The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies

Slaving, Colonial Diplomacy, and Resource Extraction in Seventeenth-Century Maritime Asia

Hans Hägerdal — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This study combines perspectives of social change and resource exploitation from two angles: the intercultural diplomacy conducted by the VOC in early modern maritime Asia, and the trajectories of slavery, slave routes, and zones of coerced labour in this macro-region. The use of enslaved people by European polities for production of cash crops and domestic work in maritime South and Southeast Asia has been widely researched. The local consequences of the widespread slaving need however to be better understood, not least in terms of the exploitation of natural resources and their entanglement with social change in the affected areas. The article discusses how early colonial diplomacy and treatymaking with indigenous societies in the period 1600-1700 had a role in shaping slave circuits while impacting on local economic systems. A combination of slaving and extraction of commercial items of ‘luxury’ type is often found in the diplomatic instruments. The study highlights the possibilities of Dutch contracts and agreements to trace historical processes in combination with other types of sources. By looking at negotiating practices, we can better understand the structures of geographical distribution of slaving activities, trading practices, forced deliveries of manpower, and resistance to enslavement. In sum, the consequences of enforced movement of people in the contact zones between colonial and indigenous groups.

Gender, Drought, Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD), and Resilience in Southern Rhodesia, 1947-1952

Mathew Ruguwa — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This study uses the 1947-49 drought and associated outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreaks in Southern Rhodesia as a lens through which to examine African responses to colonial-era crises, both natural and manmade. It pays special attention to the gender differentiated challenges experienced by displaced people who migrated into the Zimunya and Marange ‘Native Reserves’ in the Umtali district of Manicaland Province after they were dispossessed of their land by the provisions of the Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930, including those affected by the colonial government’s Ex-Servicemen Land Resettlement Scheme in the late 1940s. Guided by a combination of oral interviews, archival documents, and a wide range of secondary sources, the article argues that residents of Zimunya and Marange ‘Native Reserves’ mitigated the effects of drought and FMD by restructuring economic and social life, strengthening kinship networks, and foraging. Mothers and girls deployed various coping mechanisms, including trapping crop destroying pests that damaged crops for food and searching for local temporary employment (maricho) in return for food. Meanwhile, men migrated to urban areas and European-owned farms, where they were employed as wage labours to secure cash. Others who owned stock were forcibly displaced to madhanga (enclosures), where they attended to their livestock, which were being quarantined and vaccinated against FMD by colonial state veterinary officials. Efforts made by residents of these reserves to mitigate the disaster’s effects stimulated societal transformations, including changes in gendered division of labour.

In Conversation: Daren Ray on Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa

Daren Ray — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500

In this interview, Daren Ray discusses his book, Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa, which was published in the Indian Ocean Studies Series of Ohio University Press at the end of 2023.