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Sailors, Zielverkopers, and the Dutch East India Company: The maritime labour market in eighteenth-century Surat*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

GHULAM A. NADRI
GHULAM A. NADRI*
Affiliation:
History Department, Georgia State University, United States of America Email: gnadri@gsu.edu
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Abstract

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. The Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance of zielverkopers (labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 336 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Introduction

In May 1786, a crowd of people marched to the residence of A. J. Sluijsken, director of the Dutch East India Company (De Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie [VOC]: hereafter ‘the Company’) in Surat in Gujarat, threatening and cursing him and using abusive words. They became so violent that the director had to call the Company's armed guards to drive them away.Footnote 1 The men and women in the crowd—the spouses, families, and friends of sailors—were demanding payment of bequest and wage arrears that the Company owed to sailors serving in Batavia. The circumstances that precipitated this crisis and the resulting fallout reveal some interesting aspects of Surat's maritime labour market and its familial, social, economic, and political dynamics. The above incident is not unique: one finds in Company sources several references to similar circumstances which led to disputes between the Company and its sailors in the second half of the eighteenth century. What follows below is an attempt to tap this rich source of information to examine the characteristics of the maritime labour market in eighteenth-century Surat.

‘Indian sailors’, or lascars as the English called them or Moorse zeevarende as they were called by their Dutch employers, performed a variety of functions on board ships and in port cities.Footnote 2 Their services were required on every ship and a number of them were employed on large ocean-going ships. Asian and European shipowners, including the East India companies, employed Indian sailors on their ships plying the Indian and Atlantic oceans.Footnote 3 Sailors were highly versatile and contributed significantly to the maritime economy in the age of sail. One of the earliest wage workers in the Indian economy, they worked in groups in places far away from their homes and collectively carried out the responsibilities and tasks assigned to them. In Surat in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they formed a significant workforce that contributed to the expansion and sustenance of the city's flourishing maritime trade. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Indian sailors were employed in even larger numbers by British and Indian shipowners based mostly in Bombay and Calcutta, the two premier colonial port cities in India. A substantial literature has recently emerged that examines the maritime labour markets in late-colonial India, primarily from the perspectives of British imperialism, labour control, and social inequality.Footnote 4

The study of maritime labour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has lagged behind and several important aspects of the maritime labour markets in this period are yet to be explored.Footnote 5 It may be useful to analyse the labour processes at work and the dynamics of labour–employer relationships in the eighteenth century, a period when the labour markets in India were undergoing some major transformations. Such an exercise needs to be undertaken for two important reasons. First, this will help us to identify continuities or changes in the structural and institutional dynamics of the maritime labour markets between the pre-colonial and colonial periods. It will be interesting, for instance, to know whether or not the means and modes of labour control and the organization of the markets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, studied by G. Balachandran and Ravi Ahuja, had their roots in the pre-colonial labour markets.Footnote 6 Second, this will help us to situate the pre-colonial Indian maritime labour markets in a global context by comparing its characteristics with the labour markets in northwestern Europe.Footnote 7

In this article, I focus on a less-explored segment of Indian maritime workers, that is, those sailors working for the Company, and analyse the dialectics of their relationship with their Dutch employers in the second half of the eighteenth century. By illuminating the socio-economic and political nuances of maritime labour relations in Surat, especially the role of serangs (chiefs of sailors), zielverkopers Footnote 8 (labour contractors), and the local administration, this study hopes to contribute to the discussion on the Indian working classes in general and maritime labour in particular.Footnote 9 This article argues that, far from being a fixed and timeless institution, the maritime labour markets were sites of contestation and negotiation, and arenas in which the actors—that is, the labourers and their families, labour contractors, and employers— were (re)articulating their responses to the imperatives of the eighteenth-century political economy.

The maritime labour market of Surat

The making of maritime labour

In early modern India, port cities were major commercial markets which generated a demand for labour. The employment opportunities that the port cities offered to their inhabitants were, to a large extent, seasonal and varied with the ebb and flow of monsoon-driven maritime trade. In Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century, the demand for sailors was rather high because of two major factors: the flourishing maritime trade, carried out by local Gujarati-, other Asian-, and European-owned ships; and the shortage of European crews, which required both the Dutch and English East India companies to recruit local sailors. The insecurity of sea routes due to piracy and warfare during this period was an additional factor in the increased demand, as shipowners needed to have a reserve of sailors on board. A number of men with sailing skills readily took up these opportunities and offered their services to prospective employers. Serving on board ships ensured a monthly salary, board, and daily maintenance.

The pool of maritime labour in Surat comprised three main categories of workers, all from economically poor families. First, there were the slaves, who served as wage labourers on sailing ships and at the harbours.Footnote 10 Some ambitious entrepreneurs in Surat reportedly procured poor young boys and men, raised them as slaves, and put them to work as sailors. The Dutch accountant in Surat reported in 1779 that some people purchased poor men and negotiated with labour contractors to place them on Company ships in return for the salary and pay-off money.Footnote 11 Second, there were the free wage workers who came from families with a long tradition of sailing as a profession. Serangs and tindals (serangs’ assistants) certainly belonged in this category. Some ordinary sailors, especially those who made repeated voyages to Batavia, may have been free wage workers and have had the freedom to choose their employers.Footnote 12 The third category consisted of those who were forced into this profession by their personal or family circumstances. Usually from poor economic backgrounds, they and their families depended for survival on money they borrowed from labour contractors and serangs.Footnote 13 To pay off their accumulated debts, they sold their labour in exchange for the wages they earned working on sailing ships. Labour contractors also sometimes financially supported some prospective families, whose young male members then worked as sailors in exchange. They provided maintenance to the families for four, six, and sometimes eight months before their members could actually be sent on board ships.Footnote 14 The evidence for this is not explicit, but it does seem that this was a kind of debt bondage, with the difference that in this arrangement the lender did not directly receive the labour services of the debtors but appropriated the wages, or a part thereof, that sailors earned.

From sailors’ and their families’ perspectives this kind of arrangement was a part of the local informal support system. It provided families with the necessary means for day-to-day subsistence and the expected recovery of money kept the contractors connected with the families until the sailors’ contracts came to an end. On many occasions, as we will see below, labour contractors represented sailors and their families in disputes with the Company. Association with labour contractors was also a means of securing employment for family members. For sailors and their families, contractors and serangs were interpreters, receivers and distributors of wages and allowances, keepers of account, and custodians of money earned in Batavia or elsewhere.Footnote 15Serangs and tindals occasionally pocketed the wages that legitimately belonged to sailors: both the Dutch and English East India companies’ sources refer to some serangs depriving sailors of part of their wages.Footnote 16 The circumstances and processes that went into the making of the maritime labour force in India were not much different from those in Europe and the Atlantic world.

Labour contractors and other entrepreneurs were the Indian equivalents of labour crimps at British ports or volkhouders ((dealers in personnel) in the Dutch labour markets, who invested their capital in supporting potential sailors and their families in return for an anticipated recovery from sailors’ wages.Footnote 17 Most sailors at this time came from poor families. Sailors in America, according to Gary Nash, were ‘the poorest members of the free white community’.Footnote 18 In Europe, sons of yeoman and poor farmers and those dispossessed of land as a result of enclosures became sailors. Or, as Marcus Rediker puts it, ‘economic necessity pushed many to the water's edge’.Footnote 19 The rural agricultural background of sailors is also well recognized in the literature on Indian and European maritime labour. Most seamen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came from villages: as noted above, economic necessity forced many former peasants to join the pool of maritime labour in European port cities.Footnote 20 In colonial India, similarly, most seamen were recruited from the communities of workers who had relocated to port cities for work.Footnote 21 To many agricultural labourers, sailing may have presented an alternative avenue to work for wages, especially when misfortunes, due to famine, warfare or rural indebtedness, befell them. Information on sailors in eighteenth-century Surat is insufficient to establish their agricultural background, though. While some may have relocated to Surat in search of work and become sailors, the seasonality of employment and economic necessity may also have forced the people living at the coast to become part-time agricultural workers. Thus, combining seafaring with agricultural pursuits may have been a mixed livelihood strategy pursued by coastal communities and rural agricultural workers. In Surat, sailors were generally recruited from the city's immigrant population, which included families from coastal communities from the western Indian Ocean rim.Footnote 22 Occasionally, however, sailors were recruited from the surrounding rural areas.Footnote 23

Most sailors, except for those recruited by European companies on long-term contracts, were employed only for the duration of the journey which, in most cases, did not exceed a couple of months.Footnote 24 From the completion of the return voyage to the start of the next sailing season, sailors were free to find employment in other sectors, including agriculture. While some may have returned to the interior to carry out agricultural activities or found other means of supplementing their incomes, many waited until the next sailing season for further employment opportunities.Footnote 25 Port cities and the interior remained somewhat integrated as labourers moved back and forth seasonally, depending upon where and when the demand for labour was high.Footnote 26 The flexibility to move between the two domains was thus an important feature of the labour market in early modern India. The move between agricultural and maritime labour and vice versa implied that men had to work in a completely different environments each of which required a different mindset and skills.

