In early 1870 W. L. Hathaway, subcollector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He alleged 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 . . .[that] 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 pursued shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870’s “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a ware house 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.” This was an old problem. The local Police Weekly Circular had reported a similar case a few years earlier. On finding a ware house full of “coolies crowded together like beasts,” the police superintendent refused to let their ship depart. Questioning the detained men, he concluded, “I fancy they had got their stories cut and dried ready for use; for they answered satisfactorily enough; and they all produced parents, uncles, or guardians.” The superintendent thought, “This coolie trade has reached such large dimensions that there is plenty of room for an Emigration Agent here.” This goal was finally secured in 1873, when a protector of emigrants was appointed to oversee migration to Southeast Asia.
By 1870 circulation between South India and the Straits Settlements was entrenched, and it looked set to grow. Already cases of overcrowded ships and fugitive shipowners had come to the government’s attention. With the planters of the Straits crying for more labor, Hathaway and his colleagues in local government argued that it would be disastrous to lift legal restraints on movement between India and Malaya. British planters and their spokesmen in the Straits responded with the case for free migration. Connections across the Bay, they argued, were entirely natural. Malaya was really an extension of India; Indian laborers hardly thought it a “foreign” land. The tension between freedom and migration would resurface time and again in the years to come.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was pivotal in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The slow intensification of “traffic” through the nineteenth century was jolted into expansion, and the trickle became a torrent. Steam energy made the crossing faster, easier, and cheaper. Imperial power charged into the interior. By treaty and by conquest, colonial states moved beyond their coastal strongholds, preceded or followed by European, Chinese, and Indian investors. Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Tobacco. Rubber. Southeast Asia’s frontiers promised vast profit. Wherever in the world they found local communities stubborn in their economic independence— cultivators who found wage labor unattractive, or people who resisted enslavement— European settlers perpetuated the “myth of the lazy native.” “No gain,” Alexander Kyd wrote from Penang, “will induce a Malay to constant and unremitted Industry.” So labor, like capital, had to be imported. Chinese capitalists had a ready source: through their brotherhoods and regional associations they mobilized men in ever greater numbers as steamships brought the China coast nearer. Europeans, without access to Chinese networks, turned where the sugar planters of Mauritius and the Caribbean had first resorted after the abolition of slavery— to British India.
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Now consider this in a global context. Migration around the Bay was comparable in scale to transatlantic migration in the same era. Some 26 million people arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930 from southern and eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Add Chinese migration to Southeast Asia to the equation— around 19 million people in the century after 1840, more widely dispersed than their Indian counterparts— and it is clear that the region where the Indian Ocean met the South China Sea was home to one of the world’s great migrations. The main difference between the Asian and Atlantic circuits lies in the numbers of those who settled rather than returned. Between 6 million and 7 million people of Indian origin, and a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of the 1930s; American demographer Kingsley Davis contrasted this with the 85 million people of British origin who lived outside the British Isles by that time.
~~Crossing the Bay of Bengal -by- Sunil S. Amrith
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