(Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies) Alessandro Stanziani (Auth.) - Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants - Bondage in The Indian Ocean World, 1750â 1914-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies
General Editor
Gwyn Campbell, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University
Advisory Board
Philippe Beaujard, EHESS, CNRS, CEMAF, France
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
Masashi Haneda, IASA, University of Tokyo
Michael Pearson, University of New South Wales
Anthony Reid, Australian National University
Abdul Sheriff, Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute
James Francis Warren, Murdoch University
The Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies is the first series dedicated
to the study of the Indian Ocean World from early times to the present day.
It incorporates, and contributes to, key debates in a wide array of disciplines,
including history, environmental studies, anthropology, archaeology, socio
logy, political science, geography, economics, law, and labor and gender stud
ies. Moving beyond the restrictions imposed by Eurocentric timeframes and
national and regional studies analyses, this fundamentally interdisciplinary
series is committed to exploring new paradigms with which to interpret past
events, particularly those that are influenced by human-environment interac
tion. In this way, it provides readers with compelling new insights into areas
from labor relations and migration to diplomacy and trade.
Starvation and the State: Famine, Slavery, and Power in Sudan, 1883–1956
Steven Serels
Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914
Alessandro Stanziani
Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants
Bondage in the Indian Ocean World,

1750–1914
Alessandro Stanziani
sailors, slaves, and immigrants
Copyright © Alessandro Stanziani, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-44845-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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ISBN 978-1-349-49644-0 ISBN 978-1-137-44844-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137448446
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stanziani, Alessandro.
Sailors, slaves, and immigrants : bondage in the Indian Ocean world,
1750–1914 / Alessandro Stanziani (EHESS and CNRS, Paris).
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Sailors—Indian Ocean Region—History—19th century. 2. Slaves—
Indian Ocean Region—History—19th century. 3. Immigrants—Indian
Ocean Region—History—19th century. 4. Indentured servants—Indian
Ocean Region—History—19th century. 5. Slavery—Indian Ocean
Region—History—19th century. 6. Labor—Indian Ocean Region—
History—19th century. 7. Social change—Indian Ocean Region—
History—19th century. 8. Europe—Colonies—Indian Ocean Region—
History—19th century. 9. Indian Ocean—History, Naval—19th century.
10. Indian Ocean Region—Social conditions—19th century. I. Title.
HD8039.S42I547 2014
331.11973409182409034—dc23 2014009446
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Colonial Studies, Area Studies, and the Historical
Meaning of the Indian Ocean 13
2 Seamen in France and the French Empire: Heirs to the
Galley Slave or Forerunners of the Social Security System? 33
3 Sailors in the British Empire 57
4 Slaveries and Emancipation 69
5 Immigrants and Planters in Reunion Island 89
6 From British Servants to Indentured Immigrants:
The Case of Mauritius 107
General Conclusion 125
Notes 135
References 163
Index 185
Introduction
The Scope and Aim

This book is about bondage at sea during the long nineteenth cen-
tury (1750–1914). It challenges the romantic association between sea-
faring and freedom by exploring the labor relationships of seamen,
slaves, and immigrants in the Indian Ocean. It also avoids the clear-
cut distinction between crew and passengers or between free seamen
and unfree slaves and indentured immigrants. It sharply contrasts the
Indian Ocean World (IOW) from the Atlantic World, while stressing
its connections with Europe. Finally, it proposes a new chronology
and a different take on the relationship between labor, bondage, and
modernization.
In the romantic imagination of the nineteenth century, the sea
and seafarers evoked, above all, freedom and the absence of rules:
ever-changing horizons, winds, and adventures. The reality at sea
presented an entirely different picture, one of bonded seamen and
the construction (by force) of free trade in imperial corridors. Slaves,
convicts, indentured immigrants, and coerced seamen crossed the
seas.1 Yet, within this global trend, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean,
and the Indian and Pacific Oceans took different, though increasingly
interconnected, paths. The Atlantic paradigm has largely shaped our
interpretation of modernity made of discoveries, European suprem-
acy, global capitalism, the passage from slavery to free labor and a
quite distinctive chronology. 2 However, this view is increasingly con-
tested with regard to the Atlantic itself; it is also Eurocentric, attribut-
ing the process of modernization to the action of the West alone and
its “uniqueness.” As such, the “Atlantic view” cannot explain why
outside this space, particularly in the Indian Ocean, Western pow-
ers had so much trouble controlling the sea or why multiple forms of
2 Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants
bondage persist even today. The Atlantic view overestimates the sea
power of the European empires and underestimates the fact that it
made widespread use of coercion and bonded labor before as well as
after slavery.
If we take the IOW as our reference, we have a completely different
picture: a multiplicity of cores and peripheries; no European suprem-
acy until very late, that is, the nineteenth century; no clear shift from
slavery to wage labor but rather the coexistence of different forms of
bondage, dependence, and servitude; capitalism as fully compatible
with unfree labor.3 This chronology differs from that of the Atlantic:
it does not start with the arrival of the Europeans or end with the
Industrial Revolution. Instead we find a long period stretching from
antiquity to the rise of Islam (eighth to tenth centuries); then from the
global IOW of Islamic, Mughal, and Ming-Qing powers to the coex-
istence of these polities with Western empires (eleventh to eighteenth
centuries); and finally, the dominance of the West in the nineteenth
century, and even then with different chronologies and strength in
military, geopolitical, trade, labor, or maritime affairs; and today, the
return of Asian powers.4
The implications of this view go beyond the IOW: the transat-
lantic connection (Europe-United States) dominated the world only
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—not before or after.
Until the seventeenth century the world belonged to Asia; then, in
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and part of the nineteenth centuries, it
was, as it is now, multipolar. These relationships must be examined
in detail. In particular, instead of focusing solely on the IOW, this
book will emphasize the connections between the IOW (mainly its
Western part) and Europe. We wish to avoid both extremes: on
the one hand, the strict “dependence” approach, which deprives
the IOW and its people of any agency, and on the other, the radi-
cally globalizing approach, which ignores differences and hierar-
chies in space, areas, peoples, polities, and economies. It is true
that the Europeans penetrated the Indian Ocean and that negotia-
tions took place between the Portuguese and the Ming and between
the British and the Mughal and post-Mughal states, whereas the
obverse did not occur in London or Paris. At the same time, Asian
textiles, spices, and porcelain invaded Europe before the opposite
trend began to develop in the nineteenth century. This book will
not discuss all these interactions; instead it will introduce trade, the
environment, and the institutions to set the context for investigat-
ing labor.
Introduction 3
Coercion and Rights at Sea

Were seamen and indentured immigrants a kind of “disguised
slaves”?
Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have highlighted,
according to their disciplines, different aspects of labor relationships
in an attempt to draw the line between “free” labor and “forced”
labor, particularly slavery. Social status (membership in or exclusion
from the clan, the family, the local community), religion, legal status
(the form of dependence, freedom of movement, the hereditary char-
acter of such constraints), socioeconomic conditions (dependence,
noneconomic advantages, coercion, etc.), political rights, and legal
(and procedural) rights have all been discussed. 5 Researchers have
pinpointed several variables, but without reaching a consensus. These
issues have been debated even more fiercely in the last 20 years as
cultural studies and subaltern studies brought out the relativity of the
notions of freedom and coercion. As a result, the question has now
become whether or not a given form of dependence, bondage, and so
on found in a particular society in Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean,
or the Americas could be considered “slavery.” If the answer is yes,
then by implication slavery existed before and independently of colo-
nialism; if the answer is no, it means that these forms of dependence
and bondage were specific to a particular place, and “imperialist”
and revisionist culture would prefer to call them “slavery” in order to
minimize the West’s “debt” to the Third World.
The aim of this book is not to take sides in favor of either of the
“general” definitions of labor and forced labor and use it to qualify
seamen, indentured immigrants, and forms of bondage and servitude
as “free” or “unfree.” On the contrary, the boundary line between
free labor and forced labor will be set in specific historical and insti-
tutional contexts that explain why this line was conceived and put
into practice in one way rather than another and how it affected eco-
nomic and social dynamics.6 Instead of attempting to establish the
moment when “free labor” and “civilization” emerged, or conversely,
stigmatizing the perpetuation of latent forms of slavery, we want to
grasp the dynamics at work in certain historical forms of labor, start-
ing from the historically situated tension between freedom and con-
straint. To this end, we must first specify the local forms of labor
in their historical context and, second, explain the economic, insti-
tutional, and civilizational consequences of the encounters between
local bondage and global dynamics. Our study will focus on (a) forms
of servitude and bondage in the Indian Ocean; (b) the global maritime
labor market; and (c) indentured immigrants in the Indian Ocean.
Servitude and Bondage in the IOW

Contrary to its counterpart in the Atlantic, the slave trade in the
Indian Ocean was multidirectional; over time, its direction and main
destinations changed and involved not only men but women as well.
The forms of slavery were many and varied: there were palace slaves,
soldier slaves, female and child slaves, and slave laborers in agricul-
ture and manufacturing, with diverse statuses.7 From this standpoint,
the meaning of slavery in the Indian Ocean region only becomes intel-
ligible when viewed outside the categories of slavery in the ancient
world or in North America. It often entailed mutual forms of depen-
dence in which one individual (or group or caste) of inferior status
was under obligation to another with higher status, who in turn was
under obligation to a superior. The forms of status obligation, bond-
age, and temporary slavery (for debt, etc.) coexisted with forms of
hereditary slavery similar to the type practiced in North America.8
What happened when these forms of slavery and dependence came in
contact with the European powers?
This book will seek an answer in the evolution of local bondage
in the IOW, in the maritime labor market, and finally in the passage
from slavery to indentured immigration.
The Maritime Labor Market

Historical works on seamen in the Atlantic have stressed the proleta-
rization of this labor market since the eighteenth century. Some have
objected to the segmentation of this market by race, ethnicity, and
nationality and emphasized instead the commonality of the actual
labor, conditions and ideals of seamen and slaves.9 Ravi Ahuja has
vigorously questioned the validity of this approach for the Indian
Ocean where race discrimination and market segmentation dominat-
ed.10 Taking into consideration the main issue raised in these works,
this book will add some pieces to the picture. Our first fundamental
hypothesis is that so-called free forms of labor and bondage were
defined and practiced in reference to each other. This mutual defini-
tion of the forms of bondage and freedom took place not only within
each country and area but also on a global scale, as we shall demon-
strate, first in the maritime labor market in France and England and
in their Indian companies. In France, the galley system overlapped
Introduction 5
with navy recruitment. It was hard to distinguish slaves from con-

victs or recruits. To some extent during the eighteenth century and
far more after the Revolution, forced recruitment was enhanced by
a pension system for seamen, which was to influence the future wel-
fare state. This change accompanied the globalization of the seafarer
labor market and the (forced) recruitment of colonial seamen. From
this point of view, the French East India Company already engaged
in kidnapping in the colonies and the practice survived in various
forms throughout much of the nineteenth century. Later in the same
century, discrimination against colonial workers came to be associ-
ated with the free market, as opposed to welfare protections limited
to French crew. A similar evolution occurred in England where the
impressment system coexisted with kidnapping and the use of slaves
among the crew. Though the abolition of slavery did not put an end to
harsh punishment for English seamen (no pension funds), it enhanced
recruitment in the global markets. In this case as well, experiences
in the Indian Ocean proved decisive in the evolution of the British
maritime labor market.
Immigration and Labor

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, European powers
instrumentally described the forms of bondage used in the Indian
Ocean as “mild” dependence rather than slavery.11 Thus, whereas
indentured labor in the Atlantic was long contrasted with slavery
and therefore considered a form of free labor, in the Indian Ocean it
immediately entered the grey zone of local bondage with its multiple
qualifications. There were two reasons for this: first, the overall evo-
lution of maritime labor markets and its connection with coercion,
and second, the relationships between “free” and “unfree” labor, not
only in the Indian Ocean, but also in Europe. The interaction between
the forms of bondage and the notions of indentured labor and its
French equivalent known as engagisme exported by the Europeans
make this an interesting case.12 From the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, rules governing the treatment of runaways were adopted
not only for slaves and indentured laborers in the colonies but also in
Great Britain, where fugitive workers, journeymen, and servants in
general were subject to severe criminal punishment under the Master
and Servant Acts. Apprenticeship, advances in wages and raw mate-
rials as well as simple master-servant relations were adduced to jus-
tify such provisions. From the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth
century in Britain and Europe, free labor, even where a contract
existed, was considered the property of the employer and a resource

for the whole community to which the individual belonged.13 France
presents a similar story: the notion of a work contract, and hence that
of a “wage earner” as we know it today, did not exist until the end
of the nineteenth century. Until then, although the French Revolution
had eliminated lifetime engagement, it did not abolish the notion of
labor as service.14
We argue that it would have been impossible to develop the inden-
ture contract in the British Empire if the British wage earner had not
been a servant, subject to the multiple Master and Servant Acts and
the British sailor had not been recruited and subject to extreme, vio-
lent conditions. Similarly, the engagés (equivalent to indentured ser-
vants) and bonded laborers in the French colonies would have been
inconceivable without widespread forms of bondage in the Indian
Ocean, hiring for services and domestic service in France or forced
recruitment on French ships. Over the long term, there was interaction
within this complex world: the conditions and legal status of bonded
laborers, servants, and indentured immigrants in the IOW and those
of wage earners and seamen in France and Great Britain influenced
each other. Within this common world, inequalities between the legal
and economic entitlements of working people and those of their mas-
ters were far greater in the colonies than in Europe; they also differed
between colonies of the same empire, as well as between European
countries and between different areas of a given country.
On this basis, we will examine the relations between Europe and
some of its colonies in the Indian Ocean in a more complex way than
mere dependence of the latter on the former would suggest. In our
view, it is necessary to avoid any simplistic identification of colonial
discourse with colonial practices. Colonial elites expressed complex
and often divergent aims, which were all the more difficult to put into
practice as colonized people were by no means passive subjects. There
was considerable reciprocal influence and knowledge, institutions,
and practices circulated between Europe and its colonies and between
Europe and local powers in Asia and Africa. The history of forms of
“free” labor is intimately linked to the history of forced labor. A whole
spectrum of forms of dependence, bondage, and labor were available
and overlapped with each other in India, Indonesia, Japan, and China
as well as in Britain, France, and the Indian Ocean. Bondage and
slavery did in fact exist, although in different forms, before and after
colonization. And finally, emancipation did not come about solely
under the pressure exerted by the “advanced West.” Thus, the areas
Introduction 7
of the IOW were not just the West’s dominated peripheries, but active
players on the local and international chessboard. Even when the West
seemed to control a particular area, colonial experience strongly influ-
enced the evolution of labor rules and practices in the mainland. For
example, Henri Maine’s contribution to labor law reform in Britain
stemmed from his own experience in India. Indeed Maine is famous
for, among other things, highlighting the distinction between status
and contract. He opposed unfree societies (ancien régime, feudalism,
slavery) to free societies. In the former, the legal status of the actors
conditioned their social, political, and economic actions, while in the
latter the contract prevailed. As Prabu Mohapatra has convincingly
demonstrated, Maine drew this line based on his experience in India
when he proposed modifications of the Masters and Servants Acts
in order to take specific Indian labor conditions into account. Some
years later, he declared on the same grounds that the masters and ser-
vants relationship with its criminal punishment for breach of contract
could no longer survive in England. 15 The role of the circulation of
knowledge is bound up with economic and social trends as a whole.
Global Dynamics
As we have shown elsewhere,16 not only in the seventeenth but also
the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, the continuing
importance of cottage industries and frequent migration between city
and country throughout most of Europe (including Britain) created
a strong link between two types of constraint: presence at work and
compliance with working hours, on the one hand, and competition
among employers (including heads of households), manufacturers,
landowners, and trader-entrepreneurs for the control and appropria-
tion of labor on the other. Here we will add an importance aspect:
the connection between maritime and rural labor. In many areas, the
rural population not only alternated between agriculture and proto-
industry or agriculture and urban manufacture, they also worked
seasonally as seamen. With the increasing standardization of labor
and the length of voyages, two contrasting tendencies appeared:
rural inhabitants, who were not professional sailors, could be easily
enrolled; on the other hand, long voyages conflicted with their ambi-
tion to alternate jobs from one season to the next. This is where pres-
ence at work and harsh discipline found support in institutions and
labor law. Along with the rules governing workshops, agricultural
estates, and plantations in Europe and Asia, a set of provisions was
devised to control mobility and presence at work, such as worker’s

booklets, laws against poaching workers and begging, forms of bond-
age, kidnapping, and so on. Organizational constraints became linked
to institutional constraints; required presence at work conveyed con-
cerns about internal organization, competition, and public order. Yet
if this was the case, what were its specific features in each area and
how did they enter global dynamics?
Between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the conti-
nuities and connections between free and unfree labor prevailed over
clear-cut oppositions such as those between wage earners and serfs,
indentured immigrants and servants in both time and space. Imperial,
national, regional, and local features must be taken into consider-
ation in order to understand how the whole system worked. Thus, the
French case is of interest, not because it was the land of Colbertism as
opposed to liberal England, or because nineteenth-century France was
the country of free, codified law compared with Germany, which still
lagged behind. On the contrary, France is of interest because the gal-
ley system projected its main features well into the eighteenth century
and was transmuted into forms of forced recruitment both in France
and in the Indian Ocean. This case is all the more likely to raise new
questions as, contrary to a popular misconception, common law in
England was in fact accompanied by a considerable degree of regula-
tion and state intervention and labor remained subject to criminal
constraints until the end of the nineteenth century. The masters and
servants rules were not only enforced in Britain; they strongly influ-
enced postslavery labor in its colonies, while the navy continued to
use coercion on Britons as well as on colonial subjects.
These interactions took place in addition to more general ones
with India in terms of institutions and labor. While British norms and
perceptions translated into various forms of bondage and slavery in
India, and thereby helped perpetuate slavery well after its official abo-
lition, the latter nevertheless predated any British intervention. The
solution adopted in India and the practices that were accepted did
not result solely from British influences, but rather from interaction
between those influences and local labor relations and values. Yet we
must not confine ourselves to British-Indian interaction alone. As this
book will show, there were multiple cross-influences among France,
Britain, and the Indian Ocean, on the one hand, and among India,
East Africa, and other areas of the Indian Ocean on the other.
Within this broader picture, we have paid special attention to
Mauritius and Reunion Island because the time is ripe for a new
Introduction 9
analysis of the forms of dependence in the French and British empires

specifically based on labor status. At first glance, Mauritius and
Reunion Island seem to confirm the importance of the Atlantic para-
digm, particularly the domination exerted by European powers, the
dissemination of the plantation system, and its heritage in postslavery
forms of immigration and labor. Our aim and outcome will be dif-
ferent: we intend to show that despite the existence of plantations,
experiences in Mauritius and Reunion Island differed from those in
the Atlantic in many areas—the forms of labor recruitment, the orga-
nization of labor, the role of Arab, Indian, Swahili elites, and its final
outcome. Finally, although there were indeed differences between the
plantation systems in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, the differ-
ences were even greater for other forms of labor, farming, and bond-
age. This has several implications from the standpoint of dynamics.
While labor markets in the North Atlantic were homogenous in terms
of wages and forms of labor, such homogeneity never developed in
the Indian Ocean. Thus, instead of a successive shift from slavery
to indenture to wage labor, multiple forms of dependence coexisted
over time. Consequently, standardized labor and production could
not be imposed in the Indian Ocean World as they were in the North-
Atlantic world. On the contrary, major development growth took
place before and after the golden era of centralization and standard-
ization (1870–1980). Western hegemony chiefly benefited of this pro-
cess, whereas the Indian Ocean development was primarily linked
to different forms of production and labor such as continuing labor-
intensive growth and, along with it, persistent forms of bondage that
were perfectly compatible with capitalism.17
Plan of the Book

The relationships between maritime and agrarian labor, Europe, and
the Indian Ocean and, finally, laborers and ship crew demand care-
ful historical and analytical scrutiny. Thus, the first chapter summa-
rizes the main historical and historiographical context underlying our
investigation. In particular, it discusses the main approaches in area
studies, global studies, and imperial and colonial analysis. The his-
torical meanings of environment, trade, shipbuilding, and sovereignty
in the Indian Ocean will be also presented here.
The following two chapters take a close look at recruitment and
maritime labor in France, Britain, and their respective empires,
together with the legacy of the galley system in eighteenth-century
France and the evolution of conscription. The experience of the

French East India Company and the use of colonial labor will also be
examined. The changes in the maritime labor market in France will
be viewed in relation to the transformation of labor, recruitment, and
social welfare. The tensions between the social conditions and pen-
sions of French and colonial seamen will also be studied in detail.
In the following chapter, we will undertake a similar investigation
of the British maritime labor market and its connections with the
Indian Ocean. We will show that, contrary to commonly held beliefs
and despite the lack of a galley system, maritime labor made wide-
spread use of coercion in recruitment (press gangs, kidnapping) and
working conditions and in the extension of both to colonial subjects.
It is interesting to note that the abolitionist movement itself was much
less inclined to protect sailors than slaves, reasoning that the former
were partially responsible for their sins (drunkenness, sex), whereas
the latter had been involuntary seized and sold.
Taken together, the maritime labor market in France and Britain
and their experiences in the Indian Ocean raise doubts about the
impact of an institutional breakthrough such as the rise of modern
states, the French Revolution, and Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” or
even abolitionism on setting a boundary line between freedom and
unfreedom. The nineteenth century brought with it new inequalities
and so did the enhanced welfare regime at the turn of the twentieth
century. Distinctions in terms of masters and servants were gradu-
ally replaced by new forms of discrimination based on origin and
residence—and only later race—(mainland against colonial subjects)
and kind of labor (skilled, unskilled, maritime, industrial, and later
among different branches of the industry).
These observations on maritime labor and European labor in gen-
eral will help to explain how slavery and dependence evolved in the
Indian Ocean. Chapter 4 recalls the complex forms of precolonial
slavery and labor in the Indian Ocean World. We then go on to exam-
ine the encounter between European and local notions and practices
of labor and freedom and the tensions that arose between them dur-
ing the age of slavery and its abolition. This point is further developed
in chapter 4, which discusses indentured immigrants and other forms
of migration in the Indian Ocean. Critical attention will be devoted
to the Mascarene Islands. Using largely unexplored archives, this
chapter provides a detailed account of the concrete duties and rights
immigrants actually had. The antibondage movement in the British
colonies was much more closely linked to the pro-worker movement
Introduction 11
in Britain than its counterpart in the French colonies to greater worker

protections in France. In short, rather than look out to sea from the
land, this book will reverse the angle of vision and look at the land
from the sea.18 By putting the accent on the sea, we aim to show the
interconnections between fields and issues that are usually analyzed
separately: the relationship between the maritime labor market, on
the one hand, and the rural and first industrial labor market on the
other; the link between the evolution of labor in mainland Europe
and its colonies in the Indian Ocean, and, more broadly, the study of
the Indian Ocean in a global perspective.
1
Colonial Studies, Area Studies, and the
Historical Meaning of the Indian Ocean
To understand the scope and aim of our study, it is important to dis-

cuss the main approaches and historiographies to which this book
refers. We will then go on to present an overview of the environ-
ment, trade, shipbuilding, and institutions in the Indian Ocean to
provide the background for the notions and practices of labor to be
analyzed.
Conventional historiography neglected the importance of the
Indian Ocean and put the accent first on the Mediterranean and then
the Atlantic as the core of modernization. Pierre Chaunu dismissed
the idea of the Indian Ocean as a unit,1 while Braudel contrasted the
fragmentation of the IOW with the unity of the Mediterranean. 2 Kirti
Chaudhuri was the first to claim the unity of the IOW, but he argued
that this unity was destroyed by the arrival of the Europeans and situ-
ated its breakup in the mid-eighteenth century.3 Sanjay Subrahmanyam
has correctly observed that this interpretation opposes two static,
ahistorical models, one before and another after European coloniza-
tion. As such, these analyses prove to be deterministic and cannot
account for historical changes.4 A discussion of Indian Ocean unity
generally turns into an investigation of the respective roles played by
the environment, religion, and markets. Some scholars have linked
the unity of the IOW to the monsoons, 5 others have insisted on the
role of Islam,6 while followers of the world-system approach point to
markets.7 This book will give these variables due consideration, but
it aims to escape from traditional “colonial studies” as well as “area
studies.” Colonial studies present a major limitation: they take colo-
nial empire for granted and focus instead on evaluating the level of
dependence and hierarchies and how they evolve over time. From this
standpoint, anticolonial and subaltern studies reproduce the para-

digm of classical “imperialistic” and liberal studies but simply reverse
their main argument. In the wake of Gramsci, the authors claiming
to adhere to subaltern studies maintained first of all that language
was a component of power and a factor in hierarchies, and second,
that subaltern classes and colonized peoples were not necessarily
passive in their interactions with the colonizers. Hence, the British
exercised their power in colonial India by controlling and modifying
the language, as the case of the Zamindars clearly illustrates. The
Zamindars, who were income tax administrators under the Mughals,
were considered landowners by the British. This “translation” subse-
quently paved the way for British territorial control.
The same process can be easily discerned in other contexts, and
indeed translations, the media, the circulation of legal rules, and the
language used by international organizations have all been desig-
nated as instruments of power and domination of the “South” by
the “North.” Notions such as market, trade, family, child, property,
inheritance, peasant, worker, and so on thus acquired specific local
features that were irreducible to a more general model.8 No doubt
this approach was more nuanced and differentiated and allowed for
a more complex arborescence of societies and cultures than mono-
lithic analyses in terms of economic growth, progress, and “the rise of
the West.” From then on, dependence became decompartmentalized,
along with the history of elites and dominant groups.
These approaches are not without problems, however, starting
with how they view the interaction between elites and subaltern
groups. Fred Cooper has highlighted the fact that Africans, Indians,
and other colonized populations were far less passive than subaltern
studies would claim, in spite of their Gramscian premise. Colonized
peoples had significant impact on their colonizers, whose violence
and ambition did not always reflect real control over the colony.9
Subaltern studies and many other historical approaches encour-
age us to avoid thinking about non-European entities exclusively in
terms of our own European categories. That is fine in theory, but in
practice? Where is the boundary line separating Europe from other
worlds? In the case of the Indian Ocean, in particular, when can we
use European categories and when should we reject them? Were there
differences between the state, the law, a profit-based economy, and
economic ethics in, say, eighteenth-century India and Europe? Were
those values homogeneous throughout an area called “Europe” or
“India”?
Colonial Studies, Area Studies, Historical Meaning 15
Economic knowledge and legal models circulated along with people

and goods. This circulation led not only to greater similarity among
systems, but also to differentiation and hierarchies of areas and coun-
tries. Needham claimed that China was actually ahead of every other
country in mapmaking. Yet we know Jesuit, Mongol, and Manchu
travelers all contributed to Chinese geographical knowledge. There
was an interweaving of influences even between East and West, with
transmission in one direction of Renaissance cartography to China
and in the other direction of geographical information from East Asia
to Europe.10 All the same, when Ricci’s world map was brought to
Japan in 1603, it set the stage for Japanese study and eventual pro-
duction of world maps. At the same time, there is evidence of a great
deal of borrowing and assimilation of world knowledge stemming
from Japanese contacts with the Dutch.11 Arriving in the archipel-
ago from the Indian Ocean, like the Portuguese, the Dutch mapped
the Maldives and Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, and Bali. However, it was
not until the Magellan expedition that this zone became part of the
Western geographical imagination. Encounters between civilizations
undoubtedly played a major role, but they did not keep the European
powers from trying to produce knowledge in order to establish hier-
archies. In this case, mapping became the favorite tool for imposing
a European conception of sovereignty and French or English notions
of free trade, free labor, and so on were used to legitimize imperial
hierarchies.
With this as our starting point, we must avoid another question-
able approach (from the colonial point of view): so-called area stud-
ies. In universities, the Indian Ocean is often divided up into separate
areas (Chinese studies, Southeast Asian studies, Indian studies,
African studies), which reflect parochial academic stakes and inter-
ests far more than historical realities. The designation of well-defined
area studies is to a certain extent a burdensome legacy of the colonial
period, partly due to Orientalism and Oriental studies in the West and
partly a result of growing nationalistic tendencies in China, India,
and several African countries. All these phenomena would require
lengthy discussion of historiographies, values, and polities in their
local, regional, and transnational dimensions, which is beyond the
scope of this book and has already dealt with elsewhere.12 Instead,
we identify areas and spaces according to their historical meanings.
Chaudhuri identified four civilizations in the Indian Ocean—Islamic,
Sanskritic Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian13 but he “forgot”
East Africa. Generally speaking, the territories as well as the social
and political hierarchies of imperial areas changed over time. Thus,

the area between East Africa and China was surely connected in the
fifteenth century, well before the arrival of the Portuguese. Some his-
torians claim the fragmentation of the IOW took place after 1800,
due to the increasing political and military presence of Europeans and
conflicts among them.14 The question of IOW unity therefore depends
not only on the period under investigation but also on the main vari-
ables we take into consideration—to begin with, the environment.
Environment and Historicity

Recent historiography on the Indian Ocean often quotes Braudel and
starts from historical geography and the environment to identify the
specificity of the IOW.15
Indeed, monsoon, cyclones, and the great variety and abun-
dance of river landscapes along an immense coastline running from
the Zambezi in East Africa to the Irrawaddy and the Mekong are
all distinctive features of the IOW; we might add river instability,
volcanoes and earthquake intensity. Various subregions can also be
distinguished.
In contrast to trade wind regions like the Atlantic, the pattern of
monsoons is quite regular. These were the winds that largely deter-
mined when and where people could sail. Regional specificities have
to be considered as well. The northeast monsoon starts in November
and one could leave the Arabian coast at that time and sail at least
as far as Mogadishu. However, the eastern Arabian Sea has violent
tropical storms in October and November, so for a voyage from India
to the coast, it was best to leave in December. By March the north-
east monsoon is beginning to break up in the south, and by April the
prevailing wind is from the southwest. This was the period to sail
from the coast to the north and east. During the northeast monsoon,
November to April, a weak counterclockwise gyre produces a west-
ward current. During the southwest monsoon period, this current
reverses, going east. In the far south we are out of the monsoon sys-
tem and the southwest monsoon becomes weak and unpredictable.
The situation is different between the Red Sea and western India.
Ships left Calicut in January and arrived there from the Red Sea
between August and November. Moving west, the western coast of
Malaysia becomes a lee shore during the southwest monsoon, making
it very difficult to sail or land. The monsoon pattern dictated the pas-
sage from the west of the ocean, for example the Red Sea, to Malacca
in the Far East. This voyage could not be completed in one go; at least
one stop was necessary and it was most likely in southern India. Yet
access from Bengal to the coast of China, Siam, and Anam was pos-
sible through the Malacca and Sunda straits. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, Indian ships used the Sunda Strait, whereas Arab ships preferred
to travel through Malacca. Indeed, the China Sea has a monsoon
pattern that does not exactly correspond to the timing of the Western
Indian Ocean. Ships on the way to and from Canton or ports further
north needed a lengthy stay in Southeast Asia before favorable winds
set in. Chinese junks trading with Malacca from the beginning of the
fifteenth century followed the mainland coast to Indochina and then
crossed over to the Malay Peninsula.
A fourth area is located south of the monsoon region; it connects
the Cape of Good Hope to southern Madagascar. In this region, as in
the previous ones, ocean currents combine with winds to create con-
straints as well as opportunities for travel by sea. Off the East African
coast, during the northeast monsoon from November to April, the
weak counterclockwise gyre produces a westward current that trav-
els as fast as one knot. During the southwest monsoon, this current
reverses, going east and then north along the coast of Somalia. Below
the monsoon zone, there is a steady anticyclonic gyre and the south
equatorial current flows west and divides at Madagascar. One arm
goes north to Madagascar, then south between Madagascar and
Africa. The other branch goes south to the east of Madagascar, then
curves back toward South India. Winds and currents largely influ-
enced seafaring as well as piracy, trade and fisheries.16
At the same time, in pointing out the differences and specificities of
the IOW and its subregion, we must not fall into the trap of environ-
mental determinism. First of all, the environment itself evolves and the
same is true for our understanding of it. Let us take the example of
cyclones, which played a major role in shaping the history and images
of the Indian Ocean. Cyclones are also crucial variables in this history
insofar as they affected shipbuilding, trade, and emigration, as its
cause (damage to crops, famines), during the voyage and upon arrival
at destination (lack of food and wages). The southwest area of the
Indian Ocean, located in the intertropical zone, is one of the world’s
seven cyclogenesis basins. Tropical cyclones make their appearance
at the beginning of the austral summer, around November 15. The
cyclone season generally lasts until the 15th of April.17 Winds can reach
up to 300 kilometer per hour, with the released energy quadrupling
when wind speed doubles. The northeastern and extreme southern
zones are the most exposed.18 The first problem is that of obtain-
ing sufficiently accurate information on the cyclones. Even today,
the various weather stations name and classify hurricanes, cyclones,
and typhoons in different ways.19 It is therefore easy to see why there
was so much uncertainty and inaccuracy regarding cyclones in the
nineteenth century. The scientific identification of tropical hurricanes
developed at a slow pace. In the eighteenth century and the first half of
the nineteenth century, most information came from travel narratives
and nautical logs. At the time, meteorologists were seldom taken seri-
ously in France or in England. Scientific circles viewed meteorology
as akin to popular prophecy, or at best the professional know-how
of sailors and planters. 20 Its rise was further impeded in the colonies,
owing to limited knowledge of the local environment and the high
cost of obtaining such knowledge. In the Indian Ocean in particu-
lar, meteorological analysis remained the preserve of scientists and
explorers; the British and French navies gradually compiled charts for
currents, tides, and winds, but their analyses focused on the north-
ern Indian Ocean, leaving its southern areas relatively neglected. As
a result, progress in the understanding of cyclones was slow. It was
mainly officers and seafarers who made the first attempts at gathering
information from logbooks to arrive at more general analyses.
The first question to resolve is whether the increasing mention of
cyclones in the archives reflects reality or whether it is a source effect,
that is, political and economic stakes added to gradual improvements
in meteorology. In recent years, with the help of archaeologists, mete-
orologists have recreated past climatic events in impressive detail. In
particular, in the northern Indian Ocean it is now possible to pin-
point an increase in the temperature of the water, a reduction in rain-
fall, and weaker summer monsoons starting in 1860. Milder summer
monsoons led to drought and poor rice harvests, which in turn often
led to famine. 21
These phenomena had numerous effects on the Mascarenes: weaker
monsoons in the northern part of the Indian Ocean were accompa-
nied by a larger number of more powerful cyclones in the southern
region. Recent meteorological studies confirm the details we found in
the archives. 22
The archives list 89 cyclones for the Mascarene Islands between
1656 and 2007. There was a noticeable increase in the twentieth cen-
tury (43 cyclones compared with 17 in the nineteenth century and 20
in the eighteenth century). According to the archives, these differences
cannot be explained by improved recording. Now if we focus on the
nineteenth century, we see a definite peak in the number of cyclones

between 1870 and 1879. However, the violence of the cyclones was
the most extreme and caused the most damage in 1844, 1863, and
1868. In short, this means there was a significant difference between
long-term environmental changes and local perceptions of them.
The maritime frontier itself was difficult to determine given the huge
expanse of rivers and floodwaters, especially in South and Southeast
Asia. Rivers connected the ocean to inland territories and often com-
pensated for the lack of natural deepwater harbors. 23 River instability
and the resulting changes in plains, coastlines, and deltas influenced
human settlement and economic activity.
In view of these considerations, in the present study, the maritime
frontier is a connective and occasionally contested maritime space. 24
Many scholars such as Chaudhuri, Braudel, and Wink have stressed
the different relationship between land and sea in the Mediterranean
and in the Indian Ocean. This difference is in large part a historio-
graphical construct and should not be exaggerated. The boundary
line between seamen and agricultural laborers was narrow, not only
in the Indian Ocean but also in France and Britain, as most of them
engaged in both activities according to the season. The rigid com-
partmentalization of these two activities was a late phenomenon in
Europe, linked at first to long-distance voyages and colonial expan-
sion between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and con-
solidated only during the nineteenth century. Peasant-sailors were
the rule, not the exception. As we will see, slavery and other forms
of bondage (indenture contract) did not break this link but actually
reinforced it by using the same people for both activities. Thus, the
historically relevant difference between the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean or the Atlantic is not the frontier between land and sea
but the multiple ways by which it was shaped over time. Trade, labor,
shipbuilding, and political institutions contributed to this process.
Trade
Trade has probably been the most thoroughly explored topic in history
and social science research on the Indian Ocean. We will not develop
this point at length here, but simply recall the main orientations of
the historiography. Trade and trade networks crossed imperial and
ecological boundaries. 25 Some historians have identified three main
periods: long-distance trade prior to the seventeenth century; imperial
conquest in two centuries that followed; mass migration after that. 26
Yet this chronology relies upon specific variables and groups—trade,

merchants, migrants—and ignores religion, the exchange of food
crops, 27 and the specific dynamics and hierarchies in the IOWs. 28
Thus, cities and port cities in China or India were never merely an
administrative phenomenon, as a certain functionalist theory of these
societies claims. Merchants were always key players, even in the dis-
tant past. 29 And when an administration appears to have imposed its
authority, in reality it was for the purpose of creating links and net-
works and mixing with ethnic groups—in short, building an empire.
Trade flourished in the Indian Ocean in ancient times; there is evidence
of trade down the Red Sea and in Punt, on the African side, as early as
5000 BCE. During the first millennium BCE, connections were devel-
oped with the Mediterranean and between India, Africa, and China.
With the growth of Islam, beginning in the ninth century, trade in
the Indian Ocean expanded significantly. 30 Arabs had long traded
with the Indian coast and Indians with the Arab world. When Arabs
became Muslims, they continued to trade, and conversions took place
very early along the Indian coastline. Islam began making converts
in Southeast Asia in the late thirteenth century. From Kerala, Islam
flowed on to Southeast Asia. Extensive trade with China was handled
by Chinese and Gujarat merchants. In the fifteenth century and later,
most Asian spices were consumed by Asians. India alone consumed
twice as many fine spices as the whole of Europe. Porcelains, metals,
ivory, rice, and slaves were the most important items of trade. During
this period, the leading port cities included Sofala in the far south of
East Africa, which provided gold and ivory from the interior. To the
north, Kilwa was the principal emporium between 1250 and 1330.
By 1500 the largest port city was Mombasa, a prosperous center of
trade in ivory and gold from the south for manufactures in the west
and north.
Aden was a powerful port city owing to its location at the entrance
to the Red Sea, while the sizable ports of Gujarat were certainly prom-
inent centers of exchange. In this period, the main port was Cambay.
On the Malabar Coast, Calicut was the dominant port.
The Portuguese helped militarize Indian Ocean trade but they
failed to fundamentally transform its nature or patterns in the west-
ern part of the region. Instead they superimposed their activities on
the preexisting trade structure. Mozambique became the vital link
in the chain between Goa and Lisbon. The Portuguese system was
a vast protection racket, for the Portuguese were selling protection
from violence they themselves had created. 31 In the middle of the
seventeenth century, Portuguese control ran up against challenges

from the Omanis, the Dutch, and the British. Like the Portuguese, the
Dutch sought to control the spice trade. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg,
and mace made up the famous four spices of the Dutch East India
Company (VOC). The Dutch also made widespread use of slaves to
produce these items. However, this proved more difficult with spices
than with sugar. Pepper was the main product; it was cultivated in
several areas, not all of them controlled by the Dutch. Thus, at least
in Malabar, the Dutch were confronted by the same problems that
had hindered Portuguese efforts: the production area was inland,
whereas European power was effective only on the coast and at sea.
The Portuguese were expelled from Muscat and an aggressive new
Omani dynasty emerged. They built an empire but its reach was lim-
ited to East Africa. After 1750, Britain, and to a lesser extent France,
took the lead in the western Indian Ocean. Shipbuilding contributed
to these dynamics by introducing both opportunities and obstacles to
the circulation of knowledge within the Indian Ocean and between
the IOW and Europe.
Shipbuilding and Seamanship