In the age of sail, the skills and abilities of on-board sailors played an important role in establishing successful maritime voyages. Even though the Dutch and English East India companies did not seem to have specified any particular skills that sailors were required to possess, they certainly expected that the recruits would be ‘capable’ of carrying out the tasks that high-seas sailing entailed.Footnote 27 The Company's recruitment instructions stipulated that sailors should be young, strong, sturdy, and capable. The English East India Company, similarly, distinguished ‘able’ and ‘able bodied’ seamen from those ‘unused to the sea’ or those ‘unacquainted with the business of a seaman’.Footnote 28 Such specifications signify that employers did look for particular skills in sailors. They imply that sailors would productively and ably perform tasks and duties which included loading and unloading ships, conveying goods between ships and storehouses, cleaning the wharf, bringing water, and taking up other responsibilities such as those of watchmen and servants.Footnote 29 Depending on circumstances, they also helped with the masts, repaired sails, pumped out water from the ship's lower decks, and responded to any call for action during the journey. Sailors were expected to carry out these activities with discipline and efficiency, traits that were intrinsic to being a good sailor. Sailing skills were, thus, experience based and seamen seem to have learned them by working with other experienced sailors.Footnote 30 The particular nature of the skills required, it seems, made it possible for some families and communities to acquire this experience and transmit these skills from one generation to the next.Footnote 31 It also, at the same time, enabled men from diverse regional, ethnic, and occupational backgrounds to work together. How did this diversity impact on their identity as professional maritime workers?

In the Dutch sources, sailors are referred to as matrosen or zeevarenden. These terms were interchangeably used to describe young labourers employed by the Company to carry out a variety of tasks both on board ships and in the docks and ports.Footnote 32 These terms were then qualified with prefixes like Europeese (European), inlandse (native), moorse (Muslim) or jentiefse (Hindu) in order to identify sailors by their region, religion or ethnicity. Sailors recruited by the Company in Surat and Bengal were referred to as Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors). I should emphasize here that employers, especially the Europeans, understood professions as being caste or community based.Footnote 33 Employers preferred to recruit employees from castes or communities which, they believed, possessed the skills and expertise they were looking for. Thus, Company authorities in Surat and Bengal recruited Muslim sailors because they and their contemporaries believed that Muslims had no inhibition in working on board sailing ships and in crossing the seas. They assumed that the best sailors came from one and the same ‘caste’ (i.e. Muslim).Footnote 34 The Company, it seems, expected its sailors to be Muslims, or perhaps they assumed that all sailors were Muslims because no Hindu would choose to be a sailor and cross the seas as they considered this to be taboo.Footnote 35 The labour contractors knew this and, at times, recruited non-Muslim sailors and passed them over to the Company as Muslims. Interestingly, labour contractors in Surat and a number of the serangs and tindals mentioned in the sources were non-Muslims. The contractors who supplied sailors to the Company in Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century were Hindus, which can be discerned from their names: Nathu Ratanji, Kalyan Nanabhai, Kalyan Govindji, and Biju Bhaidas.Footnote 36 It may also be surmised from the names of sailors listed in the sources that a significant number of them were Hindus and Parsis. In the Company records, however, they are almost always, although erroneously, referred to as mooren or moorse zeevarenden.

Equally interesting for our purposes here is the ethnic diversity within each gang of sailors headed by a serang and a tindal. The gangs invariably consisted of a mixed group of Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi sailors.Footnote 37 While it may not be possible to determine the social or regional background of each of them, a close look at the names, especially of the Muslim sailors, yields some useful information regarding their regional affiliations and social statuses. In so far as the names provide information, it may be observed that some Muslim sailors were of Arab and African descent, while others were local Muslims. The Sidis, for example, were African (Abyssinian) Muslims who settled in western India and were well known for their maritime skills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 38 Similarly, sailors with longer names starting with ‘Shaikh’ were, it seems, men of Arab or West Asian descent.Footnote 39 Evidence of a highly diverse community of sailors in Surat does not match with the notions of caste- or community-based occupations commonly held by Company officials and their European contemporaries in India. It also does not sit well with the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions that serangs and sailors in their gangs came from the same villages and that the ability of serangs to control sailors stemmed from their traditionally superior socio-economic status.Footnote 40Serangs in the eighteenth century do not seem to have been less effective in controlling sailors than their counterparts in the late colonial period. The sources do not indicate any widespread labour indiscipline or violation of employment contracts. Desertion sometimes occurred in Batavia and these constituted the occasions when the authority of the serang and the Company was contested. There are several instances of desertion in the eighteenth century and it seems that escape from the Company may have been induced and facilitated by the networks and connections that sailors established at their workplaces.

The diversity among sailors, both in terms of ethnicity and forms of labour (free and bonded wage workers and slaves), may have undermined somewhat the development of a collective consciousness.Footnote 41 Working together in groups nevertheless enabled them to build ties with each other and develop a sense of belonging to a community. They cooperated with and cared for each other in difficult times. When Fazil Khan, a serang, died in Ceylon in 1762 his belongings were taken care of by another serang, Qasim Yusuf, and sailors, Azmat Khan, Sharif Khan, and Daudji Yusuf, all of whom returned to Surat on the same ship. Back in town, these sailors informed Khan's family about the incident so that they could claim from the Company whatever was left by the late serang.Footnote 42

Family and kinship ties were a route to securing employment and safeguarding interests. I suggest that such ties were sometimes invoked and enforced. Sailors with identical family or surnames serving in the same gang may indicate the role of such ties in their recruitment and placement.Footnote 43 Sailors remained connected with their families and the norms and practices of the labour markets in Surat, especially the family's claim to a part of sailors’ wages, strengthened this relationship.

In this world, seamen built new connections and developed a collective consciousness that was expressed through mutiny, desertion, and piracy.Footnote 44 The literature on Indian maritime labour has underscored that the cohesion and effectiveness of Indian sailors is attributable to serangs’ control over their crews.Footnote 45 As we will see in the next section, Company officials in Surat were engaged in seemingly perpetual conflict and negotiation with sailors’ families and contractors on the issues of death, desertion of sailors, and payment of wage arrears. The disputes had their origins in the rather unique modes of recruitment and remuneration of seamen in Surat to which we now turn our attention.

Methods of recruitment and remuneration

Sailors were recruited through serangs and zielverkopers (labour contractors). Serangs themselves could recruit sailors, form a gang (ploeg), and enter into the service of a shipowner.Footnote 46 They also served on board ships with tindals and gangs of sailors. Serangs thus performed both the functions of a labour contractor and a foreman or jobber as they also supervised the labour process on board ships. In their capacity as labour contractors, serangs stood with zielverkopers in a relationship of competition and complementarities. At times, they competed with the latter, but also, at times, acted as sub-contractors and helped zielverkopers in the recruitment of labour.Footnote 47Serangs had contacts with the families and localities from which sailors were recruited and possibly also extended monetary support to such families against an anticipated recovery from sailors’ wages. These serangs may not have been much different from their nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors, whom Ravi Ahuja characterizes as ‘an ambiguous social type, combining the features of crimp and patron, of foremen and subcontractor’.Footnote 48 Company sources clearly distinguish serangs from zielverkopers, who stayed on shore and supplied seamen to prospective employers. Those employing sailors in large numbers and for longer periods had to depend on the latter to make sure that they had the required number of labourers—and possibly the best and the ablest of them—on time.Footnote 49 Soliciting the services of contractors was also a response to the growing demand for sailors and competition among employers that sometimes rendered the labour market short of employable men.Footnote 50 The Dutch and the English East India companies thus almost always depended on the services of labour contractors, that is, zielverkopers and ghat-serangs respectively.

