This chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely trans-regional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take some distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Context

This volume examines the relationship between debt and human bondage in the Indian Ocean world (IOW). The IOW refers to a vast macro region, running from Africa to the Far East, where agricultural production, in which the vast bulk of the population were engaged, and long-distance commercial exchange, notably but not exclusively maritime trade, were largely shaped by the monsoon system. The ‘wet’ (rice) and ‘dry’ (wheat) cultivation regions of Asia were largely dictated by the reach of the monsoon rains, while the monsoon winds (from the south-west during the northern hemisphere summer and from the north-east during its winter), dictated trans-oceanic exchange to the north and to approximately twelve degrees south of the equator. Moreover, terrestrial long-distance trade in regions affected by the monsoons and/or a cyclone season was also largely seasonal, restricted chiefly to the drier winter season.

Human trafficking in the IOW has taken place since at least 2000 bc and experienced three major periods of demand-led acceleration corresponding to sustained bursts of economic growth: from about 200 bc to ad 200, from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, and again from the nineteenth century. In the intervening periods, which were generally characterized by economic stagnation or decline, the slave trade was dominated by supply factors. Systems of bond-age existed throughout the IOW but varied greatly according to time and place. Slavery was limited amongst hunter-gatherer and pastoral peoples, but relatively widespread in sedentary agricultural societies.

This chapter argues that from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, there existed a strong relationship between the institutions and practices of debt and labour in Britain and those in the colonial world. Thus, one cannot fully understand the origin and evolution of indentured labour in the Indian Ocean without taking into consideration the notions about labour, and labour practices, in Europe.

Conventionally, historians have interpreted the phenomenon of indentured labour in two main ways. The first interpretation, advanced by colonial elites in the nineteenth century and later renewed in ‘subaltern studies’, is that the indentured contract was a ‘legal fiction’, and that those indentured experienced conditions of forced labour or even slavery. This approach essentially negates the historical significance of the abolition of slavery and underestimates the efforts of indentured immigrants to fight for their own rights. Also, legal scholars have demonstrated that indentureship was initially viewed as an expression of free will in contract, and can only be considered as an involuntary contract that reflected forced labour in the second half of the nineteenth century. This in turn reflects recent debates in the history of emigration that also stress the shifting boundary between free and unfree emigration.

Comparative versus Global History of Debt Slavery

Bondage in ancient Rome and Northern America has often been presented as forms of chattel or ‘real’ slavery as opposed to the ‘mild’ or hybrid forms of slavery, servitude and coercion found in so many different contexts in Africa, Asia and medieval Europe. Such a distinction is problematic. Anthropologists, sociologists and historians differ considerably in their assessments of what precisely constitutes slavery, highlighting variously issues of social status (membership of or exclusion from the clan, family and local community), religion, legal status (forms of dependence, freedom of movement, hereditary nature of constraints), economic conditions and political, legal and procedural rights. Researchers have pinpointed several variables in their attempts to find a definition of bondage, but without reaching a consensus.

The debate has sharpened even more over the last two decades as cultural and subaltern studies scholars have highlighted the relativity of notions of freedom and coercion. As a result, the critical question currently asked is whether the different forms of servitude found in various societies in Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean world or the Americas can all be considered to constitute ‘slavery’. If the answer is yes, then by implication slavery existed before and independently of colonialism. Conversely, if the answer is no, it means that these were forms of ‘imperialist’ dependence and bondage specific to a particular place.