As far as Eurocentric accounts of slavery are concerned, malaria played a key role in the use and abuse of sub-saharan African people in agricultural plantation contexts. Up to the twentieth century, geneticists including those from Turkey, Britain and Arabic-speaking countries, debated on the biological factors that demarcated the “boundaries between white and African, Arab and Turk.”[1] Many of them attributed African ancestry to the “problem” of sickle cell related diseases, which has also been a widely cited the reason for justifying the usage of African slave labor in the Americas. Following the arrival of falciparum malaria in the 1680s, “the colonies where conditions were more favorable to endemic malaria also showed the greatest rise in slavery… In all, the introduction of falciparum malaria explains about 75% of the dramatic rise in the proportion of African slaves in the US south after 1690.”[2] White Europeans as well as wadi Arabs suffered from malaria and certain social groupings that segregated them from sub-saharan Africans were partly the result of this phenotypic difference.[3]
The situation was very different in Asia around the same time. Similar to the socioeconomic situation in Tang Dynasty China (the 7th to 9th century), the phenotype of slaves did not form the main concern for those who sold and controlled them in the subcontinent or Southeast Asia in the 18th century.[4] Religious manuals offer some insights to the attitudes towards slavery in Asia. “Al Hidayah fi Sharh Bidayat al-Mubtadi,” also known as The Hedeya, was a 12th century Islamic legal manual by Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani. Translated from Arabic into Persian in 1760 by Indian scholars upon invitation of an East India Company scholar, it was later edited by the same Company scholar—Charles Hamilton—into an abbreviated English version. There are sections devoted to explaining how to manage one’s slaves within the Central Asian Hanafi madhhab framework. In the opening dedication to Warren Hastings, the Company boss, in the translated English version, Hamilton does not comment on the explicit acceptance of what his later generations fervently opposed—the evil of slavery—within the text. He focused on the functional purpose of the text: to govern the subcontinent’s Muslim subjects within an Anglo-Muhammadan framework. Slavery did exist in various forms prior to the arrival of the British, as documented in Slavery in South Asia. The reasons differed greatly from problems of the malaria-infested plantations of the Americas. Kinship patterns of slaves in South Asia adapted to local customs and identities. Arakan slave expeditions into the Bengal region temporarily abated during various strong rulers as well, which deterred slave raids. However, tantra orders and practices suffered ignominy as a result of the Islamic rulers' understanding and boundary demarcation of normative humanhood and sexuality through their new religious outlook. (See Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal . )
Tarikh-i-Assam (History of Assam) was written by court historian Ibn Muhammad Wali Ahmad during the Mughal period and provided a description of these raids. In a quote of this text by British administrator Maurice Collis (1889 - 1973), the historian better known as Shihabuddin Talish recorded: "The Arakan pirates, who were both Portuguese and natives, used constantly to come by water and plunder Bengal. They carried off such Hindus and Muslims as they could seize, pierced the palms of their hands, passed thin slips of cane through the holes and shut them huddled together under the decks of their ships. Every morning they flung down some uncooked rice, as we do for fowl…Many noblemen and women of family had to undergo the disgrace of slavery and concubinage. Not a house eventually was left inhabited on either side of the rivers leading from Chittagong to Dacca.”
Maurice Collis continued to write on the curious connections between slavery and religion:
“The pirates, the slavers, who were [the friar's] countrymen and co-religionists, helped the Mission in a curious way. When a captain returned to Dianga after a rain, with the holds of his galleys full of Hindu and Moslem peasants, these unfortunates were visited by the friar before they were sold into slavery and, he claims, he was able to convert a very large number of them to the religion of the cruel men who had pierced their hands, and fed them like fowl. The ironic comedy of such a proceeding did not strike him or, if it did, he justified it in this way: the Portuguese in defending the frontier of Arakan against the Mughal were, in effect, continuing the agelong crusade against the Moslem infidel, which had been the glory of Portugal for so many centuries and had inspired da Gama in his voyages eastward.” Among the 5400 captured annually, the Portuguese friar Manrique managed to convert 2000.
Yet it is interesting that barely one century after the emergence of Enlightenment thought, the East India Company accepted the lack of human equality in the region where they traded and co-opted these texts. The conflict between what officials noted as “Islam” and “modernity” was also a conflict between colonialism and modernity, which centered on the control of labor and its surplus within designated spaces. The empire’s interest in capital accumulation gave rise to other polities, such as the Gulf States, in the twentieth century. As scholar Adam Hanieh wrote, Arab workers in the Gulf was replaced by a non-Arab, mostly South Asian male, disposable class. He termed it as the “spatial fix” in which the Gulf states managed the capital-labor contradiction.[5] Scholar Neha Vora also documented in her anthropological work the emergence of being identified as South Asian or “Indian” in the Gulf as linked with their marginalized working class occupations.
After the formal abolition of slavery, historian Eric Williams published his seminal book Capitalism and Slavery. He argued that the British Empire abolished slavery due to material interests such as the waning profits in the slave labor. I will research into the British archives to explore the tenuous balance the East India Company struck between Enlightenment values of equality and conditions of inequality for the purpose of revenue extraction in the 1700s, such as Charles Hamilton’s compilation The Hedeya. While many scholars wrote on this type of Orientalist knowledge industry of India,[6] my project will show that the divergences from the “ground” was possibly a conscious one, especially in areas such as slavery. If knowledge about humans through empirical methods à la Kant was not the Company’s goal, perhaps it is not a surprise that the empire projected itself as both the beacon of equality and the protector of bonded labor regimes.[7]
Endnotes
[1] Burton, Elise. 2019. “Red Crescents: Race, Genetics, and Sickle Cell Disease in the Middle East.” Isis. Volume 110, Number 2 June.
[2] Mosquitoes, malaria and the spread of slavery in the US. https://wp.unil.ch/hecimpact/mosquitoes-malaria-and-the-spread-of-slavery-in-the-us/
[3] Reilly, Benjamin. 2014. "Mutawalladeen and Malaria: African Slavery in Arabian Wadis." Journal of Social History 47, no. 4: 878-96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308820.
[4] New historical works on supra-local connections emerged in places under French colonial control as well as Dutch-controlled Indonesia. Filliot’s study of the Mascarenes showed that slaves from various Asian and African societies converging in one slave system.
Titas Chakraborty, Matthias van Rossum, Slave Trade and Slavery in Asia—New Perspectives, Journal of Social History, Volume 54, Issue 1, Fall 2020, Pages 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa004
[5] Hanieh. Adam. 2011. Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[6] See works by C. A. Bayly and Bernard Cohn.
[7] Kant, Immanuel. 1798. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
