Slavery and Fort St George: Does Madras under the East India Company have a Slaving Past

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Reynolds Painting

The Black Lives Movement in the US and across the white world has drawn attention to the enduring legacy of involuntary servitude or Slavery. In Madras, Forst St. George built on a strip of land acquired from the last ruler of the Vijayanagara Empire even as it was losing its elan to the might of the Mughals and their surrogates, remained along with Pulicat under he Dutch, Tanquebar under the Danes and Karaikkal under the French as important centres of Slave Trade in the Indian Ocan Region. The history of the Slave Trade is obviously not a pleasant subject and even the foremost authority on the Europeans Companies in India, Professor S Arasaratnam makes passing references to the prevalence of the Slave Trade. However even a cursory gkance through the Consultaions of the East India Company, Vestiges of Old Madras and of course Madras in Olden Time gives us enough material to begin a detailed study. Of these the last named compiled by James Talboys Wheeler is the most reliable and provides several insatnces of Slave Trade. Even as the debate over abolition was gaining ground in the English House of Parliament, the Court of Directors wrote that the financial problems of the Company stemmed from a "want of labouring people"and the same document states that the Company Officials in Madras were able to procule slaves for their Sumatarn outpost, Benkulen ( Richard Allen, Euroean Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, p1)..

In Love's Vestiges of Old Madras there are a few documents relating to the prevalence of teh Slave Trade and efforts made to bring the notorious trade under some legal framework:
1 An Agreement was signed between the English and the Portuguese authorities to restore slaves who had escaped from the teritories of the contracting parties
2 An Office was opened under the Town kanakkapillai to register slaves at the Choultry Building located on Market Street of Fort St George
3 A document from the Company to Elihu Yale published in Volume I of Vestiges p 546 refers to a need to ascertain the number of Slaves in Fort St George and the Black Town
4 Times of famine and they were frightfully common were times of distress and Children were sometimes sold into slavery with the connivance of Indian middlemen
5 Reference exists of young men and women sold to the Dutch at Pulicat for a bribe of 5 pagodas and the document hints that the Governor Henry Greenhill was aware of the trade and was conniving at it
6 A document registering the affadavit of John Leigh against Kannppa accusing him of procuring children for slavery and sold to "Hollenders" at Pulicat
7 Slaves had to be registered according to a document on p 80, Vestiges of Old Madras
8 "In 1687 the trade was sanctioned under regulation a duty of one pagoda exacted for each slave sent from Madras by sea". Vestiges Vol I p 545

The Slave Trade from Madras perhaps was not on the same scale and extent as the Atlantic Slave Trade but that does not absolve the various European Companies from bearing the responsibility for this Obnoxious Commerce. There were sporadic attempts on the part of Indian rulers to put an end to this menace just as the nayaks of Tanjavur who intervened to check the French Slave Trade at Karaikkal but given the superior military force at the command of the Europeans did not always succeed and also the invasion of Shvaji created extreme conditions of famine in the region and periodic shortages of foodgrain were opportune moments for the Slaving sharks, both white and Indian.

In the interest of Historical Truth it must also be mentioned that after the famous Mansfied Judgment an attempt was made to suppress the Slave Trade, However given the fragmented nature of legal jurisdiction and contesting interpretations of what constituted Slavery, the attempts to suppress Slavery had to wait the Passage of the Slaveru Abolition Act in 1834. After that the Royal Navy dployed a ship, an old Steamer for search and seizure of Arab and other ships involved in the Slave Trade. A series of treaties were signed with the sultans of Muscat, Zanzibat, Oman, the Immam of Mecca and a number of local chiels along the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to ensure compliance of the treaties. The Jeddah Massacre of Europeans in 1858 may be linked to the resntment felt against what the Arabs regarded as legitimate commerce.

Take a close look at the painting above. It was painted by Reynolds and depicts Clive with his daughter. You will find a dark Indan face in the painting. Such traces do exist in addition to the documents ; It is high time for Indian historians to wean themselvs away from the garbage of Post Colonial theories and adopt rigorous time tested methods of Historical Research,

Legacies of British Slave-ownership: A Review

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain
Cahtherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Domington and Rachel Lang
London: Cambridge University Press 2016

In 2007, on the occasion of the bi-centineal celebration of the Abolition of the  Slave Trade, or at least the Atlantic Ocean segment of the "nefarious trade" England experience on orgy of triumphalism: chest thumping about its great moral decision and a vindication of Christian commitment to Human Dignity. I agree that MPs like William Wilberforce and the great Edmund Burke did display a deep revulsion toward Slavery and the Edinburgh Review was one of the few journals that worked public sentiment against the Slave Trade. It is important to remember this today as Scotland prepares to bolt from the Union of 1707 and Britain will shrink to the boundries of its Roman past.
The book under review is a prosopographical study of slave ownership in Great Britain in the year 1834 when Slavery was officially abolished in the British territories. Ironically the Abolition of Slavery Act passed by the House of Commons in 1833 was the first legal recognition that slavery, as a form of servitude, existed in British territories. 