The Company recruited sailors in Surat for a three-year period during which time they would serve on ships or at the port in Batavia. The unusually long period of service at an oddly distant workplace rendered the recruitment and remuneration processes somewhat complicated. The Company paid labour contractors ‘earnest-money’ (handgeld), equal to one month's salary for each sailor they supplied. This was in addition to the money advanced to them for the purchase of sailors’ kit (uitrusting).Footnote 51 Labour contractors also received a commission in the form of a share in the wages paid to sailors. They kept a list of all sailors they delivered to the Company, maintained an up-to-date account of payments and arrears, and worked closely with Company officials. They presented the sailors’ grievances to the Company and often secured payment of wage arrears and bequests for sailors. In this respect, the labour contractors were entrepreneurs with complex business dealings and were thus different from serangs, who not only recruited sailors for shipowners but also supervised the labour process during the contract period. Serangs, tindals, and labour contractors thus formed competing and complementary networks of mediation in Surat's maritime labour markets in the eighteenth century.

Each sailor was paid 6 Rupees per month and the mode of payment, as practised in Surat, was as follows.Footnote 52 At the time of recruitment and upon the sailors’ arrival on board ship, five months’ wages and a bequest (two months’ wages) were paid in advance to the contractors.Footnote 53 Of the 42 Rupees paid, the Dutch accountant kept 2 Rupees as his perk and 8 Rupees was paid to the contractors as commission. Sailors’ families then received 32 Rupees for seven months of the first year. Wages for the remaining five months were paid in Batavia. In the second year, wages for eight months were paid in Batavia and two months’ wages were paid to the families of those who were still alive and active in the Company's service. Wages for the remaining two months were withheld by the Company until the sailors returned to Surat. In the third year too, sailors received wages for eight months in Batavia, and on their return to Surat at the end of the third year, they were paid for the remaining four months plus the two months of the second year.Footnote 54 Thus, about 60 per cent of the sailors’ total salary for a three-year contract was paid in Batavia and the remaining 40 per cent in Surat. The wages were paid to the contractors and serangs who then disbursed them to sailors or their families. Serangs and tindals received a monthly salary of 15 and 12 Rupees a month respectively.

In Bengal, the modes of recruitment and remuneration of sailors was rather simple. Employers paid salaries in advance that were equal to two to five months’ remuneration, depending on the circumstances and the terms of agreement. For each sailor that the Company recruited in Bengal in the eighteenth century, it paid two months’ wages in advance to serangs or labour contractors and the rest was paid in Batavia.Footnote 55 In the 1790s, the Company paid sailors a monthly salary of 5 ½ to 5 ¾ Rupees (f. 8:4:0–f. 8:11:8), which was slightly less than sailors earned in Surat.Footnote 56 Sailors’ wages in Surat were thus higher than the wages the Company paid to the sailors it recruited in Bengal. In the late colonial period too the wages of sailors in Bombay were 10 to 15 per cent higher than those received by their counterparts in Calcutta. Even the minimum diet prescribed was better for the former than for the latter.Footnote 57 The English East India Company and private British shipowners paid four or five months’ salaries in advance to ser-serangs (or ghat-serangs) who recruited sailors for them.Footnote 58

How do the wages of the Company's Indian sailors compare with those of European sailors working for the Company in Asia or with those Indian sailors who served the English East India Company in the nineteenth century? As in Europe, the Company recruited sailors in India for a term of three years. The gross salary paid by the Company to its Indian sailors corresponded quite well with the salary paid to most European sailors serving in Asia. Whereas the former received a monthly wage of 6 Rupees, the latter were paid about 6 to 11 Dutch guilders (roughly 4 to 7 ⅓ Rupees) a month, depending on their skills and experience.Footnote 59 The young European sailors (jongens) in the service of the Company in Asia received even less and soldiers (soldaten) received a monthly salary that was the equivalent of 6 Rupees.Footnote 60 The net amount that sailors actually received in Surat was a little over three quarters of their gross salary.Footnote 61 In terms of gross wages, there was therefore not much difference between European and Indian sailors. The latter received the same boarding costs (kostgeld) from their employers in Batavia as the European sailors stationed there (f. 2:8:0 per month). The portion of food (randsoen) allocated to them was, however, less than that received by their European counterparts. The cost of provision for a European sailor in 1747 was about f. 4:13:11 whereas that of an Indian sailor was f. 2:12:8 per month (see Table 1).

TABLE 1 Comparative monthly allowances and boarding costs paid to the VOC's European and Muslim sailors in Batavia

* Possibly ‘mutsje’, a measure mostly used for alcoholic drinks (i.e. slaapmutsje).

Source: HRB 345, Jacob Mossel aan GG en R, Batavia, 31 August 1747, not foliated; VOC 7595, Reglement op de verstrekkingen van randsoenen en kostgelden aan de scheeplingen, ter reede Batavia leggende [Regulations for giving the provision and boarding money to sailors stationed at Batavia], Batavia, 24 March 1775.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Company cut back on its expenses and reduced the allowances of both European and Indian sailors. Table 1 shows that the sailors’ living allowances in 1775 were less than they were in 1747. The monthly wages that the Company paid to its Indian sailors remained the same up until the late 1790s. The major difference between the Company's Indian and European sailors were the limited opportunities for upward mobility in rank and salary for the former whereas most European sailors in Asia would sooner or later move upward in the Company's hierarchy.Footnote 62Serangs enjoyed the highest position on a ship's crew that an enterprising and experienced Indian sailor might have aspired to reach.

The insignificant wage difference between the Company's Indian and European sailors in the eighteenth century stands in sharp contrast with the vast gap between the wages of Indian and European sailors on British ships in the nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, the English East India Company and other British employers paid, on average, 13 Rupees (23 to 30 shillings) per month to Indian lascars and 30 to 45 shillings per month to European sailors (i.e. their wages were 30 to 50 per cent higher).Footnote 63 Subsequently, wage levels underwent marked shifts and the gap between their respective wages widened even further. By the mid-nineteenth century, lascars’ wages were between one-fifth and one-third lower than those of European seamen.Footnote 64 This striking wage differential between the rising European seamen's wages and the stagnant or declining wages of lascars notable from the late eighteenth century onwards may be attributed to colonialism and its politico-economic imperatives, especially growing British control over Indian labour and labour markets.Footnote 65 The control may also be seen in the almost total absence of a role played by sailors’ families in the labour market of the nineteenth century. Unlike the families in eighteenth-century Surat, lascars’ families no longer seem to be claiming wages, or part thereof, from European employers. They therefore become rather invisible in the labour markets of India in the colonial period.

The Company's Indian sailors: the dynamics of the labour-employer relationship

Recruiting sailors in Surat: the genesis of the problem

Due to high mortality among European sailors during transoceanic voyages and in Cape Town and Batavia, the Company continued to experience a whittling down of their on-board maritime labour force. To make up for the loss of personnel, the Company recruited sailors in India and other parts of Asia.Footnote 66 There are references to the employment of Indian sailors on Company ships from the establishment of its commercial contacts with India from the early seventeenth century onwards.Footnote 67 The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the drying up of the recruitment of European sailors seems to have made it necessary for the Company to recruit local seamen in Asia, as was the case during the Spanish War of Succession in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 68 Recruiting local sailors was then a purely temporary recourse and the practice was given up as soon as sailors from Europe became available. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the Company began to employ a number of Indian sailors on a more regular basis than before.Footnote 69 The scarcity of sailors in Europe during this period as a result of wars combined with European navies’ need for labour necessitated the recruitment of native sailors for ships sailing in Asia and also for ships returning to Europe.Footnote 70 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Company recruited many hundreds of sailors in Surat to serve in Batavia. The Company's relationship with sailors and their families, however, was a rather complex and contested one. This was mainly because its methods of recruitment, remuneration of sailors, and the terms of employment were rather complicated.

