Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean

160 journal of world history, june 2003
of great demand or for special projects, though normally “pieces” of
slaves were stowed as supplementary cargo on board Dutch East India
ships along with other commodities. Company officials as private individuals
also engaged in the legal and illegal slave trade. Foreign slavers
would occasionally sell some of their forced labor when calling at one
of the VOC ports en route to their ultimate destination. Free burgher
and Asian merchants (rulers, nobility, and commoners) routinely carried
slaves throughout the Indian Ocean as part of the so-called country
or intra-Asian trade.
Slave Occupations
Slaves were general laborers and used in a wide variety of occupations
in the Dutch slave societies across the Indian Ocean basin. Specialization
among private and company slaves, however, occurred in accordance
with the size of the individual slave household and the particular
position the settlement occupied within the company’s overall trade
network. The majority of slaves acted as domestic servants in small or
large slave households of company officials, free burghers, and Asian
subjects in areas under Dutch jurisdiction. They served as cooks, lamplighters,
houseboys, housemaids, concubines, seamstresses, bread bakers,
tea makers, coachmen, musicians, masseuses, honor guards, valets,
and so forth. 71 They performed menial labor as coolies in the construction
of fortifications, buildings, roads, canals, and trenches, and as
porters and stevedores in the ports and warehouses.
In agriculture, slaves grew food crops (rice, wheat, potatoes, and
vegetables), cash crops (pepper, nutmeg and mace, cloves, sugar, cotton,
tobacco, and grapes), and herded cattle and sheep. In mining,
slaves dug for gold, tin, and other minerals, and broke coral stone for
the burning of lime. They served as fishermen, sailors, and country
traders in the intra-Asiatic trade. In manufacturing, slaves labored in
artisan workshops as carpenters, furniture makers, coopers, tailors,
cobblers, gold-, silver-, and blacksmiths, and numerous other artisanal
occupations. They worked in gunpowder mills, sulfur and saltpeter
refineries, arak distilleries, sawmills, shipyards, and sugar mills. In the
service sector, they were active in retail, (lower) administrative functions,
medical professions (nurses, midwives, etc.), and so forth. Polit-
71 De Haan, Oud Batavia I, pp. 458–60. For a good example, see Valentijn, Oud- en
Nieuw Oost-Indiën II, pp. 369–70.