Shipbuilding is seldom independent of the geographical environment
in which the ships are used; it is also highly adaptive and mobile. In
Europe, two basic types of ship—the galley and the round ship—
served as models for later development. From the sixteenth to the
early nineteenth century, gradual innovations continued, but no radi-
cally new ship appeared until the invention of the steam engine. In the
Indian Ocean, were there marked differences in the shape and design
of hulls from one area to another, and even within a single trading
region there were highly specialized craft considered suitable only for
particular kinds of water and sailing conditions. 32 The multitude of
vessels can be divided into three main categories. In the western half,
as far as Bengal, shipbuilding followed an Indo-Islamic tradition and
produced a number of common hull shapes. The derm dhow was used
by westerners for a variety of craft, large and small, which dominated
the western part of the Indian Ocean for centuries.33 Teakwood from
Malabar, which was highly resistant to decay, was used to make a
hull following the carvel method: the planks of the hull were laid
edge to edge rather than overlapping as in Western ships. They were
held together by coir fiber stitching that passed through holes in the
planks. The hulls could carry heavy cargo, camels, horses, and even
elephants. The ships were rigged with the famous triangular sails
known as “lateen” (derived from “Latin”). This type of sail probably
developed independently in several places, even if the Arab influence
appears to have been decisive.
The prahu and the sampan were predominant in the Indonesian
islands, Malaya and Burma. These were fast, light boats, mostly used
for inland seas. The Chinese junk, on the other hand, was the high
seas vessel par excellence. These great ships carried 200 or 300 sail-
ors; if the wind dropped, sail power was replaced by sweeps, each one
taking four sailors to row. However, reliance on Chinese ships in the
Bengal and South Asian regions ended after 1368.
In the earlier centuries of Islamic expansion toward India and
Indonesia, the shipbuilders of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea
upgraded their undecked smaller craft into bigger vessels. The arrival
of Europeans in the fourteenth century led to a gradual modification
of hull design. At the time, the Chinese navy used only light can-
nons; they failed to sink Western European ships because the weakly
planked and timbered junks were unable to carry heavy guns.34
During the sixteenth century, the Gujarat Sultanate and the Moplas
of Malabar manufactured ships weighing about 150 tons each. They
were made of wood with iron nails. In the seventeenth century, the
crews of Malabar ships were equipped with stinkpots (a type of
primitive hand grenade) and lances but lacked onboard artillery. 35 In
Calicut, the caste known as Odayis specialized in building ships of
about 350–400 tons. In 1503, the fleet of King Zamorin of Calicut
comprised 160 paros and each paro had two guns. These ships were
designed for coastal warfare along the littoral of the Arabian Sea.
They could not match the Portuguese vessels.
It is a well-known fact that the Portuguese exported the maritime
revolution to the Indian Ocean. Europeans ships proved to be supe-
rior to all other vessels in the Indian Ocean, at least on the high seas.
At the same time, many of the great Portuguese naus, and later on
company ships, were made in Asia. Due to cheaper labor and materi-
als, the cost per ton in India was only half what it was in Europe. 36
Caulking in particular was very expensive and in any case this tech-
nique had no advantage over the cheaper traditional north Indian
method of rabbeting. Indian ships continued to use coir cables and
cordage rather than hemp ropes, but coir was perfectly adequate as
long as it remained in salt water to keep it strong. 37
European supremacy was thus limited to the high seas. Along the
coasts, as in the Mediterranean, the superiority of the round ship in
no way threatened the existence of other boats, including galleys,

which had the advantages of speed and maneuverability.
In northern India, gunpowder weaponry for riverine warfare was
introduced by the Mughals. They used small boats known as khelna
to record the river depth before the main fleet moved in. In 1582, the
Mughals hired Portuguese sailors for the Mughal Eastern Fleet sta-
tioned at Dacca.38 The Mughals decided not to adopt all the European
innovations, as local boats retained their importance in both war and
coastal trading activities. As a result, the Mughals confined most of
their maritime attention to the coasts of Gujarat and Bengal. Outside
the ports, the Mughals delegated the protection of their maritime
route either to the trading communities themselves or to the special-
ized Abyssinian corsairs of Janjira on the western coast. 39 These Sidis
were authorized to protect Mughal shipping.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Sidis of Janjira
became a powerful nonstate naval power in the Konkan region. The
Hindu artisans called Sutars in the Konkan region were involved in
shipbuilding. The Sidis engaged in naval conflict with the Marathas.
Their largest ships weighed between 300 and 400 tons; they were
thus unfit to fight European ships but could face the Ottoman vessels
in the Arabian Sea. Indeed, the Ottoman ships were slow and dif-
ficult to maneuver; they were also weak and most of the sailors were
inexperienced peasants.
The Konjo shipbuilders of southern Sulawesi (Celebes) were spe-
cialized in building prahus. The whole sequence of operations from
the selection and felling of trees in the forest to the launching of the
prahu was accompanied by ritual ceremonies.
In Bengal, the situation was different. To gain control of this area,
the Mughals needed to outfit an enormous fleet of riverboats. Arakan,
the main contender in the area, possessed a fleet superior in quantity
and quality to that of the Mughals. In addition to hundreds of galleys,
he employed khalus and dhums. Furthermore, the local Zamindars
were well equipped with guns and well served by European gunners
and sailors. During much of the monsoon, when the Mughal army
was forced to endure a long period of waiting, these Zamindar navies
were quite capable of engaging in military operations. In fact, exten-
sive flooding enhanced the mobility and reach of flat-bottomed river-
boats.40 The Mughals’ solution consisted in assigning about 10,000
sailors to dig a canal and a passage to the enemy fort. Copper, coins,
rice, bhang (hemp), and opium were distributed to sailors as incen-
tives for their efforts.
In Mughal India, a large ship had several categories of crew: the

nakhuda owned the ship and determined the itinerary; the mu’allim
was the captain; then came the chief of the sailors, tandil, surang, then
storekeepers, pursers, gunners, look-outs, and common seamen.41 In
every major port such as Hormuz, Aden, Cambay, Surat, and Malacca,
as the shipping season drew near, a crowd of sailors, pilots, and cap-
tains gathered to offer their services. The first Europeans to enter the
Indian Ocean, like Vasco de Gama in 1498, employed Indian pilots
from Gujarat to set their course.42
The Maratha navy was built between 1657 and 1659 to fight the
Sidis, who were allied with the Mughals. The Marathas employed
Muslim sailors as well as Dutch seamen for their superior technical
skills.43
By 1600, Indians ships had already reached the same ratio as
European vessels of about one man for every four tons of cargo.44
By the late seventeenth century, the shipbuilders of the Coromandel
Coast had thoroughly mastered the technique of European naval con-
struction.45 According to Chaudhuri, the fact that ships built in the
Indian Ocean were not used more extensively for Atlantic voyages
was due to political opposition from shipping interests in Europe,
which feared competition.
Indeed, though the Maratha fleet succeeded in forcing the East
India Company (EIC) fleet to withdraw in 1717, the Marathas were
divided during the following years by a fight over succession and were
easily defeated by the Portuguese in 1739 and 1741. The EIC finally
destroyed the Maratha fleet in 1756.
Recent interpretations tend to minimize the impact of the West—at
least on maritime trade—prior to steam power and Suez. In the era
of sailing ships, local powers and traders still played an important
role, albeit a decreasing one and only in intra-oceanic trade. After
1870, following the introduction of steam ships and the opening of
the Suez Canal, together with the transformation of Western capital-
ism (the second Industrial Revolution) and the global dislocation of
the Russian, Ottoman, and Chinese empires, the IOW broke apart. Its
polities became increasingly fragmented and local actors were mar-
ginalized within a general process of internationalization of trade,
labor, and capital. The monsoon, a strait jacket for millennia, now
became largely irrelevant when confronted by steam ships. This pro-
cess definitively changed maritime work and labor relationships.
Prior to that same date, British vessels gradually gained supremacy
in terms of strength, solidity, and swiftness over their rivals around
the world, particularly in the Indian Ocean.46 Yet this process did not
take place into an institutional vacuum; institutions played a decisive
role in maritime relations in defining sovereignty at sea as well as the
duties and rights of seamen, working people, and immigrants.
Legal Spaces at Sea: Pirates versus

Imperial Corridors
Historians have given too much importance to European sources claim-
ing sovereignty both inside and outside Europe. Legal rules, political
and military claims, and economic pressure were undoubtedly pow-
erful tools in the hands of European elites, but implementing them
was another matter. When the Europeans were not fighting with each
other, they were still divided, even within the same empire and inside
the same administration, and the objects of their claims—polities,
local elites and people—were anything but passive actors. This obser-
vation is especially relevant in our case, as the institutions and eco-
nomic activities of the IOW were extremely fluid, multiple, and local.
Institutional pluralism was widespread at the level of empires, where
the coexistence of multiple legal systems was a potent instrument of
economic and political action.47 Not only the Mughal, but also the
Ottoman and Safavid empires granted considerable local autonomy.48
We must take care to avoid identifying entities called “India,”
“Europe,” “the Indian Ocean” or “China” in terms of their current
borders or those in the nineteenth century. Generally speaking, these
territories as well as their social and political hierarchies changed over
time. Thus, despite the myth of its millenary unity, the entity called
“China” (Zhungguo) was constantly under partition and divided
into different territories depending on the period and there is no evi-
dence to assert that all the people living in the huge area of China
today dream of becoming unified under a single empire. The core of
“China” was sometimes in the north and the steppe, sometimes in
the south along the coast.49 The same can be said of India: Mughals
came from Inner Asia and initially saw Afghanistan and the northern
part of the Indian Peninsula as the core of their power. It was only
later, with the expansion of the Safavids and Ottomans that the center
of gravity of Mughal power moved south.50 The construction of the
Mughal Empire was guided by the northern desert and the ocean, 51
while the vast expanses of the steppe along with the coastal societies
forged the Chinese Empire.
The legal order at global level was far more complex and unstable
than globalizing approaches and world-system theory have assumed.
Local conflicts framed global structures and vice versa; the final out-
come was always contingent and needed to be empirically tested. In
this context, sea had been the crux since the onset of European empires
in the sixteenth century. First merchants, then trading companies and
states, identified currents and thus maritime corridors (with the help
of geography and cartography). The primary interest of each was to
gain access to these corridors and exclude competitors or oblige them
to pay a fee. 52 Leading figures in international law sought to establish
boundary lines of ownership at sea and jurisdiction over sea space.
In this view, the sea was represented both as a privileged zone gov-
erned by natural law and as a sphere of conflicting sovereign laws.
These approaches developed in the early seventeenth century in reac-
tion to increasing maritime violence in the Atlantic, Mediterranean,
and IOWs. Despite global circulation of maritime practices, legal and
economic patterns diverged and the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean
emerged as quite distinct regulatory spheres. The Indian Ocean in
particular was identified as a space where maritime access had to
be negotiated with a multitude of coastal powers and ethnic traders.
Grotius, one of the founders of modern maritime and international
law, imported East Indies notions of the sea when he emphasized
natural law as the basis for freedom of navigation. 53 He actually
intended his argument to apply not only to the local powers but also
to the competitive European forces. The Portuguese, followed by the
Dutch, English, and French, introduced the so-called pass system in
the Indian Ocean, requiring every Asian merchant to purchase a pass
or license. Those who failed to comply with this rule were considered
pirates. Retaliatory acts against the EIC were also characterized as
piracy. The reprisals were part of more elaborate politics. The EIC
complained about seizures made by Mughals, which they qualified
as illegal, but did not hesitate to engage in and generalize such prac-
tices themselves. At the same time, the European powers accepted and
respected Mughal power, which abided by the pass system insofar as
it could also benefit from it. Ultimately, the Mughals acknowledged
the role of Britain in securing the sea. However, this was not the case
of the Sulu Sultanate in Southeast Asia, which managed to maintain
its own trading patterns for a long time. In the European view, Sulu
power was centered on piracy and slavery. 54
Indeed European notions of piracy were quite distinct from
those in the various areas of the Indian Ocean. For most European
powers, piracy applied to mutiny, shipboard felonies, and unli-

censed raiding and trade. The line between legal and illegal activ-
ity at sea and between merchants, corsairs, and pirates was thin. It
depended on whether it was drawn in time of peace or war (when
it tended to disappear) as well as on which rule was evoked and by
whom. Pirates carefully held on to letters of commission and trad-
ing privileges to protect themselves in the event of a shift in the
legal order. During the seventeenth century, imperial expansion and
legal transformations went together: increasingly centralized states
sought to justify their control of trade, routes, and territories with
the help of the law. In turn, the development of maritime and trade
law completed the evolution of warfare and shipbuilding mentioned
earlier. In the eyes of Europe’s monarchies and imperial powers, the
law was not a substitute for violence; they were perfectly comple-
mentary instruments. 55 Yet, in the Indian Ocean, the desire for con-
trol of the seas encountered two major obstacles: first, competition
among the European powers; second, the different notions of sover-
eignty, trade, and piracy supported by the commercial and military
power of local polities. The Portuguese immediately exported to the
Indian Ocean the notion of monopoly trade already developed in the
Mediterranean, but soon they had to face the increasing ambitions
of the Dutch and then English trade companies claiming the same
rights.
The approach of the main local powers in the Indian Ocean was
somewhat different. The Mughals, like many other rulers in the
region, by and large maintained a hands-off attitude toward trade
in general, including by sea. On the one hand, they sought to pre-
serve their revenues from merchant communities and activities, and
this was true in India as well as in China.56 On the other hand, they
made no serious attempt to impose a monopoly on trade upon other
polities. Since the mid-fifteenth century, that is, before the arrival of
the Europeans, the Chinese and the Arabs had withdrawn from long-
distance trade and the Indian Ocean had been divided into three main
zones of influence: the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South
China Sea.
In the Indonesian archipelago, fishing communities with little or
no land engaged in raids in the interior as well as along the coasts. 57
Piracy and other forms of predatory activities on a small scale were
most commonly conducted on a part-time basis by fishermen and
traders.58 The various Konkani castes of fishermen, as well as similar
castes of Gujarati, were regarded as descendants of pirates. In the
descriptions of early Jesuit missionaries, one finds castes of fishermen

on the Coromandel Coast prone to piracy and raiding. 59
There were also full-time pirates; with their oared vessels they
posed a terrible threat to ships that relied exclusively on sails.60 Similar
piratical activities were rife along the entire west coast between Goa
and Mount Eli and in Malabar as well. Piracy as such was an integral
part of the normal life of states. The rulers of Hindu and Muslim
states afforded protection to pirates and provisioned them. Rulers of
the Konkan Coast routinely claimed a share in maritime trade in the
form of duties. Piracy was an important component of a competitive
political system. But it was not until the formation of the great mari-
time sultanates of Achin, Johore and Malacca in the western archipel-
ago that the technical and political control of the sea was affirmed.61
As piracy was included in trade, fishing activities, and state boundar-
ies, it became their connection with the slave trade. The fluid bound-
aries of slavery and servitude in the Indian Ocean reflected those of
traders, fishermen, and pirates. Local fishermen, traders, and pirates
strongly contributed to the slave trade.
The Portuguese sought to control maritime traffic and therefore
viewed most Muslim shipping as pirate activity. Then in the late
seventeenth century, with the weakening of Mughal rule, predation
became systematic under the leadership of the Angria family, initially
on behalf of the Marathas and later for itself. 62 In short, over the
course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian coastal pow-
ers only gradually began to develop their own notion of sovereignty,
opposing the local seamen and merchants that Europeans qualified as
pirates to the European seamen and traders they viewed in the same
terms. The struggle to define piracy and identify pirates took place
between rivaling polities—local as well as European. This struggle to
define what a pirate actually was came to an end only when the EIC
imposed its rule over India, in other words, not before the early nine-
teenth century. At that point, all across the Indian Ocean, resistance
to European domination gave rise to an intensification of piracy as
defined by Europeans rules. The Sulu Sultanate was one of the best
examples of this commercial, maritime, and legal resistance.63
It was not only a question of piracy. Even after the factual col-
lapse of Mughal power, the British had to face the growing naval
power of post-Mughal states, starting with the Marathas. As we have
already mentioned, they began building a navy in the 1650s, when
Shivaji (1627–1680), the Maratha warlord, ordered the construction
of 20 galivats (large row boats with two masts) at the Portuguese
shipyard in Bassein. He employed Muslim sailors and mercenaries. In

addition, other warlords like Kanhoji Angria also had fleets. Shivaji
inflicted defeats on the British in the 1710s and 1720s. However after
his death, the fleet was divided among his four children; unable to
maintain their unity, they were defeated by the Portuguese. In the
1750s, they were still fighting the British fleet; an initial victory was
followed by a sound defeat in 1755.64
At that time, the ruler of Mysore started building his own fleet; in
1768 he had 10 graps and 30 galivats armed with artillery. Despite
defeats at the outset, the Mysore leaders restructured local finances
and built new fleets on the English model. The EIC decided to inter-
vene before construction was completed. All this came with a steep
price. In 1805, the EIC had to spend 74,837 sterling to maintain the
navy in India. After destroying the indigenous powers, the EIC main-
tained the Bombay Marine to police the Arabian Sea and conduct
expeditions against Burma, China, and so on. In 1819, an expedition
set out from Bombay to deal with the Arab pirates. It was the largest
force ever sent to the Gulf, consisting of three thousand men; about
half were European artillery and the other half native Indian infan-
try. The Bombay Marine represented a blending of western hardware
technology with indigenous skill and utilization of the natural and
demographic resources of the subcontinent. As we will see, the Indian
Navy played a major role in the Arabian Gulf following the abolition
of slavery, patrolling, and if need be seizing boats and vessels—both
European and local—suspected of trading slaves. However, those
issues did not arise before the nineteenth century and until then, nei-
ther Britain nor any other European power succeeded in imposing its
law in the Indian Ocean.
These features and chronology were strikingly different from those
in the Atlantic. In that world, where the Europeans did not negotiate
with local powers, maritime law did not give rise to a distinct body of
law but was instead absorbed into common law or mercantile law in
continental Europe. 65 The commonality of the law (trade, labor, and
state law) offered legal bridges allowing magistrates and abolitionist
movements to penetrate. Thus, in the Atlantic, the question of slav-
ery was legally debated in connection with slaves reaching the French
or British soil.66 This was possible precisely because the European
powers conceived of the Atlantic as a unified legal space. The history
of the abolitionist movement in the Atlantic is linked to legal quar-
rels over the justification of slavery in the colonies and freedom on
the mainland. Though France and Britain took different paths, and
France, unlike Britain, developed positive law regarding slavery, both

powers agreed on the supremacy of their own rules and empires over
those of natives.
This was not possible in the Indian Ocean where the European
powers immediately acknowledged the distinctiveness of local pow-
ers and the fragmentation of their own bodies of law. The IOW
helped shape a completely different European conception and prac-
tice of sovereignty than that in the Atlantic. Multiple legal orders and
disputed sovereignty in the Indian Ocean encouraged thinking and
practices pertaining to trade and labor that were quite distinct from
those in the Atlantic. One famous example is how the British viewed
Indian slavery: until at least the mid-nineteenth century, it was con-
sidered a form of domestic, customary relationship. In this case, there
was no discussion, comparable to the one in the Atlantic, of uniform
law or the value of freedom until very late: the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury for India, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for
Africa. This process was the result of long-term interaction and the
circulation of knowledge and practices not only between Britain and
India, but also between India and all the other British colonies in
the Indian Ocean. In the 1830s, the utilitarian views of many British
officers in India seemed to support Bentham’s utopia of a general
colonial code. None of these projects ever matured due to bureau-
cratic inertia and differing orientations among colonial elites and
political leaders in Britain, except for the Indian penal code,67 which
was adopted only in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising. At that
point, severe rules regarding vagrancy, labor, and public order were
established in India. Their adoption generated fierce debate among
British officers, colonial elites, and the colonial office in London over
the advisability of extending British rules to India versus abiding by
local customs.68
Henri Maine, who was still serving in India at the time, advo-
cated indirect rule as the key to preserving the stability of the empire.
Indeed, the debate over direct versus indirect rule accompanied the
greater part of British imperial history. Many colonial officers and
elites believed that adhering to local customs and indirect rule would
ensure an easier rule, cooperation, and fewer administrative costs.
Their opponents, who advocated direct rule, claimed the para-
mount importance of Britain’s civilizing mission and the necessity
of upholding order and justice. The mutiny of 1857 reinforced the
position of those, like Henri Maine, who supported the principle of
indirect rule.
This principle became the basic tenet of late imperial administra-

tion philosophy in Asia and Africa, articulated in different forms in
Malaya, Egypt, and Lugard’s famous attitude in tropical Africa. In
all those cases, Maine’s account of a traditional society in crisis sup-
plied a rationale for indirect imperial rule. Yet the system of indirect
rule Lugard applied in Nigeria and Uganda differed from the Indian
model in that the Nigerian system integrated the ruling emirs and the
British colonial officials into a single system. The native ruler retained
control over the collection of taxes and the administration of justice
but, unlike the prince in India, he was subject to strict supervision.69
As we will see, these rules strongly influenced the circulation of labor
in the Indian Ocean and the adoption and eventual enforcement of
Masters and Servants Acts in Mauritius, Burma, East Africa, Natal,
and so on.70
To sum up, different notions of sovereignty existed in the Indian
Ocean before and under colonial rule. These differences, while
important, cannot be reduced to mere opposition between the open,
multiple sovereignty of local powers and imperialistic European pow-
ers. Mughal, Qing, and other powers also imposed their hierarchies
and forms of dependence on one or another area and social group.
Furthermore, the sovereignty policies, notions, and practices of the
European powers evolved over time and there was substantial dis-
agreement within each imperial administration over which strategy
to adopt in dealing with military, legal and economic concerns. What
is of prime important to us is the enormous legacy of the Mughal
administration and those of other local powers, which was discern-
able first in the EIC and then in British rule, as well as the inter-
relation between British and Indian, Indian and Burmese and East
African rules and colonial experiences. These multiple and recipro-
cal but unequal connections were especially relevant in maritime and
labor history; in particular, the notions and practices of sovereignty in
the Indian Ocean strongly influenced those of “freedom,” maritime
recruitment and labor under slavery and abolitionism and in post-
slavery worlds. To develop this point, we will begin by looking first
at French and then British sailors and their transmutation in contact
with the IOW before going on to discuss slavery and its abolition.
2
Seamen in France and the French Empire:
Heirs to the Galley Slave or Forerunners
of the Social Security System?
From the Galley to Forced Recruitment

Duress and violence are even more deeply rooted on the seas than on
land. The long history of French seamen was that of the slow decline
of the galleys and of the ever insufficient and increasingly problem-
atic separation between military conscription and the merchant navy.
Marseille was the main port of registry for galley slaves; in 1630,
Marseille’s arsenal fleet comprised approximately 6,000 galley slaves
and Colbert organized a veritable system of recruitment in prisons
in order to meet demand.1 In exchange, he allowed galley slaves to
develop a small business, both when they arrived on the quays of
Marseille and in destination ports. The authorities also turned a
blind eye to the galley slaves’ practice of using young boys (“passe-
gavettes”) to help them with their business, or even to satisfy their
sexual needs.
Approximately 250 convicts were required for a standard galley
and about 450 for a “Royale.” Archive sources were essentially con-
stituted by the documentary series that covered the period from 1680
to 1748 (when galleys were officially abolished) for approximately
60,000 galley slaves—38,000 of whom related to the years between
1680 and 1715 when the system was in its heyday. Along with Moors
and Turks, magistrates sent to the galleys thieves, salt smugglers,
violent criminals, libertines, vagabonds, rebels, and those who had
simply been convicted of disturbing the peace, to which we must of
course add smugglers and Protestants. 2 One-third of galley slaves
died within three years. Galley benches were designed to take five
men and measured 2.3 meters by 1.25 meters. Within this space the
five galley slaves rowed, ate, slept, and defecated. They ate biscuits
and bean soup; fat was added only toward the end of the seventeenth
century. The problem was water; large quantities were required—at
least 7 liters per person per day. Huge barrels were placed on the
deck, but despite all of the tricks of the trade that were used, it was
impossible to last more than a week before having to put into port
to replenish supplies and this increased travel time, especially where
long distances were involved. The decline of galleys began at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, with the rise in sailing ships
and the difficulties encountered in recruiting manpower, including
slaves and convicts. 3 Galleys did not, however, entirely disappear
from French shipping until the middle of the eighteenth century.
Over this lapse of time there was considerable recourse to convicts,
to prisoners of war or even to slaves, especially as, with the num-
ber of galleys falling, the French Navy had convicts to put in their
penal colonies in Toulon and Brest, and later on in Rochefort and
La Rochelle. The boundary between slavery and criminality is hard
to determine; lawyers such as Ferrière were quick to qualify galley
slaves as enslaved convicts and thus incompatible with French law.4
To which Boucher d’Argis replied in the Encyclopédie méthodique
that galley slaves were persons upon whom a sentence had been
passed and not slaves, and that furthermore, unlike people sen-
tenced to work in the mines, they had the benefit of fresh air and a
view. 5 This is an important point: was slavery defined by condition
or by legal status?
If the latter, then slaves and galley slaves were in different cat-
egories; but if the former, they belonged to one and the same cat-
egory. The answers given over time by those concerned are essential
to the resolution of this question. Penal colonies survived the French
Revolution, but convicts no longer worked on ships, but in arsenals.
Vidocq was imprisoned in the Toulon penal colony (1748–1873) in
1799 and in 1836—at the latter date with 4,300 other convicts. The
Navy had other penal colonies in Brest (1749–1858) and Rochefort
(1767–1852), to which, during the periods of the Revolution and
the Empire, can be added Nice (1792–1811), Lorient (1796–1830),
Le Havre (1798–1803), Cherbourg (1803–15), Anvers (1804–14), La
Spezia (1808–14), and Civitavecchia (1810–14). During the first half
of the nineteenth century there were between 4,000 and 5,000 con-
victs in Toulon, 1,000 in Brest, and 1,500 in Lorient.6
Seamen in France and the French Empire 35
During this period, galley slaves as such had disappeared, though

duress remained strong, largely due to the lack of manpower. The
fleet grew from 160,000 to 750,000 tons between the end of the sev-
enteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century. One must
be careful with these weights, because at the time a ton was calcu-
lated differently from today: the tonneau d’arrimage7 was defined
by the 1681 edict as 42 cubic feet, or 1.44 cubic meters. This is the
equivalent of 979 kilograms, which gives a tonnage of 734,000 tons.
During the same period there was only a small increase in the number
of sailors—50,000–60,000 (80,000 if one includes novices). There
are several factors that explain this limited increase: the influence
of military conscription, and resistance from sailors and shipbuild-
ers; the difficulty in reproducing the profession of sailor-fisherman
and the importance of multiple activities; the existence of coercion
and the poor living conditions, in both the merchant navy and the
Royal Navy. The creation of a Royal Navy thus caused immediate
competition with fishermen and the merchant navy. For the Royal
Navy, there were three ways of increasing recruitment levels: higher
pay than in the private sector; the press-gang system, that is, the forc-
ible recruitment of able-bodied men in a port or district; a national
recruitment system.8 The first solution is one of incentive; yet in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only was it difficult for the
state to bear such a financial burden, as Colbert admitted,9 but in
addition, the link between increased salaries and efficient work was
by no means evident in the economic and political thinking of the
time, which tended to associate increased remuneration with a reduced
work offering.10 The recourse to coercion—whether in recruitment
or work—thus found plausible justification. The press-gang system,
widely employed in England and the Netherlands during this period,
was tested for a large part of the seventeenth century, with modest
results. The idea was to forcibly recruit all able-bodied men within
certain maritime districts. Even if Colbert initially intended to gen-
eralize this system, as was the case in England,11 the requisition of
certain districts had already created resentment among local popula-
tions and elites12 without providing a sufficient number of men to
meet the ever-increasing needs of the Royal Navy. In 1669, Colbert
therefore reverted to a mass-levy system that was only partly similar
to conscription as we knew it under the law of 1905. The class census
was applied to sailors alone and not to the population as a whole.13
Depending on the region, the latter were expected to spend one year
in three or four on royal vessels.14 The introduction of these censuses
led to the creation of a body of specialist administrators in all com-

mercial ports; a commissioner-general was in charge of each French
département concerned, while a navy supply officer and class officer
ran the districts and carried out the censuses. In the parishes, the class
officer was assisted by an agent (usually a former sailor). All seafar-
ers aged between 18 and 50 appeared on the muster rolls kept at the
Admiralty. They showed name, age, height, hair color, distinguishing
features, address, profession, and any wounds.
This solution was relatively reliable in peacetime and at the start
of military mobilization, to such an extent that France was envied by
other countries (Spain, The Netherlands). But in wartime the num-
ber of sailors was more often than not below requirements and this
deficit increased in situations of prolonged military effort. In France,
recruitment remained less efficient than in England: in the eighteenth
century, the permanent peacetime core was estimated at 4,000 avail-
able men, whereas there were 10,000 Englishmen. On the eve of the
Revolution, if, as we mention above, we estimate the number of sea-
men available in France at 60,000 (80,000 if we add novices, officers,
and shipmasters); the English could count on 100,000 men who could
be mobilized at short notice.15 This poor result can be put down to
the attempts to avoid conscription, to the flaws in class censuses and
to the uncertainties concerning tax sources due to the multiple activi-
ties of sailors.16 The recording of classes was in a pitiful state when
Louis XIV died in 1715. There was some renewed interest a dozen or
so years later, but with unreliable results for some regions. It was only
from the middle of the century that the system achieved a certain level
of efficiency along the coast. Partly due to a real shortage of men and
partly due to the unreliable figures, the number of sailors available for
the royal fleet remained limited and kidnapping and forced recruit-
ment continued to be widely used. Agents and recruiters traveled the
countryside and towns along the coasts that were often the destina-
tions of temporary migrant workers, such as hinterland laborers.17
Taverns and dark alleys were the favorite places for these types of
recruitment; they led to proper contracts bearing the signatures (or
equivalent) of the future sailors.
Other expedients were introduced to increase the offering: con-
scription was based on the broadest possible definition of sailor; as
fisherman were involved in farming activities and as an ever-increas-
ing number of seamen were coming from the hinterlands, recruiters
obviously aimed to enlist these two categories. However, this was by
no means an easy task, as these classifications were contested, not just
by the seamen-laborers but also by their masters, who accused the

government of depriving them of their manpower.
The solution put forward by Colbert was to link coercion with
incentive. The class levy was supposed to be compensated for by
social protection for the sailor and his family. In 1673, an edict intro-
duced a deduction of 2.5 percent from a sailor’s pay, as a contribu-
tion toward a solidarity fund for invalids (i.e., elderly people and the
disabled).18 In 1673 a half-pay meant that seafarers whose class was
on active service could benefit from an allowance of 5 sous per day.
In 1689 this stipend became a real pension. At the same time, the
first registries of disabled persons appeared and were used to define
invalids’ rights.19 The solidarity fund helped the maimed, old sailors,
widows, and orphans, but it was often in deficit. The reason for this
was that the system, which had been created to help seamen, ended
up being mainly used for officers. 20 Sailors did not always receive
their allowance on a regular basis and they were often the last served.
Furthermore, the one-third allotted to sailors’ families did not reach
them on a regular basis and disappeared somewhere inside company
coffers. Finally, inheritance was subject to common law, which found
it hard to control the special rules governing allowances for sailors.
Whence the difficulties that sailors’ families encountered when trying
to claim their dues. 21 All of which shows why Royal Navy recruit-
ment remained difficult. Yet one must not think that the lack of sail-
ors was simply due to competition from the merchant navy. It too was
suffering from lack of manpower, with a boom in some ports and a
decline in others (see table 2.1).
As time went by, while the Mediterranean ports reduced their
manpower, Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, and the South-West
increased theirs. These changes can be explained by the way in which
Table 2.1 Petty officers and sailors in France
Year Picardy/ Brittany South-west Eastern Total

Normandy Mediterranean
1686 9,861 14,823 12,270 15,152 52,106

1703 9,175 14,678 13,664 15,173 52,690
1775 14,099 20,707 16,866 12,043 63,715
1791 15,367 26,066 22,981 10,193 71,844
Sources: Chambre de Commerce de Dunkerque (1686), Archives Nationales, Marine, C4–129

(1703), C4–156 (1775), CC4–1 (1791). Reproduced in Alain Cabantous, Les citoyens du large
(Paris: Aubier, 1995), p. 79.
the profession was evolving, particularly with the boom in fishing in

the northern Atlantic and then in colonial transport, both of which
were developed more by ports along the Atlantic coast than in the
Mediterranean. In this respect, we must first distinguish between
fishermen and seamen. Both categories designated different people
and qualifications, depending on the region: a seaman was sometimes
an offshore fisherman, sometimes a long-hauler, whereas a sailor of
northern shores was called a marinier (seaman, mariner) in Normandy
and a navigateur (seaman, navigator) in the Mediterranean. 22 Yet
above and beyond these variations, an ever-clearer distinction was
being drawn between sailors and seamen. In the literature and writings
from the period in question, but also and above all in the understand-
ing of the coastal communities, true fisherman were distinguished
from drunken and bawdy seamen. This distinction was justified by
social background, by forms of apprenticeship, and consequently by
the very definition of maritime work. In the eighteenth century, the
profession of fisherman presented a strong degree of social reproduc-
tion. In sailors’ families, it was important to send the oldest son off to
sea as a novice or a ship’s boy so that he could complete his appren-
ticeship, something which, a few exceptions aside (Dunkirk being the
biggest), was done outside of guild regulation. In Le Havre, Bordeaux,
and Lorient, the profession of fisherman was an independent one.
This did not prevent people from creating brotherhoods that were
designed to protect sailors’ interests, and, within the sailor category,
to distinguish between seamen and fishermen (this was the case in
Bastia and Saint-Tropez) or, more frequently, between fishermen and
officers. 23 However, this distinction softened with the boom in large
merchant and military ships that required an increasing number of
unqualified seamen for faraway destinations. Among the latter, those
in the northern Atlantic were already creating apprehension die to the
risks involved and the duration of the contracts that varied from a few
months to over two years. Cod fishing quickly rose to the top of fish-
ing activities in France, 24 as the 1788 survey shows (see table 2.2).
Of all the ports, it was Saint-Malo and Granville that took the
lead in cod fishing, with respectively 59 and 57 boats employed to
this end in 1786. The sailors were usually paid on the basis of a share
of the catch—one-fifth—but on which there were substantial taxes
and deductions (to the Admiralty, to the King, pilot’s fee, towing fee,
etc.). 25
The survival and relative success of France’s cod fishing after 1763
may be attributed in part to the intervention of the French government,
Table 2.2 Types of fishing in France, 1788
Type of fishing Percentage (%)
Cod 54.6
Sundry (fresh) 15.9
Herring 13.1
Sardine 6.2
Mackerel 4.4
Whale, in Greenland and on the coast of Brazil 3.3
Contribution from abroad 2.5
Total 100
Sources: Archives Nationales–Marine C5–58—Balance du commerce, tableau

des marchandises provenant du commerce des pêches françaises rapportées
dans chaque port du royaume pendant l’année 1788.
which did not wish to lose its precious “sailor nursery,” and in part
to its presence in the north Atlantic. First of all, it introduced import
duty on salted cod sold by foreign countries in France and in the West
Indies, thus protecting the French industry from all competition in
those markets. It then took various steps to facilitate the distribution
of fish within France itself. 26
After 1783, the government offered bonuses to encourage the fit-
ting-out of fishing boats and the trading of fish with foreign coun-
tries. During the course of the 1780s, for example, it offered a bonus
of 100 pounds per crew member to boats fishing off the French shore.
The export bonus ranged from 5 to 12 pounds, depending on the
market. 27
It was, however, the boom in the colonies that was to turn the
profession of fisherman upside down: the duration of the voyage gen-
erally varied between two and three years, and more particularly, as
commercial traffic had very little to do with fishing, onboard person-
nel did not need any real sailing skills, especially as long-haul vessels
were using improved technology. While sailors along the coast pro-
tested against the invasion of these “peasant”-seamen, they were also
reluctant to sign up for such voyages. In the testimonies, voyages to
the West Indies, to Quebec, and to the East Indies are often associated
with disease, peril, and poor food. So for such trips, the seamen often
came from the hinterlands; it was the younger sons or men who had
found no work in the fields who were sent to the coastal towns. 28 The
differences between sailors and laborers remained blurred, in the case
of both fisherman and seamen, albeit according to different logic.
Near Lorient and Dunkirk, sailors were also referred to as “laborers,”
not only in everyday language, but also in tax documents that reveal
the small percentage of sailors living exclusively off fishing 29 —ap-
proximately one-quarter of sailors in Dunkirk in 1660 and in Dieppe
or Le Havre around 1695. Generally speaking, in coastal towns and
villages, populations that were entirely or mainly maritime, made up
one-third of total inhabitants. All over, it was multiple activities that
dominated. In one place you would find sailors growing hemp; else-
where they would be working in vineyards or on big cereal farms
in the Paris basin. During the Seven Years’ War, in the villages of
the Caen Admiralty, two-thirds of fishermen worked on the land—
either their own or on a farm. Yet depending on the period and the
region, the relative importance of maritime professions compared to
other activities varied. Generally speaking, in the late 1600s and early
1700s fishermen used secondary activities to complement their main
job, fishing. Seamen-day-laborers on the other hand gave priority to
major farming works and their market supply mainly depended on
farming dynamics. However, these distinctions between sailor-peas-
ant and laborer-seamen softened over time. The boom in colonial
trade led to the development of new activities: tobacco manufacture
and sugar refineries in Bordeaux; fish processing and preparation in
the main ports along the Atlantic coast; and shipyards everywhere.
Recourse to multiple activities thus intensified; in Dunkirk, the per-
centage of stable seafarers fell from 19 percent in 1660 to 10 percent
under the Empire.30 The social reproduction of maritime professions
concerned between one-third and a quarter of manpower in major
ports such as Dunkirk, Bordeaux, or Marseille, but the figure was
much higher in small ports such as Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme (59%) or
Arzon (76%).31
This multiple activity did not please shipbuilders; from the sev-
enteenth century, and to an even greater extent thereafter, the main
ports were complaining about the lack of sailors and of the need to
go ever further afield to recruit. Toward the end of the seventeenth
century, Bordeaux was still supplying a third of the sailors required
for fitting-out, but this had dropped to just one-quarter on the eve of
the Revolution.32 Recruiting was achieved at the cost of fierce com-
petition, first between ports, then between the different maritime
activities, and finally between maritime and nonmaritime activities.
The port of Dunkirk was recruiting as far away as Saint-Valéry and
Boulogne, causing protests from these towns; Le Havre was looking
for sailors in Dieppe and Honfleur, while Bordeaux was providing
La Rochelle with ever-stronger competition. At the same time, with
the boom in unqualified maritime professions (ordinary seamen), all

of the above ports were turning to the hinterlands, causing reaction
from Norman farmers and landowners. Toward the middle of the
eighteenth century, the Paris basin was providing 12.6 percent of Le
Havre’s maritime personnel—mainly farm day workers employed as
seamen.
Faced with this constant movement, with these multiple activities
and the increasing competition from other sectors and other ship-
builders, the reactions of shipbuilders were akin to those of military
leaders, masters, and employers in other sectors: come what may, they
must control the workforce. Whence the coercive measures that ranged
from pure and simple kidnapping through to methods of enrolment
into the merchant navy that were similar to those used by the govern-
ment. Sailors and seamen had limited rights and any absenteeism was
qualified as desertion and, as such, was subject to criminal law.
In terms of wages, the most criticized employment contract—one
that continued to exist right through to the nineteenth century—was
the so-called contract for payment by shares (contrat à la part), where
the risk was borne entirely by the sailors who had no idea what their
final wage would be—not to mention the deductions made for what-
ever reason on their meager final share, all without the protection
of any social minimum. This was an accumulation of factors that
formed a system: the masters, shipbuilders, and employers imposed
unfair contracts and forms of coercion in relation to both recruitment
and work. The workers responded with multiple activities and with
increased mobility that led to even more restrictive measures being
introduced. In this sense, the government’s recruiting power was only
in appearance greater than that of the shipbuilders. The class system
had to be constantly negotiated at local level, both with regard to
identifying manpower and mobilizing it. This was even truer given
that between the Royal Navy and the merchant navy, charter com-
panies created new competition and new tensions. This was espe-
cially the case for the EIC. Between 1719 and 1769, the company
built 750 ships, 440 of which were sent beyond the Cape. As time
went by, the number of units diminished while the tonnage remained
stable, at between 70,000 and 80,000 tons. The Atlantic accounted
for 22 percent of the tonnage and 43 percent of the units, with a con-
stant decline throughout the eighteenth century due to the gradual
abandonment of Senegal and the west coast of Africa. From 1727,
the tonnage travelling to the Indian Ocean overtook that sent into the
Atlantic.33 Pondicherry remained the most popular destination, with
36.5 percent of the traffic. Production in the Mascarene Islands con-

tinued to progress, accounting for 30 percent of traffic. Until 1739, it
was the VOC, which dominated traffic the Indian Ocean; it declined
after that date, while English and French companies developed, the
former gaining an ever-increasing advantage over the latter.
The amount of personnel was significant: a 600-ton vessel required
12–30 officers, 70–90 seamen, and 12–16 ship’s boys, that is, 94–136
men, depending on the period. This number never ceased to dimin-
ish: per 100 tons it fell from 20 in 1720–24, to 15 between 1765 and
1769. It was essentially the number of officers that accounted for this
drop.34 Regarding the company’s recruitment, in terms of officers at
least, the regional framework was restricted: 69.7 percent came from
the Rennes region, 7 percent from Ile de France, and the remainder
from the Manche and coastal regions. The EIC had a considerable
advantage when it came to recruiting sailors; despite the difficulties
in military recruitment, in 1719 the Regent granted the company the
right to a (authorized) levy of sailors from the Port-Louis district,
which lay within the jurisdiction of the Vannes département and
of the Brest supply corps. These sailors were allowed to freely join
merchant ships if their class was not called during the year in ques-
tion.35 The seamen were between 20 and 30 years old (70.9%) and
the ship’s boys were between 9 and 14. During the eighteenth century,
the number of men from St. Malo fell in favor of manpower from the
Port-Louis district, and during wartime competition with the Royal
Navy became fierce, especially as sailors preferred the Royal Navy,
considering the conditions imposed by the company to be excessively
harsh. Indeed, the latter was supposed to pay 25 percent more than
the wage earned by sailors on royal vessels, but this duty was rarely
respected. The company began to use methods of recruitment by
force, even going so far as pure and simple kidnapping in ports and
surrounding areas.36 The EIC was increasingly exploiting sailors, 37
not only during recruitment, but also when it came to paying wages,
which were lower than what had been promised and which were often
paid very late, 38 to such an extent that the minister of the navy was
obliged to intervene in 1691 and on many occasions during the years
that followed, to ensure that sailors and seamen were properly paid.39
However, these edicts were not respected and the authorized levy was
withdrawn in 1721 and then reintroduced when the company prom-
ised to follow the ministry’s recommendations.40 In reality, instead
of respecting the undertakings given with regard to sailors recruited
under the class system, the company preferred to increase recruitment
through alternative channels, that is, more or less forcible enrolment

in the ports and hinterlands. Finally, the recruitment of foreigners
from Europe (Ireland, Genoa, Portugal, Naples), and then of Indians,
Sinhalese, and others then became more widespread.41 The initial
muster rolls, during fitting-out, tended to minimize this colonial
presence—approximately 1 percent between 1725 and 1768.42 These
sources must therefore be added to those relating to voyages and to
onsite recruitment. In the EIC fleet, in March 1761 the Vaillant left
Lorient for France via the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at its destina-
tion in July. Refitted in 1763, it returned to Lorient in December of
the same year. Its muster rolls show the presence of a large number of
soldiers who disembarked in Ile de France, and of British prisoners,
shipmasters, officers, and ordinary seamen, used as captives during
the crossing and then disembarked at Bourbon.43 After leaving Lorient
in 1762, upon its arrival in Ile de France, the Massiac became involved
in the transport of slaves, several of whom were used as crew during
the months that the ship remained in service in the Mascarenes. The
ship’s log and muster mention 20 or so black men taken onboard and
then disembarked approximately one year later in Ile de France, many
of them ill, before the ship returned to Lorient after two years at sea.44
This was an increasingly common practice: the company’s ships left
France, returning with French convicts and galley slaves and a certain
number of English prisoners.45 However, once they had reached their
destination, where they remained for between one and three years,
these ships did not hesitate to use the slaves and local populations in
conditions akin to slavery. Taking these “additions” upon arrival into
account, the ships’ logs and musters that we have been able to exam-
ine show that approximately 10 percent of the crews were “colonial”
sailors.
There are various phenomena to explain these solutions: on the
one hand, once arrived, French crews became involved in several
business activities as a way of adding to their wages. Officers and
ordinary seamen brought cheap junk back to France and exchanged
it for textiles and spices. In principle they were only allowed limited
quantities, up to a certain value, the company’s aim being to let this
commerce act as compensation for the low wages it paid, yet with-
out compromising its own profits and its relationships with French
traders and producers who were soon complaining about fraud and
unfair competition. With the phenomenon beginning to get out of
hand, from 1724 the company attempted to curb these practices,
albeit with limited success.
The other reason that led the company, once arrived at destina-
tion, to recruit local sailors or even slaves, was the high mortality rate
onboard. The statistics are biased, because crew musters only show
deaths onboard and do not mention men with serious illnesses who
had been disembarked only to die shortly afterwards. The official
percentage is thus restricted to 13.8 percent, that is, 4,000 deaths for
25,000–30,000 men embarked.46 These figures help account for the
recourse to local sailors and slaves during the months, or even years,
that a vessel remained far from France.
These practices are also linked to the policies of local governors,
who had no hesitation in resorting to forced labor from local popula-
tions. Let us take the case of Pondicherry, which the company had
purchased in 1673 from the Sultan of Bijapur. From 1685, a succes-
sion of governors had gradually expanded the territory to cover a
large part of the Coromandel Coast. In 1741, the town contained
1,200 Europeans and 120,000 Indians.
Hostilities with the English increased and supremacy on the seas
was essential. The French and the English relied heavily on Indian
convicts and galley slaves under the command of European officers,
and Indians were often recruited by way of raids. Even when they
were legally free, Indian sailors endured extremely harsh conditions.
In 1766, just before the fall of Pondicherry, the company had approxi-
mately 1,500 French sailors and seamen and 2,000 “Lascars” (sail-
ors from Southeast Asia, India, Malaysia, and China) on site. The
latter were enrolled under extremely unfavorable circumstances47—
according to some commentators, the conditions were similar to slav-
ery, with the Lascars receiving corporal punishments, being placed
in irons and being put to work in situations similar to those found in
penal colonies.48
Who were local sailors and how were they recruited?
Those who were employed on galleys or on unskilled works on
vessels were, as in Europe, the kidnapped people and slaves. Besides
them, real local seamen and fishermen were also recruited. We have
already mentioned the diffusion of maritime activities and special-
ization in the Indian Ocean. However, the crews did not get mixed;
they were divided by dietary laws, habits, and eventually ethnicity.
Chinese crew ate pig, which was forbidden to Muslim sailors. On the
contrary, the crews of European ships in the Indian Ocean were usu-
ally as much Asian as European. The officers were Europeans but the
rest were locals. In 1625 a Portuguese fleet set off to attack some EIC
ships. On the Portuguese ships more than 200 were English, Scottish,
Irish, and Dutch, and many of the local crew were Muslims.
In 1698, four Portuguese ships that attacked Mombasa, under a
“Muslim conqueror,” employed 126 “white” and 376 “non white sea-
men and gunners.”49 The English, French, and Portuguese, at war
elsewhere in the world, were happy to cooperate when it came to
requisitioning Indians, Chinese, and Indonesians. In 1774–76, for
example, Captain Thomas Forrest (1729–1802) worked for the British
East India Company; he was in command of the galley “La Tartare,”
which served in the Moluccas. The galley slaves were recruited from
local populations, 50 more often than not by force.
The EIC also used its trading post in Senegal to “recruit” laptots,
famous Senegalese sailors and navigators, whom it employed for four
to five months to sail back up the river.51 Some of the laptots were
also embarked for the West Indies and the Mascarenes. The practice
of using local sailors became more widespread; in 1790, Louis-Marie-
Joseph-Olivier, Count of Grandpré, who saw himself as a “sailor and
traveler,” when leaving Ile de France for India where he intended to
sell his vessel to Bengal, had no hesitation in recruiting black slaves
and convicts to replace the white seamen who had brought him from
France.52 . Finally, during the triangular slave trade that the company
operated between France, Africa, and the West Indies, some of the
bought or captured slaves who were destined for American posses-
sions were put to use during the voyage to the Americas. 53
The Post-Revolutionary Seamen between