The Company's Indian sailors, who were recruited to serve in Batavia, were expected to return home at the end of their three-year term of service. Whereas some sailors returned home, a number of them did not see their families again for many more years, and some never returned. While some did not survive the harsh conditions on board ship or during their stay in Batavia, many were retained in service even after they had completed their three-year contract. In 1764, a number of sailors returning from Batavia complained that they had been kept there for longer than the stipulated time.Footnote 71 Similar complaints were made in 1788 by the families of those sailors who were sent to Batavia in 1775 and 1776 but had not yet returned to Surat.Footnote 72 It is difficult to know the circumstances that prevented their timely return to Surat. Sailors’ families often accused the Company of violating the employment contracts and protested against the detention of sailors in Batavia. While this complain may not have been entirely fictitious, the possibility that some sailors willingly and purposely overstayed in Batavia or escaped to other places should not be ruled out.

The Company's Indian sailors in Batavia, like the English East India Company's lascars in London, may have been lured by prospects of better work and wages. Some of them might have married local women and, therefore, wished to settle down there. For those who lived in conditions of near slavery or peonage in Surat, the anxiety of returning to the same conditions may also have prompted them to leave the Company's service and find work elsewhere. Regardless of what inspired them to abscond, their families held the Company accountable and demanded payment of bequest and salary arrears. Disputes also occurred when the families of dead, deserting or missing sailors demanded payment of wages and bequests. It was in these disputes that the local administration, especially the nawab (governor) and the bakhshi (head of the military) of Surat, intervened on behalf of sailors and the labour contractors. Let us examine the circumstances that led to disputes and analyse the measures the Company adopted to manage the problem of controlling its maritime labour.

The Company, labour contractors, and the local administration

Disputes originated from discrepancies in the accounts that were kept of sailors in Batavia. They arose mainly because, at times, Batavian officials were unable to identify sailors and their gang leaders (i.e. serangs and tindals). The lists of sailors that Surat received annually from Batavia often did not match those kept by the contractors and the Company accountant in Surat. Cross checking often revealed that many sailors were unidentifiable or went unrecorded in Batavia.Footnote 73 In 1781, for example, Nicholas Wiardi, the Company accountant in Surat, noted that according to salary registers maintained in Surat there were 20 serangs, 20 tindals, and 399 serving sailors in Batavia, but the statement received from Batavia showed only 19 serangs, 15 tindals, and 232 sailors, while another account showed 16 serangs, 12 tindals, and 180 sailors.Footnote 74 The Anglo-Dutch War (1781–1783), which led to the suspension of the Company's commercial activities and the temporary seizure of its establishments in India by the English East India Company, aggravated the problem. When the War broke out in 1781, there were 28 serangs, 28 tindals, and 554 Surat sailors in the Company's service in Batavia.Footnote 75 None of them returned to Surat within the next three years. After the cessation of hostilities in 1784, Surat received statements from Batavia which showed that about a third of these men had either died or deserted. Such discrepancies in the statements of account caused (occasionally prolonged) disputes between the Company and the families of deceased sailors or deserters.

The problem actually arose when it came to determine, first, how many sailors had died and how many had deserted, and second, when a sailor had died or deserted so as to calculate the salary arrears due to the affected families. The Company claimed the right to confiscate any outstanding wages or bequests of deserters, but it was not always easy to prove that a sailor had actually absconded. The contractors and the families often suspected that many sailors described as deserting or missing were in fact employed on private ships or had been sent to work at the Company's other establishments in the East Indies.Footnote 76 They questioned Batavia's statistics regarding the numbers of active, deserting, and dead sailors as well as their salary statements and demanded payment of outstanding wages as per their own registers of account.

In 1784, for instance, sailors’ families and labour contractors demanded the outstanding wages of those sailors who were in Batavia during the War, which, according to their calculations, amounted to 24,480 Rupees. Batavia's statements, however, showed that the total amount due to sailors’ families did not exceed 14,151 Rupees because, in the preceding three years, about a third of them died or deserted.Footnote 77 After much negotiation, Company officials persuaded them to accept 17,424 Rupees to settle the account.Footnote 78 Similarly, in 1786, when the statement reported one sailor dead, 33 missing, and five having deserted, the contractors refused to believe these figures. They questioned why so many sailors would be absent in one year when they had bound themselves to serve the Company, and insisted that the Company should pay the outstanding wages, which amounted to about 3,285 Rupees. As in the previous case, the Company persuaded the contractors to accept half of that amount and close the matter.Footnote 79

In the same year, a major dispute occurred between the Company and the contractors over the payment of wages of 324 sailors (including one serang and eight tindals). According to the contractors’ calculations, these sailors had been in service in Batavia since 1780. They therefore demanded the sailors’ outstanding wages, which amounted to more than 76,000 guilders (50,667 Rupees). As on many earlier occasions, the statements from Batavia showed that the majority of the sailors had deserted. The Company, considering it a breach of their employment contract, confiscated their earned wages and bequests. The outraged members of the affected families reported the matter to the local administration and, as described at the beginning of this article, marched on the director's residence to express their anger. They tried to show their power and force the Company to concede to their demands. Company officials were able to negotiate with the contractors and resolved the dispute by paying 25,000 Rupees to the concerned families.Footnote 80 In view of the discrepancies in the statements of account, neither the Company's officials nor the contractors could establish their claims. The Company usually tried—and often succeeded—in making the contractors come to an agreement on the payment of wages and bequests, as in cases mentioned above.

The way in which the Company and labour contractors sought to resolve disputes is very significant. The Company's ability to negotiate the total amount of wage arrears in question left open a space for the concerned parties to exert their power and influence and strike a favourable deal. It is not obvious, however, whether it was the Company or the labour contractors which benefited most. Presumably, the sailors’ families received their share but the nature of these settlements also, it seems, allowed the contractors much flexibility in the distribution of the money among the sailors’ families. What is also important to note is that the Company officials often alluded to the fact that the local administration of Surat played an active role in these disputes.

A dominant part of the Company's discourse on sailors was that the nawab and the bakhshi exercised control over the city's labour force and that they had a share in the wages that sailors received from the Company.Footnote 81 The local administration, according to this view, often exploited the situations arising from the disputes between the Company and its sailors. In 1787, Company authorities in Surat noted that the local administration was complicit in perpetrating violence against the Company. Referring to the abovementioned protest by the sailors’ families, they made an interesting remark: that the local administration had tried to force the Company to pay the outstanding wages not by the use of direct violence but through an ‘angry’ and ‘licentious’ crowd.Footnote 82 The Company attributed any difficulties it faced in the recruiting and handling of sailors to the nexus between the bakhshi and the labour contractors. The local administration kept an account of the sailors working for the European companies and could potentially intervene if the sailors’ families or the contractors took their grievances to that level. Many a time, invoking the local authorities was simply a pressure tactic that the contractors applied—which was often rather successful. Company officials in the second half of the eighteenth century knew that the balance of political power in India was unfavourable and it was apprehensive of the punitive measures the local administration might apply to the Company. They, therefore, often preferred to negotiate with the contractors and settle the issue lest the complainants turned to the bakhshi.

The above disputes, it must be emphasized, relate to the problem of labour management and control. Company officials in Surat, while negotiating settlements with the contractors as and when disputes arose, were also contemplating measures to eliminate, or at least minimize, the chances of disputes taking place in the future. They repeatedly requested the Batavian authorities to ensure that all sailors, serangs, and tindals return to Surat when they had completed their terms of service.Footnote 83 In 1779, a proposal was also made to purchase slaves to become sailors and put them to work wherever they were needed.Footnote 84 Efforts were also made to develop an efficient model of account keeping so that the records would contain up-to-date information on sailors and their whereabouts. Detailed procedures were developed to help the Company officials in Surat keep an updated account of sailors and their wages and allowances.Footnote 85 But Batavia could not cope with the complex task of keeping an account of all sailors, whether in service, dead, deserting, or absent and missing.

