Slavery in a Remote but Global Place: the British East India Company and Bencoolen, 1685-1825
Keywords:
Downloads
Abstract
Histories of the British East India Company usually ignore the company’s use of slave labor. Records from its factory at Bencoolen in Sumatra provide an opportunity to examine company attitudes and policies toward its chattel work force in greater detail. These sources reveal that the company drew slaves from a global catchment area to satisfy the demand for labor in its far-flung commercial empire, shed light on policies and practices regarding the treatment of company slaves, and illustrate the company’s role in the development of increasingly interconnected free and forced labor trades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Bencoolen case study also highlights the need to examine colonial migrant labor systems in the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia worlds in more fully developed contexts.
Downloads
References
Allen, R.B. (2004). The Mascarene slave-trade and labour migration in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In G. Campbell (Ed.), The structure of slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (pp. 33-50). London: Frank Cass.
Google Scholar CrossrefAllen, R.B. (2014a). European slave trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefAllen, R.B. (2014b). Slaves, convicts, abolitionism and the global origins of the post-emancipation indentured labor system. Slavery and Abolition, 35(2), 328-48. doi: 10.1080/0144039X.2013.870789
Google Scholar CrossrefAllen, R.B. (2017). Ending the history of silence: reconstructing European slave trading in the Indian Ocean. Revista Tempo [Brazil], 23(2). doi: 10.1590/TEM-1980542/x2017v230206
Google Scholar CrossrefAnderson, C. (2000). Convicts in the Indian Ocean: transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815-53. London: Macmillan Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefAnderson, C. (2007a). The Indian uprising of 1857-8: prisons, prisoners and rebellion. London: Anthem Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefAnderson, C. (2007b). Sepoys, servants and settlers: convict transportation in the Indian Ocean, 1787-1945. In F. Dikötter & I. Brown (Eds.), Cultures of confinement: a history of the prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America (pp. 185-220). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefAnderson, C. (2009). Convicts and coolies: rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century. Slavery and Abolition, 30(1), 93-109. doi: 10.1080/01440390802673856
Google Scholar CrossrefAnderson, C. (2012). Subaltern lives: biographies of colonialism in the Indian Ocean world, 1790-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefArmstrong, J.C. (2012). The Chinese Exiles. In N. Worden (Ed.). Cape Town between east and west: social identities in a Dutch colonial town (pp. 101-27). Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media.
Google Scholar CrossrefBlackburn, R. (1988). The overthrow of colonial slavery. London: Verso.
Google Scholar CrossrefBolland, O.N. (1981). Systems of domination after slavery: the control of land and labor in the British West Indies after 1838. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(4), 591-619. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/178395?seq=1 - page_scan_tab_contents
Google Scholar CrossrefBowen, H.V. (2006). The business of empire: the East India Company and imperial Britain, 1756-1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefFisher, M.H. (2004). Counterflows to colonialism: Indian travellers and settlers in Britain, 1600-1857. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Google Scholar CrossrefFisher, M.H. (2006). Working across the seas: Indian maritime labourers in India, Britain, and in between, 1600-1857. In R.P. Behal & M. van der Linden (Eds.), Coolies, capital, and colonialism: studies in Indian labour history (pp. 21-45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefForster, C. (2002). Convicts: unwilling migrants from Britain and France. In D. Eltis (Ed.), Coerced and free migration: global perspectives (pp. 259-91). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefFox, C. (2017). A bitter draught: St. Helena and the abolition of slavery, 1792-1840. Norfolk, UK: Society of Friends of St. Helena.
Google Scholar CrossrefGeber, J.L. (1998). The East India Company and southern Africa: a guide to the archives of the East India Company and the Board of Control, 1600-1858 (unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of London.
