporting regions. The same could also be true for other regions. At the Cape, for example, the VOC procured slaves for itself through slaving expeditions to Mozambique and Madagascar.
36 Other areas such as Bengal and parts of Southeast Asia were also important exporters of slaves.
All these regions were bound together by the intensive networks of intra-Asiatic and intercontinental shipping of the VOC and other Asian and European maritime merchants. Although Cochin has often been noted as one of the posts where the costs structurally surpassed the benefits for the VOC, the port and the region were important enough to maintain a relatively strong presence. Cochin was a vibrant trading port. All strata of the VOC hierarchy could develop networks with individuals who fell under the Company's jurisdiction and others who did not. Indigenous merchants were the go-betweens that extended the Cochin VOC personnel's networks to the wider Malabar world.
37 Cochin was located on the shipping routes between Persia and Surat, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, and the Indonesian archipelago.
38 Most VOC ships would stop at Ceylon during their intra-Asiatic voyages to and from Cochin.
Ceylon could perhaps best be described as the second most important region in the VOC empire. After a series of conquests by the VOC in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Company controlled much of coastal Ceylon, important for the production of cinnamon, but also an important place in the shipping networks of the VOC. After Batavia, the Ceylonese port cities of Colombo and Galle were the most important destinations for the intercontinental shipping of the VOC between Asia and Europe. From the 1660s onwards, three to four ships per year would sail directly to Ceylon from the Republic, while 5 to sometimes 10 or even 15 ships would depart from Ceylon to the Republic via the Cape.
39 The port settlements of Ceylon were also of crucial importance for the large intra-Asiatic shipping of the VOC, with most ships on routes between destinations in the Western Indian Ocean, Bengal and Southeast Asia calling at Ceylon.
The Cape had an equally important position within the VOC shipping network. It functioned as a provisioning post between Asia and Europe. After the Cape settlement was established in 1652, all ships from Batavia and Ceylon were ordered to call there before continuing their journey to the Dutch Republic. It was the last stop or barrier in intercontinental voyages. The VOC put up barriers to the migration of Eurasian and Asian subjects to the Dutch Republic: this included free persons, slaves and even wives and children of Company servants.
40 As Asian and European subjects were not allowed to travel beyond the Cape of Good Hope without permission, the VOC tried to control the movement of people on intercontinental voyages to and from the Cape as much as possible.
41 In 1636, the VOC forbade ‘natives to secretly board homeward vessels’ and ‘Europeans to take slaves on their (homeward) voyage’ to the Dutch Republic.
42 Bans on transporting slaves to the Dutch Republic were frequently repeated in the following decades, but complaints of slaves actually reaching the Dutch Republic without permission would persist in spite of this.
43 Company servants who wanted to travel to the Dutch Republic with a slave – often as a servant – needed to request permission and pay the Company a fee for the cost of provisions and transport. From 1713 onwards, the fee was raised to include the return of slaves to Asia.
44