The problem, in the Company's view, lay in the inability of the Batavian officials to identify sailors by their names or through the gangs they were part of. Company officials in Surat found out, or perhaps assumed, that the contractors gave a fake Muslim name to each non-Muslim they recruited as a sailor.Footnote 86 Such sailors may have abandoned their assigned names as soon as they left Surat or upon their arrival in Batavia. A number of sailors on the official lists were thus not identifiable, which gave rise to discrepancies in account keeping. Sometimes a sailor who was recorded as dead in the account books turned up alive a year or two later; and others who were actually dead were recorded as being active.Footnote 87 Some sailors, particularly those wishing to settle down in Batavia or elsewhere, may have used this ambiguity to their advantage and purposefully manipulated their identities.

A new set of measures, proposed by the Company in December 1784, was introduced to resolve this confusion.Footnote 88 First, the contractors were asked not to assign a new name to any sailor, and after they were delivered to the Dutch, the sailors’ names were to be verified by asking each man his name in the presence of a munshi (a local scribe) familiar with local names. Secondly, upon their arrival on board ship, the authorities were to confirm the sailors’ identity by once again asking them their names individually. Thirdly, each sailor was to be given an amulet made of copper and containing a parchment that had on it the name of sailor, the serang in whose group he served, the ship on which he sailed to Batavia, and the year of departure. Lastly, the authorities in Batavia were to be informed of this and to be requested to open the amulet upon a sailor's illness or death to establish his identity. To ensure that sailors kept this amulet with them, the Dutch authorities gave it to individual sailors via a holy man (a Brahmin or faqir or an ascetic). The Dutch anticipated that if the sailors considered the amulet to be lucky and believed that it would protect them against hazards and dangers, they would always keep it with them.Footnote 89 About 150 sailors sent to Batavia in the Trompenburg in 1784 were given the amulet.Footnote 90 It is not clear, however, if the plan was approved by the High Government in Batavia. The amulet idea was not mentioned again in the Company's records in subsequent years.

Further measures were subsequently adopted. In 1789, the Company and the contractors signed a formal contract that stipulated the terms and conditions by which they had to abide from the time sailors were received on board ships to their return after three years or more. The contract, consisting of 15 clauses, specified how the sailors were to be remunerated and set out regulations that would eliminate the possibilities of dispute.Footnote 91 It seems that the sailors had no say in the contract and, in both spirit and contents, it was quite close to the contract the Company signed annually with brokers and suppliers of merchandise.

This begs the question: were sailors considered as no more than commodities? The amulet system and the stipulations in the contract—such as ensuring the sailors’ timely return to Surat, not letting them marry or settle down in Batavia, and not putting them on Amsterdam-bound ships—were strategies to control labour and avoid disputes, on which depended the supply of maritime labour and the protection of the mutual interests of the Company and the contractors. Sailors, however, missed no opportunity to frustrate the signatories to the contract in their desire to control labour. Sailors continued to desert and escape from the Company's control by marrying and settling down in the East Indies. Thus did the disputes continue. Even in the late 1790s one finds Company officials in Surat deliberating upon sailors’ claims for bequest and salary arrears.Footnote 92 The only way out was perhaps to discard the complex modes of recruitment and remuneration and adopt the simpler system, as practised in Bengal. But Company officials in Surat were not in a position to do this because of the allegedly vested interests of the contractors and the local administration in the labour market.

Conclusions

The above discussion of the Dutch East India Company's Indian sailors and the circumstances of these seafaring men reveals the characteristics of the maritime labour market in early modern Surat in Gujarat. The most important of these was the immense complexity of labour relations caused by the intersecting or conflicting interests of the Company, labour contractors, and the local administration. Serangs and zielverkopers (labour contractors) mediated between labour and employers. As the contact person and responsible for the payment of wages and allowances to sailors and their families, the contractors remained involved for the entire duration of the sailors’ contracts and even beyond when, as we have seen above, disputes arose between sailors and their employers. Large-scale recruitment of Indian sailors in the eighteenth century by the Dutch and English East India companies and private shipowners added some dynamism to the labour market. Serangs and labour contractors took advantage of the competition among employers and exerted their authority and influence to turn business transactions in their favour.

The Company, too, sought to dominate the relationship by identifying sailors and stipulating the terms and conditions of their employment through written contracts. Its relations with sailors remained problematic throughout the period under review. The Company could not resolve the impasse because the balance of political power in Surat had shifted in favour of its European rival, the English East India Company.Footnote 93 Being on the margins of Gujarat's political landscape, the Company was unable to assert its position vis-à-vis the contractors and the local administration. The data and the analysis presented above shows that the Company, the labour contractors, sailors, and their families were constantly engaged in articulating their responses to the emerging circumstances in the rapidly changing political economy of eighteenth-century India.

References

1 VOC 3728, Resoluties [Proceedings of the Dutch Council], Surat, 29 May 1786, pp. 285–86; VOC 3727, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R [Director and Council of Surat to Governor-General and Council at Batavia], Surat, 5 January 1787, ff. 89v–90r.

2 ‘Indian sailors’ here denotes all sailors recruited in Surat and includes men of varying regional affiliations.

3 Indian seamen (mostly sailors) formed a significant part of the crew on Portuguese ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scammell, G. V., Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), Chapter IX, p. 30Google Scholar; Chapter XI, pp. 443–44; Chapter XII, p. 530. The English East India Company and British shipowners had Indian lascars on ships that plied in Indian waters and on home-bound ships. Fisher, Michael H., ‘Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and In Between, 1600–1857’, in Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Mercel (eds), Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History. International Review of Social History Supplements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 21–45Google Scholar.

4 Broeze, Frank, ‘The Muscles of Empire: Indian Seamen and the Raj, 1919–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18 (1981), pp. 43–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balachandran, G., ‘Searching for the Sardar: The State, Pre-Capitalist Institutions and Human Agency in the Maritime Labour Market, Calcutta, 1880–1935’, in Stein, Burton and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (eds), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 206–36Google Scholar; Balachandran, G., ‘Recruitment and Control of Indian Seamen, Calcutta, 1880–1935’, International Journal of Maritime History, 9 (1997), pp. 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balachandran, G., ‘Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890–1945’, in Markovits, Claude, Pouchepadass, Jacques, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (eds), Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950 (London: Anthem Press, 2006), pp. 89–130Google Scholar; Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, 1900–1960’, International Review of Social History, 51 (2006), pp. 111–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Michael Fisher and Janet Ewald have made important contributions to the study of Indian maritime labour, especially the working conditions of Indian seamen on the English East India Company ships since the early modern period. Fisher, Michael H., Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004)Google Scholar; Fisher, Michael H., ‘Working Across the Seas’, in Behal and Linden (eds), Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism, pp. 21–45Google Scholar; and, more recently, Fisher, Michael H., ‘Finding Lascar “Wilful Incendiarism”: British Ship-Burning Panic and Indian Maritime Labour in the Indian Ocean’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 35/3 (2012), pp. 596–623CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ewald, Janet J., ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’, American Historical Review, 105/1 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Balachandran, ‘Searching for the Sardars’; Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment’.

7 Sailors’ lived experiences and the organizational and institutional characteristics of the maritime labour markets in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe are fairly well explored. The researches of Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and others have illuminated very well the lives and experiences of European and American seamen. Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; van Royen, Paul, Bruijn, Jaap and Lucassen, Jan (eds), ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997)Google Scholar; Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many Headed Hydra?: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2002)Google Scholar; Fischer, Lewis R., et al. (eds), The North Sea: Twelve Essays on Social History of Maritime Labour (Stavanger: Stavanger Maritime Museum/The Association of North Sea Societies, 1992)Google Scholar.

8 The term zielverkoper has been interpreted by scholars in different ways. In the labour market in the Dutch Republic, there were volkhouders (dealers in personnel) who supplied sailors to the VOC in return for ‘ceel’ (a written authority signed by sailors to transfer a part of their salaries to the holder) which they usually sold on to speculative entrepreneurs (ceelkoper), hence they came to be called ceelverkoper or zielverkoper. Bruijn, J. R. and van Eyck van Heslinga, E. S., ‘De Scheepvaart van de Oost-Indische Compagnie en het Verschijnsel Muiterij’, in Bruijn, J. R. and van Eyck van Heslinga, E. S. (eds), Muiterij, Oproer en Berechting op de Schepen van de VOC (Haarlem: De Boer Maritiem, 1980), p. 17Google Scholar. Some have simply translated the term as ‘soulseller’ or ‘grossiers in personeel’. Marsden, P., The Wreck of the Amsterdam (London: Hutchinson, 1974), p. 38Google Scholar; Bruijn, J. R., Het Gelag der Zeelieden (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1978), p. 8Google Scholar. In this article, I have used the term ‘labour contractor’ as the English translation of zielverkoper. In their role as labour contractors, zielverkopers were the Dutch equivalents of the ghat-serangs who supplied lascars to the English East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’, pp. 24–27; Balachandran, ‘Searching for the Sardar’, pp. 211, 219.