Conscription and Social Security
The French Revolution did little to change this state of affairs, partly
due the difficulties, in France itself, of reconciling freedom at work
with the lack of manpower, conscription, and the workplace, and
partly due to the boom in the colonies and in international trade in
the nineteenth century. The intensive economic growth certainly did
not encourage any relaxation of constraints on work mobility; the
creation of a regular army went in the same direction, with man-
power remaining the main objective of the government, the army,
the navy, company bosses, and heads of families involved in farming,
industry, and proto-industrialization. These similar needs and result-
ing competition were the subject of lively debates. In 1789, 1791, and
1795, decrees were passed to confirm the class recruitment system—

indeed it was even expanded due to the war. Just like the remainder
of the population, sailors were subject to one year of obligatory ser-
vice during peacetime and to mobilization in time of war.54 Given
the virtually unlimited possibility of being called up in time of war,
the pension system was also maintained. Later on, this system was
extended to the merchant navy;55 in part, this found justification in
the decree of 1835, which removed any age limit for mobilizing sailors
in time of war, above and beyond the obligatory year of service. This
meant that for sailors, the distinction between military service and
the merchant navy became blurred, as they could be mobilized at any
time and over an increasingly long period (from 18 to 50 years old).
The term “desertion” was henceforth used for both servicemen and
for sailors in the merchant navy; in return for these restrictions there
was the pension.
There was a new change of direction in 1854 following the out-
break of the Crimean War. From January 1854—several months
before war was officially declared—the minister of the navy extended
the permanent levy to all sailors aged between 20 and 40 years old,
with less than four years of service and having been dismissed from
service for more than one year. Despite protests from the chambers
of commerce concerned, one month later, in February, a new decree
extended the levy to sailors with less than six years of service. A total
of 65,000 men were mobilized. Help was given to sailors’ families,
but it was insufficient and it fell to sailors’ mutual aid associations to
find the necessary resources for the families of mobilized sailors. 56 In
spite of the controversy in France concerning a war deemed to be far
away, of no utility and its negative effect on the merchant navy, and
despite vague promises made, no reform was introduced either during
the war or over the years that followed. The issue came to light again
a few years later, in 1860, during the Italian war of independence.
This time, several decrees (in 1860, 1861, 1863, and 1866) modified
the recruiting system. 57 All seamen aged 18 or over were obliged to
register on a list in the district where they lived. Officers and quar-
termasters were registered on the same lists. Steam-engine employees,
navigators, and long-haul shipmasters were recorded on separate reg-
isters. Pilots and pilot-candidates also had their own registers. For
each register there was a corresponding wage and pension. On the
other hand, the 1865 decree excluded from these the registers appren-
tices and workers in maritime professions, who had previously been
subject to the seamen’s levy. This was a highly controversial decision;
steamships posed the problem of the personnel in charge of the

engines—were they sailors or workmen?
In the first case, the know-how was supposed to be redefined in
such a way as to take these elements into account; the downside was
that once it was accepted that the engine mechanics and other general
workers were seamen, the conscription (and with it, the pension sys-
tem) specific to sailors was likely to be extended to cover industrial
workers. This is why the second solution was chosen, with workmen
employed onboard ships being excluded from the sailor category. As
we will see, this solution was to cause further debate at the end of the
nineteenth century, when the law on work accidents was passed.
The rules of enlistment and maritime technology evolved hand
in hand. In the nineteenth century, improved productivity, due to
new technology and then even more so to the rapid development
of steamships, reduced the need for seamen as such and helped to
reduce tension compared to the eighteenth century and beginning of
the nineteenth century. French Royal Navy personnel increased from
16,000 in 1835 to 40,000 six years later, to then settle at between
28,000 and 30,000 up until the Crimean War, showing that outside
of wartime, requirements were falling. Unlike the recruiting system,
which was to be introduced in the twentieth century, registration on
rolls was voluntary and only became automatic if administrators and
unions noticed an irregularity on their own nominative lists. In prin-
ciple, service lasted for six consecutive years; yet as in times of peace
the number of personnel was greater than the navy’s requirements,
regulations allowed for two periods of three years, with the possibil-
ity of serving for just three years with a renewable leave. If during
this period sailors volunteered to remain on shore and work as fisher-
men or inshore navigators, their activity was taken into account for
wages and pension, up until the six-year service period expired. This
system could be extended through voluntary enlistment for periods
of three years. Sailors registered on the rolls and in service were not
allowed to marry without authorization from the division to which
they belonged, or else their wives and children would have no pension
rights. Finally, the extraordinary levy was limited to wartime and
concerned men up to the age of 5058 —something that led to protest
from sailors’ associations and chambers of commerce who demanded
regulations more in line with those of the army, which required five
years of active service and service in the reserves of just four years.
For a large part of the nineteenth century, the debate thus revolved
around how to reconcile the privilege granted to sailors compared to
army conscripts on the one hand, and to other employees on the other
hand. Some people used the dangerous nature of the profession or the
duration of conscription to justify the special status for sailors. Others
considered, on the contrary, that a clear distinction should be made
between the merchant navy and the military navy, particularly with
regard to use of the term “desertion” for civil sailors. Supporters of
the removal of this offence for the merchant navy were quick to add,
as a consequence, the abolition of the special work and social security
regime. The liberal ideology of the Second Empire encouraged the
dismantling of this system, referring to the technical and economic
evolution of the merchant navy and hence the need to restrict the
mobilization of sailors to five years, as was the case for other citi-
zens.59 In return, pension and invalidity funds would be removed.60
However, these reforms were not passed and sailors retained their
special conditions under the Second Empire and, later on, under the
Third Empire. Obligatory contribution and the payment of pensions
to sailors were the first examples of the contribution system that was
to be introduced in the twentieth century, with one difference: for
sailors, the pension (requiring payment of contributions) was initially
conceived as a counterpart to the obligation to serve and, above all,
to be available for mobilization, well beyond the years of obligatory
service.
In the merchant navy, the civil code distinguishes between service
provision by seafarers and general service provision. For the latter,
regarding wages, the shipmaster was taken at his word; for the for-
mer, it was the crew’s role that was binding. The wages of servants
and workmen could therefore be partially seized, something that was
not the case for sailors.61 On the other hand, workers could withdraw
from their contracts by paying compensation with interest to their
employers; this was not the case for sailors, who could be obliged by
force of arms to honor their contracts. The shipmaster could always
dismiss his servants and workers, whereas a sailor could not be disem-
barked without authorization from the competent authority.
Lifetime enrollment was forbidden for both servants and sailors.
There were four types of enrolment contract available to seafarers:
for a voyage, for a month, freight-based, and payment by shares.
Enrolment for a voyage was a real provision of service, whereby a
seaman offered his services for the duration of the trip. This type
of contract gradually disappeared over the course of the nineteenth
century, being replaced by monthly contracts; however, in this case,
the sailor committed himself for the entire voyage and could not leave
at the end of the month. Payment by shares was common in wartime,

for corsairs, and for cod fishing. Finally, freight-based contracts were
essentially used for inshore sailing and offered remuneration relating
to the merchandise carried and delivered. A sailor’s enrolment usu-
ally took place in the presence of a public officer, who entered his
name on the roll. However, this practice only became obligatory in
1852; prior to that, informal contracts could be made, with all of the
consequences in terms of disputes on wages and sailors’ working con-
ditions, which were depended entirely on the employer’s goodwill.62
In this respect, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the general
trend among trading companies was to reduce as far as possible the
number of seamen onboard, while at the same time increasing the
number of their duties. The gains in productivity were significant on
metal sailing ships and even more so on steamships.63 It was at this
point that work accidents were to become a key variable.
In cases of illness, the right to medical care was limited to the ill-
nesses and accidents that occurred during the voyage and that were
work related. In particular, employers refused to care for sailors who
contracted sexual diseases.64 Generally speaking, small fishermen
rarely benefitted from this social protection, while seamen working
for major trading companies benefitted from the health insurance
fund, to the extent described above. In 1890, Felix Faure suggested
extending to sailors the law on work accidents that had just been
passed in relation to industrial employees. Yet during parliamentary
debates, several speakers pointed out that as things stood, this would
simply have encouraged shipowners to operate under foreign flags.
The following year, the minister of the navy asked the maritime fisher-
men’s advisory committee (Comité Consultatif des Pêches Maritimes)
to set up a commission to look into this matter. While recognizing
the lack of mutual aid and benevolent funds, the committee admitted
that it was unable to propose any alternative due to the issue of the
contributions paid by the sailors and by their employers. The project
finally saw the light of day on April 21, 1898, just a few days after
the law was passed on workers’ accidents (April 9), with the creation
of the national mutual insurance fund (Caisse Nationale d’Assurance
Mutuelle) for French sailors, to which was added the health insur-
ance fund already in place. For both workers and sailors, application
of the new law essentially concerned major companies, with family
organizations or companies with less than 15 employees remaining
outside the new system. At the same time, while in the event of an
accident and disability, workers received an allowance based on their
salaries, sailors were obliged to pay premiums and received derisory

sums compared to workers. The result was protests from both bosses
and sailors.65 Furthermore, the law did not apply to all sailors, but
only those registered on maritime rolls, thus confirming the long tra-
dition linking insurance, pensions, and conscription.
What about the other sailors?
For several years, the courts’ decisions lacked coherency: some
judges considered that “sailors” not registered on a roll should benefit
from the industrial law governing work accidents; others felt that they
could only turn to the civil code (as had been the case for workers up
until 1898), that is, in the event of an accident, they must themselves
provide proof of the boss’s negligence, something which was virtually
impossible to demonstrate. The stakes were high; as we have shown,
this issue had been raised back in the 1860s with the appearance of
the first steamships. At that time, workers working at sea had been
considered as industrial workers and not as sailors. Now that indus-
trial workers were receiving special protection, the question had to be
put differently. As certain judges remarked, if one considered, as had
been the case up until then, workmen on ships to be industrial work-
ers, they would have better protection than seamen who had no access
to the 1898 law. This is why they preferred the second solution: said
sailors were not sailors, but nor would they be considered to be indus-
trial workers. In the appeal court, it was the latter interpretation that
carried the day, thus opening the door to the recruitment of persons
not appearing on maritime rolls, so either to any other sort of worker,
or to workers found in the colonies or on the global sailor market.
In reality, under such conditions, French workmen were reluctant to
accept work at sea because they would be discriminated against com-
pared to ordinary industrial workers. This led to foreign workers pen-
etrating the market for French maritime workers, particularly from
the colonies where French law held no real sway. Indeed, during the
first half of the nineteenth century, the law stated that a crew must be
made up of domestic sailors, except in special cases, such as ordinary
seamen, for example. An 1851 law nevertheless accepted that one-
quarter of the crew, excluding officers, could be comprised of foreign-
ers. For the latter, in the case of enrolment in “faraway ports” where
there was no consular presence, “the shipmaster will give account to
whoever receives his sea report or declaration” (edict dated October
23, 1833, article 40 and decree dated March 19, 1852). This meant
that, as before, recruitment far from France was not only open to all
sorts of abuse, but was also becoming increasingly profitable. There
was a close link between the evolution in work reports for French
seamen and recruiting on the international market. The maritime
profession had a very particular work discipline system; since 1852 it
had been regulated by the merchant navy’s disciplinary and criminal
code (CDPMM) and governed by a specific but poorly named juris-
diction—the commercial maritime court (which was also competent
in criminal matters).66 There was the long-standing issue of whether
or not to apply state disciplinary law, integrated into the labor code,
to shipowners.67 The answer had often been negative, with two major
implications: on the domestic labor market, sailors had benefited
from a special system and from social protection well before most
other professional categories. At the same time, this encouraged ship-
owners to recruit on the global labor market. Given the absence and,
later on, the weakness of international agreements, these forms of
recruitment and dependency were extreme. In the nineteenth century,
foreign sailors received far lower wages than domestic sailors, with-
out benefiting from any social protection. The reason put forward
was that unlike French sailors, foreigners could not be mobilized to
join the army. Ordinary immigrant seamen like Conrad therefore
found themselves faced with a system, which, to certain work pen-
alties under the Ancient Régime, added other penalties relating to
globalization and to the rapid development of the welfare state. The
more French sailors benefited from special conditions, the more for-
eign seamen were employed in order to reduce shipowners’ costs. In
this way, by guaranteeing protection for French employees, seamen
included, the 1898 law on work accidents created a stark difference
from foreign employees and seamen who were still subject to the rules
of common law.68 In its wake, a law passed on April 7, 1902, modi-
fied an old 1793 law by accepting that with regard to cabotage linking
France to its colonies, a ship would be deemed to be French even if the
crew (with the exception of the officers, boatswains, and at least two
seamen) was made up of foreigners. The new forms of social protec-
tion afforded to French workers, combined with the old and highly
particular issue of the mobilization of domestic sailors, encouraged
employers to draw on the international market. In this respect they
found support from national authorities who passed ad hoc laws. At
an international level, France followed Great Britain, where there was
absolute freedom for the recruitment of sailors. This solution differed
from the norms in place in other countries (e.g., Italy) where it was
possible to recruit foreign sailors only when no domestic sailors were
available. Of course, on French ships, the working conditions for
Polish or Swedish sailors, while inferior to those of French sailors,

were different again from those of Africans and Asians. The presence
of the latter differed from one part of the world to another. Before the
abolition of slavery in 1848, many slaves were used as seamen during
the crossing from Africa to the West Indies or the Indian Ocean. This
practice was even more common in as much as the British had abol-
ished slavery as far back as 1807, which meant that French ships were
looking for ways of avoiding the requisition of their cargo of slaves—
hence the presence of Africans and Asians as part of the crew.69 It
was not just a case of unqualified seamen. The Senegalese laptots,
renowned for their seafaring skills, were bought as captives and put
to work on French ships.70
After the official abolition of slavery in 1848, and as we will see
in the following sections, “recruited” African and Asian crews (dis-
guised slaves in reality) took the place of former slaves on plantations
in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. Some of these recruits were
used from time to time to replace crew members during the crossing,
while others were recruited for periods of several years as an integral
part of the crew. This was particularly the case in the Indian Ocean,
on the routes linking Africa to the Arabian Sea and India, and then
on to eastern Asia. English ships were under orders to fight “disguised
slavery” and on several occasions seized French ships serving in these
regions, finding African and Asian workers both in the cargo hold
and among members of the crew.71 Senegalese and other African sail-
ors continued to be recruited on the basis of the legal fiction of the
prior repurchasing of captives. This “contract,” provided for the “lib-
eration” of slaves in these regions, in return for their “repurchase”
from their owners and local chiefs. These practices were justified as
being acts of humanity (liberation of local slaves, but also famine).
Yet in practice this argument fell apart when the former slaves were
supposed to compensate either the colonial power that had liberated
them (through taxes to be paid on their future wages and salaries),
or, more often than not, the owner-employer to whom they had been
transferred.72 The English continued to seize French ships and to free
the Africans and Asians found onboard, which led to protests from
the French who considered such acts to be unlawful and motivated
purely by reasons of economic competition.
In any case, both before and after the abolition of slavery, shipown-
ers and French colonial authorities took care to avoid these colonial
convicts and galley slaves being disembarked in France. Before 1848,
this recommendation was justified by the uncertainty relating to the
legal status of slaves arriving on French soil—were they emancipated

or not?
After 1848, this same orientation was suggested by the desire to
restrict as far as possible any “desertion” or “illegal immigration” of
colonial manpower on French soil. This meant that most Senegalese
(and other) sailors were employed for voyages far from French and
European soil.73 Even more important, shipowners and shipmasters
were determined that, as “captives,” they should not be qualified as
“seamen,” thus avoiding the need to register them on the ship’s rolls.74
We therefore find here a clear relationship between the evolution
of work and of the maritime market in France and its colonies. From
a French perspective, the global maritime labor market was encour-
aged by the social protection for maritime work in France and was
made possible by the evolution in navigation techniques on the one
hand, and by the expansion and stabilization of colonial empires dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century on the other. At the
same time this relationship was also the result of conscription, which
increased the shortfall in manpower as well as the forms of its social
protection. The military market was linked to the evolution in social
protection on the one hand and to that of the labor market on the
other. Technological innovations were a response to these needs and
in turn encouraged the development of new dynamics, particularly
with regard to the recruitment of seamen and farm workers for the
maritime market.
Thus, the French Revolution did not have the same effects in all
areas of the economy; the laws governing the labor market certainly
saw a fundamental improvement with the removal of domestic service
for life, yet this domain had already undergone major changes during
the eighteenth century, with a relaxation of conditions of servitude in
France. In addition, both before and after the Revolution, the laws on
employment contracts remained unchanged (lease-and-hire of work
and lease-and-hire of service). Working conditions thus depended
on the sector, the place and even on the persons involved. Generally
speaking, the increased protection for workers in the urban textile
sector and certain industrial branches contrasted with the depen-
dency of employees working in smaller units and in farming. Day
workers and servants endured extremely harsh working conditions
and their rights were relatively poorly protected compared to work-
ers in industrial sectors. In the eighteenth century, sailors were still
subject to a system whose boundaries with servitude and galley-slave
conditions remained blurred. They key to escaping this framework
was the relationship—very much specific to this sector—between

military recruitment, apprenticeship, and social protection. The
increased presence of the state and of the law led to greater constraint
but also to more effective social rights. The nineteenth century was
to provide a solution proper to this market: as in the industrial sec-
tor, a two-speed protection was introduced, for fisherman working
in small units on the one hand, and those working for large compa-
nies on the other. Yet unlike industry, the specific status of French
sailors contrasted with the extreme forms of dependency of sailors
recruited on the global market. This disparity was due not only to
the working conditions and forms of protection, but also to the link
with recruitment. Trading companies shifted to the global labor mar-
ket not just as a reaction to the cost of social protection, but also
due to the permanent uncertainty that weighed on sailors who could
be mobilized at any moment. Globalization brought with it neither
improvement nor deterioration to sailors’ rights and conditions, but
instead an increased differentiation between the national and global
marketplaces. The consequences were not the same for the farm
workers’ market, which remained firmly rooted in regional or even
local structures until the latter part of the nineteenth century. This
type of partitioning led to significant seasonal fluctuations in wages
and to persistent inequalities, in this case between regions rather than
between French nationals and foreigners, as was the case with sail-
ors. On the one hand, the globalization of agriculture mainly affected
produce, with the rapid development of Russian and American farm-
ing, while the dynamics of labor remained local, in France at least (in
the Americas it was already a different situation, with mass immigra-
tion from Europe, Asia, and Africa). On the other hand, the global-
ization of maritime work, with the help of the empires, led to the
emergence of the category of “national sailor” (marin national) as a
way of legitimizing social rights. Globalization did not have the same
scope or the same significance on all of these markets. Regarding
agricultural produce, European and French protectionism protected
domestic producers while at the same time leaving them on the fringe
of the new social state. On the other hand, on the maritime market,
social protection led to increased market segmentation—in the sense
of an opposition between national sailors and sailors recruited on
the international marketplace—which went hand in hand with clear
discrimination against the latter. Yet these barriers disappear when
ordinary seamen—and then maritime “workers”—are in fact farm
day workers. In this case, thanks to the new technologies that took
over after the middle of the nineteenth century, unqualified workers

could easily move from one sector to another and thus help to modify
work spaces. Maritime work and farm work, previously connected
through the temporary recruitment of farm day workers, gradually
drifted apart as the economy became global. Internationalization
between 1880 and 1914 was accompanied by the disappearance of
multiple activities.
In order to complete this picture, we need to understand the French
specificity with regard to seamen: was it a legacy from the Ancient
Régime or a consequence of the specific path to modern?
3
Sailors in the British Empire
From the Press-Gang versus Colonial Recruitment

From the seventeenth century, through the eighteenth century, and
on into the nineteenth century, the image of the sailor as an expres-
sion of liberty swept through North American and European litera-
ture. Whether fighting the elements, changing ports and women, or
even “redeeming” himself, the sailor was at the heart of many a tale.
Well before Conrad and Melville, authors such as Fenimore Cooper
(who wrote not only The Last of the Mohicans, but also The Pilot,
1824) and Dickens (Dombey and Son), to name but a very few, placed
the sea and sailors at the heart of their novels. Combining exoticism,
national exaltation, and romantic heroism, this literature celebrates
an overly positive image of the sailor and the human being, very dif-
ferent from that of Melville’s Captain Ahab and very far removed
from the often dark images conveyed by Conrad. Paradoxically, this
effervescence took place precisely when voyages were becoming lon-
ger and when there were restrictions to recruitment and to sailors’
duties. The sea as an ideal of freedom contrasted with the sea as
a place and instrument of coercion.1 From 1644, on a large scale
and in a systematic manner, England was employing the press-gang
system, which was also found in France at that time. The Navy tar-
geted entire districts and cared not whether the people it caught were
real seamen or not; in the name of military imperative and national
defense, they were seized and embarked. From the end of the seven-
teenth century on, some people questioned the constitutional legiti-
macy of this practice, but jurisprudential decisions were all in favor
of the Navy, placing individual rights behind those of the nation’s
military interests. Following these decisions, Royal Navy sailors were
not protected by the Magna Carta. The 1597 Vagrancy Act included
royal ships as one of the destinations for vagabonds, thus highlight-
ing once again the close links between duress, military service, and
“ordinary” work.
For the Navy, a more convincing argument highlighted the lack of
skill and the high desertion levels of these requisitioned “seamen.”
Numerous reports were requested but without any real reform being
passed. The “waste” of human resources mentioned in these debates
simply led to a clause in the 1703 Act that excluded from the press-
gang system anyone under the age of 18 who had already terminated
his apprenticeship. 2 This was a very important step as it demonstrated
the link among maritime conscription, the labor market, and social
order. It met two demands: the first by masters, employers, and guilds,
which said that apprenticeships were costly and beneficial not only to
masters but to the nation as well. It would therefore be a waste to send
to sea young men who had been trained in other professions. Second,
this argument was in line with the content of the 1692 Poor Law,
which included apprenticeships among the conditions that excluded
individuals from having to state their place of residence.
Thus, apprentices were excluded from press-gang recruitment
in both England and France. Toward the middle of the eighteenth
century, the question then arose of the link between these forms of
recruiting and slavery. On this matter, one must make a distinction
between what was happening in England and what was taking place
in its colonies. Charter companies and slave ships frequently used
slaves as seamen. However, this increasingly widespread practice was
causing protests from growers in the West Indies and the Americas,
who were concerned about competition on the slave market from the
Navy.
The same problem existed with regard to the recruiting of sailors.
In 1746, a new Act of Parliament forbade the use of press-gangs in
the West Indies, though not in North American colonies. This meant
that the Navy could continue to use force to recruit sailors. This led
to increasingly strong protests, especially in Boston, and formed one
of the seeds for the independence movement. 3 Despite this, the link
was established between the recruitment of sailors and the allocation
of slaves. In both cases, the colonies protested against England, with
which they were competing for access to manpower, be it slavers or
seamen. Moreover, these categories overlapped, in particular in the
case of African slaves employed as seamen, but also for emancipated
slaves and white sailors and indentured immigrants.
Sailors in the British Empire 59
In England, the relationship between the forcible seizure of sail-

ors and slavery was more complicated. The famous “Somerset case”
of 1772 has often been put forward as the first real abolitionist act.
The judge ruled that a slave was deemed to be emancipated as soon
as he laid foot on British soil and that he could not be returned to
slavery. Less familiar to historians, this same act immediately sparked
a debate on sailors: if no one could be enslaved on British soil, how
could the forcible recruitment of sailors be justified?
Yet while the antislavery campaign led to concrete measures being
taken for slaves, steps taken with regard to sailors were far more mod-
est. Their forced recruitment in port taverns, or even on merchant
vessels, continued to be practiced on a large scale;4 in the taverns,
unscrupulous intermediaries and their gangs continued to seize men.
When this occurred at sea, on merchant ships, the Navy’s “recruiters”
were under a legal obligation to replace the seamen they requisitioned.
When this obligation was respected (especially due to protests from
the trading sector), it consisted of compensating for the seizure of real
sailors on merchant ships by supplying the latter with the worst sailors
in the Navy, more often than not criminals or the most reluctant of
those who had been press-ganged in taverns and in the hinterlands.
As in France, in England it was wars that encouraged these prac-
tices, which then continued on into peacetime. Forcible recruitment
was extended to prisoners of war. In 1812, 15 percent of Royal Navy
personnel were foreigners. 5 Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Sylvia’s Lovers
(1863) describes the woes of young Sylvia Robson. Initially in love with
her cousin, Quaker Philip, Sylvia meets a seaman, Charlie Kinraid,
who rapidly replaces Philip in her heart. Yet under the indifferent gaze
of his rival, Charlie is seized by the Navy’s gangs and forcibly enlisted.
It was 1790, and England was at war with France. Believing herself to
have been abandoned, Sylvia marries Philip, who is very careful not
to reveal the truth about Charlie. They have a daughter. Predictably,
one fine day Charlie returns, and the truth comes out. Philip flees and
joins the Navy, while in order to protect her daughter, Sylvia refuses to
live with Charlie. Philip and Charlie meet one another in battle, and
this time the former redeems himself by saving Charlie’s life. Charlie
returns to England and marries. Naturally, his wife becomes friends
with Sylvia. When the latter discovers the identity of her friend’s hus-
band, she finally realizes that Charlie was not as faithful to her as she
had thought and that she truly does love Philip. However, Philip has
meanwhile been horribly disfigured by an explosion onboard a ship
and, after returning to England, is hiding in the home of the sister of
one of the servants of Sylvia’s parents (who are now deceased). He

tries to secretly see his daughter, from a distance. One day, when she
is attacked, he rushes to defend her and is mortally wounded. On his
deathbed, Sylvia forgives him.
The reality was often worse than this awful novel. The English fleet
constituted the very foundation of the empire’s military and economic
strength and was in a constant state of growth. In 1788, the British
fleet already counted 12,464 ships for 1.2 million tons. By 1815 there
were 21,869 units for 2.4 million tons. These figures remained stable
until the middle of the century, particularly in terms of units, as ton-
nage had increased to 3.5 million by the beginning of the 1840s. After
that, the expansion of steam sailing caused a huge rise in tonnage,
even though the number of registered ships remained fairly stable or
even fell slightly: 28,000 ships in 1863 for 5.3 million tons; 24,000
units and 7.2 million tons 20 years later.6 On its own, the English
fleet accounted for almost a quarter of global maritime transport—in
1850, there were 4 million British tons compared to 14.6 million for
the rest of the world. Fifty years later, the proportion was 30 to 96,
respectively.7 In reality, most of the progress in productivity took place
before this date. In the North Atlantic in the eighteenth century, the
volume of freight fell, while tonnage remained stable and the number
of men fell in line with the size of the ship. A significant proportion of
these changes related to the end of piracy in the North Atlantic and
hence to the lesser presence of soldiers and guns on board. Another
gain in productivity during the eighteenth century was due to the
shorter stays in ports before refitting and restocking, which meant
better logistics and improved supply methods. On the other hand,
after the revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, increased productivity
was directly linked to the increasing size of ships.8
Given its strategic and economic importance, the British fleet
needed manpower; forcible recruitment was practiced with the bless-
ing of numerous legal decisions that stressed the difference between
the “fully aware” sailor on one hand and children and slaves on the
other. Even if alcohol could be blamed and thus invalidate the “free
contractual will” required under British law, this element is strongly
qualified where sailors’ debauchery was invoked to stigmatize their
behavior and justify such abuse. In other words, in accordance with
the law and with the morals of the time, children and slaves should be
protected because they have no real will; persons who are legally free
do not require protection and bear sole responsibility for their degen-
eration. This was the case for “drunken sailors,” prostitutes, and all
persons placed in workhouses. It is no coincidence that one of the

most fervent admirers of Bentham and his Panopticon was Admiral
Hanwey, who was behind the creation of several correctional homes
and of methods of surveillance and encouragement on His Majesty’s
ships, taking his inspiration from the Panopticon.
Reactions against this state of affairs came from pro-abolition cir-
cles—Evangelists and Quakers—for the same reasons that they criti-
cized slavery: such forms of extreme duress were contrary to moral and
religious precepts. Yet even within these circles, a major distinction
was made between slaves and sailors: the latter must be saved from
both their sins and depraved lifestyles, and from the whip.9 This cam-
paign related to several phenomena: for the merchant navy to develop,
massive recruitment was required and coercion seemed to be unequal
to such a task, especially as there was fierce competition on the labor
market, with industrialization and urbanization growing fast toward
the middle of the century. It was during the 1850s that criticism of the
Masters and Servants Acts intensified and it was in this context that
the rules governing sailors also evolved. A campaign against use of
the whip and in favor of general improvements to sailors’ conditions
began to take shape at this time and led to the Naval Discipline Acts
1860–66. Corporal punishment was forbidden and the conditions for
sailors’ food and board had to be specified in the contracts and not be
inferior to the thresholds set down by the law.10 However, these stan-
dards proved difficult to enforce and the decriminalization of sailors’
contracts was only validated in a law passed in 1880, before once
again being criminalized to a partial extent in 1894. Any termination
of contract by a sailor was deemed to be desertion and fell under the
criminal law. This was in contrast to changes relating to the labor
market, where criminal sanctions were being removed at this time.
How can we explain these differences?
As in France, the first reason related to the link among the merchant
navy, the military navy, and the empire. British authorities believed
that their country’s military and trading supremacy came from the
strength of their fleet; this meant that maritime personnel was con-
sidered to be an absolute priority from both military and commercial
standpoints.
In France, however, for the reasons set out above, the relationship
between maritime work and conscription was insufficient to maintain
a fleet of the same size as Great Britain. Furthermore, in France the
counterpart of potential lifetime conscription for adult seamen was
the introduction of an early social protection system, but as we have
seen, this solution penalized foreign and colonial seamen at a time

when the welfare state was expanding. In England, sailors had no spe-
cific protection in the nineteenth century; on the contrary, their condi-
tions were often similar to those of slaves, though without benefiting
from the moralistic indulgence accorded to the latter. Yet toward the
end of the nineteenth century, when like in France the British welfare
state was being set up, unlike France, workers and ordinary seamen
were not penalized compared to other employees. In Great Britain,
they benefited from new norms of social protection.
At the end of the day, these analogies and differences between the
sailors market in France and England related to the integration of the
two countries into the global market, and to the roles of the respec-
tive empires. In England, the recruitment of sailors from the colonies,
often by force, probably took place from an earlier date and was more
widespread than in France.11
In the eighteenth century, alongside slavery in the strict sense of the
word, by using methods of local recruitment in the Indian Ocean,12
EIC ships recruited Indian sailors in the form of gangs (lascars, the
on-ship equivalent of coolies). Lascars were considered as less perfor-
mative than African, but much better than Arab and Chinese seamen
who hardly respected the British rules. The rationale for this, was the
same than for the French company: the lack of men in Britain itself
because of the Royal Navy, and the high mortality of British crews
in the Indian Ocean—the Navy seizing sailors of the EIC and then of
private companies when it needed.13
More often than not, they were employed through the interme-
diary of and along with the serang, the gang’s boatswain. While
there were advantages to this system, it also created problems for the
English. The serang reduced the cost of finding and recruiting sailors,
but authority over the Indian seamen depended on mediation by the
serang, who also negotiated wages. English shipowners and shipmas-
ters complained that the serangs took advantage of periods of ten-
sion, related to the monsoon and the need to make a voyage before
a certain date, to push up wages.14 Beyond seamen, Indian slaves
were also onboard. Their presence increased during the eighteenth
century, in connection with the British rule in India. Indian seamen
were first used to make coastal trade in the Indian Ocean; then also
to go back to England. This rose the problem of their presence on
the English soil; their emancipation transformed them into poor, or
worst, vagrant. Indeed, parishes refused to put them on their list for
the poor laws. In this case, the EIC was still responsible.
The Persistent Bondage of the British Sailor

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Indian and African
freed slaves were often employed as seamen, mostly in Aden and
Bombay. With the increasing antislavery patrols in the western Indian
Ocean, more and more freed African slaves reached the main British
ports in the area where they were employed as domestic servants or
seamen or even sent to mines in south Africa. From the middle of the
nineteenth century, with the rapid development of steamships, there
was an increasing presence of colonial sailors and workers; lascars
in particular were to be found in larger numbers on English ships, to
such an extent that toward the end of the century they represented
20 percent of crews.15
During the eighteenth century there were thus large numbers of
African slaves on English ships, both in the Atlantic and in the Indian
Ocean.16 Once emancipated, numerous Africans continued to be
recruited on British ships. In the Indian Ocean, these African sailors
were called seedies.17 The term seedies derived from sayyids refer-
ring to Africans in Northern India, themselves seamen. However, in
the British definition of the nineteenth century, this term referred to
men from the Swahili coast, especially Zanzibar, particularly sailors
and harbor workers.18 Between 1865 and 1870 alone, the government
recorded almost 2,200 Eastern African freedmen as having entered
Aden.19
This increasing presence of Asians and Africans in British crews
was due, first, to the shift from sail to steam that led to the need for
engineers, workers, and unqualified personnel. For a while, ships used
both sail and steam; machinery was expensive, as was coal, especially
in the Indian Ocean, and for this reason shipowners tried to compen-
sate for rising costs with cheaper manpower. For the same skill levels,
colonial manpower was less costly than English manpower. For the
same physical conditions and know-how, lascars were paid between
one-third and one-fifth of a European sailor’s wage. 20 These differ-
ences were justified by the race, with the understanding that given the
requirements of the Royal Navy, sailors descended from Africans in
the West Indies were qualified as being British, simply because they
were deemed to have good physical qualities, unlike the Asians. 21
Recruiting essentially took place on site: partly in India—mainly
in Bombay where the Royal Navy disembarked a large number of
Indian and African slaves “freed” from their European, Arab, and
African masters. This same practice was common in Zanzibar, where
Africans emancipated inland by the English, along with a mass of

“vagabonds,” day workers, indentured servants, and slaves who had
fled their masters, were to be found in ever-increasing numbers. 22 The
British Indian Navy, temporarily abolished in 1863 after the great
mutiny of 1857 and the worries about the loyalty of Indian soldiers
was restored in 1864–65. At this moment, after complaints about the
persistent slave trade in the Gulf, British policy-makers decided to
permanently lease six ships of the British admiralty to the government
of India for 70,000 sterling a year (to be paid by Indian taxpayers).
Its task was to patrol the Persian Gulf and fight against the slave
trade. Indeed, since the 1840s, Aden was a port filled with fugitives,
former slaves, and so on. Between 1839 and 1856, Aden’s popula-
tion exploded from 1,300 to 21,000. British authorities sponsored
the migration of convict labor and free worker to India, to whom
added freed slaves. In 1856, a thousand former slaves under British
protection were registered there. 23 Presumed slaves seized on French,
Portuguese, or other ships in the Indian Ocean were transported to
Aden or to other British ports. 24 By the 1870s, nearly 600 Arabs,
Somalis, and other Africans were hired on steamships. When one port
could not absorb them, they moved elsewhere. For example, young
African freedmen were landed first in Aden, then to Bombay, where
they entered the British Indian Navy. 25 Of course, they were not free
to go wherever they wished—the reasons given were fears of vagrancy
and of them being enslaved once again. So they were dispatched to
the homes of “respectable” local elite or sent to other British enclaves
in the Indian Ocean. Some were encouraged to embark on English
military or merchant ships. On the other hand, fugitive slaves taking
refuge in British enclaves were posing another type of problem. As we
will see in more detail later on, up until the 1890s the British authori-
ties tried to reconcile abolitionist principles with their own geopoliti-
cal ambitions, which consisted in increasing British influence while at
the same time leaving the local elite in place. Particularly in Africa, in
the Arab and Indian peninsula, in exchange for the collaboration of
said elites, local slavery was qualified as “domestic work.” Some fugi-
tive slaves were therefore not embarked and “freed” but were instead
returned to their masters.
Strict rules against desertion were thus needed to maintain this
segmented market and to perpetrate these inequalities. The word las-
car, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century still referred just
to sailors from southeast Asia, gradually became a category within
maritime law that made it possible to distinguish them from the sailor
per se. 26 The notions of freedom and mobility were used to attract this
manpower and to draw it away from its potential employers in India
and southeast Asia. On the other hand, once these seamen became
part of the British work circuits, it was duress and the repression of
mobility that they encountered. Indeed, what shipowners feared the
most was that upon arriving in an English port, the lascars would
escape and go into town to find better working conditions. In 1844—
the year in which the Poor Law was repealed and when for the very
first time industrial workers won their case in Parliament in relation
to the Masters and Servants Act—a new Merchant Seaman Act was
passed. The details of sailors employed on British ships were written
on a “ticket”—not just their height, weight, hair, and eye color, but
also their education and maritime career. When this ticket was com-
plete, all of the information was entered into a sailors register. The
aim was to combat desertion. However, the sailors felt these measures
to be a violation of their freedom to contract, and they refused to
provide all of the requested information, or gave false information,
or else “mislaid” their tickets. The ticket system was thus abandoned
in 1854. 27
The development of steamships in the 1860s boosted the recruit-
ment of nonspecialized Indian and African sailors whose wages were
lower than those of British sailors. The opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 encouraged English companies to take this direction: until
then they had made widespread use of Indians and Africans in the
Indian Ocean and used a mixture of British and West Indian sailors
in the Atlantic. This distinction can be explained by the existence of
different fleets due to the time it took to circumnavigate Africa. With
the opening of the Suez Canal, maritime transport became global,
and the sailors’ market with it. Crews were made up of West Indian,
African, and Indian sailors. 28 They were often used to feed coal into
the engines, to do the cleaning, and help in the kitchens. The seedies
were considered to be to be more resilient than the Indians and were
often dispatched from one part of the Indian Ocean to another, for
example, from the mines in South America to ships where they were
employed to feed coal. Stem vessels increased the demand for a new
labor industrial force, mostly working belowdecks. Because the own-
ers and managers of steam vessels sought to transfer the costs of tech-
nological innovations to their workers, the merchant maritime labor
force increasingly came from beyond the United Kingdom. Maritime
wages declined after 1850 and stagnated after 1870; thus fewer Britons
proved willing to work at sea. Foreigners and an increasing number
of seafaring British subjects from the imperial fringes replaced some

