Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia

129 Pages·2006·0.97 MB·English

by  Edward A. Alpers

Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean
Africa and Asia
Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia is the companion volume to
Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia which was published by Routledge
in 2005. This second volume, as implied by the title, recognizes the com-
plexity of forms of bondage in the Indian Ocean world – incorporating
regions running from East Africa to the Middle East, to South and Southeast
Asia to the Far East – and of resistance to them.
Slavery, in the conventional sense of the word, was in the region covered
one of many, often overlapping, forms of unfree labour that included, in
addition, various types of forced or corvée labour, debt bondage and inden-
tured or contract labour. This volume examines resistance to forms of
bondage in a variety of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial regimes, from
revolt against slavery in South Africa, to resistance to colonial forced labour
schemes in Somalia, the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotta and Madagascar,
India, Indonesia and Indochina, and the fight of Aborigines for human
rights on the cattle ranches of Northern Australia.
Just as the companion volume Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia
revealed that reactions to slavery in Africa and Asia were far more complex
than the conventional historical emphasis on forms of ‘revolt’ implies, this
collection of essays reveals an unexpectedly wide range of often very subtle
forms of resistance to a variety of repressive labour regimes in the Indian
Ocean world. In so doing, it will appeal to all those interested in exploring
the wider debate over the structure of unfree labour regimes and resistance
to them.
Edward A. Alpers is Professor of History at the University of California,
Los Angeles, USA. Gwyn Campbell is Canada Research Chair in Indian
Ocean World History in the Department of History, McGill University,
Canada.Michael Salmanis an Associate Professor of History at the Univer-
sity of California at Los Angeles.
Routledge studies in slave and post-slave societies and
cultures
Edited by Gad Heuman
1 Abolition and its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
Edited by Gwyn Campbell
2 Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
Edited by Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman
Previous titles to appear in Routledge studies in slave and post-slave
societies and cultures include:
The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
Edited by Gwyn Campbell
Representing the Body of the Slave
Edited by Thomas Wiedemann and Jane Gardner
Rethinking the African Diaspora
The making of a Black Atlantic world in the Bight of Benin and Brazil
Edited by Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay
After Slavery
Emancipation and its discontents
Edited by Howard Temperley
From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World
Edited by Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood
Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa
Edited by Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein
Classical Slavery
Edited by M. I. Finley
Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery
The mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787–1807
J. R. Oldfield
Routes to Slavery
Direction, ethnicity and mortality in the transatlantic slave trade
Edited by David Eltis and David Richardson

Resisting Bondage in Indian
Ocean Africa and Asia
Edited by Edward A. Alpers,
Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman
First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library,2006.
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© 2007 Selection and editorial matter, Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn
Campbell and Michael Salman; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-96824-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–77151–X (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96824–7 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77151–1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96824–6 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
1 Introduction: resisting bondage in the Indian Ocean
world 1
GWYN CAMPBELL, EDWARD A. ALPERS AND
MICHAEL SALMAN
2 Revolt in Cape Colony slave society 10
NIGEL WORDEN
3 Unfree labour, forced labour and resistance among the
Zigula of the Lower Juba 24
FRANCESCA DECLICH
4 Forced labour and the 1856 revolt on Mayotta 40
ISABELLE DENIS
5 Unfree labour, slavery and protest in imperial
Madagascar 49
GWYN CAMPBELL
6 Forced labour in Madagascar under Vichy, 1940–42:
autarky,forced labour and resistance on the
‘Red Island’ 60
ERIC JENNINGS
7 Sugar and servility: themes of forced labour, resistance
andaccommodation in mid-nineteenth-century Java 69
G. ROGER KNIGHT
viii Contents
8 Forced labourers and their resistance in Java under
Japanesemilitary rule, 1942–45 82
SHIGERU SATO
9 ‘Unfree’ labour on the cattle stations of Northern
Australia, the tea gardens of Assam and the rubber
plantations of Indo-China, 1920–50 96
ROBERT CASTLE, JAMES HAGAN AND
ANDREW WELLS
Index 114
Contributors
Edward A. Alpers is Professor of History at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He has also taught at the Universities of Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania and the Somali National University, Lafoole. In 1994 he served
as President of the African Studies Association. Alpers has published
widely on the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean. His major
publications include Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (London:
Heinemann/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and co-
edited volumes on Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar (Los Angeles:
Center for Afro-American Stduies, UCLA, 1982); Africa and the West: A
Documentary History of the Slave Trade to Independence (Phoenix: Oryx,
2001); History, Memory and Identity (Port Louis: Nelson Mandela Centre
for African Culture and University of Mauritius, 2001); Sidis and Schol-
ars: Essays on African Indians (Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2004); Slavery
and Resistance in Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005); and Slave
Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa (Maputo: Filsom, 2005).
His current research focuses on the African Diaspora in the Indian
Ocean.
Gwyn Campbell is Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History
in the Department of History, McGill University. His most recent
publications include An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar,
1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); editor, Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean
Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005); co-editor (with Edward A.
Alpers and Michael Salman), Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia
(London: Routledge, 2005); co-editor (with Suzanne Miers and Joseph C.
Miller), Women in Western Systems of Slavery – special edition of Slavery &
Abolition 26.2 (2005); and editor, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean
Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004). He is currently completing
Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to 1900 – to appear in
the new Cambridge Economic History of Africa series, and is undertaking
research into slavery and diaspora in the Indian Ocean World and the
foundations of the Indian Ocean world global economy.