The decline is clear to see. In 1857 a comparison of British and Indian ships entering Indian ports shows there was a pronounced gap even this early. Over 35,000 of them, with a tonnage of 1.2 million, were owned by Indians, 59,000 of 2.4 million tons by English interests. The average tonnages were respectively 35.6 and 41.6. By the end of the century things had changed dramatically. Those Indian owned were just over 2,000, with a tonnage of 133,000 for an average size of 57.8 tonnes, while British owned totalled over 6,000, tonnage 7.6 million, and an average size of 1,235 tonnes.
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Local people then had to work in the gaps and interstices of the imperial structure. This applied to the local Portuguese as much as to Indians and other Asians. The Portuguese and Indians operating under their auspices were able to function in the cracks of the now dominant British system in India. The best earner was opium. Malwa opium was smuggled to Portuguese ports on the west coast of India, and from there to their Chinese colony of Macao. As a measure of the success of this trade, around 1830 the British were importing over 7,500 chests of opium a year to Guangzhou, but at the same time Portuguese subjects were sending via Daman over 1,800 chests. The Portuguese state also collected much revenue from this trade, though much more was done illegally. Indeed, most of the buildings in the new capital of Panaji were built from profits from opium.
Yet being a part of the empire, even as a subject, could have advantages. Several distinct Indian groups played large roles in the economies of other British colonies in the nineteenth century. These groups controlled vast amounts of capital. Surat's trade declined in the second half of the eighteenth century to be sure, yet until the end of the century Surat 'was still the financial centre of western India, and Mumbai, though politically its master, was still its financial client.'
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Philip Curtin wrote an important book about 'trade diasporas', but to the extent that these Indian groups retained strong ties with their homes and went back and forth to them this concept seems invalid for our period. The Chettiar firms of Tamilnadu were headquartered in Chennai, but had branch offices in South Africa, Mauritius, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, South Vietnam and Indonesia. They operated under the British umbrella to bring these areas, notably Burma, into a modern cash economy, but at a high price for the people concerned, witness vast indebtedness and land alienation in Burma. These were very much joint family affairs. Younger members were sent overseas for a time, and then brought back to the family centre in Tamilnadu. All this is much more like the notion of circulation put forward by Claude Markovits than it is of Curtin's diaspora.
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Indian traders and merchants and officials played a large role on the East African coast. Zanzibar was a main centre: in 1886–87 forty-four per cent of the
island's exports went to India, and 40 per cent of its imports came from there, handled mostly by Indian firms.
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The longer distance intercontinental trade was done by European and American firms. In 1857 there were six European and three American firms represented in Zanzibar, but they used local Indian agents to sell their imports and collect their exports. Richard Burton in this same year noted that
Ladha Bamha farms the customs at Zanzibar; at Pembe Island his nephew Peru has the same charge; Mombasa is in the hands of Lakhmid and some of his co-religionists; Pangani is directed by Tulsidas... even S'aadani has its Banyan; Ramji, an active and intelligent Banyan, presides at Bagamoyo and the customs at Kilwa are collected by Kishandas. I need hardly say that almost all of them are connected in blood as well as trade.
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While Indian shipping certainly declined, the British pax over the ocean did facilitate Indian finance, albeit that the cost of the pax was borne by Indian taxpayers. Indian financial houses, often Gujaratis, as Burton also noted, backed Indian traders and money lenders, often kin members or at least community members, all around the littoral of the western ocean. Sir Bartle Frere in 1873 described all this: 'Hardly a loan can be negotiated, a mortgage effected, or a bill cashed without Indian agency.' And:
Everywhere, wherever there is any foreign trade, it passes through the hands of some Indian trader; no produce can be collected for the European, American or Indian market, but through him, no imports can be distributed to the natives of the country, but through his agency... it is difficult to convey to those at a distance an adequate idea of the extent or completeness of the monopoly.
