Chapter 11 - Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines the vast increase in the scale of mobility across the Bay of Bengal that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows how earlier, smaller-scale routes of mobility laid the groundwork for mass migration, including networks of recruitment. Using a range of colonial and vernacular sources, the chapter examines the interplay of freedom and constraint, mobility and immobility, that underpinned a movement of people that transformed both the landscape and the demography of Southeast Asia. The new modes of governing migration that arose through this process, both legal and extralegal, had lasting consequences in shaping the citizenship laws and migration policies of post-colonial states.

Keywords: Migration; plantations; Bay of Bengal; freedom; capitalism

In early 1870, W.L. Hathaway, Sub-Collector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He wrote that migration between South India and Malaya was “a regularly organized system of kidnapping”. Time and again, “captives were shipped from Negapatam for Penang and other countries, where the males were employed as coolies, and the females sold to a life of prostitution”. This “traffic,” Hathaway wrote, “is contrary to the law, […which] makes it illegal to assist any native of India in emigrating.” He insisted that the Madras government intervene to stop the traffic, and embarrassed the authorities in a long letter to The Friend of India, a journal read by British and Indian critics of imperial policy.

Hathaway made the “traffic” his personal mission. From his base in Nagapatnam, he waged war on shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870's “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a warehouse where migrants waited to board ships for Southeast Asia. The problem arose when their cases came before the local magistrate. Each migrant insisted that he acted of his own free will. Young boys declared that the labor recruiters were their “fathers” or “uncles”; they hadn't signed contracts, so there was no evidence that they were “migrating for the purposes of labor”. “It is useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case,” Hathaway lamented; “people themselves will not reveal the truth.”