British subjects. Globalization went along with segmentation: Britons
benefited from the higher wages.
However harsh they might have been, the conditions for work-
ers onboard British ships were presented as a “liberation” compared
to the conditions they endured in Africa. Yet as far as the British
elite was concerned, the liberation of slaves in Africa, India, or the
Arabian Peninsula was one thing; allowing them to set themselves
up in England was another. This was an enduring problem for both
the political elite and to British employees and their associations. The
new Shipping Act, passed in 1894, made shipmasters and shipown-
ers responsible for repatriating the lascars and for ensuring that they
were not “disembarked” in England without any protection. These
measures were extended to the rest of the British Empire: in 1902–3,
the Federal minister for Australia forbade any employment of las-
cars on ships to Australia in order to preserve the race and protect
the jobs of white English sailors. 29 Similarly, in the Indian Ocean,
shipmasters, shipowners, and British colonial authorities complained
about the “leakage” in Indian and African sailors and of the danger
that this represented for public order. 30 Added to British interests in
Africa, these forms of protectionism led to the disappearance of seed-
ies from British crews at the beginning of the twentieth century.
There were similar yet different situations in the Atlantic, where
immediately after the abolition of slavery in British colonies (1832–33),
an increasing number of sailors from the West Indies were registered
as members of British crews.31 In reality, the relationship between
work, remuneration, and race was a complex one: at the turn of the
nineteenth century, on British ships the difference in wages between
British and other sailors was not particularly significant. This dif-
ference increased from the middle of the nineteenth century, when
the wages of English sailors increased and those of other sailors fell.
There was a real range of wage levels, as crews were now increasingly
international, and alongside the English could be found numerous
Americans, Germans, Poles, Italians, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and
Siamese. Available data show that while English sailors’ wages were
lower than those of other English employees, they were higher than
those of sailors from other countries, European included. The las-
cars were at the very bottom of the scale. 32 This led to growing pro-
tests from British sailors’ unions who decried the unfair competition
from employers and the invasion of this foreign workforce. Projects to
restrict their employment were thus backed by the unions and by all
those who were concerned about “black” immigration in England. It

was here that political and economic issues and the legal aspects and
forms of dependence of Asian sailors became one with those, more
general, issues of the colonial workforce. In the following pages we
will relate the history of seamen to the general evolution of slavery and
post-emancipation labor markets in the French and British empires in
the Indian Ocean in particular. The question is to detail and under-
stand the historical analogies and differences between seamen, on
one hand, slaves, bonded people, and indentured immigrants on the
other hand. Were they quite distinct categories, or did they overlap at
one time or another? Did they evolve in connection of one with the
others, and if yes, this was in response to which phenomena?
In order to answer these questions, we need to study the meanings
and dynamics of slavery and other forms of bondage in the Indian
Ocean before and during the European expansion.
4
Slaveries and Emancipation
It would be a mistake to consider that modern colonial slavery

emerged only with the rise of the plantation system in the Americas.
Long before that, sugar plantations using slave labor were developed
in the eastern Mediterranean by both Venice and the Islamic pow-
ers. From 1450 increasing numbers of African slaves were shipped
to Sicily, Portugal, and Spain, and others to the sugar plantations on
the Portuguese-held Atlantic islands. Portuguese and Genoese mer-
chants competed for control of the African slave trade, the Portuguese
proving initially the more successful and establishing the pattern
for later development of the transatlantic slave trade. On the North
African coast they established trading contact with Muslim traders
and authorities, transferred slaves from the eastern Mediterranean
plantations to the “new” island plantations in the eastern Atlantic,
and bought slaves with gold from West African authorities—exactly
as the Muslim merchants did in the trans-Saharan trade.1 As early as
the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese already traded
80,000 slaves per year along the Mauritanian, Senegambia, and
Upper Guinea coasts. 2 In this they benefited from an alliance forged
with the kingdom of Congo, a non-Muslim state, which facilitated
the export of slaves to Portugal and Sao Tome from where slaves were
also shipped to the Americas from the 1530s. Overall, between 1450
and 1600 some 410,000 slaves were exported from West Africa via
the Atlantic basin, although in the mid-sixteenth century, following
the collapse of the Congo kingdom, the Americas became their main
destination.3 From the early sixteenth century, the Spanish sought to
produce sugar at Hispaniola, the Portuguese in Brazil.
The situation was as complex in the Caribbean and North America
where, faced with the irregular labor supplies and low productivity of
Amerindians, two new sources of labor were looked to—white inden-

tured immigrants and African slaves. As late as 1650, there were only
17,000 Africans in English America, amounting to only 2.5 percent
of the total population. Most Africans lived on the Caribbean islands.
On the mainland, there were only 2,000 Africans in 1650. By 1700,
however, the African population approached 150,000 more than a
third of the population of the English mainland colonies, Regional
variations were nevertheless important: the arrival of African slaves
was fast in Barbados, slower in Chesapeake colonies.
Indeed, despite the expansion of European colonies in the Americas,
the traditional export trade in African slaves north to Muslim coun-
tries continued to be significant, accounting for about 40 percent of
total slave exports from Africa in the seventeenth century, 20 percent
in the eighteenth century, and about 30 percent between the seven-
teenth and the early nineteenth century. Overall, between 1500 and
1800, the Muslim trade probably accounted for about 40 percent of
African slave exports.4
Most victims of the slave trade were enslaved as a result of wars,
razzias, criminal punishment, or impoverishment due to drought or
other natural catastrophes. African commercial networks were fully
integrated and forged strong links with external markets. The slave
export trade was organized, in Muslim areas of Africa, by govern-
ment agents, foreign merchants (mostly Muslims), and local trad-
ers, while Europeans dominated slave exports from the African west
coast: the Dutch, the French, and the English in the northern part,
and the Portuguese in the south. Slaves were purchased chiefly with
imported money (silver coins, iron bars, copper, some textile, shells,
etc.), military goods, and luxuries (textiles, mirrors, needles, liquors).
Political instability and warfare enhanced both demand for and the
supply of slaves. On the demand side, slaves were required for the
army and to finance imports of weapons; on the supply side, popula-
tion displacement and warfare encouraged razzias in which war cap-
tives and refugees were enslaved. The trade in slaves with Europeans
was initially strongest with European enclaves in Africa, notably
along the Guinea coast, and in Angola, Cape Town, and Zambezia,
which possessed between 60,000 and 100,000 slaves by the end of
the eighteenth century. 5
In Muslim societies, an early division was established between
the core Islamic lands of the Middle East that provided the mar-
kets for slaves, and non-Muslim domains that constituted source
regions for slaves—enslavement of non-Muslims captured in holy
Slaveries and Emancipation 71
wars being justified under the Sharia. Military expansion under the
Abbasid dynasty (758–1258 CE) brought into the Muslim polities an
increasing number of slaves as war captives and tribute, and through
commerce.
Islam’s subsequent expansion into the Indian Ocean, Africa, and
central Asia encouraged further development of the slave trade,
notably across the Sahara. Thus, between 1400 and 1900, 2.5 mil-
lion slaves were traded by sea along the coast of the Indian Ocean,
while about 9 million passed along the trans-Saharan route (3.6 mil-
lion being exported).6 Exports of slaves from East Africa rose from
100,000 in the seventeenth century to 400,000 in the eighteenth cen-
tury and 1,618,000 in the nineteenth century, half of whom were sent
overseas and the other half retained on the eastern African coasts.7
Well over a million slaves were obtained by the Swahili world alone
in the nineteenth century.8 Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, that
in the Indian Ocean was not under the control of the Europeans and
it was not limited to Africans, but included Asian slaves. In contrast
to the Atlantic system, IOW slaves rarely constituted as special cargo.
The slave trade in the Indian Ocean involved overland and mari-
time routes. It also went far beyond chattel slavery and the planta-
tion economy; these were important in the Mascarene and along the
Swahili coast, but, still, they cannot be taken as representative of the
multiple forms of bondage in the large IOW over the long run. Debt
bondage and other forms of servitude were extremely widespread.9
Enslavement for indebtedness was involuntary, whereas most peo-
ple entered debt bondage voluntarily as a credit securing strategy.
Mortgaging a child, or wife, to raise a loan was common practice in
the IOW. A pretext the man often used was “adultery” committed by
his wife or concubine.10
Also, slavery and its trade in the Indian Ocean began much earlier
than in the Atlantic and it survived at least until the 1930s, if not until
nowadays. The reasons for that have to be found not only in the logic
of the connections, the multiplicity of powers and forms of depen-
dence and slavery, but also in the multiple roles that many people and
area play—as both suppliers and demanders of slaves, masters and
slaves, and so on. Thus, exports from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden
ports of Massava, Beilul, Tajura, and Zayla were still running in the
first half of the nineteenth century at almost 10,000 per annum.
Further south, one of the principal slave markets was on the island of
Zanzibar. The principal markets in the Gulf of Oman were probably
Sur and Muscat. It was estimated that in the 1860s and 1870s, 13,000
slaves reached the gulf annually from East African ports, and that at
least 4,000 or 5,000 went to Sur.11
The main zones of exports of slaves from Africa to the Indian
Ocean were Northeast Africa, East Africa, and Southeast Africa.
Northeast Africa drew captives from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan
and exported to the Red Sea littoral as far as the Persian Gulf, South
Asia, and eventually Zanzibar. East Africa recruited slaves from the
hinterland and extended to the west of Lake Tanganika; it supplied
mostly Zanzibar, and also the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. East
Central Africa drew upon northern Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia,
and Zimbabwe and fed the same markets plus the Comoros, west-
ern Madagascar, the Mascarene, and Seychelles. South central Africa
reached the hinterlands of southern Mozambique and the Zimbabwe
plateau and supplied labor to the Cape, western India, and the
Mascarene. Madagascar was an early source for slaves at the Cape
and a principal provisioner for the Mascarenes.
The Portuguese increased the demand for agricultural labor; how-
ever, it was essentially the expansion of the plantation economy in
the Mascarene and along the Swahili coast that enhanced the slave
trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The period from the
last third of the eighteenth century onward was one during which the
slave trade played an important role in the economic history of East
Africa. The social transformation of Oman into a mercantile state
and the expansion of slave-based production from c. 1700 created
a demand for agricultural slaves. Thus, the Omanis enhanced their
power in the western Indian Ocean by founding colonies in Zanzibar
and Kilwa. Traditional imports of domestic slaves to Arabia added
to the increasing slave trade between inland Africa and the Omanis
plantations along its East Coast.12 The combined population of the
Hijazy cities—Mecca, Medina, and their port of Jidda—doubled in
the nineteenth century while Zanzibar’s population grew up from
12,000 in 1835 to between 25,000 and 45,000 in 1857.13
In the Mozambique Channel since the seventeenth century, the
expanding slave trade was linked to the immigration of Swahili and
Hadrami Arabs to the region and the exportation of labor from
northwest Madagascar to the ports of the Swahili coast and Arabia
that reached its heyday in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies. The Swahili identity and language, though structurally Bantu,
included much Arabic, Persian, and South Asian vocabulary.14
Slaves were also used in the army. The secularization of the Omani
state suggested the need for a standing army under the Busaidi. Thus
Ahmed Said purchased 1,000 East African slaves at one time in the
1740s. Baluchi mercenaries were largely employed: 1,700 in 1802;
3,000 in 1809.15 From the middle of the eighteenth century, how-
ever, developments in both the interior of Madagascar (the rise of
the Imerina Empire) and along the Swahili coast caused a shift in the
trade, so that Madagascar became a significant importer of bonded
African labor from Mozambique.16
Women and children were more in demand than men and were also
more likely to be incorporated into Muslim society. Boys were trained
for military and domestic services, while adult men and less attractive
women were assigned more menial tasks. Slaves were employed in all
sectors, from domestic service to urban activities, agricultural labor,
and the army. Servile labor was common on medium and even small
properties, and widely employed in irrigation, pastoralism, mining,
transport, public works, proto-industry, and construction. Slave sta-
tus in Muslim societies was also hereditary in cases were both parents
were slaves, but children of a servile mother by a free man were free
under Shi’I Islam polities (although not in societies governed by Sunni
Islam).17 In East Africa, Muslim expansion manifested itself not in
territorial empires but in commercial city-states along the coast where
slave trading rather than raiding was the main source of supply of ser-
vile population. Concubines, domestic servants, officials, and slaves
in the plantations were the most widespread forms of bondage. In
all these regions, slave women were prized by freemen as wives and
concubines, while free women sought female slaves as attendants and
household laborers.18
African slaves were not used in agricultural production in Iran
but they were widely used in maritime activities in the Persian Gulf.
Africans were ubiquitous among dhow crews of the western Indian
Ocean during the nineteenth century. Africans also constituted a size-
able proportion of pearl divers in the Gulf who were estimated to num-
ber between 27,000 and 30,000 in the mid-nineteenth century.19
On Reunion Island, alongside the use of slaves in the strictest
sense, 20 engagés of color were employed in the eighteenth century
and even more so in the nineteenth. This immigration was partly
linked to the need for artisans (Indian carpenters and masons) but
above all to the demand for additional laborers at a time when, under
pressure from the English, the price of slaves was constantly rising
and “rumors” of the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies
were growing. In all, about 160,000 slaves are estimated to have
been imported to the Mascarene Islands prior to 1810. 21 They came
primarily from Madagascar (70%), followed by Mozambique and

East Africa (19%). 22 In the early eighteenth century, France played
a central role in organizing slave trade in East Africa which was
intended for the Mascarene Islands. 23
Slaves were bought in Africa were they had been previously taken
by slave traders either through razzia or by purchasing. In this last
case, debt bondage was a major source for slavery. 24
Pawnship has been variously interpreted by different authors over
time. Until the end of the nineteenth century, British colonial authori-
ties considered pawnship to be such a “mild” form of servitude as to
be acceptable. Their attitudes changed during the Scramble for Africa
when they fell under the scrutiny of the abolitionist movement in
Britain and in the early twentieth century banned pawnship as a form
of slavery. Slavery and pawnship were complimentary institutions.
Unlike slavery, pawnship was an intrinsic part of the credit system
as pawns formed the collateral for loans. Moreover, pawnship was
much more widespread among commoners than among chiefs who
used their power, wars, and razzias to access slaves and money. 25
Along similar lines, Lovejoy argues that pawnship evolved over
time and interacted with other forms of financing, most of which
were inseparable from the labor market. Because of the importance of
women and children in pawnship, the flow of credit and the control
of labor, were closely linked to the institution of marriage. Yet pawn-
ship assumed different forms according to region and time period.
Before the abolition of slavery, pawnship facilitated the flow of some
individuals into servitude whereas following abolition it formed an
alternative to slavery. The pawning contract, not the pawn, was the
property of the creditor. Unlike slaves who remained outsiders, pawns
belonged to the society of their masters and to a given extent pawn-
ship was a means of inclusion, not exclusion. Nevertheless, pawnship
and slavery has some common features. In both, the creditor/master
had full control over the labor and hence the over the output of the
pawn/slave also. 26 Ultimately, pawns could be enslaved de facto and
de jure. Conversely, slaves could, like pawns, be used as collateral.
This also explains why pawnship was nominally much less common
in Muslim societies where debt bondage was forbidden. In reality,
however, forms of disguised pawnship and debt bondage were wide-
spread and Muslim traders who acquired pawns converted them into
slaves. From the eighteenth century, in conformity with such prac-
tices, European traders explicitly asked not only for slaves but also for
pawns who they transformed into slaves. 27 In the nineteenth century,
both pawnship and slavery increased in Africa as rising external

demand resulted in rapidly expanding production of “legitimate”
cash crops and minerals by cheap labor-intensive methods. Most such
labor was obtained through enslavement, often through raiding by
military states, and pawnship.
In principle debt bondage and pawnship were forbidden in Islamic
societies; however, they were currently practiced and local interpreta-
tions of the text provided a latitude into which local practices could
survive and develop. Thus, debt slavery was widespread in Indonesia
and under a different form in India. In general, what was notably dif-
ferent from the slavery of the Western world, was the degree to which
slaves were protected by Muslim law.
Traditionally, enslavement was legally enforced for debtors and
their relatives in many IOW regions. In Imperial Madagascar, for
instance, creditors could enslave a debtor, his wife, and children
through the application of law. 28 This was also the customary prac-
tice in Thailand and Malaya. 29
Indebtedness could arise from not only financial debt but also
an array of obligations owed by servile people to those who domi-
nated them that could not be satisfied by monetary payments. Indeed,
such indebtedness often could never be eradicated, and could endure
through the generations. 30 During catastrophes, people often entered
debt bondage or slavery in return for subsistence as a survival strat-
egy, either voluntarily, as was the case of many dvija caste members in
India, or propelled by their kin group. 31 Those subject to debt bond-
age could outnumber slaves. For example, they were possibly the most
numerous social category in Majapahit, in Java, whereas in central
Thailand, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they formed up
to 50 percent of the total population. In Burma in the mid-nineteenth
century, when debt bondage was far more widespread than hereditary
slavery, the male head of an impoverished household frequently sold
his wife and children to meet tax impositions. The servitude to which
those in debt bondage were subjected to was generally taken as paying
off interest on the loan they had contracted, to which was added the
cost of lodging, feeding, and clothing the debtor. Consequently the
debt in most cases increased and servitude could become permanent,
even hereditary, at which point there was little to distinguish debt
bondage from slavery.32
European colonial regimes, through imposing monetary taxes,
promoting commercialization, and enforcing credit contracts, facili-
tated a growth in indebtedness. At the same time, colonial authorities
maintained both tight budgetary regimes that avoided funding public

welfare programs, and distinguished debt bonds–people from “true”
slaves, whose condition they attributed solely to violent capture. As a
result, debt bondage and enslavement through debt expanded consid-
erably across the IOW, affecting a wide range of people in the IOW,
from farmers mortgaging future harvests and potential grooms bor-
rowing a bride price, to small traders living off credit from larger
merchants, the ubiquitous rural gambler of Southeast and East Asia
and opium addicts in nineteenth-century China, and Gulf pearl div-
ers.33 India is a prime example. In a century characterized by ris-
ing taxation and years of famine, “freedom” for members of the
former slave outcastes, who had deliberately been kept destitute and
debarred from land ownership, translated into the liberty to starve.
Some adopted sharecropping, but with two-thirds of the crop paid to
the landlord, the risk of failure was high. In order to survive, many
entered debt bondage that was from 1859 reinforced by the Breach of
Contract Act. In some areas of India, members of the most depressed
castes formed the overwhelming bulk of those in debt bondage. The
situation closely resembled slavery in that bondage could be inherited,
and vast majority of bonded people had their geographical mobility
restricted.34
After the Napoleonic Wars, although France officially reintro-
duced slavery, English pressure resulted in certain slave importations
assuming the form of contracts of engagement. It was in this man-
ner that an estimated 45,000 illicit slaves were imported to Reunion
Island between 1817 and 1835. 35 Taking into account of official
censuses and disguised importations, between 48,900 and 66,400
slaves are believed to have arrived in Reunion between 1811 and
1848. According to Allen, about 300,000 slaves are said to have been
imported to the Mascarene archipelago between the eighteenth and
the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike the eighteenth cen-
tury, this time East Africa and Mozambique were the main source of
supply (60%), with the rest coming from Madagascar (31%) and the
countries of southern Asia (9%).36 These networks, as we shall see,
were to remain in place after the abolition of slavery.
However, Reunion and Mauritius islands were not alone in illicit
trafficking of slaves. After the Napoleonic Wars, the English imposed
the ban of slave trade; in order to overcome French resistance, they
signed in 1820 a treaty with the Merina King offering a subsidy of
20,000 dollars per annum in return for banning the export slave
trade. Unfortunately, this treaty boosted the slave trade: the French
found new suppliers and imported slaves, then contract laborers from
Comoros, Mozambique, and Madagascar. The Merina kingdom itself
expanded and increased its imports of slaves. The Antanarivo popula-
tion rose between 1820 and 1833 from 10,000 to 50,000, two-thirds
of whom were slaves.37
The Comoro archipelago had no plantations; slavery rather was
a political institution of the sultanates. Due to its localization, the
Comoro formed the fundamental pivot of the slave commerce between
the East African Coast and the Indian Ocean islands. Mozambique
had been a privileged region for the provisioning of slaves; still in
1869, most of the salves arriving at Mayotte (one of the Comoro
islands) came from Cap Delgado. However, the Comoranians too
were engaged in the slave transportation to Madagascar’s Sakalava
kingdoms. In Comoro, the slave owners regarded slaves as luxury
goods and as domestic servants.
In Madagascar, the slave trade was already important in the 1660s;
slaves were exported from and imported to Madagascar. Over time, the
Antalaotras—Islamic merchants of Swahili-Arab origin—controlled
the slave as well as the general trade with the Arabian Peninsula. They
constituted a powerful network with the Indians Karany (Muslims) in
Merina and with the Omani power in Zanzibar. 38 The Swahilis them-
selves took an active part in the commerce in ivory and slaves. 39 Instead
of making an attempt to seize control of the trade, the European pow-
ers—the Portuguese,40 Dutch,41 British,42 and French43 —thus sought
to integrate the already existing networks. Thus Gujarat merchants in
Mozambique bought slaves from Africa and sold them in India and
in the Mascarenes.
The role of non-European merchants is even more important if we
do not limit ourselves to the maritime, but consider also the overland
slave trade. In all the concerned areas, in Africa as in India, in Arabia
as in Europe, the increasing demand for labor was linked to the gen-
eral upward economic trend. Not only Europe, but also the Omani,
Merina, Ethiopian, and Egyptian Empires developed and required a
larger labor force. As in earlier times, concubine, soldier, domestic,
and plantation slaves formed the bulk of this trade. Pearl fishers in
the Gulf, slave-seamen, and new urban slaves were also important.44
Thus, in the 1820s–1840s, the growth in the demand for slaves within
the Merina kingdom paralleled the growth in the demand for slaves
among many of the coastal kingdoms and chieftaincies of Africa.
Most of the slaves imported into Madagascar came from eastern
Africa south of Kilwa. Important also was the independent sultanate
of Angoche on the coast between Quelimane and Mozambique, which

was not brought under Portuguese control till the 1840s. In turn the
Mozambique slave trade peaked from 1820 to 1835; during the 1820s
over 100,000 slaves were exported from Mozambique, mostly fuelled
by the increasing Brazilian demand. Exports to Portuguese India also
increased in the 1820s as demand for African slaves increased in west-
ern India.45
The Napoleonic Wars were a catastrophe for the Omani and
Swahili merchants in East Africa. They were not confined to the west-
ern Indian Ocean but were global, disrupting the previously lucrative
slave trade. The Omani traders realized that if slaves could no more
be exported, the product of their labor could. Sugar and cloves plan-
tation further developed in this period.46 Plantations could be rela-
tively modest—at about 20 slaves—but some huge planters like Tippu
Tip were accredited of 10,000 slaves.47 It was during this lucrative
period that cloves spread to Pemba. By 1848–49 Pemba was producing
10,000 fraselas48 of cloves.49 Slaves in Zanzibar continued to increase,
to between 14,000 and 15,000 in the 1850s and to about 20,000
in the 1860s. But by then the clove economy had already entered a
phase of overproduction and economic stagnation in Zanzibar. 50 The
outcome was that many Arab owners mortgaged their plantations to
Indian moneylenders who sometimes cultivated themselves the plan-
tations and more often used slaves. In 1860–61 the British authority
emancipated over 8,000 slaves in Zanzibar owned by Indians. 51 As
a consequence, the price of cloves dropped and that of slaves as well.
However, the latter fell less than the former (50% as against 85%
between the 1840s and the 1860s) for the declining price of slaves and
cloves pushed to other commodities such as indigo and coconuts, also
slave-based. Along the southern coast, between Tungi and Kiswere,
there was considerable development of millet (7,000 tons annually
since the late 1840s) and sesame (3,500). 52
The European demand for sugar and cotton strongly contributed to
the growth of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean: Mascarene Islands
absorbed most of the slave trade, while, paradoxically, the abolition
of slavery in the United States led to increasing production of cotton
in Egypt, which greatly relied on slaves. 53 The export boom in the
western Indian Ocean was especially marked from about the 1840s to
the 1880s and it created a strong demand for slaves. Captives were a
consequence of the expansion of the Egyptian, Ethiopian, Omani, and
Merina empires. Well over a million slaves were probably obtained
by the Swahili world alone in the nineteenth century. Luxury slaves,
eunuchs, concubines, and administrators were largely demanded.

But in African societies they coexisted with slave laborers. Domestic
servants increased with rising incomes; although they were usually
women, they were clearly demarcated from concubines. Prestige was
attached to owning slaves and this seems to explain why they were
preferred to free servants, in particular in Egypt. As a consequence
of this, when the British decided to abolish the slave trade, they had
to compete not only with recalcitrant French and Portuguese, but
also with local powers and existing forms of bondage. Thus even in
1870–80, the slave traffic from Mozambique to the French possessions
in the Indian Ocean were made through Madagascar. However, a sub-
stantial number stayed in the island. In 1877 the Queen of Tananarive
issued a decree emancipating the Masombiky (from Mozambique)
slaves, but on the Sakalava monarchy—out of her jurisdiction—the
abolition remained an unkept promise. It was in this context that the
French tried to develop plantations in Nosy-Bé, an islet northeast of
Madagascar. They imported “laborers” from Mozambique; in 1897,
King Radama I declared the Masombiky free, while private slavery
had already been abolished in Merina in 1877. Former slaves became
a government labor reserve; this caused shortage of labor in the pri-
vate sector and provided an incentive for the continuation of the clan-
destine trade. The French occupied Madagascar in 1896 and formally
abolished slavery. At that moment, 500,000 persons officially desig-
nated as slaves were freed. Most of these were Malagasy. 54
Emancipation
Debates about abolitions have essentially focused on two interrelated
questions: (1) whether nineteenth and early twentieth century abo-
litions were a major breakthrough compared to previous centuries
(or even millennia) in the history of humankind during which bond-
age had been the dominant form of labor and human condition; (2)
whether they express an action specific to Western bourgeoisie and
liberal civilization.
It is true that the number of abolitionist acts and the people con-
cerned throughout the extended nineteenth century (1780–1914) had
no equivalent in history: 30 million Russian peasants, half a million
slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1790, four million slaves in the United
States in 1860, another million in the Caribbean (at the moment of
the abolition of 1832–40), a further million in Brazil in 1885, and
250,000 in the Spanish colonies, were freed during this period.
Abolitions in Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century have been

estimated to involve approximately seven million people. 55
Yet this argument has been criticized by those who have argued
that the abolitionist legal acts take into consideration neither the
important rate of manumission and purchase of freedom in Islamic
societies, in areas such as Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Ottoman
Empire, 56 nor the important rate of manumission in Russia and Brazil
prior to general abolition, nor the legal and social constraints on freed
slaves and serfs.
This section seeks to provide answers that go beyond these stan-
dard oppositions between “before” and “after” the abolition, one the
one hand, and between the “West” and “the rest” on the other hand.
We will stress interrelations in terms of the circulation of ideas and
the economic and social dynamics between various areas—Europe,
Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Taking this as our starting point, we
will attempt to identify continuities and changes in the long-term pro-
cess of emancipation and the interaction between different notions
and practices of “freedom.”
The first British abolitionist campaigns combined moral, politi-
cal, religious, and economic arguments. The latter were probably the
weakest, not just because slavery was objectively profitable, but also
because in England itself Adam Smith’s arguments did not become
widespread until the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, religious anti-
slavery groups were opposed to both materialism and utilitarianism
and used this argument to criticize slavery. 57
Abolition of slave trade caused Britain to lose profits not only from
this trade, but also from the reduced production of sugar in the West
Indies in the years following the abolition of the slave trade. After
that period, despite the slow recovery of production, on the European
markets Britain constantly lost shares of sugar and coffee to the ben-
efit of Spain and Brazil.58
The slave trade was nevertheless a global affair. In the Atlantic,
between 1500 and 1850, 31 percent of African slaves transported
to the Americas went to Brazil; against 22 percent to the French
Caribbean, 23 percent to the British Caribbean, 9.6 percent to the
Spanish colonies, and 6 percent to North America. In the Caribbean,
slaves were mostly employed on sugar plantations. Unlike those in
Brazil, these were huge plantations; they were also badly organized
and essentially relied upon strong coercion. The history of slavery and
sugar in the Caribbean is one of rampant profit-taking and strong
slave resistance encouraged by the size of the plantations size and
by the high proportion of slaves compared to the population as a

whole (about three-quarters, as against 44.8% in the deep south
United States in 1860). Resistance was also enhanced by the low rate
of reproduction and the continuous flow of new slaves from Africa.
Indeed the abolition of the slave trade did not reduce the over-
all number of slaves carried across the Atlantic but enhanced it for
a time. Encouraged by the demand for sugar and coffee in North
America and Europe, increasing numbers of African slaves were car-
ried to Brazil and Cuba.59 Even worse, at least 90 percent of the man-
ufactured goods used in this slave trade to Brazil and Cuba came from
Britain, while British credit financed half of the Cuban and Brazilian
slave trade.60
In Africa itself, the export trade in African slaves northwards to
Muslim countries continued to be significant, accounting for about
30 percent of total slave exports from Africa in the seventeenth cen-
tury, 20 percent in the eighteenth century, and about 30 percent
between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Overall,
between 1500 and 1800, the Muslim trade probably accounted for
about 40 percent of African slave exports. During the first half of
the nineteenth century, half a million African slaves were sent to the
Indian Ocean and another 420,000 to the Red Sea.61 As a conse-
quence of British abolitionism, the initial decline in slave prices stimu-
lated internal demand. The enslavement frontier was pushed further
into the interior than ever before. The introduction of so called legiti-
mate trade (palm oil, coconuts) also contributed to the recrudescence
of slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean. In most cases, manumis-
sions were extremely important, in particular in Islamic areas. On the
other hand, there was no equivalent of the British notion and practice
of abolitionism at they were progressively identified in the nineteenth
century.
In England many had believed that the abolition of slave trade
would lead to the progressive abolition of slavery. This was not the
case, as France, Spain, and Portugal continued to import slaves, while
in the West Indies planters resisted any attempt to improve the con-
ditions of slaves. A new antislavery society was founded; it shifted
from gradual abolition to immediate abolition of slavery. A period
(usually six to seven years, which typically reproduced the timeframe
of individual emancipation as well as the apprenticeship contract)
was imposed during which the quasi-former slaves were given an
apprenticeship status.62 Slaves did not enjoy full legal status inasmuch
as they were not yet “civilized.”63 Apprentices worked 45 hours a
week for their former owners in exchange for food, clothing, lodg-
ing, and medical care. Absenteeism or bad performance (according
to standards set by the planters themselves) led to severe penalties
and increased the period and the amount of apprentices’ obligations.
Physical punishment, which had been suppressed under slavery dur-
ing the 1820s, was now reintroduced for apprentices. Abuse was thus
extremely frequent.64
Thus, even though former slaveowners had received compensation
of 20 million pounds, many planters used the apprenticeship program
as additional compensation and, to this end, they sought to extract
as much unpaid labor as possible. The final social and economic out-
come differed from one colony to another according to the availability
of land, previous forms of bondage and types of culture, new forms
of labor and their rules (different masters and servants acts enacted
in each colony), and to systems of credit.65 In Barbados the planters
kept almost all the land that they rented in part to former slaves,
few of whom therefore left their original plantations. In Jamaica,
Trinidad, and English Guyana, many former slaves had formal access
to land, but many of them ended up indebted to their former mas-
ters and found themselves back on the plantations.66 This did not
prevent former slaves (when they did not run away) from providing
extremely irregular (in their masters’ eyes) labor. A fall in sugar out-
put in Jamaica was one of the major expressions of resistance.
In this context India was a special case within the British Empire;
public opinion in Britain tended toward the adoption of a broader
conception of slavery (from chattel slavery, to debt bondage, domestic
and agricultural slaves, cast dependence, children dependence, etc.),
a conception that would extend the range of reforms and the areas
of the Empire concerned. However, in practice colonial officers sup-
ported a relatively restrictive interpretation of slavery, by arguing that
many forms of “dependence” were far milder than slavery and were
part of local customs. In turn, the latter were to be preserved for social
and political imperial equilibrium. Ever since, historians have fiercely
debated whether the multiple forms of Indian bondage were or were
not “slavery” and, hence whether slavery decreased or increased over
time. Indeed, the British administration openly supported masters’
rights until 1843, when it adopted a comparatively neutral attitude up
until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when more aggressive
antislavery policies were adopted.67
The French only abolished slavery in 1848; unlike the British they
did not go through an intermediate period of “apprenticeship” but
rather practiced disguised forms of enslavement. Recruitment in India,

Madagascar, Mozambique, and the eastern coast of Africa relied on
networks that had been in place since the eighteenth century and it
employed the same practices as the slave trade. It often involved vio-
lence, sometimes with the help of local tribal chiefs. Using the slave
trade system already developed in the region with the rise of Islam,
French traders, helped by local sultans, began importing libres engagés
from Gabon, Zaire, and West Africa—a name that fetished freedom
while practicing enslavement.68 There were also “prior redemptions”
(the term given to such purchases) in Madagascar, Zanzibar, and
Mozambique, causing conflicts with the Portuguese and the English.
Ultimately, these disguised forms of slavery evolved only with the
development of new massive worldwide forms of population displace-
ments: convicts, indentured immigrants, coolies, then more or less
“free” immigration took a massive dimension after the mid-1850s.
Forced Migration across the Oceans: Convicts

Before and after Foucault,69 the Panopticon has been seen as a response
to social deviance and has been viewed in relation to prisons and
the emergence of a global surveillance system in modern societies.70
I have already challenged this approach by arguing that the Panopticon
project was actually a system for controlling wage labor that drew its
inspiration from a particular image of Russian serfdom and from the
Bentham brothers’ experiences in that country.71
Jeremy Bentham’s starting point, to be sure, was an idea that reso-
nated powerfully with his sense of morality: that it was better to put
prisoners to work than let them vegetate and that such an approach
would facilitate prisoners’ progressive reintegration into society. Yet
he could not resist straying from this rationale and returning to the
utilitarian calculation that new forms of surveillance and organiza-
tion could and should make prison labor profitable.72 From there it
was but a short step to start thinking about ways to maximize pris-
oner productivity. At first he proposed to rationalize prisoners’ diet:
they should not become malnourished or else their productivity would
diminish. Yet Bentham thought mostly in terms of amounts and was
not embarrassed to suggest that prisoners be given spoiled food mixed
with fresh food (within reasonable limits, to avoid abrupt drops in
labor productivity).73 He seemed excited at the thought that prisoners
could be made to work 15 hours and more without their wanting to
leave their jobs, as wage laborers did.
Bentham was not exceptional in advancing these ideas. For example,

his friend Admiral Jonas Hanway, founder of the Magdalen Hospital,
applied the same principles to the Navy and workhouses. He sought
to transform the prison into a place of highly productive forced labor
and then exported that model to the working world at large. By the
mid-seventeenth century, many parishes were using the Poor Law to
shelter both children and the aged in hospitals and to employ those
capable of labor in workhouses or with local employers.74 Around the
end the seventeenth century, a number of urban workhouses were set
up to train poor children while profiting from pauper labor. In this
context, the distinction between vagrant and poor was crucial; a poor
person without employment or residence became a vagrant and was
submitted to penalties similar to those imposed on “ordinary work-
ers” (i.e., servants). “Vagrancy” described a condition in which an
able-bodied person without work or other means of subsistence was
to be submitted to corporal punishment and returned to his parish.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English Poor
Law system was distinctive in Europe to the extent that it embod-
ied a nationally organized, comprehensive, and publicly regulated
approach to relief.75 However, in the mid-eighteenth century, the
workhouses and Poor Laws began to be disparaged as inefficient and
expensive. A parliamentary enquiry of 1776 revealed the existence of
1,970 workhouses holding a total of 90,000 paupers. In most cases,
pauper labor did not meet the general running costs of a workhouse.
This situation became all the more alarming when the estimated poor
rates increased sharply from 700,000 pounds in 1700 to 1,500,000
pounds in 1776.76 Increasing enclosure of the countryside greatly con-
tributed to this rise by cutting off access to the land.77
In 1782, a bill known as Gilbert’s Act was adopted that allowed
neighboring parishes to group together for Poor Law purposes and
set up poorhouses under a board of guardians. At the same time,
attempts were made to increase the efficiency of the entire system by
rational organization, that is, by supervision of the workhouses. This
made the boundary between free and unfree labor even more tenu-
ous. Servants, wage earners, the poor, criminals, slaves, and serfs all
had to respond to common general principles of utility and efficiency,
“no matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it
be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming
the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining
the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch
of industry, or training the race in the path of education: In a word,
whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room

of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary
houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or
mad-house, or hospital, or schools.”78
Following the suggestions of Bentham and others since the 1780s,
reformers made a sharp distinction between the “natural poor” and
the indigent (unable to work), and only the latter were permitted to
benefit from poor relief. The same principles were applied to for-
mer slaves, who qualified as vagrants if they were not settled and
employed.
We find here a crucial link between the seamen, the prisoner, and
the worker. All of them were under penal sanction and all of them
were confronted to the crime of escaping (fugitives). However, this
does not mean, as Foucault argues, that the prison model influenced
the general organization of society but the other way round. It was
because individual and social responsibility condensed in the labor
activity (as the Poor house system shows) that the prison could become
a system of rehabilitation through work. From our perspective, there
was not so much a tension between surveillance and punishment, as
in Foucault, but that between equal formal rights and unequal access
to real rights. Servants and seamen had not the same right of their
master and this, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, was
not in contradiction with the formal equality in front of the law.
It is from this perspective that we must read the transmutation of
these ideas and practices in the colonies. Bentham himself was inter-
ested in India and the colonies to which he applied his general prin-
ciple of utilitarianism and legislation instead of local jurisprudence.79
This work entered a wider debate about the reform of criminal justice
in India; unlike some local governors who claimed for the acknowl-
edgment of local custom and jurisprudence, Bentham claimed for its
subordination and incorporation in the general principles of British
jurisprudence under the umbrella of utilitarianism.80 In practice,
Bentham’s approach was rejected and the British rule accepted and
even gave a legal and anthropological meaning to “local custom.” A
consequence of this attitude was, for example, that different Indian
forms of slavery were qualified as “mild” dependence and, as such,
tolerated.81 Quite the contrary, as we will see in detail in following
chapters, the Masters and Servants Acts in India exported the British
notions of masters, servants, apprenticeship, and vagrancy and they
were widely enforced in Assam and in other parts of India under the
British rule. This was not a contradiction for, in the nineteenth century
British legal and political culture, “free” labor included servitude and
servants and contrasted chattel slavery only. It was only after the 1850s
the unfree labor acquired a broader definition, inclusive of indentured
contracts and many other forms of servitudes. Convict labor therefore
must be included into this broader approach. It would be misleading
to argue that all workers were like convicts only because they were
under criminal punishment for breach of contract and because they
had limited rights. For sure, convict labor as a form of penal servitude
is usually associated with public law and social order.82 Yet its bound-
ary with private law and private forms of servitudes was continu-
ously blurred. Convicts transported by the British to North America,
the Caribbean, Australia, or the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were given in service to private merchants
and estate owners. The terms of service were often between 7 and
14 years, with no guarantee that the convict would be redeemed at the
end of the term. Since the 1830s, the abolitionist movement began to
include convict labor among the forms of labor it regarded as slavery.
The lack of convicts’ consent to the duration of work and the price
were arguments in favor of this orientation; defenders of the convict
system argued that unlike slavery, penal servitude was not perpet-
ual; it rested upon conviction; and it lacked any racial basis. Indeed,
the living conditions of convicts depended on the time, the colony,
and the estate. In public camps, the inmates were subjected to severe
deprivation, whereas when assigned to private merchants or planters,
they were quickly assimilated to slaves and thus often protected as a
form of capital (e.g., in Australia). At the same time, private masters
did not hesitate to punish convicts for disobedience. Convict labor
was often made up of prisoners who had previously been condemned
to death but whose sentences had been commuted to lifetime penal
servitude; however, in periods of rigorous enforcement of the law
in Britain coupled with the inadequacy of the country’s prisons to
cope with the number of prisoners, many people were transferred to
labor for minor offences. Something like 60,000 British convicts were
transported to North America and the Caribbean between the 1660s
and the 1770s, and 162,000 were sent to Australia between 1788 and
1867.83 The French transported at about 36,000 convicts to French
Guiana and New Caledonia. To this, one has to add at least 100,000
Indian convicts transported to Aden, Mauritius, and Southeast Asia,
between the 1790s and the early 1860s.84
Convict labor was unpaid but costly; the costs of transportation,
feeding, and surveillance had to be taken into consideration, and they
often exceeded the estimated or real monetary rewards.85 Convicts