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Indians also settled in the Aden colony, where they ran businesses that dealt with Somalia and Ethiopia as well as working as an administrative class for the British. The Cowsaji Dinshaw firm, based in Aden with branches in Zanzibar and Mumbai, even ran a steamer service between Aden and East Africa. They also helped pay for the construction of a Zoroastrian fire temple in Aden, which is in itself a good example of the types of encounters with the alien that occurred during this period. There had not been a Zoroastrian presence in South Arabia since the Sassanian conquest, but a new one was created both there and in Zanzibar as a consequence of British influence. The pop star Freddy Mercury was one such Parsi, from Zanzibar, and in typical fashion he was educated in India and found fame and fortune in the West.
The other people who operated in this way were the Chinese in southeast Asia, who especially in Malaya and Indonesia controlled most of the retail sector, and important parts of the import and export trades. Tin mining in Malaya, and rubber cultivation in Indonesia, were both largely dominated by Chinese.
In other areas also Europe was not totally in control. In Mauritius and Madagascar the colonial powers had to learn from indigenous people how to engage successfully in agriculture. Many local trades continued: the Chinese junk trade to Thailand, dhow trade all around the shores of the eastern ocean, peddling all through the ocean. Earl noted in Bangkok in 1833 that 'The brig we found at Bankok belonged to natives of the Coromandel coast; and many of the Kling seamen had goods of their own, which they hawked about the towns further in the interior, exchanging them for sugar, ivory, gamboge etc, and their vessels consequently remain several months in the river.'
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Nor were all Europeans in the ocean lords of all they surveyed. There were many European common seamen, and soldiers, whose lives were rough indeed. The sealers in the far southern ocean perhaps lived lives no better than the poorest peasant in Java or India. These men were left on St Paul and Amsterdam islands, to kill and skin seals. After some months, or even years, the ship would come back to collect them and the skins. On these isolated islands, some 1,500 sea miles from Africa, Antarctica, Sri Lanka and Australia, the men subsisted on meat and eggs alone. Their lives were extremely hard. An account of 1797 said
the seabears were killed while they were warming themselves in the sun on the rocks along the shore and the wide bay. Because only the skins had value for them, they left the skinned bodies lying rotting on the ground in such masses that it was difficult not to stand on these bodies as one went ashore. Each step there revealed a highly revolting sight and everywhere there was a foul stench of rotting flesh [which] poisoned the air.
In 1820 an American ship found two men who had been left behind in a 'cave which was a wretched hovel to be sure, built in the cavity of the rock, with a kind of shrub matted together for a front, and a couple of square holes left in it to let the lights in. The... bed, which was two sealskins, was a pigstye and everything else there in one room. The whole was a picture of human misery.' So efficient was this industry that by about 1810 the seal population had been exterminated, as also the original flora and fauna, which fell victim to fires and the introduction of new species like pigs, which soon went feral, and deer, goats and rabbits. The pigs also plundered seabird nests and ate the eggs and the young birds. In sum, the islands once 'were green, now they are brown, desolate and despoiled.'
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These sealers, and whalers also, travelled long distances from their homes in America and Europe to the hunting grounds, then back to Guangzhou to sell the catch, and then home again, where they hoped to use their profits to buy a farm and give up the sea. Who else travelled over our ocean? The general point is that in previous times people travelled by sea to be sure, but not that many, and most of them came from, and visited, only littoral areas. Now there were many more people travelling. Some of them came from inland, such as bonded labourers, and some came from right outside, that is Europeans bound for the settlement colonies in the
southern ocean: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Our travellers include pilgrims, religious exemplars, troops, bonded labourers, westerners travelling within their empires or back home to the metropole, and slaves. We will discuss slaves first.
