The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [173]
To call this a new system of slavery is perhaps to paint too black a picture. It is true that conditions on the plantations could be very harsh, but on the other hand skilled labour could do very well. One way to provide a context is to note that the death rate among Indians on the voyages from India to Mauritius was much higher than that of free white labour going to the settlement colonies of the Americas or Australia, but much lower than on the slave voyages across the Atlantic.105 Unlike slaves, there was a good chance of returning home, as the figures above show. In the case of Burma, a third of the Indian population moved in and out each year. Some 450,000 Indians came to Mauritius between 1834 and 1910, and 157,000 returned home.
Another variant in the category of more or less coerced movement of peoples was the use of Indian troops and police all around and beyond the ocean. They played a crucial role in extending, and maintaining, the British empire. Sikhs were used as police around most of the shores of the ocean. Gurkha mercenaries similarly served from Hong Kong to East Africa. The Indian army took a very large part – even 50 per cent – of the Indian colonial budget. Indians were paid about one-third of what British troops got, and served in Egypt in 1882, the Sudan in 1885, China in 1900, and several times in Burma and East Africa. Indian involvement in World War I was massive: a total of Indian combatants and non-combatants of 44,000 in East Africa, 589,000 in Mesopotamia, 116,000 in Egypt, and 50,000 in Aden and the Gulf.106
An important consequence of the movement of so many people was an increased mobility of disease. In most areas this was not a matter of the virgin soil epidemics which devastated native populations in the Americas and the Pacific, which in turn facilitated European conquest. Most of the ocean, some islands excepted, was part of a common Eurasian disease pool, so that frequently some immunity had been built up. Indeed, if anything it was the newly arrived Europeans who were most threatened by 'Indian Ocean' diseases. However, a vastly increased mobility, along with the development of poverty and slums in the port cities, did lead to much greater outbreaks of common diseases even if they were not new to the areas. Leprosy was a problem in the eighteenth century in the Cape, and may have arrived with the Malay servants and slaves that the Dutch introduced. As communications improved diseases could spread more quickly, no longer so hindered by the vast extent of the ocean which previously had acted to restrict the spread of 'crowd' diseases like cholera, smallpox and plague. A new and very virulent type of epidemic cholera spread out from Bengal several times during the nineteenth century. The first devastating episode was in 1817–22. Its spread was helped by movements of people: hajjis, troops, migrant labour. Cholera reached Java in 1821 and killed 125,000 people, while on the other end of the ocean, in East Africa, there was a particularly serious outbreak in 1865. The hajj was a great transmitter of this disease, and mortality at Mecca itself was often fearsome. In 1865, out of a total of 90,000 pilgrims, 15,000 died. In the 1880s rinderpest was introduced into Ethiopia, probably again from India, and in the next decade spread, with devastating effects, down the East African coast.107
It is now time to set sail again, and look at the actual experience of people travelling over the ocean in the great western