Legacies of British Slave Ownership

The abolition of Slavery neccesitated the creation of a Commission to pay compensation to the Slave Owners who stood to gain an enormous sum of 20 Million pounds as compensation for around 28,000 slaves who were freed at least on paper. An Apprenticeship Agreement meant that many had to continue on the estates of their masters for another 6 years. And that too did not mean the end of servitude. William Gladstone's family owned nearly 3000 slaves in British Gyanna and Abolition meant economic disaster to John Gladstone. Fortunately for him, India by that time was sufficiently tamed to supply Indentured Servants to work on the very same plantations which had freed its slaves. Hugh Tinker has rightly called Indenture a "New Kind of Slavery".This book is based on the Records of the Slave Compensation Commission and cover the estates in St Kitts, St Vincent, Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Surinname and a few other places. The transfer of 20 million pounds from the public exchequer to private hands marks an important ship in the social or rather class structure of modern Britain. One can even argue that the social foundation of modern Britain lies in this singular historical event.

The Oxford Dictionary of Nation Biography, the gold standard of British aristocracy and its social legitimacy does not quite reflect the extent to which the ruling political class of England, both of the Victorian Era and of the post World War II Era derived its economic strength from the slave compensation monies. West Indian Merchant Houses, Insurance Companies, Shipping Companies, Trading Houses, Banking Houses were all implicated in this Great Game of slave compensation and the 20 million pounds would be worth nearly 2 billion pounds into todays exchange rate.

The document on the left is a page from the Slave Compensation Commission Records preserved at Kew Archives. From the study of the record of nearly 30,000 compensation paid out the authors estimate that more than 75% of the beneficiaries were from England with Scotland accounting for around 18 to 19% and Ireland a mere 4%. The figures are illustrative of the fact that the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of Britain into Asia, particularly India and other regions was symptomatic of a social order that was changing with the infusion of Capital. Eric Williams did not use these records but his insight into the development of English capitalism as a direct consequence of Slavery seems to be borne out. More interestingly, women figure quite prominently as slave owners who claimed compensation. This was because of the financial insitutions morgating their estates along with slaves and the mortgagee inheriting the property. 

The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker: A Review

Barack Obama's speech on race and racism has quite honestly triggered an avalanche of interest in the whole issue of slavery. I recently bought Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship: A Human History and having read this wonderful book would like to share my thoughts with the blogger on this site.
Dr Rediker is currently the Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and has taken his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a noted maritime historian and has an earlier work on slavery entitled The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the hidden history of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Like Simon Shama, Rediker has been exploring the history of Afro-Americans in the Revolutionary era.
All these new works on slavery starting with Phillip Curtin's The Atlantic Trade are essentially commentaries on the famous line of W E B Dubois, "the slave trade was the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history". In fact Rediker takes the phrase "human history" from this line of Dubois. He deals with the period stretching from 1700 to 1808 when the slave trade was regarded as the most profitable commercial venture, yielding returns as high as 700 to 1000%.The English Parliament abolished slavery in English sea going vessels in 1835 under pressure from William Wilberforce and other abolitionists.
Marcus Rediker is a hard nosed historian and therefore does not confuse the issue with mushy sentimentalism. In fact the book documents very carefully the "historical context" in which the trading in "human cargo" was carried out. The eighteenth century opened when Africa was being criss-crossed by Arab traders who followed the ancient caravan routes to the west coast of Africa. Here too trading societies which until a few generations back were mere fishing villages were beginning to see opportunities in state expansion and trade both fuelled in part by the artillery and gunpowder that the Europeans, particularly the Portuguese and the dutch introduced. Africa in the turn of the eighteenth century was as Rediker is at pains to argue a mosaic of stateless societies and more sophisticated war polities in which capture in war meant a life of servitude. Slavery was an established institution in Africa and it was not introduced by the Europeans. In fact the Europeans only took advantage of pre-existing relations and structures in order to acquire slaves. In the 18th century, the raiding and trading parties were confined to the coast, an area known as the Bight of Biafra. As the century proceeded the areas of the interior were also coming under the baleful influence of the slave trade and this expansion in the range and scope of them trade was driven by the expansion of the Dahomey, a kingdom created by the wealth of the slave trade.
The narrative is gripping and is full of insight. Marcus Rediker has drawn on contemporary slave autobiographies and narratives in order to give the human dimension to the Atlantic Trade. It must be said that the African elites and the Arab Muslim merchants were as much part of the nexus of slave trade and plantation economy and it is worth emphasising this point.