also frequently escaped—some 9 percent did so in Maryland between
1746 and 1775—and were often drunk and incapable of work.86 At
the same time, convict labor cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of
a cost-benefit analysis that compares it with wage labor. In the places
where convict labor was primarily used in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, there was extremely little or no free labor. When the
conditions in new settlement colonies were too harsh to attract free
labor, convicts were pressed into the breach. Clearance of the land,
the construction of harbors and roads, and the development of cattle
and sheep ranches were among the convicts’ tasks. They also exploited
timber and minerals where the climate and the terrain were so hostile
that compulsion remained the only viable solution. In the seventeenth
and early eighteenth century, petitions by convicts show that they
still preferred to serve in the army, be flogged, or used for medical
research rather than be transported to America.87 From this stand-
point, convict labor aimed at a goal similar to that of the workhouse;
beyond any calculation of utility and economic considerations, these
forms of bondage served multiple aims, such as meting out punish-
ment and providing a labor force for situations in which other forms
of more or less coerced labor (indentured immigrants) were still insuf-
ficient and where slave imports were still too expensive. With this
background one can understand the indirect benefit Britain sought
to gain by sending convicts to Australia: by doing so they reduced
incarceration costs and the rate of recidivism (which was 80% for
the incarcerated population in question), while engaging in a positive
production of wealth.88 This calculation was probably accurate for
Australia and some areas of North America, but much less for Guiana
and the Indian Ocean settlements. The latter case involved Indians
and other Southeast Asian populations, unlike the first generation of
convicts sent to Australia, who were white convicts unacceptable in
the motherland. Britain began to send Indian convicts to Mauritius
from the turn of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century. Yet
within a few years, the authorities expressed increasing skepticism
about the efficiency of convict labor, focusing in particular on the
high cost of convict transportation. Other considerations pushed in
the opposite direction, namely the lack of labor force in Mauritius
and other British settlements in Southeast Asia after the abolition of
slavery, as well as the perception that convict transport was an appro-
priate punishment in India’s caste-based society.89 But the issue on the
ground was quite different: members of high castes were extremely
rare among convicts, most of whom were peasants, of low castes,

or even Muslim. Most of them were placed under colonial authori-
ties for public works. However, convicts enjoyed a limited right to
move, and some of them had children. They entered into economic
relations, which raised the question whether they could actually own
property.90 Colonial authorities mostly answered this question in the
affirmative.91 Between 1815 and 1837, almost 1,500 Indian convicts
were transported to Mauritius, first from Bengal, then from Bombay.
Even if their legal status was not that of formal slaves, their very exis-
tence raised the question of the boundary between forms of servitude
within empires and, thus, that of the boundary between bondage and
formally free labor. Until now we have adopted a restrictive definition
of convicts following official sources of the time. However, we must
take into account that the boundaries between convicts, colonists,
seamen, and indentured immigrants were vague. We have already
discussed the connection between maritime convicts and the Navy’s
recruitment, in particular in France. Actually, in the perceptions and
categories of the period under investigation, this overlapping con-
cerned also colonists and indentured immigrants. In the next section
we will study the evolution of indentured immigration in the Indian
Ocean before, during, and after slavery.92
5
Immigrants and Planters in Reunion Island*
According to a first approach, the indentured contract resembled

forced labor and slavery, and contracts were expressed as legal fiction.1
Such an approach deprives the abolition of slavery of any historical
significance2 while neglecting all the efforts indentured immigrants
made to fight for their own rights.
Several scholars have opposed this view by demonstrating that the
indenture contract was not considered an expression of forced labor
until the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas until that
date, it was viewed as an expression of free will in contract.3 This
argument joins recent trends in the history of emigration that also
stress the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.4 I
develop this last view and add a further dimension to it, namely, the
link between the evolution of forms of labor in Europe and in its colo-
nies in the IOW. I add that all these actors (masters, servants, seamen,
indentured immigrants, etc.) belonged to one and the same world,
which comprised legal inequalities between employers (masters) and
workers (servants, seamen). Let us be clear: I do not claim that British
or French wage earners were “unfree” or that their legal and social
conditions were the same as those of indentured immigrants, I simply
argue that it would be misleading to put these actors into distinct,
opposing boxes: the indentured immigrant, close to forced labor on
the one hand, and the wage earner, an expression of “free labor,”
on the other. Within this common world, inequalities between the
legal and economic entitlements of working people and those of their
masters were far greater on the sea than on the industrial market, in
the colonies than in Europe and also differed between colonies of the
same empire, as well as between European countries and between dif-
ferent areas of a given country.
In economic terms, it is not correct to interpret indentured labor

as a simple and temporary substitute for slavery in the aftermath of
its abolition. Indentured labor began far before slavery and persisted
during and after it. 5 The first phase, from the seventeenth century to
the 1830s, concerned about 300,000 European indentured servants
who were intended for tobacco plantations and to some extent for
manufacturing.
With the rapid development of plantations, African slaves grad-
ually supplanted them. However, white indentured immigration
retained all of its importance in North America and Canada until at
least the 1830s and responded to both push factors in Europe (indus-
trialization, transformation of the countryside) and pull factors in
North America. The abolition of slavery gave new life to indentured
immigration. The second phase (nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries) concerned 2.5 million indentured servants, mostly Chinese and
Indian but also African, Japanese, and immigrants from the Pacific
Islands. They were employed in sugar plantations and in manufactur-
ing. Unlike white settlers during the first phase of indentured immi-
gration, during the 1850s and 1860s, many indentured immigrants
returned home (mostly Indians). The percentage was one-third in
Mauritius, the Caribbean, Surinam, and Jamaica but this was far
from the 70 percent repatriation recorded in Thailand, Malaya, and
Melanesia. Distance and the cost of transport were only two of the
variables affecting repatriation; politics, concrete forms of integra-
tion, and death from disease were also important factors. In this con-
text we may thus detail indentured labor in the Indian Ocean. Here
an important part of indentured immigrants were absorbed in the
sugar plantations of the Mascarene. I will develop this point in the
next sections. However, one must take into account that indentured
labor to the plantations was not the only form of immigration and
plantations were not the only destination.
Emigration from Africa was a by-product of the abolition of slavery
by colonial powers. We have seen that since the abolition of the slave
trade in 1807 and even more after that, the British rescued fugitives
and illegally traded Africans. The Privy Council issued regulations
for placing such liberated Africans under the care of others. They
were either placed as domestic servants or recruited in the Britain’s
colonial regiments or the African corps of the British Navy. Some
3,250 Africans liberated by vice-admiralty courts in the British West
Indies between 1807 and 1819 were inducted into the military life
or apprenticed to individuals under 14-year contracts of indenture.
Immigrants and Planters in Reunion Island 91
The antislavery trade squadrons of Britain, the United States, and

France diverted an estimated 160,000 Africans from the slave trade
between 1810 and 1864. Since these captured Africans could not be
returned to their homelands, they were deposited at various conve-
nient islands or coastal stations in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and
the Indian Oceans.6
Several thousands of the 20,571 Africans liberated at Sierra Leone
between 1808 and the end of 1825 were also made to enlist in British
military forces and most of the rest were indentured as apprentices
to Sierra Leone residents.7 Until the early 1840s, Britain policy in
Sierra Leone consisted in resisting shipping liberated persons out
of Sierra Leone. Freedom from slavery did not include freedom to
move. Restrictions were lifted in the 1840s when the British needed
African laborers to send to Jamaica and Trinidad. However, as a
whole, indentured labor recruitment in Africa failed to satisfy the
demand resulting from the ending of slavery. Indeed, more than five
times as many enslaved Africans were brought to Cuba between 1840
and 1867 as entered all Caribbean colonies under indenture. Of over
60,000 overseas indentured recruits from Africa, less than 10 percent
were completely voluntary.
The lack of African indentured immigrants became more strin-
gent with the progressive intrusion of colonial power into Africa and
the need for labor. Since the 1870s, African indentured emigrants
were contended not only between different colonial powers, but
also between Europeans and local powers and, ultimately, between
colonial elites belonging to different parts of the same empire (con-
flicts between Indian and Cape authorities or between Reunion and
Martinique were classical examples). Indeed while Zanzibar, which
needed its slaves for clove production, proved of little value as a
source of indentured labor, the Sultan’s East African dependencies
from Somalia to Mozambique were another matter. British pressures
failed to persuade the Sultan to interfere with slave trading. Thus the
French bought important contingent of indentured Africans on the
coast. At the same time, they needed the cooperation of Portuguese.
Underpaid Portuguese officials in Mozambique ignored the 1836
abolition of slave trading in Portuguese dependencies. Armed cara-
vans led by Portuguese mulatto or Swahili agents moved inland in
search of slaves, ivory, rhinoceros horn, and malachite that they sold
to French. In the 1850s Portugal forbade participation in the French
engages traffic but not until 1857 did a governor general take action
against it. And when he did, France violently reacted. France did not
want to be excluded from the Mozambique labor pool but now they
had to face British competitors in Natal. The issue was a displacement
of the recruitment frontier far into the lands. The scramble for Africa
was also an attempt to solve this problem.
Chinese indentured labor partially compensated this lack of
Africans. Burgeoning Chinese emigration in the nineteenth century
was closely related to deteriorating economic and social conditions.
Periodic natural disasters, particularly floods and droughts, along
with growing political instability drove many to leave home. For
example, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 resulted in a large exodus
from the lower Yangzi. However, only a small percentage of Chinese
migrants were overseas. Massive migration took place from overpop-
ulated southern provinces to the northern frontier. By the early twen-
tieth century the Chinese settlement in Manchuria was advancing at
the rate of 300,000–400,000 a year.8 Migration to the coastal cities
was also important: from Fuzhou to Taiwan, from Canto to Macao
to Southeast Asia and the East Indies. The vast majority of Chinese
migrants came from the southern provinces of Guandong and Fujan.
Up to 11 million traveled from China to Singapore and Penang, from
where more than a third of these were transshipped to the Dutch
Indies, Borneo, Burma. Nearly 4 million traveled directly from China
to Siam, between 2 and 3 million to French Indochina, over a million
directly to the Dutch Indies, less than a million to the Philippines, and
half a million to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and other islands
in the Pacific and Indian oceans.9
Less than three quarter of a million Chinese migrants signed
indentured contracts with European employers. Chinese financed
their voyage with money advanced by families or future employ-
ers through a “credit ticket” system. Recruits were delivered to the
European firms by Chinese brokers who bypassed Chinese legal inter-
dictions of indentured emigration. Kidnapping was extremely wide-
spread and conflicts rose between China and major European powers
who accused each others to facilitate this trade. Commissions were
settled in France, England, and their colonies; their archives testify to
the difficulties in separating voluntary from involuntary emigration,
first because it was in the interest of the commissions to exaggerate
or minimize kidnapping according to the national-imperial interests,
and second because the boundary was vague in itself. Contracts of
indenture included coercion, and the identification of “free will” as
the basic condition for separating free from unfree emigration was, at
the best, a lure.
Indian emigration was the most important in the Indian Ocean.

The size of the exodus from India reflected the push of rising dis-
tress in the territory and its integration into the British Empire.
Most of the 1.3 million Indian emigrants who ventured overseas
were processed through British depots, traveled on British ships,
and worked in British colonies. Even those who went to Reunion
Island were subjects to conditions of agreements between France
and Britain. Actually, at the end of the eighteenth century already,
Indian laborers were a common sight in Southeast Asian ports,
Ceylon, and east Africa. We will detail in the following section the
Indian indentured immigration in the Mascarene. However, this
requires to be included into a wider picture. As in China, the over-
seas emigration made part of a much larger movement of people.
There was considerable migration from rural areas to the cities,
short-term migration within British India for seasonal work, inden-
tured migration to Assam tea plantations, and recruitment for pub-
lic works. While intersectoral labor mobility was highly imperfect,
connections between these markets were nonetheless important.
Thus, in Punjab, increasing demand for public-works labor in con-
structing canals diverted labor from factory employment in Agra.10
There was an intimate link between debt and obligation to work.
Creditors exchanged small advances for large quantities of work.
Thus, advances on wages and advances on voyage looked similar
to emigrants and they formed an integrated system of debt, bond-
age, and labor. Landless workers lacked collateral and they were
forced to offer months or years of future labor to repay the loan
and to secure the debt. As Prakash has shown, these arrangements
were deeply embedded in networks of reputation, deference, and
community-regulated norms.11 At the same time, local systems of
debt, advances, and dependences perfectly adapted to the Masters
and Servants Acts and British police regulation. Both linked labor
and credit markets and justified punishments of laborers-debtors.
The Indian Workman’s Breach of Contract Act of 1859 was similar
to those adopted in England and many other colonies. Its distinc-
tiveness lied in its emphasis on monetary advances. A significant
proportion of employment contracts thus reproduced local informal
contracts and involved some species of monetary advance. Along
this line, in 1873, the T. B. Macaulay commission in charge with the
elaboration of an Indian Criminal Code stresses the importance to
fight insubordination of servants and sailors. Precisely when rules
and practices of these two actors were being separated in England,
they still overlapped in the colonies, where labor was considered as

a form of military recruitment. This was the link between different
forms of emigrations for which the conventional opposition between
“free” and “unfree” was blurred and does not correspond to the his-
torical realities under examination. The overlapping between labor
and credit market provided the overall connection between different
forms of mobility. Recruiters and village creditors were sometimes
in opposition; sometimes they were the same person who dispatched
workers to different markets. This actually was an operating system
for the British Empire, relying local intermediaries to colonial elites.
As in China, in India as well, recruiters and middlemen were cru-
cial actors.12 The Indian recruiter or arkatia watched the markets,
caravanserais, railway stations, and bazaar for likely candidates.
Intermediaries sometimes played a more active role: like the serang
on the ships, for industrial workers the sardar recruited and con-
trolled the workers. Jobbers not only possessed the power to hire or
fire at will but often controlled access to credit, housing, shops, and
medical care as well. Colonial authorities stressed several times the
necessity to avoid abuses and control recruiters. This aim responded
in part to the pressure of the antislavery movement in part to the
competitive interest different elites had in recruiting. All the colo-
nial emigration agents thus met from time to time in order to discuss
common problems. They exchanged complaints, in particular about
the Indian magistrates and police who were not cooperative. The
recruiting agencies also agreed on that, fraud and deception should
be stamped out. However, complaints and evidence of kidnapping
persisted and there was high rate of mortality in the depots. 13
As an integrated local-imperial-global movement, Indian labor
thus moved not only inside India but also to other British colonies
in Southeast Asia. Ceylon for tea plantations totaled 1.5 million
between 1843 and 1938 (8 million according to Mc Keown), while
Burma reached 2.6 million for the rice harvest during the same period
(15 million for Mc Keown). Between 1844 and 1910 another quarter
of a million Indians went to labor in the colonies that became British
Malaya. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, total
departures from India rose from an average of 300,000 a year to over
425,000, of which the overseas indentured component was less than
a tenth. As a whole, over 29 million Indians moved to Southeast Asia
and the Indian Ocean between 1840 and 1940. Climatic disasters,
political events (the Sepoy rebellion of 1857), and the construction of
railroads contributed to this issue.
Many came from the lower castes and classes. But this was not
necessarily the case as middle and upper castes migrated as well as
detailed studies on Mauritius and Natal confirm.14 However, our
knowledge of the caste status of overseas migrants is dependent on
the recording of these data by the clerks who prepared the certificates
and ships’ list. Many of them were unfamiliar with castes’ names and
tended to simplify them. On the other hand, upper classes tended to
disguise their status for several reasons: shame, interdiction to cross
the “black water,” and the employers’ preference for lower castes sup-
posed to be more productive.15
Voyages are a fundamental component of our history: they are at
the origin of massive migration, in particular progresses in maritime
transportation; they also connect histories of seamen to histories of
working people and histories of slaves to those of convicts, and inden-
tured immigrants. One major change in the nineteenth century was
the great increase in the size of sailing ship. Average Tonnage of ships
bringing African slaves to the Americas between 1821 and 1843 was
about 172 tons. It rose to 632 for Indentured African to Caribbean
between 1848 and 1867 and to 968 tons for indentured Indians to
British Caribbean between 1858 and 1873.16 The picture was differ-
ent out of the transatlantic routes. Ships in the early Chinese labor
trade were fitted out in the manner of African slave ships so as to
control victims of kidnapping or deceit. Revolts were numerous and
repression brutal. The transport of Indian laborers was more uniform
because it was dominated by the British and its regulation. However,
mortality rates stood high: about 120 per thousand on voyages of
indentured Chinese to Latin America; 65 per thousand for Indian
migrants to British West Indies, and 35 for Africans to this same des-
tination. In terms of comparison, losses in the Atlantic slave trade
averaged about 70 per thousand between 1811 and 1863. These
figures need to be corrected in order to take into consideration the
length of the voyage. In this case, over the period of one month, mor-
tality of slaves in transatlantic voyages was about 60 per thousand,
and that of Chinese, Indian, and African indentured stood between
20 and 30 per thousand.17 Archives files are full of descriptions (and
explanations in some cases only, those for which an investigation was
opened). Yet when one puts together those cases, it seems difficult to
find any direct correlation between crowding and the rate of mor-
tality. This conclusion is in line with recent similar studies on slave
trade.18 Some have suggested a relation between the rate of mortal-
ity, on the one hand, the social origin and cause of migration, on the
other hand. Chinese and Indians escaping famines presented higher

mortality rates during their trip than other immigrants from other
Chinese or Indian areas. 19 Depots were also important. Conditions in
China left much to be desired, in particular out of government depots
in Canton and Macao. In India, mortality rates were very different
among immigrants from Madras and from Calcutta to Mauritius: 5
per thousand and 19 per thousand respectively in 1858. 20 Analogous
differences were recorded for voyages to the West Indies. Officials and
inquiries gave the same explanation: those departing from Calcutta
were infected with disease, most commonly cholera. A correlation of
high mortality on ships with preboarding conditions was also men-
tioned for indentured Africans. 21 However, different interpretations
were also advanced: doctors and inspectors stressed the resemblance
of conditions of convicts, prisoners in the main land and indentured
immigrants. Some studies made an effort to quantify similarities. 22
Again we find the connection between the prison, the worker, and
the seaman.
In order to examine in detail this point, we need to scrutiny not
only formal, but also real rights and the “voice” indentured immi-
grants had or were capable to conquer. We will consider the cases of
Reunion and Mauritius islands.
The Invention of Engagisme in France:

From Rural Worker to Immigrant
French engagisme has no doubt received less attention than Anglo-
Saxon indentured service. In the French colonies, the contract of
engagement or indentured service was developed in the seventeenth
century. 23 It was initially intended for white settlers whose transport
expenses were advanced by employers or their middlemen in exchange
for a commitment to work for several years. The engagés were sub-
ject to criminal penalties and could be transferred along with their
contracts to other masters. It is important to point out that, owing
to the close resemblance between wage earners and domestic ser-
vants, especially under the Old Regime, and the survival of forms of
domestic service into the nineteenth century, the contract of engage-
ment should not be understood in opposition to these other labor
relationships but rather as an extension and radicalization of them in
the colonial scenario. Indeed, the notaries of Normandy in charge of
drafting the first contracts of engagement in the seventeenth century
explicitly relied on two already existing contracts: the agricultural

laborer’s contract and the sailor’s contract. 24 These contracts allo-
cated a special status to a hired person who offered his service and
all his time to his master. As we have shown, the sailor’s contract
extended the length of this commitment and added special clauses
related to travel expenses. 25 Indeed, the origin of engagisme has to be
found not only in the sailor’s contract but also in rural workers. As
the boundary between the sailor and the laborer was often blurred, so
it was the distinction between the indentured immigrant, the colonist-
laborer, and the sailor.
Crossing Revolutionary Boundaries:

Servants in Husbandry and the
Invention of Engagisme in France
In the past, historians have been fond of comparing the continuation
of guilds and the corporatist spirit in French labor law to the free
market of Anglo-Saxon labor. 26 This contrast is no longer relevant
and the regulation of labor in France is not viewed in opposition to
market growth. 27 From this standpoint, France would even appear
to have been the first country to have abolished domestic service as
well as criminal penalties in labor disputes. 28 Indeed, the notions of
“labor contract” and “wage earner,” as we understand them today,
were invented in France in the late nineteenth century. 29 As late as the
eighteenth century, France’s leading legal experts considered labor to
be a service provision.30 Moreover, French case law made no clear
distinction between hiring a person for service and hiring a thing. 31
Similarly, apprenticeship contracts and domestic service contracts
for longer than one-year term, bound individuals to place all their
time at the service of their employers, 32 which prompted the writ-
ers of the L’Encyclopédie méthodique to denounce such contracts as
“slavery.”33
Although the Revolution abolished lifelong domestic service, it
retained both forms of contracts from earlier periods: hiring for labor
(louage d’ouvrage) and hiring for services (louage de service). While
the former brought the status of the wage earner more in line with
the independent artisan, the latter carried over an important legacy
from earlier forms of domestic service. Cottereau has emphasized the
importance of hiring for labor in nineteenth-century France and its
ability to protect wage earners.34 This argument, while not false, is
nevertheless biased by the sources studied, that is, the textile industry
and certain urban milieus. But what about the other sectors— espe-
cially agriculture and the colonies?
This point is extremely important to us for, on the one hand, sea-
men often were rural workers as well and, on the other hand, as we
will see, the invention of the contract of engagisme (indenture) lied at
the intersection of the sailor’s and the rural daily worker’s. We thus
need to better understand this last actor and contract. Both before
and after the Revolution, agricultural laborers were either daily labor-
ers or “task-workers” (tâcherons), and servants in husbandry were
included in these two categories.35 The conditions of rural working
people changed slowly over time. Prior to the Revolution, penalties
were imposed on all those—daily laborers, pieceworkers or servants
in husbandry—who left their jobs before the end of their contracts
or without their employer’s authorization. A variety of contractual
arrangements to limit mobility existed at the time (e.g., bonuses for
hardworking day laborers, payment by task), along with more general
provisions.36 The seasonal nature of agricultural labor gave rise to a
significant amount of regional mobility, which was already consider-
able in the seventeenth century and remained high until around the
end of the nineteenth century. 37 It is precisely this mobility, together
with the notion of labor as service in the legal and economic culture
of the time, that helps to explain why working people, their masters,
and employers as well as the authorities devoted so much time and
energy to specifying conditions for hiring. The Revolution abolished
personal service, and first interpretations of the civil code considered
that day laborers, servants in husbandry, and domestics were hired
for labor while being in service. What did this mean?
Each type of worker had different possibilities for mobility and
those rights were linked to the other duties, forms of remuneration,
and welfare protection provided for in the formal or informal arrange-
ments they made with their master-employer. For example, a day
laborer could leave his employer at any time or be discharged with-
out prior notice, without receiving or claiming any compensation. In
practice, however, the need to ensure sufficient hands for urgent labor
had an obvious corrective effect on this rule. Yet both the wage earner
and the master paid for that freedom: the laborer’s employment status
was precarious and he ran the risk of seasonal unemployment, while
the employer faced a possible shortage of hands at peak seasons.
At the opposite, servants in husbandry were most closely tied to
their masters. This was not due to the work they performed (e.g.,
domestic chores) but rather to their place of residence and commit-

ments. Servants in husbandry were subject to their master’s will,
which meant they “owed all [their] time to the master for any labor
demanded.”38 This subordination to the master meant that the prom-
ised gages were paid as a lump sum. The master could discharge the
servant without notice or compensation for “dishonesty,” “disobedi-
ence,” “forgetting duties,” cursing, or acts of violence. Servants in
husbandry, on their side, often complained of poor or inadequate
food.39
We may now understand why the notaries of Normandy in charge
of drafting the first contracts of engagement in the seventeenth cen-
tury explicitly relied on two already existing contracts: the agricul-
tural laborer’s contract and the sailor’s contract.40 These contracts
allocated a special status to a hired person who offered his service and
all his time to his master. As we have shown, the agricultural laborer
transferred exclusive ownership of his time and his services to his
employer; the contract of engagement also borrowed from the sailor’s
contract, clearly stipulating the length and type of service required
and, above all, the penalty for desertion.41 Similarly, contracts of
engagement evoked apprenticeship contracts: the same requirement
to provide for the care of the engagé and the apprentice were assigned
to the master as to a good head of the household, the same expenses
in case of illness.42 In general, the engagés were not allowed to marry
without their master’s permission. An engagé had the right to redeem
his indenture, but he could not oblige his master to agree to early con-
tract termination. There was a thin line between engagés and enlisted
men. The terms of commitment and the criminalization of desertion
were common to both categories. However, the origins and conditions
of immigrants changed according to the period and their destination.
In the following section we will discuss the evolution of engagisme in
Reunion Island.
Engagisme in Reunion Island

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the contract of engage-
ment concerned mainly white Frenchmen who went to the French
West Indies, and Canada but also to colonies in the Indian Ocean.43
From La Rochelle alone, 5,200 engagés left for the French West Indies
between 1660 and 1715. This figure is well below the 210,000 inden-
tured Britons who left for North America between 1630 and 1700.44
In Reunion Island, along with slaves in the strict sense,45 the use of
engagés of color developed in the eighteenth century and even more

in the following century. This immigration was partly linked to the
need for artisans (Indian carpenters and masons), but above all to the
demand for additional laborers at a time when, under pressure from
the English, the price of slaves was constantly rising and “rumors” of
the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies were growing.46 In
all, about 160,000 slaves are estimated to have been imported to the
Mascarene Islands prior to 1810.47
After the Napoleonic Wars, although France officially reintroduced
slavery, English pressure resulted in several slave importations being
presented as contracts of engagement. In this manner, an estimated
45,000 slaves were illicitly imported to Reunion Island between 1817
and 1835.48 Under these conditions, the distinction between slave and
engagé was difficult to determine; the fragile boundary was noticeable
on arrival and departure. Ships’ captains transporting Indians often
resorted to fraud; contracts of engagement to Singapore were signed
but the engagés ended up being sent to Reunion Island.49 The French
colonial administration encouraged the Indian engagés and tried to
establish rules of law that were sufficiently clear to avoid trouble,
but they also worried about their actual enforcement.50 Translating
those principles into action remained difficult. During the first half
of the 1830, Indian engagés numbered about 3,000.51 The legal rules
in force provided that the engagés should receive food, lodging, and
wages.52 In practice, however, the employers-landowners seldom
complied with the rules and, in the event of a dispute or a problem
with the administration, the settlers justified withholding the wages
of the Indian engagés by claiming they had failed to fulfill their com-
mitments. The Indian engagés resisted not only by fleeing (runaways),
reducing the amount of work they did, and rioting, but also by taking
their cases to court.53 However, faced with the unfavorable attitude of
the magistrates and the administration, Indian engagés formed a trade
union in which the members with the best mastery of the French lan-
guage played a highly active role in formulating appeals, intervening
with the authorities, and so on. 54 In some trials, Indians won favor-
able decisions and were able to recover their wages or leave without
having to pay “compensation” to their masters. Debates arose among
the settlers and rumors spread of increasing appeals by the engagés
that would inevitably lead to the breakdown of the whole social order.
In 1837, the trade union was prohibited. 55
At that point, the engagés discovered a different instrument:
competition among employers. If they did not like their working
conditions, they simply left their employers and went into the city
where they worked as domestic servants. They became “fugitives”
and “deserters.”56 Many landowners did not demand the return of
their runaway engagés; they knew perfectly well that it was in the
interest of many of them to appropriate engagés belonging to other
settlers.
Competition between planters and estate owners, as well as differ-
ent attitudes among colonial rulers helped to reinforce the immigrants’
resistance. Some rulers, such as Governor Pujol, requested legal pro-
tections for immigrants such as that already in place in Mauritius. 57
Other colonial administrators and plantation owners thought the state
of affairs was to the result of Indian indolence rather than contracts
of engagement and lack of cooperation among landowners. It was
in this context that slavery was abolished in France and its colonies.
Did this step mark a new departure or consolidate existing practices
under a new name?
Engagisme: A New Departure

In 1847, in Reunion Island, there were a total of 6,508 engagés,
comprising Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Creoles. 58The lack of an
available labor force encouraged several landowners to call for the
recruitment of additional engagés, but this time from Africa, especially
since the trend in France was moving toward the abolition of slavery
and they had to prepare for this. Indeed, as in the British Empire in
the 1830s–40s, the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848
was followed by a revival of engagés. Indeed, while only 153 African
engagés entered into service in 1853, thereafter, on average, about
4,000 Africans arrived each year between 1851 and 1854, 10,008
in 1858, and 5,027 the following year. 59 In reality, recruitment in
India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and the east coast of Africa relied
on networks that had been in place since the eighteenth century and
employed the same practices as the slave trade. “Recruitment” often
took place violently, sometimes with the help of local tribal chiefs.60
Similar trends were found in relation to Indian engagés who, in prin-
ciple, were under the protection of the British administration. In prac-
tice, the kidnapping of adults and children was regularly denounced.61
In all, 43,958 Indian engagés were to arrive in Reunion Island between
1849 and 1859.62
Thus, the market for engagés was far from being “free,” not only
because of diplomatic and political interference but also because
of the way in which it worked. In the early 1850s, while the rules
adopted in France were becoming increasingly favorable to workers
(e.g., the introduction of the law prohibiting child labor, the aboli-
tion of a criminal charge for forming workers’ coalitions), the Second
Empire began imposing tighter restrictions on emancipated slaves and
engagés. A contract of engagement was imposed on all workers in
the colonies; the legal rules governing the livret ouvrier were widely
used and enforced.63 Anyone without fixed employment (defined as
a job lasting for more than one year) was considered a vagrant and
punished as such.64 The penalties were considerable, but the law was
also frequently circumvented through fictitious contracts of engage-
ments that some—especially women—signed with landowners who
were interested in having occasional laborers.65
In principle, engagés had the right to go to court and denounce
mistreatment and abuses. We have seen that during previous decades
those rights had been largely ignored. Now, in practice, it was
extremely difficult to make use of the rules, above all because colo-
nial law courts were in the hands of local elites. Thus, when immi-
grants approached the courts to report abuses, they were often sent
back to their employers who, at best, punished them and kept their
wages for insubordination; at worst, employers sued their workers for
breach of contract and slander. In the face of these difficulties, work-
ers sometimes joined together to denounce illegal practices, but they
risked being sentenced by the judge and the police to two months of
forced labor in a workhouse for illicit association and breaching the
peace.66
Legal disputes mainly concerned health care, contractual perfor-
mance, and physical violence. Until the adoption of the 1898 law on
labor accidents French employers were not responsible for the injuries
of workers, unless it could be proved that they were at fault. In “hiring
for service” contracts, this attitude was justified by the fact that day
laborers had short-term, informal contracts. As for louage d’ouvrage,
workers were considered independent artisans and, as such, they were
personally responsible for injuries and casualties. Finally, the mobility
of servants in husbandry was severely constrained but they benefited
from health care. In the colonies, under the concessionary regime
indentured immigrants were immediately assimilated into servants in
husbandry and were therefore supposed to benefit from health care
provided by their employer as they were explicitly obliged to statutes
and contracts provided.
This solution was adopted within the context of broader agree-

ments with Britain on the circulation of the labor force in the Indian
Ocean region; Britain demanded the provision of health care on plan-
tations in exchange for liberalizing Indian immigration to Reunion
Island. However, in Reunion Island other official provisions were that
workers could benefit from health care only when they could demon-
strate that they had complied with all the health and technical pre-
scriptions detailed in the estate regulations and in official statutes.67
In practice, health care provision was poor; medical services simply
did not exist on plantations, and injured and sick workers were not
only mistreated but their wages were even reduced.68
What about broader legal protection of immigrants?
Unlike slaves, engagés had the right to return home; terms were
negotiated in their contracts that were supposed to comply with the
general provisions of the law. In practice, however, repatriation was
difficult. During the 1850s and the 1860s, one-third of indentured
immigrants returned home (mostly Indians). This percentage was
close to that in Mauritius, the Caribbean, Surinam, and Jamaica
at the time, but it was far from 70 percent repatriation recorded in
Thailand, Malaya, and Melanesia. Distance and the cost of transport
were just two of the variables affecting repatriation; politics and con-
crete forms of integration were also important factors.69 In Reunion
Island, in particular, urban traders and some colonial officers encour-
aged engagés to return home. The former group argued that once the
immigrants had completed their commitment, they settled in towns
and engaged in illegal trade and were a source of unfair competi-
tion. Colonial administrators were inclined to support this view: the
defense of public order required the repatriation of immigrants. 70
In contrast, several employers and estate owners, especially small
ones, were hostile to the resettlement of immigrants in town or their
repatriation and pushed for contracts to be renewed. Their attitude can
be explained by the fact that, unlike large estate owners, they faced
increasing problems in finding the financial resources, networks, and
diplomatic support to recruit new workers. They therefore made use
of all available legal and illegal means to retain workers at the end
of their contracts. In particular, they seized immigrants’ wages and
livrets, and added strong penalties whenever possible (“laziness” and
failure to accomplish assigned tasks in good time were the most com-
mon arguments for adding penalties). Hence, the worker’s “debt” was
never repaid and their contracts were extended. Day labor standards
and objectives were gradually raised so that few workers could meet
them; they were thus subject to stiff penalties, even though they were
working 18–20 hours a day instead of 10 hours mentioned in their
contracts and official rules.71 If all this was not enough, employers did
not hesitate to physically force workers to renew their contracts.
These practices had been informally denounced since the 1850s but
it was not until the 1860s that they were brought before the courts,
under pressure from British diplomats and French central government
authorities.72 Even then, lawsuits often went on for years and con-
cerned only a very small percentage of workers. Local court records
list a few dozen cases per year of contractual abuses and illegal wage
retention, even though there were several thousand workers on the
island. Even in these few cases, employers were merely forced to give
workers their due wages with no damages or interest, and many
immigrants were granted permission to terminate (illegal) contracts
and abuses without their employers having to pay penalties.73
Beside contracts and wages, corporal punishment and violence
were the most common crimes brought before magistrates. In the late
1860s and the 1870s, special investigative commissions were set up,
most often in response to British diplomatic pressure. Their archives
testify to widespread corporal punishment, but also to the resistance
of the commission’s members to acknowledge its existence. In most
cases, abuses were described as “exceptional.” In fact, they were com-
monplace and they were an expression of deep-rooted brutality. Yet,
employers were sentenced to as little as one month in prison, even in
cases of the death of brutalized workers.74
Let us take the case of an estate owner, aged 64 in 1869, native of
Reunion Island. He was investigated for injuries and mistreatment for
which he had already been condemned in 1850, 1854, and 1865.75 This
time, the case was much more embarrassing to him and the colonial
authorities. Here are the facts. In 1864, an Indian worker knocked at
the appeal court, a chain at his neck. He explained that since many
years already, himself and other workers of the domain were regularly
whipped and their wages kept by the employer. He had gone several
times to the syndicate for the protection of immigrants who refused
to start any legal action against the employer. After a new mistreat-
ment, the worker ran away; the police kept him and he was sentenced
100 days of forced labor in a local working house. After that, he was
sent to his employer who immediately whipped him. A few days later,
he ran away again, was kept again, and sentenced another 100 days in
a public working house. This time, the employer after having whipped
him (in front of the prying local priest), attached a chain to his neck
day and night. Twelve days later, the Indian ran away and this time
went to the Imperial court (second-degree court). An instruction was
ordered and all these facts found confirmation. The employer was
sentenced one month prison (not executed).
Throughout the 1870s, between just one and seven employers were
sentenced each year for injuries and violence in first-level courts. At
the appeals court level, the figure dropped to one per year and—
exceptionally—four in 1875, but this was a single lawsuit and the
three people who received sentences were immigrants who worked as
supervisors.76
On the opposite side, every year in the jurisdiction of each justice
of the peace, employers sued several hundreds of workers for breach
of contract. Sentences were usually favorable to the plaintiffs and the
workers had to face heavy monetary penalties, which often translated
into forced labor. Every year, immigrants were also dragged into
court for robbery; sentences were tough—five years of forced labor
for a stolen chicken, for example.77
Theft was mentioned in sordid cases as, for example, Chinese “coo-
lies” were sued after refusing to allow their employer to “safeguard”
their savings. The police confirmed they had found an “unjustified”
amount of money in their barracks; the “coolies” claimed it was their
savings and the employer claiming the money belonged to him. The
“coolies” were sentenced to five to seven years of forced labor.78
To sum up, in Reunion Island, after the abolition of slavery, access
to justice was extremely difficult for immigrants and their living con-
ditions were incredibly harsh. The source of legal inequalities in the
contracts of engagisme can be found in the contracts of daily laborers
in France. The opportunity for legal redress and sentences were not
the same for laborers and their employers; this gap was even greater
in the colonies where the abuses, corruption, or simply partisan atti-
tudes of local officers were extremely widespread.
This situation evolved over time and the conditions of indentured
immigrants improved after 1875. This was due to several factors: the
endurance of the immigrants themselves, who continued to denounce
abuses despite the difficulties; their engagement in passive resistance,
absconding, and forming groups; and their willingness to pursue
lawsuits. All these became tools for resistance. To a certain extent
this proved favorable to the large planters who mostly benefited from
immigrants running away from small estates where the labor con-
ditions were worse. “Liberal” attitudes required economies of scale
that only large units could bear. These approaches met with increas-
ing “benevolence” on the part of colonial elites, in some instances
because they firmly believed in freedom and/or the virtues of the free
market, while others responded to political pressure from Paris and
London. No doubt, Britain was inclined to protect Indian immigrants
in Reunion Island not only for humanitarian reasons but also to guar-
antee a labor force for British employers in India and other parts of
their empire. Whatever the rationale for Britain’s action—probably a
combination of both motivations—the final outcome was increased
legal protection for immigrants. Unfair competition between small
and large estate owners and between rural and urban masters in
Reunion Island were also contributory factors. Major employers were
much more favorable to a fair labor market than small ones insofar
as they benefited from economies of scales in the recruitment and
exploitation of workers.
A third factor affecting the conditions in which immigrant lived,
was the decline of sugar prices in the international market. In the
early 1840s average producer prices of sugar were at about 39 pounds
a ton. By the 1870s they were down to around 22 pounds a ton and,
as the glut grew in the 1890s, they fell by another 10 pounds on aver-
age, reaching a low of 9.60 pounds in 1896.79 Small producers tried to
cope with this trend by imposing increasingly harsh labor conditions,
which provoked massive absconding (which actually manifested as
transfer to large estates) and worker resistance. Many petits blancs
sold their properties and moved up to the heights of the Island80 where
they were joined by immigrants and former slaves who began buying
land or, more often, cultivating it under new forms of renting.81
We still have to determine whether the case of France and Reunion
Island was an exception. Did the status of engagés of color reflect
a long, arduous process of abolishing slavery in France compared
with Great Britain?82 And was the inferior status of immigrants in
the colonies and of daily laborers and servants in France a broader
consequence of the way the Revolution of 1789 dealt with labor and
rights?
To answer these questions, we need to compare labor conditions
in France and Reunion Island to those of working people in Britain
and Mauritius.
6
From British Servants to Indentured
Immigrants: The Case of Mauritius
Masters and Servants in Britain

As a master in Great Britain had the right to recover fugitives, so too
in the colonies, indentured servants who fled were subject to criminal
penalties. Without the Masters and Servants Acts, indenture would
not have been possible. This means that the labor contract was not
a “fiction” but a real tool in the master’s hands. This is all the more
important as masters in the colonies gradually obtained broader rights
than those held by masters in Great Britain. They could exercise cor-
poral punishment, authorize the marriage of indentured servants, and
so on.1 The idea that the British Industrial Revolution was made pos-
sible, thanks to institutions that facilitated free contracts and, accord-
ing to some, the proletarianization of the peasantry, is supported by
a long tradition dating back to at least the nineteenth century and
the classical economists. However, these views are not confirmed by
close historical examination. Until the mid-nineteenth century double
employment (mostly in rural and urban areas) was the rule rather than
the exception. As Lindert and Williamson have recently estimated, for
the larger occupational groupings, such as “agriculture,” “commerce,”
and “manufacturing trades” the error margins are probably within
the range of minus 40 to plus 66 percent. 2 Between 1701 and 1831 the
absolute number of workers employed in agriculture remained roughly
constant at around 1.8 million. Between 1801 and 1851, the number
even increased slightly as new techniques in husbandry demanded
more labor not less.3 This can go some way to explaining the long life
of labor institutions in Britain. I have discussed elsewhere Bentham’s
attitudes and how they were related to the Poor Laws.4 Indeed, in
Great Britain, the Statute of Laborers (1350–51) was followed by a
set of legal rules and laws gathered together under the umbrella of the
Masters and Servants Acts, which multiplied in the sixteenth century
and accompanied the Statute of Artificers and Apprentices (1562). 5
These measures formed a coherent whole in which an inferior legal
status and fewer rights were conferred on apprentices, servants, and
any other type of wage earners when compared to their employers and
masters. Any untimely breach of contract on the part of a servant was
subject to prosecution. The word “fugitive” was clearly employed to
describe apprentices and servants who left their employment without
giving notice. The measures were justified by several factors: frequent
advances on wages, which gave special power to the master/employer
who was also a creditor; and advances on raw materials,6 particu-
larly in centralized and also decentralized manufacturing. Servants
were entrusted with raw materials, which they were supposed to use
entirely; they were held accountable in the event of waste and were
hence under obligation to the master-merchant who commissioned
the work. Employers requested and received criminal legislation that
designated waste as theft.7 Despite the existence of a contract, the
legal status of the actors mattered and it was not always identical.
Labor itself was considered to be the property of the master/employer,
but it was also viewed as a resource for the community to which the
working people belonged—the parish and society as a whole—and
hence the basis of the servant’s obligation.8
The “wage earner” as we understand this today did not exist
as such. And careful attention should be paid to the definition of
“servant.” Macpherson and other scholars maintain that this term
referred to all forms of wage labor,9 whereas Laslett argues that it
applied only to domestic servants in the strict sense.10 However, as
Robert Steinfeld has thoroughly documented, the word “servant”
took on different meanings at different times, especially when the
labor relationship was between actors with different legal statuses.
For example, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
sources seem to limit the use of the word “servant” to people who
resided with their master; laborers and artificers were still excluded
from such categorization. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the
word “servant” increasingly referred to all types of wage earners, and
included artificers, daily laborers, and any other sort of travailleur.11
In a rather confused way, the case law of the second half of the eigh-
teenth century began to exclude domestic servants in the strict sense
From British Servants to Indentured Immigrants 109
from decisions based on Masters and Servants Laws, at least in Great

