‘No day goes’, the chronicler Shihabuddin al-Umari recorded during Alauddin Khalji’s rule from 1296-1316, ‘without the sale of thousands of slaves.’
Flags covered the skies, and drums thundered as they would on a tiger hunt as the army of the Arakan marched into the jungles, great ranks of infantry backed by hundreds of battle elephants. Tens of thousands of boats stood by, to help the army jump over the dense veins of rivers that separated the mountains from the plains. King Sirisudhammaraja—“the very image of virtue, and in prowess, like the morning sun,” gushed a court chronicler—was hunting for human prey.
This weekend, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands formally apologised for the role of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in enabling the slave trade. The Dutch East India Company slave traders, the King said, had turned individuals into commodities, a kind of oppression that is “the most hurtful, the most humiliating, the most degrading.”
Earlier this year, a historical investigation commissioned by the Dutch parliament showed that the royal house had directly earned at least €500 million from the slave trade in modern currency.
Like so many painful colonial memories, the story of the Indian Ocean slave trade—which saw Indians being trafficked from Malabar, the Coromandel coast and Bengal to the Dutch East India Company outpost at Batavia, in Indonesia—has been obliterated from our memories. King Willem-Alexander’s apology should push India to honour the victims.
The Indian slave trade
Even though Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar had ordered the Mughal empire’s slaves to be set free in 1582—centuries before the United Kingdom followed suit in 1838—trafficking in humans continued. Tens of thousands of enslaved Indians continued to be purchased by the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, kidnapped from Bengal and the Coromandel coast by pirates, mercenaries, and the Taung-gnu rulers of Arakan.
The historian Markus Vink has shown the Indian Ocean slave trade relied on three interlocking circles of trafficking—an African circuit, running from the East African coast to Madagascar and Mauritius; a middle circuit, running from Malabar to the Coromandel and Bengal; and a Southeast Asian circuit drawing on Malaysia, Indonesia, Irian Jaya, and the southern Philippines.
From the work of historian Ishrat Amin, among the few chroniclers of the Indian Ocean slave trade, we gain a sense of the savagery it involved.
After the Arakan king’s successful raid on Bengal in 1624, the Dutch East India Company had despatched the frigates Jager and Muys, along with the yacht Meden Blicque, to purchase at least 1,0000 or the 10,000 captives who were reputed to have been taken. The bulk of the slaves, though, had died in an epidemic during their forced march, and just 93 were available for sale.
In 1643, Dutch East India Company chief merchant Aren Van Del Helm obtained a licence from the Arakan king, allowing freedom to purchase gum, indigo, white cotton cloth, rice and human beings. That year, the Company bought 600 slaves, out of which 135 died of smallpox on their way to Batavia.
The same year, Dutch East India Company ships trawled the Cochin coast, looking for slaves captured in the war in Bijapur. Following devastating wars and famine in Nagapattanam in 1660, the crews of the Walvis Bay and Ulisses were able to find hundreds of enslaved people for sale.
Later in the century, rates were fixed: men aged 20 to 36 sold for 12½ rials, women from 12 to 25 for 8 rials, boys from 8 to 19 for 7½ rials, girls from 7-12 for 6 rials, and smaller children for 3½ rials. Even younger children were accepted, but without payment, because of the high mortality rates. The price of an adult male slave was about a third of that of a ton of rice.