There was always a considerable internal slave trade within Africa, but we will focus on long-distance trade by sea. This trade had existed for many centuries. The greatest flow was from Africa to the Middle East. Among the early Europeans the Dutch were the main traders, bringing in quite large numbers from Africa and India to work as domestics and on plantations in Indonesia, and from Madagascar for the Cape. The Portuguese were also involved, but to a lesser extent. However, the trade grew exponentially once plantations had been established by Europeans on the islands of the ocean. We lack authoritative estimates of the numbers involved, but certainly some hundreds of thousands were sent to the European islands, and many more to Brazil and Cuba. French planters in the Mascarenes brought in slaves from Madagascar, and then from the East African coast. Later the Seychelles also required slave labour. Mauritius and the Seychelles became British in 1814, but the slave trade continued until the British abolished it in 1834. Even after this there was an extensive illegal trade, especially to the French island of Bourbon. Meanwhile there were two other main streams: from Portuguese Mozambique to Brazil, and from Zanzibar to the Middle East and the northern Swahili coast. Their treatment here seems to have been much less oppressive than on the European plantations, being nearer to clientage than to the horrors of a slave life cultivating sugar. Pfeiffer commented on this difference in Madagascar in 1857, where she claimed that to be owned by a native was much preferable to being owned by a European:
The position of slaves is here, as among all half-civilised nations, much better than that of their fellow-bondmen among Europeans and Creoles [by which she means Europeans born in the Indian Ocean area]. They have but little work to do, are fed about as well as their masters, and are seldom punished, though the laws do not at all protect them.
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Not all slaves came from Africa: on Mauritius in 1806 ten per cent were of Indian origin. Nor did they all work on plantations for Europeans. Many worked on the docks, in construction, as sailors and as pearl divers in the Gulf.
The nature of this trade changed once the British had abolished slavery and took steps to stop others trading in human beings. The French planters in response pretended that their slaves were really bonded labour, not property. Abolition was a difficult task to accomplish. One British officer told Captain Sulivan, who commanded a ship off the East African coast and inspected every ship he came across, that 'If we go on condemning these vessels for having only a few slaves on board, we shall be having our supplies cut off again from the interior.' All too often a suspicious dhow would be chased, only for it to beach itself and crew and passengers escape inland. Independent Zanzibar was a particular problem, constituting a gap in the
system of patrols that the British tried to enforce. It was only in 1873 that the sultan was persuaded, or rather required, to stop exporting slaves from his island, while it was only after Zanzibar came under British protection that domestic slavery was ended in 1897.
It is useful to distinguish three sorts of colonies around the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, with rather different people travelling across the ocean to reach them. First are the settler colonies, where white people displaced indigenous inhabitants: South Africa and Australia are the obvious examples. Second are plantation economies, with a mostly imported population, of which Mauritius is the type study. Finally, there are mixed areas, where Europeans ruled indigenous people and also introduced a host of migrant Indians and Chinese: Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Singapore all fit here.
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Once slavery was abolished a new form of labour was required. This was the indentured labour system, whereby poor people were recruited for a set number of years to work for low wages, after which they were free to work for themselves. This was hardly a new system, as it had operated across the Atlantic to the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century. The difference was the scale, and the fact that most of the indentured labourers were Indian; there was a racial as opposed to class element involved. The broad context is of a steep rise in the movement of people around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A large part of this was Atlantic, with a huge influx of free labour to North America. In the Indian Ocean the movement was not of free people. Chinese indentured labour moved to southeast Asia, and Indians to the islands, to South Africa, Burma, Malaya, and far afield to Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad.
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The majority were Indians. Once slavery was abolished in South Africa, labour was still needed, and the local Zulus were not interested. Between 1860–68, and 1874–1911 around 176,000 Indians were imported.
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In several parts of the tropical world plantations were booming, first sugar, and then coffee, tea, and later rubber. The system began in Mauritius in 1834, which island in total received 450,000 Indian labourers. The system was soon extended to other places beyond the ocean. Between 1834 and 1937 thirty million left their homes to go overseas, and 24 million returned. These workers certainly made more money than they would if they had stayed in India, but conditions of work were often brutal, and those who through illness could not work lost pay. However, if they survived the first few years they often could save and send money back home to their families in India. Indians were preferred, as free African labour was seen at the time as more or less useless: too stupid, lazy and unreliable. Indians, on the contrary, were perceived as docile, industrious, and respectful, or so it was thought at first. When they began to assert themselves the European planter stereotype changed: they now were greedy, weak and dirty, and Chinese were preferred instead.
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