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Free and Unfree Labor Migration, 1600–1900: An Introduction
David Northrup
Boston College
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Each of the following three papers breaks new ground in the study of Westerners' mobilization of Asian and African labor. Markus Vink adds precise detail to our knowledge of the Dutch slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. Anand A. Yang brings to light the history of another kind of Indian Ocean forced labor, South Asian convict laborers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Matthew Pratt Guterl reexamines the labor and racial ideas in the post-emancipation American South through the prism of Cuba's recruitment of indentured Chinese laborers. The light that the three essays cast on their individual topics also serves to illuminate some larger themes in modern world history. Besides their common concern with Western-constructed labor migration, the three authors also struggle to extract larger meaning from labor migrations that are documented almost exclusively from Western sources and whose interpretation has been dominated by the horrors of the African slave trade and the rhetorical idealism of abolitionism and working-class Marxism. Indirectly at least, the papers raise questions about the meaning of freedom in migration as perceived both by the hegemonic Westerners and by the laborers themselves. |
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While sharing a common concern with how Western interests mobilized Asian and African labor, the authors focus on topics at the edges of the massive labor movements of the African slave trade and the free and indentured Asian migrations of the nineteenth century. Removed from the center of the largest migrations, they are in a position to offer illuminating insights of the larger phenomena. Thus, Vink's pioneering research demonstrates that the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean was home to a Dutch-organized slave trade, whose volume was much smaller than that of the Atlantic and whose use of slave labor was, on the one hand, narrower than the existing systems of slavery in the region and, on the other hand, broader than the tightly focused plantation systems characteristic of the Americas. |
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The smaller volume of the Indian Ocean slave trade reflects two factors. First, Europeans were less powerful there, not only the Dutch and the earlier Portuguese, but the British and French who came later.1 Second, Indian Ocean peoples had generally escaped the epidemiological disaster that befell indigenous peoples of the Americas and so (outside of the uninhabited Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Réunion and the Cape Colony, where smallpox epidemics decimated the native people) there was less need to bring large numbers of people from elsewhere to provide a labor force. In many ways, as Vink argues, the Dutch recruitment of slave labor for servants, as manual laborers, and in manufacturing was an extension of slave systems that had long existed in Indian Ocean lands and thus was different from the new system of chattel labor largely focused on plantation production for export in the Americas, but, as in the Americas, Europeans overlaid the system with their own attitudes and legal institutions. |
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Yang similarly positions his account of the little-known convict labor trade among Britain's Asian colonies in the larger context of contemporary slave trading and the Asian indentured labor trade that developed to meet plantation needs in the Americas and the Mascarenes as slavery was suppressed. Although indentured Indian laborers were constrained by similar economic and imperial forces, their migrations differed from those of the slaves and convicts in two ways. One was that their departure was conditioned upon agreement to the terms of contracts that provided impoverished people with free passage in return for lengthy work obligations. Second, the indentured migrations to far distant lands became feasible because of the availability of Western ships that were larger and faster than those that had previously been used in ocean labor migrations.2 |
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