Britain; they were included in them in the colonies.12
In the agricultural sector in the same period, we find important sim-
ilarities with France: it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between
domestic servants and daily laborers as they were both included in the
more general category of “servants.” Agricultural workers were paid
their wages at the end of their contract to ensure their labor during
harvests. At the same time, domestic servants in the strict sense had
longer-term contracts that lasted for at least one year and often much
longer. As in France, these annual contracts, which were frequently
renewed, were signed on conventional dates that varied from one
region to the next depending on local agricultural calendars as well
as fairs, which offered a prime opportunity for massive hiring of these
wage earners.13 Although the Masters and Servants legislation of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged from the framework
of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, it also marked a departure
from it. The Masters and Servant Acts were not an attempt to keep a
preindustrial model of household employment in place. Instead, they
aimed to impose a more rigorous system of work discipline upon the
growing numbers of laborers, artisans, and outworkers employed
in manufacturing, as well as maintain control of the agricultural
labor market at a time of considerable upheaval.14 These measures
also applied to insubordination and failure to comply with work-
shop rules, both of which were assimilated into an implicit, unilateral
breach of contract.15 Worse still, from the 1720s the measures of the
Masters and Servants Acts grew stricter, when penalties against ser-
vants who broke their contracts were reinforced. Between 1720 and
1792, ten acts of Parliament imposed or increased terms of imprison-
ment for quitting or for misbehavior. They established ground rules
for bargaining, usually concerning wages (and from this standpoint
they provided the background for the “new” Masters and Servants
Acts), but also for other issues, as the emphasis on unfair competition
confirms. Specific groups promoted these changes included tailors,
shoemakers, leatherworkers, mariners, and lace makers.
All these statutes responded to the increasing demand for labor
created by expanding markets. In thriving sectors of the economy,
employers wanted to be able to retain workers.
To a certain extent, compulsion and criminal sanctions reflected a
widespread idea common at the time, which was that higher wages
would reduce workers’ willingness to work and therefore only com-
pulsion could force servants to honor their commitments. Tighter
constraints were also applied to anyone who refused work,16 which

shows how closely labor contracts came to be connected to the Poor
Law from the late seventeenth century, when the Masters and Servants
Acts were supplemented with a larger code of laws directed against
the disorderly poor. Penalties against workers were bolstered by those
against vagrancy and disorderly behavior.17 As Tawney notes, the Poor
Law began where serfdom stopped.18 In eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Britain, freedom to choose one’s employer did not imply
the freedom to remain unemployed. Opposing tensions were thus
expressed: on the one hand, employers tended to retain the “good”
workers; on the other hand, some workers were encouraged to move
on in order to lower the expenses of the district concerned.19
Were these rules enforced?
When historians encountered criminal sanctions in late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century Britain, they depicted them as anomalous
rules in a market society with a large population of “proletarians.”
They believed that the rules were scarcely enforced. Detailed analyses
have recently been carried out on the rate of penalty enforcement in
the courts of England, Great Britain as a whole, and the colonies.
This outstanding quantitative work clearly shows that harsh penal-
ties on servants in the legal rules and case law did not reflect inad-
equate enforcement but, on the contrary, was an extension of it. Rules
were not only increasingly enforced, but also covered a broader cross-
section of laborers and working people and grew distinctly tighter
between 1750 and 1875 (when they were finally abolished). 20 County
and police district records are available from 1857 to 1875. They show
that about 10,000 people were prosecuted each year for Masters and
Servants offences. Of these, 7,000 were convicted, 1,700 served a sen-
tence in a house of correction, 2,000 were fined, and 3,300 received
other kinds of punishment (e.g., abated wages and cost assessments).
Whipping was extremely rare (11 people in 1857, 2 in 1858 and 1859,
1 in 1860, and 1 in 1866). 21 However, most conflicts were resolved
out of court; most often, the masters wanted “to set an example” and
have their workers and servants come back to work. There were no
significant differences in the rate of prosecution under the Masters
and Servants Acts in rural and urban counties, in agriculture, put-
ting-out or manufacturing areas. 22
In contrast, masters and employers were not subject to these mea-
sures; the first rulings in this sense occurred in 1844, exactly at the
time the Poor Law was eliminated. Until that time, masters were
never threatened with imprisonment for breach of contract. After
that, it is unclear whether official statistics include worker-initiated

proceedings; Steinfeld claims they did not. However, some archival
investigation shows that some percentages of prosecutions under the
Masters and Servants Acts were initiated by workers against their
employers, primarily for back wages or wrongful dismissal. 23 As
regards day and rural laborers, the rate of prosecution was season-
ally determined: it was highest during harvest periods, when people
moved from towns to the countryside. This corresponded to the terms
of contract for agricultural laborers who were paid only at the end
of their contract, precisely to avoid such problems at the harvest sea-
son. Masters constantly prosecuted servants engaged in occupations
that were half-agricultural, half in trade who, in their eyes, did not
provide the promised service. From this standpoint, the enforcement
confirms that the Masters and Servants rules were tools for reducing
turnover costs.
Thus, the long-term movement of labor and the rules governing it
in Great Britain hardly confirm the traditional argument that early
labor freedom in the country supported the Industrial Revolution.
On the contrary, the latter was accompanied by increasingly tough
regulations and sanctions on workers. The Masters and Servants
Acts were a powerful tool in the hands of masters/employers to cope
with increasing demand for labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Rules became harsher for workers during the Industrial
Revolution and the rate of prosecution also increased.
However, opposite trends were also at work. Masters were united
in criticizing unreliable servants and workers, but they were also in
competition among themselves and did not hesitate to seize others
employers’ workers. This attitude, together with increasing pressure
from trade unions, ultimately changed the balance in the labor market.
The new trend began in the 1840s when another attempt by masters’
representatives in Parliament failed to extend the Masters and Servants
Acts to other categories of workers. In that same year, the Poor Law
was repealed and masters began to be prosecuted as well. In 1875, the
Employers and Workmen Act decriminalized employment offences.
This was soon followed by the first welfare state legislation.24
Were the same dynamics found in the colonies?
Servitudes in Mauritius Island

To be sure, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the rate of pros-
ecution of workers under criminal rules was around 5 to 8 percent in
Britain, whereas the percentage rose to 20 percent in the British colo-

nies, reaching particularly high peaks in Mauritius in the plantation
and mining areas. 25 In the following section, I will turn to explaining
the analogies, differences, and mutual influence of labor rules and
their enforcement between England and one of its colonies, namely
Mauritius.
English legal language first began using the term “indenture” in
relation to apprenticeship contracts to indicate the apprentice’s obli-
gation to the master. 26 The guardianship of minors, the apprentice-
ship contract and the limited rights of apprentices were therefore
interconnected. Like slaves, children and apprentices had diminished
legal capabilities, and it was upon this that the master’s authority was
based. It was no accident that changes in the legal rules governing
apprenticeship and family law came about during the same period,
and were interconnected. During the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, when the status of the apprentice came under increasing criti-
cism from guilds, workers and officials, the authority of the head of
the family over his children, particularly with regard to corporal pun-
ishment and labor, was similarly called into question. 27
The hierarchical relationship between children and apprentices,
on the one hand, and fathers and masters, on the other, formed the
ground upon which family and labor relationships were regulated in
the British colonies. Thus, the way children of indentured servants
were viewed in the North American colonies was significant. The
prevailing practice, imported from England, of placing orphans in
workhouses in part reflected a desire to avoid the danger of gangs
of children and adolescents developing and growing out of control.
Nonworking children and teens, like indentured fugitives and run-
away slaves, were viewed as challenges to the social order. Hence, the
municipalities set up forced apprenticeship systems, either with mas-
ters or in correctional institutions and workhouses. 28 The same sys-
tem applied to the children of indebted indentured servants: parents
could place their children in apprenticeships in order to help redeem
their debt. It was for this purpose that a system was established in the
main cities on the east coast of North America of putting children
up for auction as indentured servants. Between 1740 and 1800, for
example, there existed an estimated 1,400 such child indenture con-
tracts in Boston, and 6,700 in Baltimore. 29 Thus, children and their
labor were considered as collateral for the repayment of the monetary
(and eventually criminal) debt of their parents. This practice, formally
forbidden in England, was a derivative of the colonial context.
The legal status of children and apprentices, then, played an impor-

tant role not only in the evolution of indentured service but also of
slavery. When slavery was abolished in 1832, the British authorities
decided that a given period (usually six years—reproducing the time-
frame of individual emancipation as well as of apprenticeship con-
tracts) be stipulated during which the former quasi-slaves were given
an apprenticeship status. There are two aspects of this system: first,
the decision to implement it occurred after the reform of the appren-
ticeship system in 1814; second, the similarities between apprentices,
children, and slaves were brought out in debates, and later in legisla-
tion and case law, on the apprenticeship of slaves. 30 The prevalent view
was that children and slaves did not enjoy full legal status inasmuch
as they were not yet “civilized”; children, slaves, and apprentices were
supposed to be trained for life in society. During this transitory train-
ing phase, the almost-ex-slave and apprentice needed to be trained to
become responsible “free” labor. The “cost” of this effort to the state/
master/employer was passed on to the ex-slave who, in order to repay
this “debt,” was obliged to provide unpaid labor to his or her former
master and the colonial government for a period of between five and
seven years.31
However, in order to avoid abuse of the system and ex-slave by the
master, apprenticeship relations were entrusted to special magistrates.
These “protectors” of slaves were established in all the main British
colonies in the wake of abolition, and their reports constitute a major
source for historians.32 It appears that during the transitional appren-
ticeship period, very few slaves succeeded in redeeming their freedom.
Moreover, even when this phase officially ended—between 1838 and
1841, depending on the colony—the degree of social and economic
integration of former slave apprentices varied greatly. For example,
in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guyana, most former apprentices
ended up indebted to their former masters and found themselves back
working on the plantations. 33 Even worse, former slaves had to face
competition from new immigrants, now under indentured contracts.
The indenture contract, usually considered by historians to be a
form of forced labor, did not come under this category until the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century. In contrast, until that point (since the
seventeenth century), indenture had been viewed as the expression of
free contract; the individual bound by the contract was just a servant
whose travel expenses were paid in advance and who committed him-
self for a longer period of time than a laborer but a shorter one than a
domestic servant in the strict sense. Like the others, however, he owed
all his time to his master, who could sell the indentured servant along
with any debts he owed to some else. As a master in Great Britain
had the right to recover fugitives, so too in the colonies, indentured
servants who fled were subject to criminal penalties. Without the
Masters and Servants Acts, indenture would not have been possible.
This means that the labor contract was not a “fiction” but a real tool
in the master’s hands. This is all the more important as masters in the
colonies gradually obtained broader rights than those held by masters
in Great Britain. They could exercise corporal punishment, authorize
the marriage of indentured servants, and so on. 34
An innovation occurred around the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury in the American colonies: magistrates decided that indentured
servants (but not Native Americans) could be subject to criminal pen-
alties. This was the first colonial innovation in relation to English
case law. Indenture contracts nevertheless continued to provide for
criminal penalties for whites until the 1830s. For the others, that is,
Indians, Africans, and Chinese, indenture contracts and the corre-
sponding forms of servitude continued to be practiced until the early
twentieth century, several decades after the abolition of slavery. 35
The same situation prevailed in other English colonies in Central and
Latin America and, above all, in Asia. We can therefore distinguish
two periods: the first, from the seventeenth century to the 1830s,
concerned about 300,000 European indentured servants. It took
place while slavery was still legal and the slave trade was operated
by European traders. Indentured servants were intended for tobacco
plantations and to some extent for manufacturing.
The second phase, during the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, concerned 2 million indentured servants, mostly Chinese and
Indians but also Africans, Japanese, and immigrants from the Pacific
islands. They were employed in sugar plantations and in manufac-
turing. Unlike the indentured servants in the first phase, these new
bonded laborers seldom returned to the world of free labor once their
period of commitment ended as their indenture contracts were usu-
ally renewed.36
In this context, Mauritius is of particular interest for several rea-
sons. After an initial period when the island belonged to the Dutch
(1638–1710), it became a French colony, and then, starting in 1810,
part of the British Empire. The first engagés arrived in Ile de France
(the French name for Mauritius) in the 1720s; they were artisans
from India and other French colonies. 37 In the late eighteenth cen-
tury, 40 percent of free men of color and just 15 percent of the servile
population in Mauritius were of Indian extraction. 38 The English

administration that succeeded the French in 1815 consistently encour-
aged the arrival of indentured servants from Madagascar and India
and, increasingly, of Swahilis from East Africa.39 There were many
intermediaries in India, Mozambique, Madagascar, and West Africa,
ranging from local sultans to village chiefs as well as Indian, Arab,
and Portuguese middlemen, in addition, of course, to the French and
English landowners and traders.40 The commitment terms were as
varied as those we have identified in Reunion Island: in many cases,
contracts were signed by force or fraud; at the same time, many
Indians signed up quite voluntarily.41
In Mauritius, slavery came to an end on February 1, 1835. As in
the other British colonies, in Mauritius as well a transitory period
of apprenticeship of six years was required to transform slaves into
free people. As elsewhere, abuses were widespread and former slaves
themselves regarded apprenticeship as the continuation of slavery.
This system came to an and in February 1839 and within days most
apprentices left the plantation of their enslavement. Nearly all of the
10,000 purchasing their freedom during the apprenticeship period
abandoned the plantation; virtually none of the 13,000 female labor-
ers completing apprenticeship ever returned on wages; only 4,000 of
the 17,000 men completing apprenticeship agreed to sign one-year
labor contract. By August 1846 only 189 former apprentices were still
working as laborers on the plantations.42
Between the official abolition of slavery in 1834 and 1910, 450,000
indentured servants arrived from India and from Madagascar. Two-
thirds never returned home and, as a result, the Indian population
grew constantly (from 35% in 1846 to two-thirds of the popula-
tion in 1871).43 Numerous observers continually drew attention to
the inhumane living conditions of these immigrants.44 These figures
must be expanded to include other indentured servants from South
Asia and Africa: 30,000 in 1851, and twice that number ten years
later. These two forms of immigration to Mauritius led to protests
from English landowners and from sectors such as the railway in
India and East Africa, complaining of unfair competition on the
part of the Mauritians aided by the French who contributed to this
human trafficking both before and after 1848.45 Female immigra-
tion to Mauritius remained secondary, at least initially, and had to
be overseen by the state.46 It did not develop rapidly until the middle
of the nineteenth century, after the abolition of slavery, due to the
arrival of new indentured servants who came with their families and
to considerable demands for domestic and some urban labor as well

more traditional labor on sugar plantations.
Similar uncertainty surrounds the relationships between former
slaves and new indentured servants. Some scholars think that the
former were marginalized in Mauritian society,47 while others, on
the contrary, emphasize that their status changed to that of small
landowners or shopkeepers and they were therefore much better inte-
grated into Mauritian society than Indian “coolies” after the aboli-
tion of slavery.48
At the same time, even with equal legal status, differences emerged
between former slaves and the new indentured servants. These two
groups were sometimes of different ethnic origin: the former slaves
were African and sometimes Indian; the engagés were usually
Indians, but as time went by, African immigration also increased.
Along with ethnic origin, how long they had been there was an
important factor as it indicated whether or not an individual was a
former slave. Newcomers often agreed to work for lower wages than
former slaves, causing the latter to protest, playing into the hands of
the landowners.49 Most studies have focused on Indian immigrants;
however, Malagasies were also important, at about the quarter of for-
mer slaves-apprentices. Unlike Indians, they were bilingual—Ceole
and Malagasy—to which they added the study of the English after
1835. English missionaries settled school next to Port Louis and Piton
where the percentage of Malagasy was particularly high. To this issue
also contributed the prohibition of Christianity in Madagascar and
thus the flight of British missionaries and literate Malagasy refugees
to Mauritius, the Comoros, and the Cape colony. 50
As in Reunion Island, the conditions that workers experienced
depended not only on how long they had lived in Mauritius and their
ethnical origin, but also on the estates on which they worked. Small
plantation owners were more concerned about fugitive, insubordi-
nate, and vagrant indentured servants. 51 Large plantation owners, on
the other hand, who complained of the excessive cost of slave surveil-
lance, often imposed a liberal ideology on the colonial systems; they
found support for the indenture system in humanitarian and anti-
slavery associations by underscoring the benefits of free immigration
(indenture) as opposed to slavery, as well as “famine” in India and
Africa.52
Despite the efforts of the British abolitionists, who were on the
lookout for any form of disguised slavery, the conditions of these
immigrants remained quite harsh and the law difficult to enforce.
Indenture contracts were governed by the provisions of the Masters

and Servants Acts in the colonies, 53 strongly informed by practices in
Great Britain. It was undoubtedly extremely challenging for workers
to make use of the law; the local magistrates were corrupt and had
close ties to the plantation owners. The terms for reimbursing travel
expenses to Mauritius were often complex and only vaguely explained
to workers when they entered into their contracts, thus leaving many
of them indebted for life. 54 This drew protests from the antislav-
ery movement in Great Britain, as well as from the Indian colonial
authorities.55 The Free Labor Association replied that the landown-
ers had the right to recover travel expenses they had advanced and
that the market price did not allow them to raise the wages of the
engagés to the level of other wage earners. 56 All the same, the immi-
grants often complained of ill treatment, withheld wages, and poor
food.57 Estate inspectors, who were introduced specifically to over-
see these relationships, confirmed the abuses;58 however, the courts
seldom ruled in favor of the immigrants, in spite of the creation of a
body of magistrates appointed by London in the early 1840s. Planters
generally succeeded in convincing magistrates that the indentured ser-
vants had invented “malicious” complaints against them and should
be punished for it.59
The number of cases in which indentured servants brought proceed-
ings against their masters—which rarely happened in the 1850s—rose
sharply thereafter. Between the 1860s and 1870s, about 10 percent of
the indentured servants sued their masters, in virtually every case for
nonpayment or insufficient payment of wages and they won in more
than 70 percent of the cases.60 However, this result, partly due to pres-
sure from England, did not indicate that the “march to equality” was
under way. In subsequent years, the percentage of cases brought by
“coolies” declined first by 5 percent overall (at end of the 1870s) and
later dropped to a mere 0.3 percent between 1895 and 1899, with the
success rate falling to less than 40 percent.61 This can be explained by
that fact that, after the successes of the 1860s—and thanks to a new
law on labor contracts adopted in 1867—contracts tended to take the
form of oral agreements and it was therefore more difficult for the
“coolies” to produce proof. Above all, contracts were no longer drawn
up with the plantation owners but instead with Indian middlemen,
which no doubt helped to stifle many of the conflicts.62 The retention
of workers increased, as both the result and source of this process,
with the percentage of contract renewals rising from 40 percent in
1861 to more than 70 percent 20 years later.63
The law was largely wielded to sue immigrants. Any unjustified

absence was subject to criminal prosecution. In particular, the law
against vagrancy took on particular importance in Mauritius; several
restrictive laws were adopted between the abolition of slavery and the
1870s. Their adoption testifies to the same concerns that prompted
legal rules limiting the mobility of workers and peasants in the rest of
the British Empire, and also, as we have seen, in the French empire:
considerations of public order (monitoring movements, knowing the
exact location of the immigrants, and amount of their wages) con-
verged with those involving competition among employers. Small land-
owners complained of runaway engagés, a problem that also stemmed
from lack of cooperation on the part of large landowners. Between
1860 and 1870, about 70,000 complaints were filed by landowners
and employers each year against Indian immigrants; in 80 percent of
the cases, they pertained to desertion or illegal absence.64 When the
other landowners refused to collaborate, these complaints often came
to nothing, which is why many of them preferred to resort to employ-
ing newcomers.65 Nevertheless, this result, which was partly due to
pressure from the abolitionist movement in Britain, did not indicate
that the “march to equality” was underway. Indeed, the percentage
of labor complaints concerning indenture contracts declined by 5 per-
cent at end of the 1870s, and dropped to a mere 0.3 percent by 1895
to 1899, when laborers won less than 40 percent of cases.66 This was
because, in response to the rise of work grievance complaints in the
1860s, employers sought alternative labor agreements, notably oral
contracts, against which laborers found it almost impossible to lodge
complaints. This was facilitated by the 1867 legislation that endorsed
oral contracts at the point of recruitment of indentured labor in India.
Moreover, coolies’ contracts were from 1867 drawn up with Indian
middlemen instead of plantation owners, which shifted the responsi-
bility for settling any contentious issues to the former.67 Moreover,
the indentured laborer became increasingly indebted to the planter.
This process started with the necessity, often poorly explained at
the time of recruitment, for the laborer to repay the cost of travel to
Mauritius.68 In addition, notably small planters enforced a range of
penalties that increased the debt of indentured laborers, thus increas-
ing the likelihood that the laborer was obliged to renew his contract;
the percentage of contract renewals rose from 40 percent in 1861 to
over 70 percent in 1881.69
Such abuses drew protests from the antislavery movement in Great
Britain, as well as from the Indian colonial authorities.70 The Free
Labor Association replied that landowners had the right to recover

the travel expenses they had advanced, and that the market price did
not allow them to raise the wages of contract workers to the level
of other wage earners.71 The estate inspectors, who were introduced
specifically to oversee these relationships, confirmed that abuses
occurred.72 Nevertheless, planters succeeded in convincing magis-
trates appointed by London in the early 1840s that the indentured
servants had invented “malicious” complaints against them and ought
to have been punished for it.73 Thus, the courts seldom ruled in favor
of the immigrants.
Moreover, many indentured laborers found the cost of the return
trip to India to be prohibitively expensive. In 1876, only 2,572 of the
150,000 Indians on Mauritius went back to India.74 Most planters, in
particular small planters, did their utmost to oblige workers to renew
their contracts, especially from the late 1860s, as Indian immigra-
tion to Mauritius slowed. In 1871, for example, 28,172 newly arrived
Indians signed contracts, whereas 47,713 established Indian workers
renewed their expired contracts—to which figure must be added the
increasing number of Indian workers who, once their initial contract
had expired, entered into new informal contracts with Indian sub-
contractors who then transferred the immigrants to the planters. All
these had to obtain police passes—the number of which increased
from 12,597 in 1871 to 17,730 in 1875.75 At the same time, planters
sought local creole workers; those entering engagements on planta-
tions increased from 2,938 in 1869 to 5,501 in 1873 and 8,001 in
1876.76
Thus, government authorities promoted short-term 6–12-month
contracts instead of the traditional 3–5-year contracts, and most
planters followed their advice because they gave them more flexibil-
ity in dealing with, and greater control over, immigrant workers. In
1876, of a total of 60,555 contracts signed, 52,292 were short term.
Officials trusted that such contracts would facilitate the early return
of migrant workers to India. In fact, the opposite occurred, and con-
tracts were usually renewed. This was chiefly due to planters claiming
damages from immigrants and retaining most of their wages as com-
pensation. This was done in several steps. From the start of the con-
tractual system, planters kept most of the wages due by arguing both
that immigrants were in debt to them, and that they would spend
any money received on alcohol and other vices. However, such argu-
ments were increasingly attacked by British officials and the antislav-
ery movement and, from the mid-1860s, it was stipulated that wages
be paid on a monthly basis. Despite this ruling, as late as 1875–76,

most planters still delayed the payment of wages to workers by a mini-
mum of three to four weeks. Moreover, masters claimed that workers
were indebted to them for most of their wages. In 1874–75, out of a
total of £1 million in wages nominally due, masters deducted in 1874
229,225 pounds for absenteeism and about 91,000 pounds for costs
associated with illness,77 and in 1875 103,756 pounds for sickness and
254,193 pounds for illegal absences. Their calculation was simple: a
worker lost one day in wages for each day of sickness, and two days’
wages for every day in jail or absent.78 Plantation accounting books
also show that planters arbitrarily made other deductions for various
offences, including alleged “theft,” go-slows, and inefficiency—so
that, on average, the final payment to the worker barely reached one-
quarter of the contractual wage.79
Testaments and successions are also important sources for such
investigations. From 1875, vacant estates were put under the admin-
istration of a curator named by the colonial state. The curator pro-
vided details for each worker, including name, declared profession,
place of birth, last place of residence, type and duration of contract,
wages, debts, and his or her accounting balance with the estate. This
huge mass of data has yet to be analyzed in order to compare worker
contracts, wages and debts on estates of different sizes and degrees
of capital investment. However, the fact that all plantation workers
appear to have incurred debt suggests that all estates were in financial
difficulty, and that planters considered their workers to be part both
of the problem and of the solution. This is further reflected in curator
and public magistrate reports on the resources to be distributed to
estate heirs and creditors.
Nevertheless, indentured immigrants were sometimes able to save
money. In 1875, for example, when leaving Mauritius to return to
India, 2,576 former contract workers declared that they were car-
rying with them a total of Rs. 437,039 worth of money, of which
101,223 was in gold, 201,541 in silver and 134,275 in drafts on
British Emigration agents.80 The bulk of this sum belonged to 1,938
men. However, around 1,000 of the returning laborers that year
had less than 300 rupees each, and 400 had no savings at all.81 In
the following years, declared savings showed a generally downward
trend, to 358,314 rupees in 1876, and 281,089 in 1877, before rising
to 386,963 in 1879 and dropping again thereafter to reach 172,653
rupees in 1881. In part, this trend reflected fluctuations in the num-
ber of returnees.82 However, it also reflected the fact that immigrant
workers increasingly chose to remit directly their savings. For exam-

ple, in 1875 the Mauritius immigration office remitted on behalf of
workers 146,555 rupees, 48.57 percent of which was sent to Calcutta,
40.57 percent to Madras, and 10.87 percent to Bombay.
This flow of money to India encouraged more Indians to migrate
to Mauritius, as did the growing possibility for migrants to purchase
property. From the late 1860s, competition from sugar-beet production
led to decreasing cane sugar prices. To counter this, wealthier planters
introduced mechanized farming,83 whereas small planters, who lacked
the capital resources to mechanize, tried to survive by squeezing their
labor force—imposing both harsh work conditions and penalties that
indebted laborers to them. However, such methods bought them lit-
tle time, and ultimately most small planters were obliged to sell their
estates. After 1880, large estate owners also started selling off the most
unprofitable portions of their land. Such sales gave Indian immigrant
workers the opportunity, which they seized, to purchase small plots
of land on Mauritius. The process had started in the late 1840s,84 but
became significant only after 1880, when the scale of large morcelle-
ment (parceling estates) accelerated.85 Most Indian land acquisitions
comprised small plots of less than two arpents (approximately 6,800
square meters).86 According to bank and notarial archives, Indian
immigrants who bought land did so with a mixture of their own sav-
ings and bank loans.87 These small Indian landowners (at least on
paper) used family labor to work their plots, growing sugar cane to
sell to big sugar producers, and thus to gain the means to pay off their
bank loans and remaining debts to plantation owners. In other cases,
Indians merchants bought land, and recruited Indian laborers to work
it, chiefly on a sharecropping basis.88
To sum up, the status of bonded laborers, indentured servants, and
others was modeled on the status of apprentices and servants in Great
Britain. As this status was inferior to that of the masters’, indentured
servants, apprentices, and domestic servants had equally limited legal
rights. The gap separating servant and master was not as great as that
between indentured servants and their masters, which continued to
grow during the nineteenth century. In Mauritius, 14,000 indentured
and domestic servants were prosecuted each year in the 1860s; during
the same period in Great Britain, proceedings were brought against
9,700 servants per year for breach of contract and almost always
resulted in convictions. In contrast, masters were seldom indicted and
even more rarely convicted for breach of contract, ill treatment, or
nonpayment of wages.
At the same time, even though the living conditions of indentured

servants were not necessarily better than those of the slaves who pre-
ceded them, the rights they enjoyed and—above all—the fact that
their status was not hereditary constituted essential differences that
were to play an increasingly important role in the twentieth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Indians comprised a tiny minor-
ity of landowners (1.1% in 1891),89 most of whom were still obliged to
work for the majority of the year as laborers for bigger landowners in
order to pay off the debt incurred to buy their small parcels of land—
most of which lay largely uncultivated. The same trend continued into
the early twentieth century. The end of Indian immigration in 1916
led to a stabilization of social hierarchies on the island and facilitated
the integration of former immigrants. By 1910, Indians owned one-
fifth of the total area of land on Mauritius devoted to sugar produc-
tion.90 By 1930, the average size of Indian holdings was 2.5 acres,
compared to 15.1 acres for non-Indians. Many of these small owners
continued to work most of the year as laborers on large estates; they
and other small planters were hit hard by the Great Depression, the
colonial government recording an increase in the number of “desti-
tute” Indians from 11.2 per thousand in 1929 to 27.6 in 1935.91 By
that time, the International Labour Organization (ILO) convention
of 1930 had forbidden private labor contracts that were not signed
voluntarily by workers, and in which criminal penalties were imposed
for nonperformance of work. However, labor contracts for public
works, which were excluded from the ILO provisions, continued to
be significant in India and Africa.92
Conclusion
Instead of a history made up of slaves, bonded people, and free wage
earners, or analogously, an old regime and capitalism—with a trium-
phant passage from one to the other—our findings suggest something
altogether different. The French Revolution suppressed life domestic-
ity, while the nineteenth century progressively abolished slavery in
British and then French colonies. Still, this process did not go along
with the rise of a free labor market involving legally equal actors.
In Britain, as in France, and in their colonies, workers and inden-
tured immigrants were absolutely not disguised slaves (as much litera-
ture of the nineteenth century has argued),93 but they had an inferior
legal status and far fewer rights than their masters. All the same,
the Industrial Revolution in Britain actually strengthened rather than
reduced legal constraints on labor. In both Britain and France, this

issue was linked to several factors. Over the long term, from the six-
teenth to the early twentieth centuries, the demand for labor rose as
a result of territorial and colonial expansion, along with the growth
of agriculture and trade, proto-industrial, and later industrial devel-
opment, despite demographic growth and slavery that increased the
available labor force.
This dynamic was consequently accompanied by stronger legal
constraints on the free movement of workers, ranging from criminal
penalties in contracts to workers’ records books to widespread servi-
tude. From this perspective, there is no reason to contrast guild-based
France with liberal England. Yet, working people benefited from
competition between masters/employers who, precisely because of the
existence of rules limiting workers’ mobility, were ready to keep “fugi-
tives.” The same competition was in play between colonial authorities
who protected the rights of immigrants and local laborers against the
practices of competitors, which were judged to be contrary to human
rights, treaties, and so on. In short, “unfair” competition helped to
smooth out inequalities.
Differences between Britain and France concerned the timing and
the scope of labor rights. In the early nineteenth century, Britain
quickly granted freedom of association but preserved criminal pun-
ishment for breach of contract. France quickly eliminated criminal
penalties in labor relations, while sanctions against working people
were harsher in the countryside and in small industrial units than in
large urban firms. The protection of urban workers was nonetheless
counterbalanced by the prohibition of trade unions and associations
until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Britain, instead of
an opposition between rural and urban, the logic of local markets and
the technical specificities of industries (including harvest techniques)
played a crucial role in defining and enforcing legal rules of labor.
The similarities and differences between Britain and France were
reflected in labor and labor rules in their colonies. Colonies were
territories not only of slavery, but also—and above all—of forms of
bondage inspired by status inequalities entrenched in Europe. The
forms of bondage in the colonies would have been inconceivable with-
out the inequalities of status existing between “wage earners” and
their masters in Europe. Again, local conditions played an important
role. In Reunion Island, indentured immigrants met with constant
difficulties in availing themselves of the law. When they were suc-
cessful, it was usually due to British and French political intervention
and depended on unfair competition between employers. At the same

time, the crisis in the sugar market, followed by successful compe-
tition from Mauritius, lack of capital, and competition from sugar
beets in northern France finally swept away most of the small planters
and small units. Former indentured immigrants partially benefited
from this trend and gained access to marginal land. “Small whites”
and former indentured laborers shared their social inferiority and dis-
trusted each other.
In Mauritius, former indentured immigrants enjoyed greater
social mobility, more favorable economic trends, and political sup-
port among British and colonial elites. Paradoxically, the protection
of labor arrived later in Britain than in France, yet the defense of the
rights of immigrants improved in Mauritius sooner than in Reunion
Island. The antibondage movement in the British colonies was much
more closely connected to the pro-worker movement in Britain than
its counterpart in the French colonies to greater worker protections
in France.
Market trends strongly affected conditions for immigrants. The
steady fall in the price of sugar on international markets (from 39
pounds a ton in the early 1840s to 22 pounds in the early 1870s and
down to a low of 9.60 pounds in 1896)94 pushed small producers to
impose harsh labor conditions, which led to massive worker abscond-
ing and resistance. As a result, in Reunion Island and Mauritius, many
petits blancs sold their properties and moved to the highlands,95 where
they were joined by immigrants and former slaves who began buying
land or, more often, cultivating it under new forms of renting.
Together with the declining price of sugar, the generally increasing
supply of migrants influenced conditions on local and global labor
markets. In 1916, the indenture contract was repealed for Indian emi-
grants. However, at a broader level, the movement did not bear fruit
until the interwar period with the creation of the ILO and the sign-
ing of labor agreements.96 The welfare state, which brought about
increasing protection of labor in certain industries in Europe (mostly
large industries), mostly ignored labor rights and conditions in small
units, agriculture and, above all, in the colonies. If there was a “great
divergence” between labor conditions in Europe and in its colonies,
it is to be found in the twentieth century and the welfare state rather
than in classical liberalism and colonialism.
General Conclusion
Conventional historiography opposes land to maritime empires and

justifies the supremacy of Europe by the strength of its fleets, capital,
and technical progress.1 We have shown that the maritime option did
not become decisive until the eighteenth century and even later in
the Indian Ocean, when local traders and ships were overpowered by
steam-operated European vessels.
All the same, contrary to conventional views, we argue that the
supremacy of the West was linked not only to capital and technical
progress but also to its long and persistent use of coercion. This was
obvious in the maritime world as well as in European and colonial
labor markets. Kidnapping in French and English ports supplemented
the constant use of slaves far from European coasts. In France, the
galley system overlapped with naval recruitment. It was difficult to
distinguish slaves from convicts and recruits. Indeed, kidnapping in
the colonies was already practiced by the French East India Company
and survived in various forms during much of the nineteenth century.
Partially in the eighteenth century and far more frequently after the
Revolution, forms of forced recruitment coexisted with a pension and
social welfare system limited to French seamen.
A similar evolution took place in England where the impressment
system coexisted with kidnapping and the use of slaves among the
crews. While the abolition of slavery enhanced recruitment in the
global markets, it did not put an end to harsh punishment for English
seamen (no pension funds for them). In this case as well, experiences
in the Indian Ocean had a decisive influence on the evolution of the
British labor market. The identification of forms of slavery, particu-
larly “mild slavery” in India, was not only a useful tool to manage
the Empire; it also interacted with the identification of “free labor” in
Britain itself. If Indians were not “real slaves,” then servants, appren-
tices, and later indentured immigrants were definitely “free” laborers.
Punitive sanctions were added to legal rules and their implementation
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, the long-term move-

ment of labor and its rules in Great Britain hardly confirm the tra-
ditional argument that early labor freedom in the country supported
the industrial revolution. On the contrary, what bolstered the indus-
trial revolution was the subjection of workers to tougher regulations
and punitive sanctions. Increasing legal constraints on labor—not
increasing free wage labor—went hand in hand with the industrial
revolution and empire building.
This process was finally brought to a halt between 1850 and 1914
as a result of several interconnected dynamics: abolitionism in the
European colonies; the second industrial revolution (capital-intensive);
the emergence of the first forms of the welfare state. In England, at the
start of the 1870s, most industrial enterprises were still independent
family-run firms that employed fewer than a hundred workers. Mass
production was slow in evolving and was still quite rare by 1870. 2
By the mid-nineteenth century, a decisive shift occurred toward an
industrialized economy in which sustained increases in output per
capita were able to support a growing population, which, in a virtu-
ous circle, provided a source of rising demand. 3 From the mid-1880s,
large combines of firms began to emerge, notably in textiles, coal,
and engineering. This process was paralleled by changes in the nature
of intrafirm organization: managerial functions grew, while techni-
cal change influenced the contract system. Internal contracting was
often bound up with traditional methods of craft control, which came
under pressure from increased mechanization. Vertical integration,
the welfare state, and changing labor institutions went hand in hand.
Vertical integration required a stable labor force and large units;
the peasant-worker, the traditional poor, and Poor Laws hardly fit
this process. For Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the emergence of a fully
developed and stable form of trade union organization in the middle
decades of the nineteenth century was associated with the establish-
ment of wage labor as the predominant form of work relationship.4
Under the Statute of Artificers and Apprentices, the journeymen’s
association was nothing more than a subordinate department of the
masters’ guild. Picketing was a criminal offence, and under the Master
and Servant Acts, individual workers taking part in strikes were liable
to prosecution. The Trade Union Act and Criminal Amendment Act
of 1871, as well as the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act
and the Employers and Workmen Act, both of 1875, provided a basis
for union growth. Trade union membership grew steadily after 1870;
membership in 1914 was double that of 1905. 5
The removal of criminal sanctions from the individual employ-

ment relationship in the 1870s was soon followed by the first legisla-
tive interventions of the welfare state. A wave of social legislation
began with the Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, according to which
an employer could not be held liable in tort where one employee’s
negligence caused personal injury to another. From this small begin-
ning, the first Workmen’s Compensation Act was introduced in
1897, and the first National Insurance Act, in 1911. They imposed
liability on employers for workplace-related injuries and disease, and
they prompted the widespread use of employers’ liability insurance
to spread the risks in question.6 This same act made unemployment
compensation available on the basis of contributions paid by indi-
vidual wage earners (limited to some industrial sectors and extended
to other sectors and agriculture only in 1936). These changes meant
that the Poor Law remained in place but dealt only with residual cases
that fell outside the range of the statutory social-insurance scheme.7
On the maritime labor market, the new Shipping Act, passed in 1894,
made shipmasters and shipowners responsible for repatriating the las-
cars and for ensuring that they were not “disembarked” in England
without any protection. These measures were extended to the rest
of the British Empire: in 1902–3, the federal minister for Australia
forbade any employment of lascars on ships to Australia in order to
preserve the race and protect the jobs of white English sailors.
Along an analogous path, in France, the law of March 21, 1884,
legalized the unions; thus the question arose as to the lawfulness of a
union pressuring an employer to dismiss a worker who was employed
at will. In general, tribunals and courts still opposed any acknowledg-
ment of collective contracts. Not until 1913 were unions authorized
to defend an occupation’s general interest.
Within this context the notion of the labor contract (contrat de tra-
vail) appeared. The term contrat de travail was not in widespread use
in France before the mid-1880s. The main impetus for its adoption
was an argument by employers in larger enterprises that the general
duty of obedience should be read into all industrial hiring; however,
once the term became established, it was used in turn-of-the-century
legislation with respect to industrial accidents (law of 1898),8 which
introduced the employer’s objective responsibility in case of accident.
Public order and competition also pushed toward a new labor
regime. In 1890, the worker’s booklet was suppressed, and in 1900
the judiciary was asked to impose a private law solution in circum-
stances where public law solutions had become anachronistic.
However, the new labor law widened rather than reduced legal,
social, and economic inequalities among working people. It excluded
huge categories, such as foreign seamen, small enterprises, craftsmen,
and peasants.9 All these groups were marginalized as “independent”
workers.10 They were not obliged to fulfill many of the obligations
that other workers had toward their employers, but they also could
not benefit from the same social security advantages enjoyed by other
workers. Thus, new forms of social protection afforded to French
workers, combined with the old and highly particular issue of the
mobilization of domestic sailors, encouraged employers to draw on
the international market. In short, the new discriminatory welfare
state intervened as a form of protectionism of European labor and
increasing exploitation of “foreign” working people recruited on the
global labor market.
Imperial dislocations at the global scale also contributed to this
process. Between 1840 and 1940, 55–58 million Europeans, 2.5 mil-
lion Africans and Asiatic reached the Americas; during this same
period, other 29 million Indian, 19 million Chinese, and 4 million
Africans and Europeans moved to Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands,
and the Indian Ocean Rim. Finally, 46–51 million people from north-
eastern Asia and Russia moved (or were compelled to move) to Siberia,
Manchuria, and Central Asia.11 Many of these movements were
coerced—especially those working for European enterprises—but
many others also moved without physical coercion.12 “Free” migra-
tion expanded with the increasing restriction of indentured contracts,
imperial dislocations, global economic dynamics, and, in particular,
the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Economic factors were important, but they were not alone in caus-
ing this phenomenon. Given a strong assist by the transport revolution
(the definitive success of steamboats and railroads), global migrations
caused a significant shift in the distribution of the world’s popula-
tion. All three aforementioned destinations experienced enormous
population growth, increasing by factors of 4 to 5.5 from 1850 to
1950. Growth rates in these areas were more than twice that of world
population as a whole, and about 60 percent greater than in Africa, a
region of small net immigration. By comparison, growth rates in the
regions of emigration were lower than world population growth and
less than half of those in the regions of immigration. Taken together,
the three main destination regions accounted for 10 percent of the
world’s population in 1850 and 24 percent in 1950.13
Even if relocation within the same empire was important (in particu-
lar in the Russian and British Empires), trans-imperial, intracontinen-
tal, regional, and local forms of migration were also important—and
they clearly show the inadequacy of the Eurocentric paradigm, which
consists of explaining migration as an “expansion of the West.”14
Indeed, migration was multiscale and involved almost all areas
of the world. Nearly 4 million Indians travelled to Malaysia, over
8 million to Ceylon, over 15 million to Burma, and about 1 million
to Africa, other parts of Southeast Asia, and islands throughout the
Indian and Pacific Oceans. Up to 11 million Chinese (most from the
southern provinces) travelled from China to the Straits Settlements,
although more than a third of these transshipped to the Dutch Indies,
Borneo, Burma, and places farther west. Nearly 4 million travelled
directly from China to Thailand, between 2 and 3 million to French
Indochina, more than 1 million to the Dutch Indies (for a total of
more than 4 million if transshipments from Singapore are included),
and just under 1 million to the Philippines.15
At the same time, railroad construction and a relative relaxation of
frontiers between Russia and China also led 28–33 million northern
Chinese to migrate to Siberia and Manchuria.16
Migration within each area increased and interacted with long-
distance emigration. Migrants from Ireland traveled to England for
work, others moved from eastern and southern Europe to indus-
trial areas in northern Europe, especially France and Germany. In
Russia, migrants moved into the growing cities and southern agri-
cultural areas. Within India, they moved to tea plantations in the
south and northeast, to the mines and textile-producing regions of
Bengal, and to newly irrigated lands and urban areas throughout the
subcontinent.17
Thus it would be reductive to explain twentieth-century emigra-
tion as simply an “expansion of the West” and the triumph of free
labor and free emigration over bondage. To be sure, whole sets of
laws in defense of “freedom” were adopted on all continents. “Free”
migration expanded with the increasing restriction of indenture con-
tracts and their final abolition in 1920. In the United States, the Anti-
Peonage Act of 1867 extended the prohibition of servitude (voluntary
or involuntary) to all states in the Union. The government of India
first restricted and then forbade Indian indentured contracts in 1916,
while in 1874 an agreement between the Chinese and Portuguese gov-
ernments stopped the export of Chinese contract labor from Macao.
Chinese authorities investigated the conditions of Chinese migrants

