bengals-forgotten-slave-trade-portuguese-arakanese-and-dutch-trafficking-networks
Bengal’s forgotten slave trade: Portuguese, Arakanese and Dutch trafficking networks
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By Rila Mukherjee
We tend to equate economic growth with social and political vitality in conventional history-writing, but this was not the case in southeast Bengal. Environmental pressures led to a social crisis in the seventeenth century, manifested through slave raids by a Portuguese-Arakanese combine (Magh). Subsequent slave trading by Arakan and Portugal, and later by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), unveiled the paradox of social breakdown during a period of economic growth, as the active delta generated new rice-producing lands.
The Europeans did not introduce slave trading into Bengal. A robust trade in eunuchs, sourced from Sylhet, supplied markets in West Asia and China until the Mughal emperor Jahangir put an end to it.
An even older trade existed. Dry-zone Burma’s medieval landlocked Bagan (849 to c. 1287) had a state-driven religious policy, a state-directed labour system, a state-sponsored building programme and state-administered trading practices. A slave-owning society, its inscriptions mention Assamese and Bengalis settled there from Pattikera in Comilla. Comilla housed the Buddhist complex of Mainamati-Lalmai, with which Bagan had connections. An inscription dated 1164 states that six ‘Indian’ slaves were exchanged for one elephant, and 40 slaves were exchanged for one horse. Kachin, Karen, Arakanese and ‘Indians’ formed part of a labour force subordinate to Burmans, Mons and Shans. As Angkor’s dependency in the twelfth century, Bagan came under Khmer influence, which spread to the southeast. The second Bhatera plaque of the Buddhist Chandras, dating from the late eleventh to the early twelfth centuries, contains 32 lines in Sanskrit in a proto-Bengali script. It is similar in style to the Khmer plaques of Cambodia.
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