Slavery in the East

The Chessmen Museum owns several chess sets from Indonesia. Some of them were made when the country was still a Dutch colony. 72 years ago, on August 17, 1945, Sukarno proclaimed the independence of the country. The ´emerald belt´ would no longer serve as a province of the far-away Netherlands.

The Dutch East Indies were incredibly valuable for the Netherlands from an economic point of view. The huge profits that were made there were directly linked to slavery. This occurred on a larger scale than on the plantations in Suriname and the Caribbean Islands, a fact that is not widely known. For a long time, historians considered slaves in the Indies status symbols for the homes of wealthy merchants that belonged to the Dutch East India Company (DEIC). The fate of these ‘servants’ was considered less grave than that of the plantation slaves in the West. Slowly, this image started to change.

Heavy labour in the East
In Asia, slavery was a widespread phenomenon even before the arrival of the Europeans. War was the main impulse of an increase in the number of slaves and the demand for slaves had always been a threat to the inhabitants of these areas. But now the demand for cheap labour force was growing and therefore the chance of ending up as a slave increased as well.

The Dutch East India Company played a major role in the slave trade. Even though the company wanted to limit this lucrative business, it was its employees from all walks of life that bought slaves in a personal capacity. Although this was officially illegal, they freely used the ships and the trade network of their employer. Travel journals demonstrate that not only important DEIC ministers owned hundreds of slaves. The soldiers or craftsmen that were in the city also bought slaves.

All these slaves did not only do housework: when the slave owner himself did not have any jobs for them, they had to go out and earn money as day labourers. The slaves would work as porters to load and unload ships or they would perform other kinds of heavy manual work in mines, on construction sites or on plantations. They had to hand over (a large part of) their wages to their owner. Slaves were also used to work for the DEIC itself, the wages being paid directly to their owner. The gold from the mines on Sumatra, for example, was mainly extracted by slaves, under the supervision of the Dutch East India Company.

Severe penalties
Slavery in the East was no less cruel than slavery in the West: penalties were heavy here as well. Runaway slaves were tied to a pole, flogged and their wounds rubbed with salt. The owners kept their slaves under control with cruel punishments and divide-and-conquer tactics. One of the slaves would be promoted to the desired role of supervisor of his fellow-slaves. In exchange for privileges or other types of rewards, slaves would go on a manhunt for fellow-slaves that had run away. It was often these supervisors that would whip the recovered slave so the owner hardly had to get his hands dirty himself.

Slaves serving in housekeeping could report abuse to the authorities, which seems like a good thing in theory. But if the judges of the court considered the complaint unfounded, the slave would end up getting a beating anyway. It is not surprising that few complaints were made.

On January 1, 1860, slavery in the Dutch East Indies was abolished, but the lack of freedom of its people was sustained by the culture system (1830-1870). The system forced the people to cultivate export goods for the Netherlands, causing a food shortage in the colony. The people were starving, and the profits on the products ended up in the pockets of the Dutch. Nothing much had changed since the glory days of the Dutch East India Company.

By Marjolein Overmeer