The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [172]
The position of slaves is here, as among all half-civilised nations, much better than that of their fellow-bondmen among Europeans and Creoles [by which she means Europeans born in the Indian Ocean area]. They have but little work to do, are fed about as well as their masters, and are seldom punished, though the laws do not at all protect them.100
Not all slaves came from Africa: on Mauritius in 1806 ten per cent were of Indian origin. Nor did they all work on plantations for Europeans. Many worked on the docks, in construction, as sailors and as pearl divers in the Gulf.
The nature of this trade changed once the British had abolished slavery and took steps to stop others trading in human beings. The French planters in response pretended that their slaves were really bonded labour, not property. Abolition was a difficult task to accomplish. One British officer told Captain Sulivan, who commanded a ship off the East African coast and inspected every ship he came across, that 'If we go on condemning these vessels for having only a few slaves on board, we shall be having our supplies cut off again from the interior.' All too often a suspicious dhow would be chased, only for it to beach itself and crew and passengers escape inland. Independent Zanzibar was a particular problem, constituting a gap in the system of patrols that the British tried to enforce. It was only in 1873 that the sultan was persuaded, or rather required, to stop exporting slaves from his island, while it was only after Zanzibar came under British protection that domestic slavery was ended in 1897.
It is useful to distinguish three sorts of colonies around the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, with rather different people travelling across the ocean to reach them. First are the settler colonies, where white people displaced indigenous inhabitants: South Africa and Australia are the obvious examples. Second are plantation economies, with a mostly imported population, of which Mauritius is the type study. Finally, there are mixed areas, where Europeans ruled indigenous people and also introduced a host of migrant Indians and Chinese: Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Singapore all fit here.101
Once slavery was abolished a new form of labour was required. This was the indentured labour system, whereby poor people were recruited for a set number of years to work for low wages, after which they were free to work for themselves. This was hardly a new system, as it had operated across the Atlantic to the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century. The difference was the scale, and the fact that most of the indentured labourers were Indian; there was a racial as opposed to class element involved. The broad context is of a steep rise in the movement of people around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A large part of this was Atlantic, with a huge influx of free labour to North America. In the Indian Ocean the movement was not of free people. Chinese indentured labour moved to southeast Asia, and Indians to the islands, to South Africa, Burma, Malaya, and far afield to Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad.102
The majority were Indians. Once slavery was abolished in South Africa, labour was still needed, and the local Zulus were not interested. Between 1860–68, and 1874–1911 around 176,000 Indians were imported.103 In several parts of the tropical world plantations were booming, first sugar, and then coffee, tea, and later rubber. The system began in Mauritius in 1834, which island in total received 450,000 Indian labourers. The system was soon extended to other places beyond the ocean. Between 1834 and 1937 thirty million left their homes to go overseas, and 24 million returned. These workers certainly made more money than they would if they had stayed in India, but conditions of work were