in Cuba, Peru, and the United States, which led to the suspension of
most of these contracts.
At the same time, formal rules for emigration were not always sup-
ported by real legal rights granted to immigrants once they reached
their destination. For example, the conditions of former indentured
laborers were extremely different, precisely as they had been for for-
mer slaves. The access to landowning that one had on Mauritius and
Reunion Island was hardly the rule. Elsewhere, between 1899 and
1938, most of the indentured immigrants served as day laborers in
agriculture or in commerce; this was the case with Chinese, Indian,
and Japanese immigrants in Cuba, British Guyana, Trinidad, and
Hawaii. Servant contracts or “independent” commercial activity were
much more widespread in Cuba (40% of the immigrants) and Hawaii
(48%) than in British Guyana (8%) or Trinidad (24%).18
Most important, different forms of bondage and debt obligations
survived far into the twentieth century. Chinese, Africans, Indians,
and, to a certain extent, even European emigrants were still subject
to disguised forms of indenture contracts and bondage. The same
can be said for Africans, who even if officially freed from slavery
were still under multiple forms of bondage in both intra-African and
African-European relations. Local bondage coexisted with the inter-
continental flow of free and less-free people. This was the case for
various reasons: labor markets remained highly segmented, unequal
skills adding to important institutional constraints. Immigration
was never really free; laws and reciprocal and multilateral agree-
ments between powers obtruded and thus regulated the flow. This
was the case between European and American states (both northern
and southern); between China and Australia and other British Empire
destinations; between the American powers, India, and other British
colonies; between French and British colonies in Africa; between
the Ottoman Empire and the Western powers; between Russia, the
Ottoman Empire, and the United States, and so on and so forth.
To summarize, the decline of indentured labor in some areas did
not always correspond to the passage from “unfree” to “free” migra-
tion, insofar as the conditions for the emigration of new generations
of Asians and to a certain extent Europeans hardly resembled those
conjured up in the liberal imagination. Disguised indentured con-
tracts and other forms of bondage persisted in many areas. This trend
contrasted with the increasing social protection of some groups of
European workers.
This social gap grew wider in the colonial state and the global
economies. Between the 1890s and World War I, European powers
decreed the abolition of slavery in Africa. British officials believed
that Africa’s development required Africans not being allowed to
work when, where and how they chose. In both French and British
Africa, there was a campaign against vagrancy, theft, drinking and
personal violence. African slave owners and slaves practiced emanci-
pation in a manner which the British (or French) did not necessarily
approve. Instead of becoming “capitalists,” “landowners,” “proletar-
ians” (as the British hoped in Kenya and Tanzania), or “peasants”
(as the French wished), most Africans worked as “peasant-workers”
moving back and forth between their own plots and plantations or
urban activities.19
In French Africa, in 1887, the code of “indigenous people” pro-
vided criminal sanctions and repressed vagrancy. 20 Obligatory labor
was the rule in both private and public companies and plantations. 21
At the same time, “obligatory labor” was carefully distinguished from
slavery; to some extent it was even presented as a way of escaping it.
Limitation of freedom in the name of freedom was a constant refrain
which was not considered to be a contradiction in terms. So-called
prestations were legalized in 1912 but they had been in use since the
end of the nineteenth century. Local inhabitants were compelled to
work to pay their taxes, to work off their sentences or as a form of mil-
itary conscription. Governors pressured Africans to produce certain
crops for export and to work for concessionary companies especially
in Afrique Equatorial Française (French Equatorial Africa, AEF). The
French authorities, like the British, introduced highly repressive work
discipline. The former slaves were not supposed to work wherever and
whenever they thought best; if they did not have a proper labor con-
tract, they could be found guilty of vagabondage; if they left before
their task was completed, they would be condemned for desertion.
Indeed, the “march towards freedom,” which seemed to be an irre-
versible achievement at the turn of the twentieth century would not
be confirmed. On the contrary, during World War I, requisition, mili-
tarization of labor and obligatory labor were practiced on a massive
scale in Europe and even more so in its colonies. 22 The heritage of
World War I was important: in Europe, German and Soviet leaders
took inspiration from their experiences during World War I (and in
the Russian Civil War), to develop new forms of coercion. During the
same period, international organizations made their first attempts to
fight slavery outside of Europe (1926: League of Nations’ Convention)
and, more generally, forced labor (ILO’s convention of 1930). The

1926 Convention widened the definition of slavery and marked the
beginning of the attack on a wide range of exploitative practices. Yet
it was difficult to enforce, partly because of the ambiguity of some
formulations, partly because many states, such as France, opposed
practices of monitoring as infringements of national sovereignty. 23
More generally, uncertainty persisted about which forms of bondage
should be considered as “slavery” and which could be tolerated. In
particular, colonial powers across the IOW considered debt bondage
to be a benign form of private welfare, and generally condoned its
continuation well into the twentieth century. In some areas, such as
Thailand, Burma, and Indochina, this encouraged a revival of covert
slave raiding. 24 In Africa where debt bondage was represented by the
pawnship of a person, usually a young girl, to a creditor in return
for a loan, the system weakened only during the post-World War II
boom. 25 In all cases, the debtor had a clear market value, expressed in
more monetized Asian economies in terms of cash, and in less mone-
tized economies, as in most of Africa, in terms of “human” wealth. In
Liberia, pawnship became an integral part of the extractive system,
contributing to the transfer of wealth from the interior to the coast.
By the 1920s, pawn children from the interior were extremely wide-
spread in Monrovia. New regulations adopted in 1923 even solidi-
fied the advantage of the creditor vis-à-vis his client. Thus, if a pawn
escaped or died, the holder was entitled to repayment of the loan or
replacement of the pawn. 26
In India, in the late colonial period, the authorities declared them-
selves avid supporters of free labor. The belief, so strong in the past,
that colonial rulers should adapt to the custom of the land made way
for an awareness that paying landless people a wage insufficient to
live on forced them to accept advances for expenses that exceeded
their daily earnings. The resulting relationship of bondage enabled
the farmers to continue to keep wages at the minimum level. Thus, in
July 1923, the government of Gujarat, by proclamation, declared the
whole system of forced indentured as illegal. 27
After the independence, Indian planners established both minimum
and maximum limit for landownership and thus envisaged an agrar-
ian society of self-cultivating owners. They called for the state to ban
various forms of debt-based bonded labor. Bonded laborers should
be released from debt that were more than five years old and should
be allocated uncultivated lands. Unfortunately, the promise was not
f ulfilled; only half the land worked by tenant farmers changed own-
ers, usually to the benefit of farmers from high castes. 28
After World War II, while forced labor was banned in Europe, it
was also abolished in the declining French Empire, due to the pres-
ence of African members of parliament in the Assemblee Nationale
Constituante in 1946. A strong international consensus was reached
that forced labor was both identifiable and unacceptable The OIT
tried to argue that social legislation for Europe should apply to col-
onies—that is, that labor was a universal social issue. However, this
motion was strongly denied in both Britain and France. Liberation in
one sense—sovereignty—provided a screen behind, which practices
agreed in international circles to be unacceptable reappeared, with
the connivance of European and American corporations.
Quarrels over slavery were embedded in the broader tensions and
framework of the Cold War. Thus in Saudi Arabia, the British com-
plained that because of the increasing involvement of the United States
with regard to oil, slavery persisted to a large extent. The French con-
firmed the importance of trans-Saharan slave trade to Saudi Arabia.
By 1962, slavery had become a political issue in Saudi Arabia itself;
20 Saudi princes involved in an abortive coup fled to Egypt, where
they denounced slavery, thus fuelling Nasser’s campaign against the
Saudi royal family. After the new coup in 1963, the new Saudi regime
declared the official abolition of slavery. Yet charges that slavery still
existed in Saudi Arabia continued into the 1980s.
Forms of welfare were introduced in Africa, but the discrepancy
between European legal and economic categories and labor practices
in Africa made it difficult to implement these rules. 29 Even worse,
most of these rules were preserved in postcolonial Africa and have
contributed to legitimizing abuse. Multinational firms and new states
such as Ivory Coast evoked formal labor rules to deny any accusation
of practicing slavery. Quite ironically, these arguments were the same
as those used by people who, at the opposite end of the political and
intellectual spectrum, criticized the categories and rules derived from
the West as a form of neocolonialism. These orientations ignored the
fact that European colonial powers had supported this argument as
early as the nineteenth century.
Notes
Introduction
1. The best works on the relationships between seamen, convicts, and inden-
tured immigrants across the oceans are: Janet Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea:
Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the North-Western Indian Ocean,
c. 1750–1914,” American Historical Review, 105, 1 (2000): 69–91; Janet
Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation,
c. 1840–1914,” Slavery and Abolition, 31, 3 (2010): 451–66. On con-
victs in the Indian Ocean: Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean:
Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000). On these connections in the Atlantic: Markus Rediker,
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-
American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
2. On the distinctiveness of the Atlantic compared to the Indian Ocean:
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ed., The Economics of the Indian
Ocean Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1989); Gwyn Campbell, ed., The
Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass,
2004); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700:
A Political and Economic History (New York: Longman, 1993); Edward
Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Patterns of International Trade in East
and Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press 1975); Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices
and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire
into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey, 1987).
3. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003); Edward
Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The
Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006); Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, eds., Connecting Seas and
Connecting Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China
Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
4. On the long history of the Indian Ocean, among the others: Janet Abu-
Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350
136 Notes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); André Wink, Al-Hind, The Making
of Indo-Islamic World, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Philippe Beaujard, Les
mondes de l’Océan indien (Paris: Colin, 2012).
5. Alain Testart, L’esclave, la dette et le pouvoir (Paris: Editions errance, 2001);
Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage (Paris: PUF, 1986); Moses
Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press,
1980); Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical
and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1977); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1944); Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Martin Klein, ed., Breaking
the Chains: Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Stanley Engerman, ed.,
Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999); Michael Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery (New York;
London: Longman, 1996).
6. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller, eds., Children in
Slavery through the Ages (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009).
7. Clarence-Smith, The Economics: Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on
the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
8. James Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Derick Scarr, Slaving and
Slavery in the Indian Ocean (London and New York: Macmillan, 1998).
9. Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000).
10. Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South-Asian
Seamen, c. 1900–1960,” International Review of Social History, 51 (2006):
sup: 111–41.
11. Seymour Drescher, Abolitions: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gyan Prakash, Bonded
Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12. Utsa Chakravarti, “Of Dasas and Karmakaras: Servile Labor in Ancient
India,” in Utsa Patnaik and M. Dingawaney (eds.), Chains of Servitude:
Bondage and Slavery in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
pp. 40–54; Markus Vink, “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery in the
Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, 2
(2003): 131–77.
13. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation
in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: North
Carolina University Press, 1991); Michael Postan, “The Chronology of Labor
Services,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 20 (1937): 169–93;
Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labor: The
Debate Continues (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997).
14. Alain Dewerpe, “En avoir ou pas. A propos du livret ouvrier dans la France
du XIXe siècle,” in Alessandro Stanziani (ed.), Le travail contraint en Asie
et en Europe, XVIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: MSH éditions, 2010), pp. 217–40.
Notes 137
15. Prabhu Mohapatra, “Les contradictions des contrats. Les origines des rela-
tions du travail dans l’Inde coloniale au XIXe siècle,” in Stanziani, Le travail
contraint, pp. 5–34.
16. Alessandro Stanziani, Bondage. Labor and Rights in Eurasia, from the
Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berghahan,
2014); Alessandro Stanziani, ed., Labour, Coercion, and Economic Growth
in Eurasia, 17th–20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
17. Stanziani, Bondage.
18. A similar view: Pearson, The Indian Ocean.
1 Colonial Studies, Area Studies, and the

Historical Meaning of the Indian Ocean
1. Pierre Chaunu, European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages (Amsterdam:
North Holland, 1979).
2. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerrannée à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin,
1949).
3. Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
4. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards reconfigu-
ration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3 (1997):
735–62.
5. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization; Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean
(New York: Routledge, 2003).
6. André Wink, Al-Hind, The Making of Indo-Islamic World, 3 vols (Leiden:
Brill, 2004); Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History. Essays on
Europe, Islam, and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993).
7. Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of
the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais. Essai
d’histoire globale, 3 vols (Paris: EHESS, 1990).
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
9. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
10. Joseph Needham, with Wang Ling, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 3.
Mathematics and the Science of Heaven and Hearth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1959), pp. 583–90.
11. Geoffrey Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800
(Lenham, Boulder, CO : Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 130–31.
12. Alessandro Stanziani, After Oriental Despotism (London: Bloomsbury,
2014).
13. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization.
14. For a discussion see Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean
in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
138 Notes
15. Among the others: Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe; Wink, Al-Hind.
16. Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India
Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais.
17. Jean Ecormier Cyclones tropicaux du Sud-ouest de l’Océan Indien, le cas
de l’Ile de la Réunion (S.M.R: La Réunion, 1992), p. 7.
18. Prosper Eve, Ile a peur. La peur redoutée ou récupérée à La Réunion des
origines à nos jours (Saint André, La Réunion: Éd. Graphica, 1992).
19. Centre canadien de prévision d’ouragan (16 septembre 2003) Comment caté-
gorise-t-on les ouragans? http://www.ec.gc.ca/ouragans-hurricanes/default.
asp?lang=Fr&n=AB062B74–1; Bureau of Meteorology, Guide to Tropical
Cyclone Forecasting, 2008, http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/about/names.
shtml.
20. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather. Victorians and the Science of
Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Fabien Locher,
Le savant et la tempête. Étudier l’atmosphère et prévoir le temps au XIXe
siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
21. Hai Xu, Y. Hong and B. Hong, “Decreasing Asian Summer Monsoon
Intensity after 1860 AD in the Global Warming Epoch,” Climatic Dynamics,
39 (2012): 2079–88; Fu Congbin and J. Fletcher, “Large Signals of Climatic
Variation over the Ocean in the Asian Monsoon Region,” Advances in
Atmospheric Sciences, 5, 4 (1988): 389–404.
22. Emmanuel Garnier and Jérôme Desarthe, “Cyclones and Societies in the
Mascarene Islands, 17th–20th Centuries,” American Journal of Climate
Change, 2, 1 (2013): 1–13.
23. Wink, Al-Hind, III, p. 9.
24. Angela Schottenhammer and Roderick Pick, eds., The Perception of
Maritime Space in Traditional Chinese Sources (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz
Verlag, 2006).
25. On the identification of oceanic basins: Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée
à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949); Pearson, The Indian Ocean;
Jerry Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,”
Geographical Review, 89, 2 (1999): 215–24; Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural
Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols.
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, 1993).
26. Jerry Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodizzation in World
History,” American Historical Review, 101, 3 (1996): 749–70.
27. Patrick Manning, “The Problem of Interaction in World History,” American
Historical Review, 101, 3 (1996): 771–82.
28. Erik Gilbert, “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-
Distance Trade, Empire, Migration and Regional Unity, 1750–1970,” The
History Teacher, 36, 1 (2002): 7–34.
29. Just a few references within a huge bibliography: Chaudhuri, Asia before
Europe; James Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sanjay Subrahamanyam, The
Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 –1700: A Political and Economic
Notes 139
History (New York: Longman, 1993); Om Prakash, European Commercial

Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, The New Cambridge History of India,
II, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ashin Das Gupta
and Michael Pearson, eds., India and the Indian Ocean, 1500 –1800
(Calcutta: Oxford University Press 1987); Niels Steensgaard, The Asian
Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974).
30. For a synthesis: Philippe Beaujard, Les mondes de l’Océan indien (Paris:
Colin, 2012).
31. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 121.
32. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach,”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 11, 2 (1980): 266–76.
33. Edward Prados, “Indian Ocean Littoral Maritime Evolution: The Case of
Yemeni Huri and Sanbuq,” Mariner’s Mirror, 83 (1997): 185–98; Clifford
Hawkins, The Dhow: An Illustrated History of the Dhow and Its World
(Lymington: Nautical Publishing, 1977).
34. Geoffrey Parker, “Ships of Line,” in Parker (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated
History of Warfare : the Triumph of the West (Cambridge : Cambridge
University Press), p. 120.
35. Kaushik Roy, War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740–
1849 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 12.
36. Pearsons, The Indian Ocean, p. 185.
37. Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and
Culture, AD 1498–1707 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 20.
38. Atul Chandra Roy, A History of Mughal Navy and Naval Warfare (Calcutta:
World Press, 1972).
39. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
p. 164.
40. Gommans, Mughal Warfare, p. 174.
41. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization, p. 125.
42. Charles Rathbone Low, The History of the Indian Navy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012, original 1877); Kenneth Hall, A History
of Early Southeast Asia. Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–
1500 (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).
43. K. S. Mathew, ed., Shipbuilding and Navigation in the Indian Ocean Region,
1400–1800 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997), p. xiv.
44. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 185.
45. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, p. 150.
46. Patrick O’Brien and Xavier Duran, “Total Factor Productivity for the Royal
Navy,” in Richad Unger (ed.), Shipping and Economic Growth, 1350–1850
(Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 279–320.
47. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
48. Stephen Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
49. Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
140 Notes
50. Gommans, Mughal Warfare; Muzzafar Alam, The Language of Political

Islam. India 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
51. Pearsons, The Indian Ocean.
52. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty. Law and Geography in European
Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
53. Ram Anand, Origins and Development of the Law of the Sea (The Hague:
Martin Nijhoff, 1983).
54. James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898 (Singapore: National
University of Singapore Press 1981).
55. Alessandro Stanziani, Bâtisseurs d’Empires. Russie, Inde et Chine à la croi-
sée des mondes, XVI–XIX siècles (Paris: Liber, 2012).
56. Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise; Schottenhammer and Pick, The
Perception of Maritime Space.
57. R. H. Barnes, Sea Hunters of Indonesia: Fishers and Weavers of Lamalera
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
58. Warren, The Sulu Zone.
59. Wink, Al-Hind, III, p. 103.
60. Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar
in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (New Delhi: Asian Educational
Service, 1866).
61. Lombard, Le Carrefour, II, pp. 84–85.
62. John Anderson, “Piracy and World History,” in C. R. Pennell (ed.), Bandits at
Sea: A Pirate Readers (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 95.
63. Warren, The Sulu Zone.
64. Roy, War, Culture and Society, pp. 19–21.
65. Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France (New York, Oxford: Oxford
66. Seymour Drescher, Abolitions. A History of Slavery and Antislavery
67. C. E. Grey and E. Ryan, “Some Observations on a Suggestion of a Code of
Law,” submitted September 13, 1830, to the Governor-General in Council.
Bentick to Grey and Ryan, October 9, 1831, British Parliamentary Papers,
1831, 6 (144).
68. Sandra den Otter, “Law, Authority and Colonial Rule,” in Douglas Peers
and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire India and the
British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 168–90, in
particular p. 179. See also: Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British
India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Martin Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder
and Justice under British Rule, 1870 –1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge
69. Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections. India in the Indian Ocean Arena,
1860–1920 (Berkeley, Los Angeles : University of California Press, 2007),
p. 43.
70. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay, eds., Masters, Servants and Magistrates in
Britain and the British Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina
Notes 141
2 Seamen in France and the French Empire:

Heirs to the Galley Slave or Forerunners
of the Social Security System?
1. André Zysberg, Les Galériens. Vies et destins de 60 000 forçats sur les
galères de France (1680–1748) (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987).
2. René Burlet, Jean Carrière, and André Zygberg, “Mais comment pouvait-on
ramer sur les galères du Roi soleil,” Histoire et mesure, 1, 3–4 (1986):
147–208.
3. Archives Nationales (henceforth AN) Fonds Marine, Mar A2, 18.
4. Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pénalité, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Brunet, 1749), 1: 965. See also: “Galères,” in Joseph-Nicolas Guyot,
Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence (Paris: Visse, 1784).
5. Albert Boucher d’Argis, “Galères,” Encyclopédie méthodique, Jurisprudence,
vol. 4 (Paris: Panckoucke 1784), p. 690.
6. André-Roger Voisin, Le bagne de Rochefort (Tourquant: L’apart, 2011).
7. Based on the capacity of a ship’s hold, the tonneau d’arrimage weighed less
than a standard ton (979 kilograms compared to 1,000 kilograms).
8. AN Mar, G, 230, dossier 1.
9. Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, par Pierre Clément, membre
de l’Institut. Tome 2, 1e partie, Marine et galères (Paris: Imprimerie nation-
ale, 1864).
10. Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique (Paris:
EHESS, 1992).
11. Félix Joubleau, Études sur Colbert. Exposition du système d’économie poli-
tique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1856).
12. René Memain, Matelots et soldats des vaisseaux du Roi: levée des hommes
du département de Rochefort, 1661–1693 (Paris: Hachette, 1937).
13. AN, Mar, A2, 34.
14. See, for example, the muster rolls for this period in the ADLA (Archives
Départementales de la Loire Atlantique), série C, in particular from C 1408
to C 1433* for ordinary seamen, for the years 1701–89.
15. Alain Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France, 1715 à 1871 (Paris: PUF,
1997).
16. On the wages and pay of crews: archives de la Marine, Brest, sous-série P.
17. Thierry Souzeau, “Du village à la ville: Les trajets professionnels des marins
de la Seudre (1770–1793),” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays del’Ouest, 113,
4 (2006): 83–96.
18. AN, Mar, A1, 13, édit de Nancy.
19. AN, Mar, B2, 99, f°215–216.
20. AN Mar, G, 233, dossier 1.
21. Archives de la défense, Vincennes, 2-P, 71, 5 (e.g., heirs receiving the amounts
left by the deceased, Compagnie des Indes Orientales).
22. Alain Cabantou, Les citoyens du large. Les identités maritimes en France
(XVIIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris: Aubier 1995), p. 80.
142 Notes
23. Cabantous, Les citoyens, p. 33.

24. Patrick Villiers, Les corsaires du littoral. Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne
de Philippe II à Louis XIV (1568–1713) (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses
Universitaires du Septentrion, 2000).
25. ADLA (Archives Départementales de Loire Atlantique), série C (Chambre
de commerce de Nantes), carton 744, “Règlementation de la pêche à la
morue.”
26. Reynald Abad, Le grand marché (Paris: Fayard, 2002).
27. ADLA, C 744.
28. Souzeau, “Du village.”
29. Philippe Guillot, “Étude économique et sociale du front de côte entre Orne
et Seules,” Cahiers des Annales de Normandie, 3 (1963): 275–441.
30. Cabantous, Les citoyens, p. 166.
31. Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’océan. Les populations maritimes de
Dunkerque au Havre (1660–1794) (Paris: Publisud, 1991), p. 227.
32. Christian Huetz de Lemps, Géographie du commerce de Bordeaux sous
Louis XIV (Paris- La Haye: Mouton, 1975), p. 585.
33. Philippe Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle,
2 vols. (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005), 1: 332.
34. Haudrère, La compagnie française, 1: 412.
35. AN Mar, B 2, 261, f. 554; Archives du Port de Lorient, 1 E4, 27 f. 252;
1 P 246.
36. Marc Perrichet, “L’administration des classes de la marine,” Revue d’histoire
économique et sociale, 37 (1959): 89–112.
37. Philippe Haudrère, Les compagnies des Indes orientales. Trois siècles
de rencontre entre Orientaux et Occidentaux (1600—1858) (Paris:
Desjonquères, 2006).
38. On recruiting and wages on ships of the EIC: Archives de la Marine à
Lorient, sous-série 2P.
39. AN, Mar, B 2 80, f. 980, 1004, 1099.
40. AN Mar, A2 XXV, XXIX.
41. Archives de la défense et des anciens combattants, archives du port de
Lorient, sous-série 1 P, 273 (pièces relatives à l’Inde).
42. Haudrère, La compagnie, vol. 2, tableau G: 901–2.
43. Archives de la Marine, Lorient, 2P39-I.8.
44. Archives de la Marine, Lorient, 2P39-II.1. Rôle et liste nominative du
Massiac.
45. Jean-Michel André, Les engagés de la Compagnie des Indes: marins et ouvriers
(1717–1770) (Paris : Service historique de la Marine, 2004) (CD-ROM).
46. Haudrère, La compagnie, vol. 2, annexe: 905.
47. Archives de la Marine, Lorient, 1P 70 “Rôle général des gens de marine qu’il
y a eu à Pondichéry et autres comptoirs (1745–1751).”
48. Archives de la Marine, Rochefort, série 2 O, “Maison marine d’arrêt de
Rochefort”; Archives de la Marine, Brest, sous-série 2O.
49. Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 186.
50. Captain Thomas Forrest and M. Démeunier, Illustrations of the Voyage to
the Molluccas and New Guinea on the Galley “La Tartare” in 1774, 1775
Notes 143
and 1776, by Order of the English Company, by Captain Forrest Bernard,

grav (Paris: S.N., 1780).
51. AN Col 6 11, 1734.
52. Louis-Marie-Joseph-Olivier, Count of Grandpré, Voyage dans l’Inde et au
Bengale, fait dans les années 1789 et 1790, contenant la description des îles
Seychelles et de Trinquemalay . . . suivi d’un voyage fait dans la mer Rouge,
contenant la description de Moka, 2 vols (Paris: Dentu, 1800).
53. Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Nantes au temps de la traite des noirs (Paris:
Hachette, 2007).
54. Archives de la marine de Brest, série P, Navigation commerciale et recrute-
ment des équipages; archives de la défense, Vincennes, séries CC3 (troupes
et équipages) et CC4 (inscription maritime et navigation commerciale).
55. Archives de la Marine, Vincennes, sous-série FF1.
56. Jacques-August Filleau, Traité de l’engagement des équipages des bâtiments
du commerce (Bordeaux: P. Chaumas-Gayet, Libraire, 1857).
57. Jean-Baptiste Bielle, Le Recrutement de l’armée. Recueil des lois, décrets et
instructions ministérielles relatifs au recrutement de l’armée et aux engage-
ments volontaires dans l’armée de terre, la marine et l’armée coloniale
(Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1901).
58. Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, Règlement général sur l’administration
des quartiers, sous-quartiers et syndicats maritimes, l’inscription maritime,
le recrutement de la flotte, la police de la navigation, les pêches maritimes
(7 novembre 1866) (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1867).
59. Charles Le Cour Grandemaison, Conditions des gens de mer (Nantes:
Imprimerie Vincent Forest et Émile Grimaud, 1870).
60. Marie-Laure Goebbels, “Histoire du droit social de la marine,” Revista
Crítica de Historia de las Relaciones Laborales y de la Política Social, nos,
1–2 (diciembre 2010/jenero 2011): 12–28
61. Filleau, Traité.
62. Aldrick Caumont, “Gens de mer, salaire, dernier voyage,” reprint from
Revue critique de jurisprudence maritime (Nantes: Imprimerie Mellinet,
1869).
63. On this the special issue: “La marine marchande française de 1850 à 2000,”
Revue d’histoire maritime 5 (2006) in particular: Jean-Louis Lenhof, “Voile
ou vapeur. Le travail et la vie à bord des cargos français à la fin du XIXe
siècle,” Revue d’histoire maritime 5 (2006): 59–102.
64. Eugène Fron and D. Déléarde, Inscrits maritimes au droit des accidents du
travail ou l’assurance des gens de mer (Paris: Augustin Challamel Éditeur,
1905).
65. Fron and Déléarde, Inscrits maritimes.
66. Archives de la Marine, Rochefort, sous- série 3 O, Justice maritime, 3O4,
Arrêts de la cour de cassation intéressant spécialement les juridictions mari-
times, 1828–44.
67. Patrick Chaumette, “De l’évolution du droit social des gens de mer Les
marins sont-ils des salariés comme les autres? Spécificités, banalisation
et imbrication des sources,” Annuaire de droit maritime et océanique, 27
(2009): 471–99, Université de Nantes.
144 Notes
68. Accidents du travail. Nomenclature des taux d’incapacité admis générale-

ment par les cours et tribunaux. Dans le présent recueil sont réunies les
décisions de jurisprudence les plus intéressantes. Elles sont groupées sous
forme de tableaux indiquant les taux de réduction propres à chaque mutila-
tion. Fascicule 44 (Paris: Impr. Chaix, 1925).
69. Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000).
70. Centre des archives d’outre mer (henceforth CAOM) FM SG/Reu (fonds
ministériels, Séries géographiques/ Réunion) c158 d 1307.
71. Janet Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedman, and Other Migrants
in the North-Western Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical
Review, 105, 1 (2000): 69–91; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The
Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1989).
72. CAOM, FM SG/Inde, c 464, d 590; CAOM FM SG/Reu c 382 d 3318, c 379
d 3206.
73. CAOM FM SG/Reu c158 d 1307.
74. CAOM FM SG/Reu c158 d 1307.
3 Sailors in the British Empire

1. Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First
Globalized Industry, 1820 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011).
2. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain,
1649–1815 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
3. Keith Mercer, “Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in
British North America, 1775–1815,” Canadian Historical Review, 91, 2
(2010): 199–232.
4. Fink, Sweatshops at Sea.
5. Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, Chapter 1.
6. B. R. Mitchell, with Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 216–18.
7. Angus Maddison, The World Economy. A Millenium Perspective (Delhi:
OCDE), p. 197.
8. Douglass North, “Sources of Productivity Change in Ocean Shipping,
1600–1850,” Journal of Political Economy, 76, 5 (1968): 953–70.
9. Myra Glenn, The Campaign against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors,
Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1984).
10. David Williams, “Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Seamen,” International
Journal of Maritime History, 3, 1 (1991): 101–26.
11. Michael H. Fisher, Counter Flows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and
Settlers in Britain 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
12. Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and
Identity, 1880–1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
13. Fisher, Counter Flows.
Notes 145
14. Michael Fisher, “Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Laborers in
India, Britain, and in between, 1600–1857,” in Rana Behal and Marcel van
der Linden (eds.), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism. Studies in Indian Labor
History, International Review of Social History Supplements (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 21–46.
15. Gopalan Balachandran, Globalizing Labor: Indian Seafarers and World
Shipping c. 1870–1945 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
16. Janet Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedman, and Other Migrants
in the North-Western Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical
Review, 105, 1 (2000): 69–91.
17. Janet Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation,
c. 1840–1914,” Slavery and Abolition, 31, 3 (2010): 451–66.
18. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea,” p. 83.
19. Edward Alpers, “The Somali Community at Aden in the Nineteenth
Century,” Northeast African Studies 8, 2–3 (1986): 143–68.
20. Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South-Asian
Seamen, c. 1900–1960,” International Review of Social History, 51 (2006):
111–41.
21. Fisher, “Working across the Seas.”
22. Jonathan Glassman, “The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory
Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast,” Journal of African
History, 32, 2 (1991): 303–9.
23. R. L. Playfair, History of Arabia Felix, Including an Account of the British
Settlement of Aden (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1859, reprinted
Farnborough: Gregg International, 1970), p. 15.
24. Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen.”
25. Anirudh Deshpande, “The Bombay Marine: Aspects of Maritime History,
1650–1850,” Studies in History, 11, 2 (1995): 281–301; Charles R. Low,
History of the Indian Navy, 1613–1863 (London: Bentley and Son, 1877).
26. Ewald, ‘‘Crossers,” 75.
27. Alan Cobley, “Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine
in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” History Workshop Journal, 58 (Autumn
2004): 259–74.
28. Ewald, “Bondsmen.”
29. Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment,” p. 124.
30. Ewald, “Bondsmen.”
31. Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Cobley, “Black West Indian Seamen.”
32. Gopalan Balachandran, “Conflicts in the International Maritime Labor
Market: British and Indian Seamen, Employers, and the State, 1890–1939,”
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39, 1 (2002): 71–100.
4 Slaveries and Emancipation

1. Jakob Vogt, The Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1979).
146 Notes
2. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2000), p. 37.
3. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 41.
6. Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in
Jan S. Hogendorn (ed.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic
History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979),
Table 2.8: p. 66. Ralph Austen, “The Nineteenth Century Islamic Slave
Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,”
Slavery and Abolition, 9 (1988): 21–44.
7. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 61–62, 155–58.
8. Ralph Austin, “The Nineteenth century Islamic Slave Trade from East
Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in William
Gervase Clarence-Smith (ed.), The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave
Trade (London: Frank Cass 1989), pp. 21–44.
9. Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction,” to Gwyn Campbell (ed.), The Structure of
Slavery in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004),
pp. i–xxxii.
10. Angela Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial
China,” in Campbell, The Structure, pp. 143–154.
11. Shinan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, “On the African Diaspora
in the Indian Ocean Region,” in Shinan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard
Pankhurst (eds.), The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NY
and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2003), pp. 7–18.
12. Esmond B. Martin and T. C. Ryan, “A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab
Slave Trade of East Africa, 1770–1896,” Kenya Historical Review, 5, 1
(1977): 71–91.
13. William Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz
under the Ottoman Control (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984).
14. Erik Gilbert, “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean : Long-
Distance Trade, Empire, Migration, and Regional Unity,” The History
Teacher, 36, 1 (2002): 5–34.
15. C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast, Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the
East African Littoral, 1798–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977),
pp. 101, 257.
16. Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Patterns of International Trade
in East and Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).
17. Robert Brunschvig, “Abd,” in Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Encyclopedia of Islam,
vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), pp. 24–40.
18. Pier Larson, “African Diasporas and the Atlantic,” in Jorge Canizares-
Esguerra and Erik Seeman (eds.), The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–
2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), pp. 129–47.
19. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory (London: J. Currey, 1987), p. 37.
20. Jean-Marie Fillot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: Orstom, 1974); Sudel Fuma, L’esclavagisme à la Réunion,
Notes 147
1794–1848 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992); Jacques Weber, “L’émigration

indienne des comptoirs, 1828–1861,” Etudes et documents IHPOM 11
(1979): 133–59; and Richard Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and
Labor Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries,” in Campbell, The Structure, pp. 33–50.
21. Fillot, La traite, pp. 54–69.
22. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade,” p. 36.
23. Edward Alpers, “The French Slave Trade in East Africa 1721–1810,” Cahiers
d’études africaines 10, 37 (1970): 80–124.
24. Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, “Introduction,” in Gwyn
Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (eds.), Bonded Labour and Debt in the
Indian Ocean (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 1–21.
25. Gareth Austin, “Human Pawning in Asante, 1820–1950: Markets and
Coercion, Gender and Cocoa,” in Paul Lovejoy and Tonin Falola (eds.),
Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Asmara, Eritrea: Africa
World Press, 2003), pp. 187–220.
26. Lovejoy and Falola, Pawnship, p. 4.
27. Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Pawns Will Live When Slaves Is Apt
to Dye: Credit, Risk and Trust at Old Calabar in the Era of Slave Trade,” in
Lovejoy and Falola, Pawnship, pp. 71–96.
28. Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–
1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
29. Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1950), pp. 47, 150.
30. Schottenhammer, “Slaves and Forms of Slavery.”
31. Martin A. Klein, “Introduction: Modern European Expansion and
Traditional Servitude in Africa and Asia,” in Klein (ed.), Breaking the
Chains. Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia
(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 11; Utsa Patnaik
and Manjari Dingwaney, eds., Chains of Servitude, Bondage and Slavery in
India (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1985), pp. 25–26.
32. Campbell and Stanziani, “Introduction,” Bonded Labour.
33. Karine Delaye, “Slavery and Colonial Representations in Indochina from
the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries,” in
Campbell (ed.), Structure of Slavery, pp. 129–42.
34. Utsa Patnaik, “Introduction,” to Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney
(eds.), Chains of Servitude, pp. 29–31.
35. Monica Schuler, “The Recruitment of African Indentured Laborers for
European Colonies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Pieter Emmer (ed.),
Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labor before and after Slavery
(Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), pp. 125–61;
Herbert Gerbeau, “Quelques aspects de la traite illégale des esclaves à
Bourbon au XIXe siècle,” Mouvements de populations dans l’Océan indien
(Paris: Imprim Champion, 1979), pp. 273–96; Louis Maillard, Notes sur
l’île de la Réunion (Paris: Dentu, 1862).
36. Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade,” pp. 37–38.
148 Notes
37. Gwyn Campbell, “Madagascar and the Slave Trade, 1810–1895,” Journal of
African History, 22, 2 (1981): 203–27.
38. Gwyn Campbell, “Madagascar and Mozambique in the Slave Trade of the
Western Indian Ocean 1800–1861,” in Clarence-Smith, The Economics,
pp. 166–93.
39. Thomas Vernet, “Le commerce des esclaves sur la côte swahilie, 1500–1750,”
Azania, 38 (2003): 69–97; Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders,
the Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
40. Pedro Machado, “a Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati
Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, c. 1730–
1830,” in Campbell, The Structure, pp. 17–32.
41. Markus Vink, “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery in the Indian
Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History, 14, 2 (2003):
131–77.
42. Timothy M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).
43. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A
Political and Economic History (New York: Longman, 1993); Alpers, Ivory
and Slaves; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration
of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–
1873 (London: James Currey, 1987).
44. Clarence-Smith, “Introduction,” in The Economic, pp. 4–8.
45. Machado, “A Forgotten.”
46. CAOM SG/OI 5 d 23 c 4 and 5 (Mémoire sur la population, l’organisation et
l’économie de l’île de Zanguebar).
47. Sheriff, Slaves Spices and Ivory, p. 54.
48. Frasela: a unit widely used along the East African Coast varying from 27
pounds or 12.393 kilograms in Mozambique, 35 pounds in Zanzibar, 36
pounds on the Benadir.
49. CAOM SG/OI c 2, d10, 2 (Mission de M. Guillain à la côte orientale
d’Afrique, 1845–1858).
50. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory, p. 60.
51. Rigby to Anderson, May 14, 1861, The National Archives (TNA) FO
84/146.
52. CAOM SG/OI c2 d 10, 2A.
53. Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide
Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” The
American Historical Review, 109, 5 (2004): 1405–38.
54. Malyn Newitt, “Madagascar and the African Diaspora,” in Jayasuriya and
Pankhurst (eds.), The African Diaspora, pp. 81–98.
55. Seymour Drescher, Abolitions. A History of Slavery and Antislavery
56. On this debates, see among the others: Joseph Calder Miller, Slavery and
Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900–1996 (Armonk, NY: M.
E. Sharpe, 1999); Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage (Paris:
PUF, 1986); Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New
Notes 149
York: Viking Press, 1980); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death:
A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
James Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Clarence-Smith, The
Economics of the Indian Ocean.
57. Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American
Slavery (New York: Norton, 1994), 1: 203–4.
58. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of Transatlantic Slave Trade
59. David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays
on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT: Yale
60. Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 59
61. Lovejoy, Transformations, p. 137.
62. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery (London: Palgrave, 1987);
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London:
Verso, 1988).
63. House of Commons, “Papers in Explanation of the Condition of the Slave
Population, 5 Nov. 1831,” British Parliamentary Papers, 1830–31 (230),
16.1: 59–88.
64. J. R Ward, British West India Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of
Amelioration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
65. Mary Turner, “The British Caribbean, 1823–1838: The Transition from
Slave to Free Legal Status,” in Paul Craven and Douglas Hay (eds.), Masters,
Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the British Empire, 1562–1955
(Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2004), p. 322.
66. Thomas, Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in
Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992).
67. Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (New Delhi: Manohar,
1992); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in
Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
68. Edmund Maestri, ed., Esclavage et abolition dans l’ Océan Indien, 1723–
1869 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
69. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Paris,
1975, and in English translation, by A. Sheridan for Harmondsworth, 1985).
The identification of Foucault’s understanding of the Panopticon solely in
terms of surveillance has recently been challenged by Anne Brunon-Ernst in
“When Foucault Reads Bentham,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting
of the Law and Society Association, Berlin, July 25, 2007, http://www.alla-
cademic.com/meta/p178059_index.html.
70. Let me provide just a few references from the huge bibliography on Foucault
and his interpretation of the Panopticon: Alain McKinlay and Ken Starkey,
eds., Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon
to Technologies of Self (London: Sage Publications, 1998); Janet Semple,
“Foucault and Bentham: A Defence of Panopticism,” Utilitas 4, 1 (1992):
105–20; Jean-Yves Grenier and André Orléan, “Michel Foucault, L’économie
150 Notes
politique et le libéralisme,” Annales HSC 5 (2007): 1155–82; Marc Abélès,

