Slavery and South Asian History

10. Slaves or Soldiers? African Conscripts in Portuguese India, 1857–1860

10 Slaves or Soldiers? African Conscripts in Portuguese India, 1857–1860 Timothy Walker The Portuguese colonial reaction to the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 is bound up with the question of illegal slave trafficking into Portuguese India from Africa. In Goa, the colonial government’s intended use of conscripted African troops in response to the Indian uprising was hindered by existing restrictions on the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This essay argues that older histories of military slave use by Portuguese colonial populations in the early modern world resembled, but did not replicate, contemporary Asian patterns of military slave use. This may have explained the growing divergence between Portuguese and Northern European slaveholders,differences which were to manifest themselves in dramatic ways by the mid-nineteenth century . North European abolitionist pressures could only minimally restrict the oceanic slave trade of the Portuguese colonists under the terms of the Anglo-Portuguese accord of 1842. Abolitionist pressures did not initially prohibit slave holding in the Portuguese colonies of Goa, Damao, and Diu. (See map 2.) This, in turn, allowed for the development of a contraband trade in smuggled slaves which, though opposed by the colonial governor sent out from Lisbon, continued with little discouragement from locally born officials in Portuguese India.1 However, the 1857 revolt of native troops in British India and the severe crisis of authority it portended compelled the serving Portuguese governor to call for a direct import of conscripts from Africa.While these conscripted Africans were supposed to be “freemen,” the Portuguese governor of Mozambique refused to send them by sea to Goa, on the grounds they would appear as contraband “slaves” to British patrols. This episode offers us a glimpse of the Portuguese willingness to abrogate the terms of an abolitionist treaty and thereby reveals the fissures within abolitionist histories in general and in Lusophone histories in particular during the nineteenth century. Military Use of Male Slaves Potentates in the Indian subcontinent and adjacent regions had a long tradition of training foreign-born slaves for use by the state in battle, stretching back centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese.As Peter Jackson confirms in his chapter in this volume, for centuries the Delhi Sultanate used enslaved Turks in the thousands as soldiers (ghulams) along “Islam’s Indian frontier.” Indeed, Jackson asserts that, by the eleventh century, professional “Turkish slave-regiments formed the nucleus of most armies in the eastern Islamic world.” Sunil Kumar’s work on the Shamsi bandagan, or prominent privileged slave-warriors who fought for the early Delhi Sultanate, chronicles a system in which young male slaves, typically acquired in Afghanistan or other regions of Central Asia, could be eventually assigned to positions of command over forces that included free men. Slave-commanders were empowered to restrict or forbid activities normally permitted to soldiers of free status . According to Kumar, this system flourished under the >Abbasid caliphs of the ninth and tenth centuries, and continued under the Delhi sultans of the thirteenth century. Slaves of the sultans, because of their personal dependence on the ruler for their position and status, could be counted on to follow orders faithfully, while free commanders of independent means could not.2 Similarly,Richard Eaton in this volume describes the widespread martial employment of slaves in India’s Deccan plateau during the early modern period . Even though the use of slaves in a military role was not a cultural norm in that area prior to the arrival of Arab Muslims from the Middle East, Deccan rulers imported a steady stream of fit Ethiopian men annually between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries to meet that region’s “insatiable demand for military labor.” Such slaves, called “Habshis” in Arabic, were intended to serve exclusively as elite warriors—one Portuguese observer of the early sixteenth century referred to these specialized African soldiers as “knights” (cavaleiros), a term simultaneously revealing their advanced level of training and the observer’s genuine respect for their martial ability. Though historians of the Portuguese have attested to the military deployment of slaves throughout the Portuguese colonial empire from Brazil Slaves or Soldiers? | 235 to Macau,3 they seldom analyze the origins of such practices in comparative terms. Given the scholarly silence, we can only suggest overlaps and continuities between Mediterranean and Central Asian premodern systems of slave use. The Romans had occasionally incorporated slaves into their chronically undermanned provincial legions during the...