The Illusion of Abolition Full Article Language: En Indien Anders: Engelse Articletitle: 0

_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): The Illusion of Abolition _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 The Illusion Of Abolition 439 Chapter 9 The Illusion of Abolition It is important to begin this chapter by recalling the process by which slavery was “abolished” in India. The reader will recall that slavery was an ancient prac- tice in India and that it exhibited itself in many forms and was often quite viru- lent. Slaves functioned as domestic servants, artisans, concubines, dancing girls, temple workers, factory workers, soldiers, palace guards, agricultural workers and predial slaves (those bound to the land).1 Most of these forms of slavery were shaped by Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu religious law and prac- tice, as well as by local custom.2 A majority of the slaves in nineteenth-century India were women and children but there was also a great prevalence of debt bondage and men often found themselves effectively enslaved to a credi- tor because they were unable to pay crushing and unjustly accumulated debt.3 Although Indians formed a majority of the population of slaves, Africans were regularly imported. There was also a regular traffic in Southeast Asians as well as denizens of the Indian tribal areas. As I have observed, the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 excluded India, Ceylon, and St. Helena from its otherwise comprehensive ban on slavery, creating an “India Exemption.” The Act was also not applied in Singapore, Malacca, Penang, or Province Wellesley, even though these were territories under the sovereignty of British colonial authorities and therefore juridically within the reach of the law.4 Slavery and slave trading flourished after it became known that India and Ceylon were exempt from the Slavery Abolition Act. Thereafter, the Government of India was slow and recalcitrant in its efforts to interdict the seaborne slave trade in Africans, Baluchis, and Iranians, coming from the Per- sian Gulf region and East Africa, the seaborne slave trade in Southeast Asians coming from Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as slavery and slave trading in the Indian Princely States and in the tribal areas. The British East India Company, which administered the territory at the time, was also loathe to disturb this situation. Slavery, especially of children, was often analogized to a form of adoption and magistrates would creatively interpret the Islamic or Hindu law to allow a dependent person to remain 1 Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, CA; Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003), 30. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398795_011 440 Chapter 9 enslaved. In times of famine or other privation, many Indians would sell their children into slavery to avoid starvation or other hardship and the British East India Company officials often turned a blind eye to these situations. Even if there was not an outright sale of a child or a wife, debt bondage schemes en- abled landowners and other creditors to effectively take possession of the debtor’s family member, or the debtor himself, for life.5 There is no doubt that the world encountered by the East India Company merchants when they arrived in India underwent a profound change during the time they were there. This change brought with it, and was largely brought about by, the introduction of the telegraph, the steamship, the rapid-fire weap- on, liberal education, and increasingly efficient modes of production in the factories and the fields. Astoundingly, what did not change was the milieu of slave holding and slave trading that had existed in India and in the larger In- dian Ocean world, especially the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca, for thousands of years. This inertia occurred despite the worldwide declaration of the British imperium that slavery and slave trading would not be tolerated any- where in its dominions and despite well-meaning efforts by many British sub- jects and sympathetic non-British persons to bring about the moral and philosophical change in human attitudes desired by the abolitionists. Such change did occur in the Atlantic World, albeit slowly in many places like Ja- maica, Cuba, and Brazil. And, of course, there was the American Civil War. But that kind of change never came to the Indian Ocean world nor to Eurasia. There were no great slave revolts, no Toussaint l’Overtures or Frederick Doug- lasses or William Lloyd Garrisons or John Browns or Simon Bolivars, rallying the faithful to rise up against the yoke of the slave masters. This fact is made plain by the sheer size and extensive nature of the slave-holding regimes and slave trading schemes that flourished after the adoption of the UK Slavery Abo- lition Act in 1833. The Duke of Wellington’s pronouncements were heard loud and clear by many, including many British entrepreneurs, all across the Indian Ocean world. The entrepreneurs in India and perhaps their masters in London then set about creating a new world, one that did not really exist, but one that would provide justification for the continued traffic and sale of human beings, particularly women and children, even though the law on the books suggested otherwise. This nonexistent world derived its validity from these important facts: (1) the widely disseminated impression that slavery had in fact (twice) been abolished in India and in many of the territories controlled by the East 5 Ibid. Siddharth Kara has traced the history of debt bondage in India in his recently published study, Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)..

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