9 In the historiography of the Indian working classes, the primary focus has been on the wage workers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those employed in the jute and textile industries. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, in Behal and Linden (eds), Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism, pp. 7–19; Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, ‘Aspects of the Historiography of Labour in India’, in his History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 236–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some recent studies on Indian labour have espoused two major views. The first holds that Indian labour in the early twentieth century was increasingly subordinated to capitalist market forces and labour regimes. In other words, wage workers, according to this view, were increasingly proletarianized. The other view emphasizes the rather complex relationship between wage workers and their employers, and argues that workers exercised some agency and ceaselessly contested the authority of intermediaries and employers and often frustrated the latter in their attempts to enforce a strict capitalist labour regime at work. Roy, Tirthankar, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Roy, Tirthankar, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haynes, Douglas E., ‘The Labour Process in the Bombay Handloom Industry, 1880–1940’, Modern Asian Studies, 42/1 (2008), pp. 1–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 The use of slaves as maritime labour was not uncommon in early modern Asia. The VOC had slaves working as sailors in Batavia. In 1783, the Company had 72 slaves, serving as ‘coolies’ and helpers, from a total of 1,948 maritime workers in Batavia. VOC 3658, J. D. Schrijver aan GG en R, Batavia, 1 September 1783, ff. 256r–262r.

11 They purchased ‘beggars, coolies, and vagabonds’ who were sold or mortgaged for money or even for ‘a pack of rice’. Some of them also purchased Habshi (Ethiopian) slaves for 60–70 Rupees, put them to work as sailors, and received wages from the Company. VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 9 December 1779, ff. 106v–107r.

12 There were families in Surat whose members are said to have willingly worked as sailors and were free to choose their employers. Some sailors preferred to work on VOC ships. VOC 3438, Resoluties, Surat, 28 August 1764, pp. 263–64. Studies on the late colonial Indian maritime labour market have emphasized the hereditary nature of this profession and the inter-generational transmission of sailing skills in the families. Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 104. Children of serving sailors sometimes accompanied their fathers onto the ships, acquired skills, and readied themselves to take up sailing whenever the opportunity arose. Vaidya, K. B., The Sailing Vessel Traffic on the West Coast of India and its Future (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1945), p. 34Google Scholar.

13 The VOC officials in Surat spoke of sailors and their families as ‘arme mensen’ and ‘arme lieden’ (poor people), ‘nood druftige ingesetenen’ (needy inhabitants), and ‘arme gemeene mooren’ (poor common Muslims). Nederlandse Bezittingen in Voor-Indië [Dutch Possessions in South Asia] 142, Resoluties, Surat, 26 November 1784, not foliated; ibid, Resoluties, Surat, 14 December 1784, not foliated; VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 20 November 1789, p. 170.

14 VOC 3728, Resoluties, Surat, 29 May 1786, pp. 279–80.

15 Fisher, ‘Finding Lascar “Wilful Incendiarism”’, pp. 600–02. In the nineteenth century, jobbers, and sardars (literally, ‘chiefs’, a term used for labour contractors) performed these functions for the indentured Indian labourers of Mauritius and other places. Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History’, Modern Asian Studies, 42/5 (2008), p. 982CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 They sometimes deprived sailors of their entire salaries and cheated them by simply providing some clothing and a turban instead. VOC 3576, Resoluties, 9 December 1779, f. 107r. Ser-serangs of Calcutta reportedly kept for themselves a large part of the advance money paid to sailors by the British shipowners. British Library, Home Miscellaneous 190, ‘A rule ordinance and regulation for ascertaining and fixing the wages to be paid to the native seafaring men belonging to the port of Calcutta’ (hereafter Regulations concerning the native seafaring men), Calcutta, 1783, pp. 81–102.

17 For the role of crimps in the British maritime labour market, see Williams, David M., ‘“Advance Notes” and the Recruitment of Maritime Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, in his Merchants and Mariners: Selected Maritime Writings of David M. Williams (Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2000), pp. 266–72Google Scholar.

18 Gary Nash, quoted in Rediker, Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea, p. 5. Most sailors on Portuguese ships sailing between Lisbon and Goa were poor and heavily indebted to creditors at home. Disney, A. R., Twilights of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 134–36Google Scholar.

19 Rediker, Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea, p. 13.

20 Ibid.

21 Seamen working on Bombay-based sailing and steamships came from diverse regional and ethnic backgrounds. There were thus Muslim and Hindu sailors from Sind, Kachh, Kathiawar, Surat and other parts of Gujarat, from Ratnagiri and Kolaba districts, and from several districts of the Kanara and Malabar coasts. Vaidya, The Sailing Vessel Traffic, pp. 34–35; Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 104. Sailors recruited in Calcutta for British-owned steamships, similarly, came from various regions of the Bengal Presidency, such as Chittagong, Noakhali, Mymensingh, Sylhet, and Dacca. Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 104; Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment’. In times of acute unemployment, as during the inter-war years (1920s and 1930s), many sailors returned from Bombay to their native villages. Desai, Dinkar D., Maritime Labour in India (Bombay: Servants of India Society, 1940), p. 42Google Scholar.

22 Many sailors and a few tindals on the VOC's list of Surat seamen with the surname Sidi were African immigrants. Sailors with Carwa as their first or last name, similarly, may possibly have come from Kachh and Kathiawar. VOC 3670, Resoluties, 6 March 1781, ff. 129r–138r. The Hindu sailors from these regions were known as ‘Kharwas’ in the twentieth century. Vaidya, The Sailing Vessel Traffic, pp. 33–34.

23 In times of shortages of labour, as happened in 1778, labour contractors had to go to the villages to recruit sailors. VOC 3549, Resoluties, Surat, 2 December 1778, ff. 148v–149r.

24 The voyage from Surat to China was by far the longest and it took about 10 months to make the round trip. The return journey along the western coast up to Ceylon took about four months. The VOC also employed sailors for short periods to serve on its ships sailing from Surat Bhavanagar, Jeddah, and Mokha. These sailors received a quarter of a Rupee per day (7 ½ Rupees a month). VOC 3381, Resoluties, Surat, 4 November 1773, ff. 159v–160v.

25 Some of them readily took the opportunities that arose from the number of small boats plying the river and coastal waters of Gujarat. Besides, there was a considerable demand for labour in the construction or renovation of houses in Surat which the sailors were able to undertake. There were, therefore, some all-year-round job opportunities that sailors could take up during the off season. In the eighteenth century, the VOC often solicited sailors’ services to obtain wood, stone, and other building materials from outside Surat and other manual labour. In 1749, for instance, the VOC employed a number of sailors who rendered services that amounted to 10,926 days of labour. VOC 2786, Resoluties, Surat, 1 September 1749, pp. 123–24.

26 The notion that the maritime and landward labour markets in Europe were integrated at the local level matches quite well the structure of such markets in India. Kaukiainen, Yijo, ‘The Maritime Labour Market: Skill and Experience as Factors of Demand and Supply’, in Scholl, Lars U. and Hinkkanen, Merja Liisa (comps), Sail and Steam: Selected Maritime Writing of Yijo Kaukiainen (Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2004), pp. 45–52Google Scholar.

27 For a discussion on what seamanship and skill implied in the British maritime labour market in the nineteenth century, see David M. Williams, ‘The Quality, Skill and Supply of Maritime Labour: Causes of Concern in Britain, 1850–1914’, in Fischer, et al., The North Sea, pp. 41–52.