Anthropologie de l’Etat (Paris: Payot, 1990); Louise Warriar, Andrew
Robert, and Jennifer Lewis, Surveillance: An Analysis of Jeremy Bentham
and Michel Foucault and Their Present-day Relevance, http://www.mdx.
ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/ybenfou.htm.
71. Simon Werrett, “Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the
Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth-century Russia,” The Philosophic
Age Almanac 9 (1999, special issue: The Science of Morality: Jeremy
Bentham and Russia): 106–35. See also Ian R. Christie, The Benthams
in Russia, 1780–1791 (Oxford: Berg, 1993); Simon Sebag Montefiore,
“Prince Potemkin and the Benthams: The Project to Create an English
Village with Modern Factories in Belorussia,” History Today 52, 8 (August
2003): 38–43; Alessandro Stanziani, “The Traveling Panopticon: Labor
Institutions and Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 4
(2009): 715–41.
72. Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment (1830), repr. in The Works
of Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring (ed.), 11 vols (Edinburgh: William Tait,
1838–1843), 1: 439.
73. Semple, “Foucault and Bentham,” pp. 130–31.
74. Kathryn Morrison, The Workhouse: A Study of Poor-Law Buildings in
England (Exeter: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of
England, 1999); M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System, 1834–1929: The
History of an English Social Institution (Athens: Georgia University Press,
1981).
75. Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labor Market
Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 114.
76. Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 1st. ser., IX, 1774–
1802: 297–538.
77. J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic
History Review, 36, 4 (1983): 483–505. For classical interpretations, see
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957,
orig. 1944); and Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Middlesex: Penguin,
1969).
78. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, Miran Bozevic (ed.) (London:
Verso, 1995), Letter 1. See fn. 13.
79. Jeremy Bentham, Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of
Legislation, in Works of Jeremy Bentham, 1: 171.
80. Kartik Kalyan Raman, “Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial
India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence,” Modern
Asian Studies, 28, 4 (1994): 739–91.
81. Prakash, Bonded Histories.
82. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British
Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987);
Alan George Levers Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal
Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other
Notes 151
Parts of the British Empire (London: Faber 1966); Gwenda Morgan and
Peter Rushton, eds., Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The
Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004).
83. Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past
84. Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South
Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 5.
85. Frank Lewis, “The Cost of Convict Transportation from Britain to Australia,
1796–1810,” Economic History Review 41, 4 (1988): 507–24.
86. Kenneth Morgan, “Convict Runaways in Maryland, 1745–1775,” Journal
of American Studies 23, 2 (1989): 253–68.
87. Ekirch, Bound for America.
88. Lewis, “The Cost of Convict Transportation.”
89. Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, p. 16.
90. Mauritius National Archives (henceforth MNA) RA 132, Rossi to Barry,
1823.
91. Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, pp. 98–99.
92. For an economic analysis comparing white indentured and convict labor in
North America, see Farley Grubb, “The Transatlantic Market for British
Convict Labor,” The Journal of Economic History, 60, 1 (March 2000):
94–122.
5 Immigrants and Planters in Reunion Island

* A previous version of this and the following chapter has been published in
Modern Asian Studies: “Local Bondage in Global Economies: Servants, Wage
Earners and Indentured Migrants in Nineteenth Century France, Great Britain
and the Mascarene Islands,” Modern Asian Studies, 47, 4 (2013): 1218–51.
Copyright © 2013, Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. I
acknowledge my gratitude to the Journal and Cambridge University Press for
permitting its partial reproduction here.
1. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labor
Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Hansib, 1974); Gyan Prakash, Bonded
Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ho Hai Quang, Histoire économique
de l’île de la Réunion, 1849–1881: Engagisme, croissance et crise (Paris:
Lavoisier, 2004); Sudel Fuma, De l’Inde du sud à la Réunion (Port-Louis:
Graphica, 1999); Sully-Santa Govindin, Les engagés indiens (Saint-Denis
la Réunion: Azalées, 1994); Michèle Marimoutou, Les engagés du sucre
(Saint-Denis La Réunion: Editions du tramail, 1999); Edith Wong-Hee-
Kam, La diaspora chinoise aux Mascareignes: le cas de la Réunion (Paris:
L’Harmattan 1996).
2. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Marina Carter, Servants,
Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi: Oxford
152 Notes
University Press, 1995); Edmond Maestri, ed., Esclavage et abolition dans

l’Océan Indien, 1723–1860 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
3. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor. The Employment Relation
in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: North
Carolina University Press, 1991); On the mobile boundary between free and
unfree labor, see Stanley Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom,
and Free Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Frederick
Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of
Race, Labor, and Citizenship on Post-Emancipation Societies (Chapel Hill:
North Carolina University Press, 2000).
4. Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History:
Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997); David
Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspective (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002); David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial
America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); Farley Grubb, “The Incidence of Servitude in Trans-Atlantic
Migration, 1771–1804,” Explorations in Economic History 22, 3 (1985):
316–39; Guther Paul Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in
the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964); Claude Wanquet, La France et la première abolition de l’esclavage,
1794–1802 (Paris: Karthala 1998); Christian Schnakenbourg, Histoire
de l’industrie sucrière en Guadeloupe aux XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007).
5. Galenson, White Servitude.
6. Monica Schuler, “The Recruitment of African Indentured Laborers for
European Colonies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Pieter C. Emmer,
Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labor before and after Slavery
(Dordrecht: Martin Nijhoff, 1986), pp. 125–62.
7. Northrup, Indentured, p. 45.
8. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990),
p. 210.
9. Adam Mckeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization
of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
10. Michael Anderson, “India, 1858–1930: The Illusion of Free Labor,” in
Paul Craven and Douglas Hay (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in
11. Prakash, Bonded Histories.
12. Tirthankar Roy, “Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labor Contractor and
Indian Economic History,” Modern Asian Studies, 42, 5 (2008): 971–98.
13. India Office Records, Emigration Proceeding, 1862, 1241–68; Sanderson
Report on the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies
and Protectorate (London: H.M.S.O, 1910): question 2923.
14. Surendra Bhana, Indentured Indian Emigrants to Natal, 1860–1902. A
Study Based on Ships’ List (New Delhi: Promilla, 1991).
15. Carter, Servants, Sirdars.
Notes 153

18. Northrup, Indentured, pp. 92–93.
19. Sucheng Chan, “European and Asian Immigration into the United States
in Comparative Perspective, 1820s to 1920s,” in Virginia Yans-McLaughin
(ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 44.
20. British Parliamentary Papers, General Report of the Colonial Land and
Emigration Commission, 1866, Appendix 17. 1857–58, 34 (2395).
21. British Parliamentary Papers 1847–48, 26 (961).
22. Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South
Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
23. The rare research works have been done by: Gabriel Debien, Les enga-
gés pour les Antilles 1634–1715 (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies
françaises, 1952); Louise Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal
au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1974); Frédéric Mauro, “French Indentured
Servants for America, 1500–1800,” in Emmer, Colonialism and Migration,
pp. 83–104.
24. Archives Départementales de Charente maritime (ADCM), Minutier
Teuleron, 1638–80, in particular files: 1638, 1641, 1649, 1651, 1666–67,
1670, 1671. Also: Bibliothèque nationale, section des manuscrits, “Nouvelles
acquisitions de France,” 9328, copies of documents on immigration to the
colonies (inhabitants, engagés, slaves).
25. Archives Départementales de Charente maritime, Ex Moreau minutes, April
19 and 25, 1664.
26. Emile Coornaert, Les corporations en France (Paris: Gallimard 1941);
Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1963); William Sewell, Gens de métier et révolution. Le
langage du travail de l’Ancien régime à 1848 (Paris: Aubier, 1983).
27. Michael Sonenscher, Works and Wages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Philippe Minard, La fortune du colbertisme (Paris: Fayard,
1998); Steven L. Kaplan, La fin des corporations (Paris: Fayard, 2002);
Steven R. Epstein, “Crafts, Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological
Change in Preindustrial Europe,” The Journal of Economic History, 58,
3 (1998): 684–713; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820
(London: Routledge, 1985); Alessandro Stanziani, ed., Dictionnaire histo-
rique de l’économie-droit, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: Librairie Générale de
Droit et Jurisprudence, 2007).
28. Alain Cottereau, “Droit et bon droit. Un droit des ouvriers instauré, puis
évincé par le droit du travail, France, XIXe siècle,” Annales HSC, 57, 6
(2002): 1521–57; Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labor
Market Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Willibald Steinmetz, ed., Private Law and
Social Inequalities in the Industrial Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000).
29. Alain Dewerpe, Le monde du travail en France, 1800–1950 (Paris:
Colin, 1989); Yves Lequin and Pierre Delsalle, La brouette et la navette:
Tisserands,paysans et fabricants dans la région de Roubaix et de Tourcoing,
154 Notes
1800–1848 (Lille: Westhoek, 1985); Jacques Le Goff, Du silence à la parole

(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004).
30. Jean Domat, Les lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel. First published 1697;
reprinted in Œuvres (Paris : Alex Gobelet, 1835); Robert-Joseph Pothier,
Traité du contrat de louage (Paris: Bugnet, 1861).
31. Sonenscher, Works and Wages, p. 70.
32. Sonenscher, Works and Wages, p. 75.
33. Encyclopédie méthodique, Vol. 9: “Jurisprudence” (Paris: Panckoucke,
1789), 15. Sara Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century France
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Jean-Pierre Gutton,
Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Aubier-
Montaigne, 1981).
34. Cottereau, “Droit.”
35. Jean-Marc Moriceau, “Les Baccanals ou grèves des moissonneurs en pays de
France, seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” in Jean Nicolas (ed.), Mouvements
populaires et conscience sociale (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), pp. 420–33.
36. Phil Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society. The French Countryside,
1450–1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 45–46.
37. E. J. T. Collins, “Migrant Labor in British Agriculture in Nineteenth
Century,” Economic History Review, 29, 1 (1976): 38–59; Gilles Postel-
Vinay, “The Dis-integration of Traditional Labor Markets in France: From
Agriculture and Industry to Agriculture or Industry,” in George Grantham
and Mary MacKinnon (eds), Labor Market Evolution (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 64–83.
38. Parliamentary enquiry of 1870, in AN, C 1157 to 1161.
39. Henri Oudin, Recueil des usages locaux en vigueur dans le département
de la Vienne (Poitiers: Oudin, 1861); Antoine Pages, Usages et règlements
locaux, servant de complément à la loi civile et topographie légale du dépar-
tement de l’Isère (Grenoble: Baratier frères 1855).
40. Archives Départementales de Charente maritime, Minutier Teuleron,
1638–80, in particular files: 1638, 1641, 1649, 1651, 1666–67, 1670, 1671.
41. Archives Charente Maritime, Ex Moreau minutes, April 19 and 25, 1664.
42. Debien, Les engagés, 46–47. However, two clauses differentiated the appren-
ticeship contract from the contract of engagement: the act of apprenticeship
emphasized training in a trade, whereas in the contract of engagement, the
engagé first owed his labor to his master who, in exchange, was to teach him
about colonial farming. It was also the master who gave a lump sum to his
engagé and not the other way around as in the case of the apprentice.
43. Dechêne, Habitants; Mauro, “French Indentured Servants.”
45. Jean-Marie Fillot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: Orstom, 1974); Hubert Gerbeau, “Engagees and Coolies on
Reunion Island. Slavery’s Mask and Freedom’s Constraints,” in Emmer,
Colonialism, pp. 209–36; Hubert Gerbeau, “Covert Slaves and Coveted
Coolies in the Early Nineteenth-Century Mascaraignes,” Slavery and
Abolition, 9 (1988): 194–208; Jacques Weber, “L’émigration indienne des
comptoirs, 1828–1861,” Etudes et documents IHPOM, Aix en province,
Notes 155
11 (1979): 133–59; Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade; Jean-Vincent Payet,

Histoire de l’esclavage à l’ile Bourbon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990).
46. Fillot, La traite; Fuma, L’esclavage.
47. Fillot, La traite, 54–69. Edward Alpers, “The French Slave Trade in East
Africa 1721–1810,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 10, 37 (1970): 80–124.
48. Monica Schuler, “The Recruitment,” pp. 125–61.
49. TNA, CO 415/9/A.221, 1827.
50. Archives départementales de la Réunion (henceforth ADR) 57 M1.
51. Louis Maillard, Notes sur l’île de la Réunion (Paris: Dentu, 1862), p. 190.
52. Bulletin officiel de l’Ile Bourbon, arrêté du 3 juillet 1829.
53. Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island Slavery in Eighteenth Century
Mauritius (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
54. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 406, c 432 d 4603 through 4606 (immigration chi-
noise). Also: ADR 168 M 3.
55. Sudel Fuma, Esclaves et citoyens, le destin de 62 000 Réunionnais, histoire
de l’insertion des affranchis de 1848 dans la société réunionnaise (Saint-
Denis, La Réunion: Fondation pour la Recherche et le Développement dans
l’Océan Indien, 1979, 2nd ed., 1982), p. 116.
56. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 380 d 3288, c 370 d 3180.
57. CAOM FM SG/Inde 464, d 590, letter February 26, 1848.
58. L’indicateur colonial, April 12, 1845.
59. CAOM, Réunion, tableau de l’immigration africaine à la réunion de 1848
à 1869, c 454, d 5042 à 5074. Also Ho Hai Huang, Histoire économique
de l’île de la Réunion, 1849–1881: Engagisme, croissance et crise (Paris:
Lavoisier, 2004).
60. Schuler, “The Recrutement”; François Renault, Libération d’esclaves et
nouvelle servitude: les rachats de captifs africains pour le compte des colo-
nies françaises après l’abolition de l’esclavage (Abidjan: Nea, 1976); Sidi
Ainouddine, “L’esclavage aux Comores. Son fonctionnement de la période
arabe en 1904,” in Maestri, Esclavage, pp. 89–114.
61. Virginie Chaillou, De l’Inde à la Réunion. Histoire d’une transition.
L’épreuve du lazaret, 1860–1882 (Saint-André de la Réunion: Océan édi-
tions, 2002).
62. Jacques Weber, “L’émigration indienne à la Réunion: ‘Contraire à la morale’
ou ‘utile à l’humanité,” in Maestri, Esclavage, pp. 309–28.
63. Le Moniteur de la Réunion, July 3, 1852.
64. Bulletin officiel de l’île de la Réunion, February 13, 1852.
65. Litigations are available in: ADR, séries U 339, 349 (justice of the peace).
66. CAOM FM SM/Reu c 379 d 3211 and c 383 d 3323.
67. CAOM FM SG/ Reu c 384 d 3341, Reports of the syndic of immigrants,
1858, 1859 up to 1864.
68. CAOM FM SG/ Reu c 384 d 3341, Reports of the syndic of immigrants,
1858, 1859 up to 1864.
69. Northrup, Indentured, pp. 129–32.
70. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 382 (a few dozen files) and c 379.
71. CAOM FM SG/ Reu c 379 d 3211.
72. CAOM FM SG/ Reu c 382 d 3324, 3310 3311, 3318.
156 Notes
73. CAOM FM SG/Réunion c 379 d 3217, 3210.

74. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 382 d 3323.
75. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 382 d.3323.
77. CAOM SG/Reu c 385 d 3367.
78. Justice cour d’assise, Saint-Denis, 3e session 1868, CAOM FM SG/Reu c 385
d 3367.
79. Northrup, Indentured, 31; Richard Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured
Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 23.
80. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 400 d 3688; c 514 d 5970. Also Alexandre Bourquin,
Claude Prudhomme, and Hubert Gerbeau, Histoire des petits-blancs à la
Réunion (Paris: Karthala, 2005).
82. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
6 From British Servants to Indentured

Immigrants: The Case of Mauritius
1. David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic
Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2. Peter H. Lindert and Geoffrey Williamson, “Revising England’s Social
Tables, 1688–1812,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982): 385–
408. Also Peter H. Lindert and Geoffrey Williamson, “English Workers’
Living Standards during the Industrial Revolution: A New Look,” Economic
History Review, 36, 1 (1983): 1–25.
3. Charles Timmer, “The Turnip, the New Husbandry, and the English
Agricultural Revolution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 83, 3 (1969):
375–95.
4. Alessandro Stanziani, “The Traveling Panopticon. Labor Institutions and
Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51, 4 (2009): 715–41.
5. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation
in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870. (Chapel Hill:
North Carolina University Press, 1991), p. 30; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in
Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
6. Donna C. Woods, “The Operation of the Masters and Servants Act in the
Black Country, 1858–1875,” Midland History, 7, 1 (1982): 93–115; Mark R.
Freedland, The Contract of Employment (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976); David Galenson, “The Rise of Free Labor: Economic Change and the
Enforcement of Service Contract in England, 1361–1875,” in John James
and Mark Thomas (eds.), Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic
Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 114–37.
Notes 157
7. Francis Slyder and Douglas Hay, “Introduction,” in Francis Slyder and Douglas
Hay (eds.), Labor, Law, and Crime (London: Tavistock, 1987), p. 15.
8. Michael Postan, “The Chronology of Labor Services,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 20 (1937): 169–93.
9. Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
10. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
11. Steinfeld, The Invention, pp. 17–22.
12. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay, eds, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in
13. Ann Kussmaul, “The Ambiguous Mobility of Farm Servants,” The Economic
History Review, 34, 2 (1981): 222–35.
15. George Barnsby, Social Conditions in the Black Country (Wolverhamptom:
Integrated Publishers, 1980).
16. Douglas Hay and Nick Rogers, English Society in the Eighteenth Century:
Shuttles and Swords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Douglas Hay,
“Masters and Servants in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Century,” in Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), Private Law and Social
Inequalities in the Industrial Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
pp. 227–64.
17. Joanna Innes, “Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800,” in
Slyder and Hay, Labor, pp. 92–122.
18. Richard H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New
York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 47.
19. Kussmaul, Servants.
20. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay, “The Criminalization of Free Labor: Masters
and Servants in Comparative Perspective,” Slavery and Abolition, 15, 2
(1994): 71–101.
21. Judicial Statistics, England and Wales, 1857–1875, 19 vols (London,
1858–76), quoted in Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor
in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 73–78.
22. Douglas Hay, “England 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses,” in Hay and
Craven, Masters, Servants, p. 67.
23. Wood, “Operations,” p. 102.
24. Wood, “Operations,” p. 107.
25. Hay and Craven, “Introduction,” in Hay, Craven, Masters, Servants.
26. R. Burn, The Justice of Peace and Parish Officer, 4 vols (London: A. Strahan,
1785), 1: 98.
27. J. Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law (London: S. Sweet, 1767), p. 413.
28. John Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon, “Markets for Children in Early
America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship,” The Journal of
Economic History, 62, 2 (2002): 356–82; Farley Grubb, “The Auction
158 Notes
of Redemptioner Servants, Philadelphia, 1771–1804,” The Journal of

Economic History, 48, 3 (1988): 583–603; Benjamin Llebaner, “Pauper
Auctions: The New England Method or Public Poor Relief,” Essex Institute
Historical Collection, 91 (1955): 195–210.
29. Llebaner, “Pauper Auctions,” 195–210.
30. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery (London: Palgrave, 1987);
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–
1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
31. House of Commons, Papers in explanation of the condition of the slave pop-
ulation, November 5, 1831, British Parliamentary Papers, 1830–31 (230),
16.1: 59–88.
32. Mary Turner, “The British Caribbean, 1823–1838: The Transition from Slave
to Free Legal Status,” Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants, 303–22; J. R.
Ward, British West India Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration
33. Pieter C. Emmer ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labor before
and after Slavery. Dordrecht (Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986);
on apprentices in Réunion, see Sudel Fuma, De l’Inde du sud à l’Ile de La
Réunion, les réunionnais d’origine indienne d’après le rapport Mackenzie
(Saint-Denis de La Réunion: Université de la Réunion and Grahter, 1999).
For a comparison, see Stanley Engerman, “Economic Change and Contract
Labor in the British Caribbean: The End of Slavery and the Adjustment to
Emancipation,” Explorations in Economic History, 21 (1984): 133–50;
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica
and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992).
35. Steinfeld, The Invention.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Table A.1: 156–57.
37. Richard Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial
Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84. Claude
Wanquet, “Violences individuelles et violence institutionnalisée: le régime
servile de l’Ile de France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle à la lumière des dossiers
de procédure criminelle,” in Edmond Maestri (ed.), Esclavage et abolition
dans l’Océan Indien, 1723–1860 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), pp. 203–26 ;
Hubert Gerbeau, “Les indiens des Mascaraignes. Simples jalons pour
l’histoire d’une réussite (XVIle–XXe siècle),” Annuaire des pays de Indian
Ocean, XII (1990–91): 15–45 (Aix-en-Provence : Éditions du CNRS/ Presses
universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1992).
38. Musleem Jumeer, Les affranchissements et les libres à l’ile de France à la fin
de l’Ancien Régime, 1768–1789 (PhD, Université de Poitiers, 1979), pp. 24,
54, 105, 212–14.
39. Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–
1874 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
40. Vijaya Teelock, Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in Nineteenth Century
Mauritius (Moka: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1998).
Notes 159
41. Correspondence concerning the Indian immigration to Mauritius in: British

Parliamentary Papers, 1840, 37 (331), 1842, 30 (26), 1844, 35 (356 and
530), 1846, 28 (691 II). Also TNA CO 167/245, Stanley, July 26, 1843.
42. Northrup, Indentured Labor, p. 20.
43. Allen, Slaves, 16–17. Also Auguste Toussaint, Histoire de l’ile Maurice
(Paris : PUF, 1974).
44. Colony of Mauritius, Annual report, 1854, British Parliamentary Papers
92, (2050). Also Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast (Delhi: Oxford
45. British Parliamentary Papers, 1841, 16 (45), Petition of the inhabitants of
Calcutta.
46. Carter, Servants, p. 3.
47. Satteeanund Peerthum, “Le système d’apprentissage à Mauritius 1835–
1839: plus esclave mais pas encore libre,” in Maestri, Esclavage, pp. 285–94;
Jocelyne Chan-Low, “Aux origines du malaise créole? Les ex-apprentis dans
la société mauricienne, 1839–1860,” in Maestri, Esclavage, pp. 267–84.
48. Allen, Slaves.
49. Chan-Low, “Aux origines.”
50. Pier Larson, Oceans of Letters. Language and Creolization in an Indian
Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
51. British Parliamentary Papers 1842, 30 (26): 25.
52. Carter, Servants.
53. Allen, Slaves, p. 60.
54. British Parliamentary Papers 1836, 49 (166), 1837–38, 52 (180); 1840, 37
(58); 1847–48, 46 (250); TNA CO 167/201.
55. British Parliamentary Papers, 1837–38, 52 (180).
56. British Parliamentary Papers, 1837–38, 52 (180),1849, 37 (280).
57. British Parliamentary Papers, 1842, 30 (26).
58. TNA CO 167/263. Labor Committee Evidence, Appendix A, October 22,
1845. British Parliamentary Papers 1847, 39 (325).
59. TNA CO 167/213, 202, 266.
60. “Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the
Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius,” in British Parliamentary Papers,
1875, 34 (704), and Appendices A and B. Colony of Mauritius, Printed doc-
uments, Annual Report of the Protector of Immigrants, 1860–85.
61. “Report of the Royal Commissioners.”
62. Allen, Slaves, pp. 69–71.
64. Colony of Mauritius, Protector of Immigrants.
65. TNA CO 167/252.
66. Mauritius Immigration Department, Annual Report of the Protector of
Immigrants (Port Louis: R. W. Brooks, 1860–85).
67. Allen, Slaves, pp. 69–71.
68. British Parliamentary Papers 1836, 49 (166); 1837–38, 52 (180); 1840, 37
(58); 1847–48, 46 (250); TNA CO 167/201.
70. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–38, 52 (180).
160 Notes
71. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–38, 52 (180); 1849, 37 (280).

72. TNA CO 167/263; Labor Committee Evidence, Appendix A, October 22,
1845, British Parliamentary Papers 1847, 39 (325).
73. TNA CO 167/213, 202, 266.
74. CAOM, FM/SG REU 380/3228, minute 6, March 1876.
77. CAOM, FM/SG REU 380/3228, minute 6, March 1876: 13.
79. Carter, Servants, p. 179.
82. CAOM, FM/SG REU 380/3228, several minutes, 1877–82.
83. Allen, Slaves.
84. Allen, Slaves, “Introduction” and Chapter 6.
85. Mauritius National Archives (MNA) NA 80, 83, 84.
86. British Parliamentary Papers 1901, 106: 78–81.
87. MNA NA 80, 83, 84. For loans by Indian merchants in Mauritius, see MNA
NA 102, several files.
88. Colony of Mauritius, Blue Book for the Colony of Mauritius (Port Louis:
Storekeeper General’s Printing Establishment, 1900–8).
90. British Parliamentary Papers, 1924, 24: 99–102.
92. M. K. Banton, “The Colonial Office, 1820–1955: Constantly the Subject
of Small Struggles,” in Hay and Craven, Masters, pp. 251–302; Frederick
Cooper, “From Free Labor to Family Allowances: Labor and African Society
in Colonial Discourse,” American Ethnologist, 16, 4 (1989): 745–65;
Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique occidentale française, 1900–1946
(Paris: Karthala, 1993).
93. On this debate, see Alessandro Stanziani, “Free Labor-Forced Labor: An
Uncertain Boundary? The Circulation of Economic Ideas Between Russia
and Europe from the Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 9, 1 (2008): 1–27.
95. CAOM FM SG/Reu c 400 d 3688 and c 515 d 6005.
96. Banton, “The Colonial Office.”
General Conclusion
1. Among the others: Dominic Lieven, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its
Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London: Pimlico, 2003);
John Darwin, After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires,
1400–2000 (London: Penguin, 2007); Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and
Empire (Middlesex: Penguin, 1969); Immauel Wallerstein, The Modern
World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989).
Notes 161
2. Joel Mokyr, The Level of Riches (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990),
p. 114.
3. Eric A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the
Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).
4. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, 2nd ed. (London:
Longmans, 1911).
5. Hugh Armstrong Clegg, Alan Fox, and A. Thompson, A History of British
Trade Unions since 1889, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
7. Gilbert Bentley, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain:
The Origins of the Welfare State (London: Joseph, 1966); Jose Harris,
Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886–1914
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
8. Bruno Veneziani, “The Evolution of the Contract of Employment,” in Bob
Hepple (ed.), The Making of the Labor Law in Europe (London: Mansell,
1986), pp. 31–72.
9. Robert Salais, Nicolas Bavarez, and Benedicte Reynaud, L’invention du
chômage (Paris: PUF, 1986).
10. Marta Torre-Schaub, Essai sur la construction juridique de la catégorie
de marché (Paris: LGDJ, 2002). Alessandro Stanziani, Rules of Exchange:
French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective, Eighteenth to Early
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012).
11. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization
of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
12. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and
Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, CT,
and London: Yale University Press, 1980).
13. McKeown, Melancholy Order.
14. Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History: The
Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996).
15. Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their Immigration
and Settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1969).
16. Robert H. G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
17. Arjan de Haan, “Migration on the Border of Free and Unfree Labor:
Workers in Calcutta’s Jute Industry, 1900–1990,” in Jan and Leo Lucassen
(eds.), Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New
Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 197–222.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 150.
19. Cooper, From Slaves.
162 Notes
20. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: the Republican Idea of Empire in

France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997); Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: California University
Press, 1997).
21. Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique occidentale française, 1900–1946
(Paris: Karthala, 1993).
22. Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War. A Social and Economic History
(London: Pearson Education, 2005); Christopher Fischer, Civilians in a
World at War (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
23. Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (Walnut Creek and
Oxford: Altmira Press, 2003).
24. Andrew Turton, “Violent Capture of People for Exchange on Karen-Thai
Borders in the 1830s,” in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Structure of Slavery in
Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 69–82.
25. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 13–14.
26. Martin Ford, “Indirect Rule and the Brief Apogee of Pawnship in Nimba,
Liberia, 1918–1930,” in Paul Lovejoy and Toyin Fayola (eds.), Pawnship,
Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, Asmara: Africa World Press,
2003), pp. 283–98.
27. Jan Breman, Labor Bondage in West India (Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford
28. Alice and Daniel Thorner, Land and Labor in India (Bombay, London: Asia
Publishing House, 1962), pp. 61–64.
29. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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Index
Abyssinia, Abyssinian, 23 Caribbean, 69, 70, 79, 80, 86, 90, 91,
Aden, 20, 24, 63, 64, 71, 86 95, 103
Angria, 28, 29 caste, 4, 22, 27, 28, 75, 76, 87, 88,
apprenticeship, 5, 38, 54, 58, 81, 95, 133
82, 85, 97, 99, 112, 113, 115, census, 35, 36, 76
154n42 child, children, 4, 14, 29, 47, 60, 71,
Arabian Sea, 16, 22, 23, 27, 29, 52 73, 74, 75, 82, 84, 88, 101, 102,
Arakan, 23 112, 113, 132
Australia, 66, 86, 87, 92, 127, 130 China, 6, 15, 16, 17, 20, 25, 27, 29,
44, 76, 92, 93, 94, 96, 129, 130
Baluchi, 73 civil code, 48, 50, 98
Bantu, 72 Colbert, 33, 35, 37
Barbados, 70, 82 colonial
Beilul, 71 administration, 100, 101, 103
Bengal, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27, 45, 88, authorities, 67, 74, 75, 88, 101,
129, 143n52 104, 117, 118, 123
Bentham, Jeremy, 30, 61, 83, 84, 85, code, 30
107 discourse, 6
Bijapur, 44 elites, 6, 30, 91, 94, 106, 124
Bordeaux, 38, 40 government, 113, 122
Borneo, 92, 129 labor, 5, 10, 63, 125 (see also labor)
Brazil, 39, 69, 79, 80, 81 law, 102
Burma, 22, 29, 31, 75, 92, 94, 129, officers, 82, 103
132 officials, 31
manpower, 52, 53, 63
Caisse nationale d’assurance power, 32, 90, 91, 132, 133
mutuelle, 49 recruitment (see recruitment)
Cambay, 20, 24 rulers, 101, 132
cannon, 22 seamen (see seamen)
Cape of Good Hope, 17, 43 state, 120, 131
capital, 24, 86, 120, 121, 124, 125, studies, 10, 13
126 subjects, 6, 10
capitalism, 1, 2, 9, 24, 122 trade, 30
caravan, 91 transports, 31
186 Index
colonialism, 3, 123 Gabon, 83

Comoros, 72, 77, 116 galley, 4, 8, 9, 10, 21, 23, 33–5, 44,
compensation, 43, 48, 82, 98, 99, 45, 52, 53, 125
100, 119, 127 Goa, 20, 28
concubine, 71, 73, 77, 79 Grotius, 26
contract, 5, 6, 7, 19, 36, 38, 41, 48, Guandong, 92
49, 52, 53, 61, 65, 74–7, 81, 86, Gujarat, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 77, 132
89, 90, 92, 93, 96–123, 124, gunpowder, 23
126–31 Guyana, 82, 113, 130
convict, 1, 5, 33, 34, 43, 45, 52, 64,
83, 87, 88, 95, 96, 110, 125, Hanway, Jonas, 84
135n1 Hawaii, 92, 130
copper, 23, 70 health
Coromandel, 24, 28, 44 care, 102, 103
cotton, 78. See also textile insurance, 49
court, 50, 51, 90, 100, 102, 104, 105, hiring, 6, 97, 98, 102, 109, 127
110, 117, 119, 127 hurricane, 18
credit, 71, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 92, 93,
94 ILO, 122, 124, 132
cyclone, 16–19 Imerina Empire, 73
indentured, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 19,
debt, 3, 4, 71, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 93, 58, 64, 67, 70, 83, 86–96, 102,
112, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120, 103, 105, 107–22, 124, 125, 128,
121, 130, 132 129, 130, 132
dhow, 21, 73 Indian Criminal Code, 93
dhum, 23 Indian Navy, 29, 64
Dieppe, 40 Indonesia, 6, 22, 27, 45, 75
domestic inequalities, 6, 10, 54, 64, 89, 105,
labor, 51 123, 128
servant, 63, 73, 77, 79, 90, 96, 101, intermediaries, 59, 94, 115
108, 109, 113, 121 invalid, 37, 48
service, 6, 30, 53, 73, 96, 97 Islam, Islamic, 2, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22,
slave, 72, 77, 82 71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 81, 83
Dunkirk, 38, 39, 40 ivory, 20, 77, 91
dvija, 75
Jamaica, 82, 90, 91, 103, 113
East India Company, 5, 10, 21, 24, Java, 15, 75
45, 125 junk, 17, 22, 43
Egypt, 31, 77, 78, 79, 133
Employers and Workmen Act, 111, Karany, 77
126 Kerala, 20
Ethiopia(n), 72, 77, 78 kidnapping, 5, 10, 36, 41, 43, 44, 92,
94, 95, 101, 125
French Revolution, 6, 10, 34, 45, 53, Kilwa, 20, 72, 77
122 Konjo, 23
Fujan, 92 Konkan, 27, 28
Index 187
La Rochelle, 34, 40, 99 Omani, 21, 72, 77, 78

labor accident, 47, 49, 50, 51, 102,
112, 127 Panopticon, 61, 83, 149n70
labor contract. See contract paro, 22
laptot, 45, 52 passe-gavette, 33
Lascar, 44, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 127 pawnship, 74, 75, 132
Le Havre, 34, 38, 40, 41 Pemba, 78
levy, 35, 37, 42, 46, 47 pension, 5, 10, 37, 46, 47, 48, 50, 125
Lisbon, 20 piracy, 17, 26, 27, 28, 60
livret ouvrier, 102, 103 pirate, 25–9
Lorient, 34, 38, 39, 43 plantation, 7, 9, 52, 69, 71, 72, 73,
77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 90, 93, 94,
Madagascar, 17, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 101, 103, 112, 113, 114, 115,
77, 79, 83, 101, 115, 116 116, 117, 118, 119, 120
Maine, Henri, 7, 30, 31 Poor Law, 58, 62, 65, 84, 108, 110,
Malabar, 20, 21, 22, 28 111, 126, 127
Malawi, 72 Port, 17, 20, 24, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41,
Malaya, 22, 31, 75, 90, 94, 103 42, 50, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 71,
manufacture, 7, 20, 22, 40, 81 72, 93, 125
map, mapping, 15 Portuguese, 2, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24,
Maratha, 23, 24, 28 26, 27, 28, 29, 43, 44, 45, 64,
Marseille, 33, 40 69, 70, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 91,
Mascarene, 10, 18, 42, 43, 45, 71, 72, 115, 129
73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 90, 93, 100 prahu, 22, 23
Massava, 71 press-gang, 30, 35, 57, 58, 59
Masters and Servants Acts, 7, 8, 31, property, 6, 14, 74, 88, 108, 121, 126
41, 61, 65, 85, 93, 107, 108, 109, proto-industry, 7, 45, 73, 123
110, 111, 114, 117
Mecca, 72 Qing, 2, 31
Medina, 72
Mekong, 16 recruiter, 36, 59, 94
merchant, 20, 26, 27, 28, 33, 35, 37, 38, recruitment, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 31, 33,
41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 59, 61, 64, 65, 35–7, 41–3, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54,
69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 86, 108, 121 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65,
metal, 20, 49 83, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101, 106,
Mogadishu, 16 118, 125
Mombasa, 20, 45 Red Sea, 16, 20, 22, 71, 72, 81
monsoon, 13, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 62 rice, 18, 20, 23, 29, 94
mortality, 44, 62, 94, 95, 96 Rochefort, 34
Mozambique, 20, 72, 73, 64, 76, 77, runaway, 5, 100, 101, 112, 118
78, 79, 83, 91, 92, 101, 115
Muscat, 21, 71 Safavid, 25
Saint-Domingue, 79
Natal, 31, 92, 95 Sakalava, 77, 79
Netherlands, 35, 36 sampan, 22
Nigeria, 31 sardar, 94
188 Index
savings, 105, 120, 121 textile, 2, 43, 53, 70, 98, 126, 129
seedies, 63, 65, 66 Thailand, 75, 90, 103, 129, 132
Senegal, 41, 45 trans-Saharan route, 69, 71, 133
serang, 62, 94 Trinidad, 82, 91, 113, 130
servant, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 31, 48, 53, 60, Turk, 33
61, 63, 64, 65, 73, 77, 79, 82, 84,
85, 86, 89, 90, 93, 96, 98–102, Uganda, 31
106–13, 114–17, 121, 122, 123, utilitarian, 30, 83
125, 126, 130 utilitarianism, 81, 85
servitude, 2, 3, 4, 28, 53, 71, 74, 75,
86, 88, 111, 123, 129 vagrancy, 30, 64, 84, 85, 110, 118,
Shipping Act, 66, 127 131
Sidis, 23, 24 Vagrancy Act, 58
Sierra Leone, 91 Vasco de Gama, 24
silver, 70, 120 VOC, 21, 42
soldier, 40, 43, 60, 64, 77
Somalia, 17, 72, 91 wage, 2, 5, 9, 17, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47,
Somerset (case), 59 48, 49, 51, 52, 64, 62, 63, 65,
sovereignty, 9, 15, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 66, 83, 84, 87, 89, 93, 96, 100,
132, 133 102, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111,
Spain, 36, 69, 80, 81 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120,
steam, 21, 24, 46, 49, 50, 60, 64, 65, 121, 122, 132
125, 128 Workman’s Breach of Contract Act, 93
Suez, 24, 65
sugar, 21, 40, 69, 78, 80, 81, 82, 90, Zaire, 83
106, 114, 116, 121, 122, 124 Zambezi, 16, 70
Sulu, 26, 28 Zambia, 72
Surat, 24 Zamindar, 14, 23
Swahili, 9, 63, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 91, Zanzibar, 63, 71, 72, 77, 78, 83, 91
115 Zayla, 71

(Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies) Alessandro Stanziani (Auth.) - Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants - Bondage in The Indian Ocean World, 1750â 1914-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

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Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants

Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies

Bondage in the Indian Ocean World,

The Scope and Aim

Coercion and Rights at Sea

Servitude and Bondage in the IOW

The Maritime Labor Market

with navy recruitment. It was hard to distinguish slaves from con-

Immigration and Labor

existed, was considered the property of the employer and a resource

devised to control mobility and presence at work, such as worker’s

analysis of the forms of dependence in the French and British empires

Plan of the Book

France and the evolution of conscription. The experience of the

in Britain than its counterpart in the French colonies to greater worker

To understand the scope and aim of our study, it is important to dis-

standpoint, anticolonial and subaltern studies reproduce the para-

Economic knowledge and legal models circulated along with people

and political hierarchies of imperial areas changed over time. Thus,

Environment and Historicity

nineteenth century, we see a definite peak in the number of cyclones

Yet this chronology relies upon specific variables and groups—trade,

seventeenth century, Portuguese control ran up against challenges

Shipbuilding and Seamanship

no way threatened the existence of other boats, including galleys,

In Mughal India, a large ship had several categories of crew: the

Legal Spaces at Sea: Pirates versus

powers, piracy applied to mutiny, shipboard felonies, and unli-

descriptions of early Jesuit missionaries, one finds castes of fishermen

shipyard in Bassein. He employed Muslim sailors and mercenaries. In

France, unlike Britain, developed positive law regarding slavery, both

This principle became the basic tenet of late imperial administra-

From the Galley to Forced Recruitment

During this period, galley slaves as such had disappeared, though

led to the creation of a body of specialist administrators in all com-

by the seamen-laborers but also by their masters, who accused the

Table 2.1 Petty officers and sailors in France

Year Picardy/ Brittany South-west Eastern Total

1686 9,861 14,823 12,270 15,152 52,106

Sources: Chambre de Commerce de Dunkerque (1686), Archives Nationales, Marine, C4–129

the profession was evolving, particularly with the boom in fishing in

Table 2.2 Types of fishing in France, 1788

Type of fishing Percentage (%)

Sources: Archives Nationales–Marine C5–58—Balance du commerce, tableau

the boom in unqualified maritime professions (ordinary seamen), all

36.5 percent of the traffic. Production in the Mascarene Islands con-

through alternative channels, that is, more or less forcible enrolment

The Post-Revolutionary Seamen between

1795, decrees were passed to confirm the class recruitment system—

steamships posed the problem of the personnel in charge of the

at the end of the month. Payment by shares was common in wartime,

salaries, sailors were obliged to pay premiums and received derisory

Polish or Swedish sailors, while inferior to those of French sailors,

legal status of slaves arriving on French soil—were they emancipated

was the relationship—very much specific to this sector—between

over after the middle of the nineteenth century, unqualified workers

From the Press-Gang versus Colonial Recruitment

In England, the relationship between the forcible seizure of sail-

one of the servants of Sylvia’s parents (who are now deceased). He

persons placed in workhouses. It is no coincidence that one of the

seen, this solution penalized foreign and colonial seamen at a time

The Persistent Bondage of the British Sailor

Africans emancipated inland by the English, along with a mass of