ABSTRACT
This volume presents a number of examples of resistance in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) from South Africa to the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotta and Madagascar, to India, Australia, Java and Indochina. Bondage in the IOW assumed a multiplicity of often overlapping forms that varied according to region and inevitably changed over time. They ranged from permanent chattel slavery, characteristic of ‘closed’ slave systems of the Far East and European-run plantations on the Mascarene islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to multiple and flexible forms of servility, such as existed in many ‘open’ slave systems in Africa and Southeast Asia, in which changes in status from free to servile and vice versa were often possible. At the same time, the gender and age profile of servile labour in the IOW varied enormously over time and according to region and the system of bondage. Thus whereas adult males were most in demand on the Mascarenes plantations, females and children were often the most sought after forms of servile labour in traditional forms of bondage in indigenous IOW societies. Again, whereas Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity had relatively little impact upon the attitude of slave-owners subscribing to those faiths towards their slaves, Islam did affect many Muslim slave-owners’ attitudes to their slaves; for example, most children of a Muslim master and a female slave were automatically granted freedom, as was their mother upon the death of the father.