28 Home Miscellaneous 190, Regulations concerning the native seafaring men, 1783, pp. 81–82. The Company classified sailors into two categories, depending on their work experience, and paid them accordingly. Thus, some sailors were paid 6 Rupees per month while others received 4 Rupees a month. Similarly, there were three categories of tindals who received monthly salaries of 12, 10, and 8 Rupees respectively. Ibid, p. 85.

29 VOC 7595, Bataviasche papieren rakende de Militaire Commissie (Batavia papers concerning the Military Commission), 1792, part II, pp. 513–14. In Batavia, sailors carried out these tasks. Some of them were attached to the artillery, some were assigned to officials as servants, and some had to take care of the Company's canoes. VOC 3658, Resoluties, Batavia, 1 September 1783, ff. 256r–262r. For details on the role of Muslim sailors in Batavia, see van Rossum, Mathias, ‘A “Moorish World” Within the Company: The VOC, Maritime Logistics and Subaltern Networks of Asian Sailors’, Itinerario, 36/3 (2012), pp. 39–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Some of the skills so crucial for the sailing ships became obsolete in the age of steamships. Seamen on steamships were required to possess a different set of qualifications and skills, many of which could only be obtained through formal education and training. Vaidya, The Sailing Vessel Traffic, pp. 34–35.

31 The hereditary nature of this profession in the late colonial period is well known. Vaidya, The Sailing Vessel Traffic, p. 34; Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 104.

32 These terms were also applied to the labourers who carried out various chores in the construction or renovation of the Company's buildings that housed its officials and merchandise in Surat. Matroos and zeevarende were, thus, engaged in the mixing and pounding of lime, woodwork, binding bamboos, and some other tasks. In the statements of expenditure, sailors are invariably listed together with carpenters, bricklayers, sail makers, porters, and other labourers. NA, VOC 2786, Resoluties, Surat, 1 September 1749, pp. 123–24; VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 30 June 1780, f. 208r; Bescheiden der Voormalige Nederlandse bezittingen in de Voor-Indië, 1703–1826 [Records of the former Dutch possessions in India], 137, Resoluties, Surat, 26 June 1794, pp. 70–71; VOC 10429, Resoluties, Surat, 20 May 1759, pp. 66–68.

33 This was so much the case that it became an accepted characteristic of the labour market in South Asia in the early modern period. For an analysis of the social identities and composition of the military labour market in early modern India, see Kolff, Dirk H. A., Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 4Google Scholar.

34 Van Bijland, the VOC's accountant in Surat, reported to the director in 1779 that shipowners recruited thousands of ‘real’ sailors all from the same caste. VOC 3576, Resoluties, 9 December 1779, f. 107v.

35 The Hindus, it was thought, were reluctant to render such services because of the Brahmanic injunctions against crossing the sea. Some might have taken the injunctions seriously but the ban did not prevent a number of Hindus from travelling overseas. The Hindu Keling and Bania merchants of eastern and western India respectively were actively involved in maritime trade and had permanent or quasi-permanent settlements across the Bay of Bengal in different parts of Southeast and East Asia and across the Arabian Sea at various ports in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and East Africa. M. N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Subramanian, Lakshmi, Medieval Seafarers (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1999), pp. 9–10; Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

36 VOC 3728, Resoluties, Surat, 7 July 1786, pp. 342–44; VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 20 November 1789, pp. 166–70.

37 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, ff. 129r–138r; VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 5 January 1788, ff. 17r–19r.

38 Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’, p. 83; Basu, Helene, ‘Africans in India: Past and Present’, Asienforum: International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 32/3–4 (2001)Google Scholar; Basu, Helene, ‘Drumming and Praying: Sidi at the Interface between Spirit Possession and Islam’, in Simpson, Edward and Kresse, Kai (eds), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 303Google Scholar.

39 VOC 3670, Resoluties, 6 March 1781, ff. 129r–138r.

40 Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, pp. 106–08.

41 Sailors were not organized as a class and, until the early twentieth centuries, they did not have a union or organization that would represent their collective interests. Vaidya, The Sailing Vessel Traffic, pp. 37–38.

42 VOC 3122, Resoluties, Surat, 20 December 1762, pp. 364–66.

43 The gang of 20 sailors under Serang Giesa Raja Mohammad, who went to Batavia in 1780, included Jabir Giesa, Ramzani Giesa, Giesa Mahmud, and Hazuri Giesa, among others. The serang and these sailors probably belonged to the same family or kin. VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, f. 137v.

44 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, pp. 109–10.

45 Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, pp. 107–08; Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’. The low rate of desertion has been held as one of the reasons why British merchants and shipowners employed lascars. Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment’, p.113.

46 Most local and some European shipowners reportedly recruited sailors through serangs. In 1779, Van Bijland, soldijboekhouder (an accountant; a salary-bookkeeper) at Surat, wrote to the director and the council that thousands of sailors were recruited by local shipowners and all other ‘nations’ without the help of labour contractors. VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 9 December 1779, f. 106v. A ploeg, or labour gang under a serang, usually consisted of 25 sailors, although it could number as many as 50. The VOC's Chinese sailors usually worked in groups of 26 men each under a mandoor (chief). VOC 3658, D. Schrijver aan GG en R, Batavia, 1 September 1783, ff. 261r–v.

47 In 1787, when the VOC entered into a contract with serangs to recruit some 50 sailors, the Company's labour contractors, in connivance with the local administration, opposed this measure and did not let any sailors go on board. VOC 3805, Resoluties, Surat, 11 April 1787, pp. 135–37.

48 Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment’, p. 133.

49 Fisher, ‘Finding Lascar “Wilful Incendiarism”’, pp. 607–08. So far, I have not come across any references in the sources to the age at which sailors were recruited in India. In Europe, most sailors were recruited between the ages of 15 and 20, although some were also hired in their mid to late twenties. In judging the new entrants’ physical strength and suitability for this service, the contractors and Company officials generally applied their discretion.

50 On many occasions, the VOC officials in Surat attributed their inability to recruit the desired number of sailors to the large-scale employment of sailors by the English East India Company. VOC 3268, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 14 April 1769, ff. 49v–50r; VOC 3362, Resoluties, Surat, 23 December 1775, ff. 463r-v; VOC 3521, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 28 December 1778, ff. 112r–113r; VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 11 December 1780, ff. 339r–v. Under such circumstances, labour recruiters demanded additional money from employers and, at times, deliberately delayed recruiting sailors to force the Companies to concede to their demands. The English East India Company and VOC officials sometimes laid complaints against ghat-serangs and contractors for abuses in the recruitment of sailors and accused them of supplying inexperienced and incapable seamen. VOC 3549, Resoluties, Surat, 2 December 1778, ff. 148v–149v; VOC 3521, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 28 December 1778, ff. 112v–113r; VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 1 October 1780, f. 339r–v; Home Miscellaneous 190, Regulations concerning the native seafaring men, 1783, pp. 82–102.

51 VOC 3821, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 28 December 1778, ff. 112v–113r; VOC 3549, Resoluties, Surat, 2 December 1778, ff. 148v–149v. VOC 3728, Resoluties, Surat, 29 May 1786, pp. 279–80; VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 20 November 1789, p. 166. The Company also paid them a travel allowance if they had to undertake a journey into the interior to recruit sailors. The kit included some clothing and necessary utensils such as a plate, knife, kettle, and pots. These items are listed in a rare inventory of the personal belongings of a serang who died in Ceylon in 1762 while attempting to return to Surat. VOC 3122, Resoluties, Surat, 20 December 1762, pp. 364–65.

52 The VOC remunerated its Surat sailors at a flat rate of 6 Rupees per month. The accounts maintained in Batavia of the wages paid to individual sailors affirm that the sailors serving in a gang received equal wages. In Bengal, too, the wages that the VOC paid to sailors varied only a little (5 ½ and 5 ¾ Rupees per month). VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, ff. 129r–138r; HRB 233, Memoir of the Directory of Bengal, 1791, not foliated; VOC 7595, Bataviasche papieren rakende de Militaire Commissie, 1792, part 2, p. 477. The English East India Company paid wages based on the new recruits’ skills and experience. The wages that the company paid to its lascars thus varied between 23 and 30 shillings per month. Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’, p. 27.

53 Sailors in Europe received one to two months’ salary in advance depending on the length of the voyage. The English East India Company seamen received two months’ pay in advance. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, p. 125.