Google Scholar CrossrefGrubb, F. (2000). The transatlantic market for British convict labor. Journal of Economic History, 60(1), 94-122. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2566798?seq=1 - page_scan_tab_contents
Google Scholar CrossrefHarfield, A. (1995). Bencoolen: a history of the honourable East India Company’s garrison on the west coast of Sumatra (1685-1825). Barton-on-Sea, UK: A. and J. Partnership.
Google Scholar CrossrefJayasuriya, S. (2009). East India Company in Sumatra: cross-cultural interactions. African and Asian Studies, 8, 204-21.
Google Scholar CrossrefJones, E. (2010). Wives, slaves, and concubines: a history of the female underclass in Dutch Asia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefKnaap, G., & Sutherland, H. (2004). Monsoon traders: ships, skippers and commodities in eighteenth-century Makassar. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefLockard, C.A. (2013). Chinese migration and settlement in Southeast Asia before 1850: making fields from the sea. History Compass, 11(9), 765-81. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12079
Google Scholar CrossrefLogan, F.A. (1956). The British East India Company and African slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687-1792. Journal of Negro History, 41(4), 339-48. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2715359
Google Scholar CrossrefMajor, A. (2012). Slavery, abolitionism and empire in India, 1772-1843. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefMcKeown, A. (2004). Global migration, 1846–1940. Journal of World History, 15(2), 155–89. doi: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20068611
Google Scholar CrossrefPhilips, C.H. (Ed.). (1951). The correspondence of David Scott, director and chairman of the East India Company, relating to Indian affairs, 1787-1805, vol. 1. London: The Royal Historical Society.
Google Scholar CrossrefPlatt, V.B. (1969). The East India Company and the Madagascar slave trade. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26, 548-77.
Google Scholar CrossrefRaben, R. (2008). Cities and the slave trade in early-modern Southeast Asia. In P. Boomgaard, D. Kooiman, & H.S. Nordholt. Linking destinies: trade, towns and kin in Asian history (pp. 119-40). Leiden: KITLV Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefRediker, M., Pybus, C., & Christopher, E. (2007). Introduction. In E. Christopher, C. Pybus & M. Rediker (Eds.), Many middle passages: forced migration and the making of the modern world (pp. 1-19). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefRobins, N. (2006). The corporation that changed the world: how the East India Company shaped the modern multinational. London: Pluto Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefSen, S. (2000). Disciplining punishment: colonialism and convict society in the Andaman Islands. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefStern, P.J. (2011). The company-state: corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British empire in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefVan Welie, R. (2008). Slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire: a global comparison. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 82(1 & 2), 47-96. Retrieve from https://www.jstor.org/stable/43390702?seq=1 - page_scan_tab_contents
Google Scholar CrossrefVink, M. (2003). ‘The world’s oldest trade.’ Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. Journal of World History, 14(2), 131-77. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/20079204?seq=1 - page_scan_tab_contents
Google Scholar CrossrefWard, K. (2009). Networks of empire: forced migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar CrossrefWinterbottom, A. (2011). From hold to foredeck: slave professions in the maritime world of the East India Company, c. 1660-1720. In M. Fusaro & A. Polónia (Eds.), Maritime history as global history (pp. 95-124). St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association.
Google Scholar CrossrefWyman-McCarthy, M. (2014). Rethinking empire in India and the Atlantic: William Cowper, John Newton, and the imperial origins of evangelical abolitionism. Slavery and Abolition 35(2), 306-27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.800277
Google Scholar CrossrefYang, A.A. (2003). Indian convict workers in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Journal of World History, 14(2), 179-208. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/20079205?seq=1 - page_scan_tab_contents
Google Scholar CrossrefYoung, R.J. (1989). Slaves, coolies and bondsmen. A study of assisted migration in response to emerging English shipping networks in the Indian Ocean, 1685-1776. Indian Ocean Review, 2(3), 23-26.
Google Scholar CrossrefDownloads
Published
Almetric
Dimensions
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All articles are published under Creative Commons copyright (CC BY). Authors hold the copyright and retain publishing rights without restrictions, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles as the original source is cited.
.