54 VOC 3490, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, Surat, 5 April 1777, f. 32r; VOC 3576, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, Surat, 31 December 1780, ff. 61r–v.

55 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 26 November 1784, ff. 20 r–v, 21v; VOC 3727, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, Surat, 1787, ff. 92v–93r.

56 HRB 233, Memoir of the Directory of Bengal, 1791, not foliated; VOC 7595, Bataviasche papieren rakende de Militaire Commissie, 1792, part 2, p. 477.

57 Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 99.

58 Home Miscellaneous 190, Regulations concerning the native seafaring men, 1783, pp. 82–102.

59 Paul C. van Royen, ‘Recruitment Patterns of the Dutch Merchant Marine in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, in Fischer, et al., The North Sea, p. 17; F. Lequin, ‘Het Personeel van de Vereningde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Azië in the Achtiende Eeuw, meer in het bijzonder in de Vestiging Bengalen’ (The Personnel of the VOC in Asia in the Eighteenth Century with Specific Reference to Bengal), 2 vols, PhD thesis, Leiden University, 1982, Bijlage 7, pp. 425–539.

60 ‘Jongens’ and ‘soldaten’ were usually paid a monthly salary of 5 and 9 guilders respectively. Lequin, ‘Het Personeel van de Vereningde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Azië’, Bijlage 7, pp. 425–539.

61 Thus, out of 42 Rupees paid in advance for seven months, 10 Rupees (about one-fourth) were pocketed by the VOC accountants and the contractors and 32 Rupees actually went to sailors. VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 9 December 1779, f. 107r.

62 J. R. Bruijn, ‘Career Patterns’, in Royen, et al., ‘Those Emblems of Hell’?, pp. 31–33. This is evident from the career overview of a large number of VOC personnel in Asia. Lequin, ‘Het Personeel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Azië’, Bijlage 7, pp. 423–539.

63 Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’, p. 27.

64 Ahuja, ‘Mobility and Containment’, p. 112. In the 1920s, some categories of lascars received wages that were about a quarter to one-fifth of the wages paid to their European counterparts. Balachandran, ‘Circulation through Seafaring’, p. 96.

65 Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’, pp. 32–35; Fisher, ‘Finding Lascar ‘Wilful Incendiarism’, pp. 597–601, 621–23.

66 In 1755, the VOC authorities in Bengal reported to the governor general in Batavia that they recruited Indian sailors (inlandsche matroozen) to serve on ships only when there was a shortage of personnel resulting from heavy sickness and mortality among European sailors. HRB 242, Directeur en Raad van Bengal aan GG en R, Hugli, 27 February 1756, ff. 13r, 58v. Gaastra, F. S. and Bruijn, J. R., ‘The Dutch East India Company's Shipping, 1602–1795, in a Comparative Perspective’, in Bruijn, J. R. and Gaastra, F. S. (eds), Ships, Sailors and Spices: East India Companies and Their Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries(Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993), p. 200Google Scholar.

67 Dutch sources indicate that sailors were recruited in Surat in the early 1620s. Prakash, Om, Dutch Factories in India, 1617–1623: A Collection of Dutch East India Company Documents Pertaining to India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharla, 1984), p. 203Google Scholar.

68 Karel Davis, ‘Maritime Labour in the Netherlands, 1570–1870’, in Royen, et al., ‘Those Emblems of Hell’?, p. 51.

69 Ibid. Chinese and Javanese sailors entered the Company's service in the 1750s and the late 1770s respectively and by the 1780s, there were about 2,000 Indian, Chinese, and Javanese sailors (about two-thirds of the crew) serving the VOC in Asian waters. Davis, ‘Maritime Labour in the Netherlands’, pp. 51–52.

70 The English East India Company and private English shipowners recruited Indian sailors in large numbers, many of whom also served on homebound ships and found their way to England. Visram, Rozina, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’; Lahiri, Shompa, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000)Google Scholar; Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism; Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas’, pp. 21–45; Balachandran, ‘Searching for the Sardar’, p. 109.

71 VOC 3155, Resoluties, Surat, 20 December 1764, pp. 654–55. Those who went to Batavia in 1761–62 had not returned to Surat even by 1769. VOC 3268, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 14 April 1769, ff. 49v–50r. In 1777, the group under the serang, Sadel Shakur, were in their eleventh year of service. VOC 3490, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 5 April 1777, f. 33r.

72 VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 5 January 1788, not foliated.

73 In a report, the VOC accountant in Surat, Van Bijland, mentions how, on many occasions, some sailors who were earlier reported to be dead were later recorded as alive and in the active service of the Company. VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 14 October 1780, ff. 265r–269r.

74 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, ff. 127v–138r. Such discrepancies were also the result of the different locations where sailors were employed and paid in the East Indies. A number of serangs and their gangs served and were paid in Padang and Malakka in 1777 and were therefore not included in Batavia's statements. When they returned to Batavia a year later, they were listed as such in that year's account. VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, f. 140v.

75 Nederlandse Bezittingen in Voor-Indië 142, Resoluties, Surat, 26 November 1784, not foliated. Ibid, Resoluties, 14 December 1784, not foliated; VOC 3670, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 16 January 1785, ff. 83r–87v. According to another report, there were 34 serangs, 35 tindals, and 723 sailors serving the VOC in Batavia. VOC 3727, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 20 April 1786, f. 85v.

76 VOC 3728, Resoluties, Surat, 29 May 1786, p. 278.

77 Nederlandse Bezittingen in Voor-Indië 142, Resoluties, Surat, 26 November 1784, not foliated. Ibid, Resoluties, 14 December 1784, not foliated.

78 VOC 3670, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 16 January 1785, ff. 87r–v.

79 VOC 3805, Resoluties, Surat, 17 May 1787, f. 171r.

80 VOC 3728, Resoluties, Surat, 29 May, 1786, pp. 277–87; VOC 3727, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 5 January 1787, ff. 88r–93r.

81 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 26 November 1784, ff. 21v–22r. It was also alleged that the contractors had to solicit bakhshi's permission to recruit sailors for the VOC and pay him a portion of their commission. Ibid.

82 VOC 3727, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 5 January 1787, f. 90r.

83 VOC 3094, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 12 January 1763, p. 66.

84 VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 9 December 1779, ff. 107v–108r. The VOC also used slaves as ordinary labourers or ‘coolies’ (huurlingen) to perform a variety of tasks at the Company's various establishments in Batavia. VOC 3658, Opper Equipagiemeester A. J. Schrijver aan GG en R, Batavia, 1 September 1783, ff. 256r–262r; ibid, 29 January 1784, ff. 275v–276r.

85 VOC 3576, Resoluties, Surat, 7 February 1780, ff. 157r–159v.

86 The names in the surviving lists of sailors indicate that a good number of those recruited seem to have retained their non-Muslim names: see the names of 399 sailors recorded in 1781. VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 6 March 1781, ff. 129r–138r.

87 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 14 December 1784, f. 30v; VOC 3670, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 16 January, 1785, ff. 88r–89v.

88 Ibid, ff. 30v–32r; VOC 3670, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 16 January 1785, ff. 81r–90r.

89 VOC 3670, Resoluties, Surat, 14 December 1784, f. 31r–v; VOC 3670, Directeur en Raad van Surat aan GG en R, 16 January 1785, f. 89v.

90 Ibid.

91 VOC 3854, Resoluties, Surat, 29 November 1789, pp. 165–68.

92 Nederlandse Bezittingen in Voor-Indië 139, Resoluties, 18 January 1796, pp. 1–3; Nederlandse Bezittingen in Voor-Indië 150, Soldijboekhouder Meijer aan Directeur en Raad van Surat, 11 January 1797, not foliated.

93 The labour market in Bengal was transformed as a result of the political ascendancy of the English East India Company after its victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the consolidation of its administrative and judicial powers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This can be seen in the Company's efforts to regulate the recruitment process and wages of sailors in Bengal in the early 1780s. Home Miscellaneous 190, Regulations concerning the native seafaring men, 1783, pp. 82–102.

Figure 0

TABLE 1 Comparative monthly allowances and boarding costs paid to the VOC's European and Muslim sailors in Batavia