Introduction¹

I am grateful to Ulbe Bosma, Marcel van der Linden, and especially Femme Gaastra, who provided valuable feedback on a previous version of this article. I also wish to thank Jan Luiten van Zanden (supervisor) and Christiaan J. Van Bochove (who conducted the research) for showing me a research report from 2002 about employee arrangements in Asia.

The VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) was a major multinational in every sense of the word at a time when such companies were very rare indeed.²

Major enterprises certainly existed before the nineteenth century. One was the famous Venice arsenal, although that firm was no bigger than the VOC wharf in Amsterdam. Careful research reveals that nearly all the few large firms of the ancien régime with over 1,000 workers in fact employed only a minority of the number reported by means of direct management. In answering the question “How large is ‘large'?” Sidney Pollard concludes that until the early nineteenth century, firms with a few hundred workers in their direct employ were considered large.³

Comparing the VOC (and its predecessors from 1595 until the company's official establishment in 1602) with the other European trading companies confirms that the Dutch firm was exceptionally large. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese dominated, but by the early seventeenth century the Netherlands had more operations in Asia than all other European nations combined. Although the gap narrowed in the eighteenth century, the Dutch preponderance continued until around 1750. Even thereafter, however, the VOC remained larger than any of its competitors. By the 1780s the English East India Company did send out as many ships as the VOC, but the (brief) surge in French shipping trade with Asia was truly remarkable during that period. This was possible only once the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes was discontinued after 1770. The absence of the other competitors (the Portuguese, the Danish, the Swedish, the Southern Dutch, and the Prussians) from this article may appear surprising. Except for the Portuguese, though, who remained the largest presence until 1630, all these other initiatives, however interesting they were as such, were of little importance, especially as sources of employment. Altogether, the VOC transported more persons from Europe to South Africa and Asia than did the ships from all other European nations combined before 1800.⁴

The VOC was exceptional not only because of its size. Historians greatly appreciate the relative wealth of papers remaining about this company: an estimated 25 million pages of historical records, stored on over four kilometers of shelf space.⁵

This does not mean that the history of this organization is taken for granted, as has become clear from the extensive criticism voiced in 2002 at the countless congresses, workshops, and exhibitions commemorating the establishment of the VOC four centuries before.⁶ Moreover, this quadricentennial commemoration has elicited a wave of publications that seems infinite for the time being.

Obviously not all—but a considerable share nonetheless—concern the role of the VOC as an employer, which is all the more reason to explore this remarkable company and its significance with respect to labor history.⁷

The two questions I will address are: how did the VOC recruit its employees, and how did labor relationships develop within the company? The first question concerns the entire issue of early-modern proletarianization, in which a growing share of the population became wage dependent. Thus far, most discussions in this field have revolved around protoindustrialization. The second question concerns the degree of anonymization in a large company and whether new forms of solidarity and resistance arose. Moreover, the operations of the VOC across three continents enable global comparisons and amply justify featuring this company in a special issue on global labor history. The VOC had many types of employees. An analytical distinction exists between workers recruited in Europe (who originated from there as well) and those from Asia and South Africa and between free and unfree labor and between sailors, seamen, and other workers. The European sailors and soldiers, who sailed to the tropics under similar circumstances, have been covered the most extensively by researchers and will dominate this account. The non-European staff has been studied in far less detail. Much research remains to be done. The problem is that the area where the VOC operated, to the east of the Cape and to the west of the Straits of Magellan, was far more legally and culturally diverse than Northwest Europe. After all, the role of the VOC as a territorial power in many places directly influenced labor relationships. It made a world of difference whether the VOC wielded exclusive territorial power, as was the case in parts of West Java, or was simply granted a tiny artificial island as a franchise, such as with Deshima in Japan.

1. Labor needs and recruitment in Europe and Asia

The first letter of the abbreviation of VOC was very meaningful.⁸

The organization was the result of a state-imposed merge between various voorcompagnieën or predecessors that operated as shipping companies between 1595 and 1602 and sent out fifteen fleets comprising sixty-six ships. However spectacular this may have seemed for those years—the Dutch were the first to break the Portuguese monopoly on Asia—this was only a modest beginning. The VOC sent over 4,700 ships to Asia before it was replaced in 1795 by what would nowadays be called a colonial department. After 1795 the Dutch shipping trade with Asia certainly did not grind to a halt. Nor was it replaced by an entirely free cargo trade system, although the VOC's centralized system of recruitment and labor relationships ceased at that point. This subsequent period, though undeniably of interest, exceeds the scope of this article.⁹

Throughout its lengthy existence, the VOC recruited labor in four different ways. The largest number of workers was hired at one of the six Dutch offices and subsequently dispatched to Asia.¹⁰

About half were recruited at the Amsterdam office, one quarter at the one in Middelburg, and the others at the ones in Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn, or Enkhuizen across Holland. Most were individual recruits. Only with the soldiers were entire regiments sent overseas at once. These troops came from Germany, Switzerland, or France.¹¹ Second, employees were needed back in the Netherlands to work for these six “chambers” on the wharves, in the warehouses, and at the offices, roperies, and other workplaces. Many additional workers were needed overseas, in addition to the ones recruited outside Europe. Both free and unfree labor was used. The free Asian (and African) workers, our third category, consisted primarily of soldiers and also included artisans, dockers, and the like, as well as in increasing measure toward the end of the eighteenth century, sailors, especially for the intra-Asian shipping journeys. The unfree workers from Asia and Africa—our fourth category—were acquired through purchase or lease of slaves and forced employment of the local population. As stated above, most of the information available covers the first category, although the other three are also interesting. From a global labor history perspective, the third as well as the fourth categories merit greater consideration than they have received thus far. Pending a more elaborate description of the different types of labor employed directly by the VOC, the summary below reflects the magnitude of and changes in the work force (Table 1). The account concerns only those directly employed. In other words, the countless workers for subcontractors in Europe (free workers) and Asia (free workers as well as a great many slaves) and military allies are not included here.¹²

1.1 European Staff to Asia

The data are fairly accurate concerning the number of people who boarded over 4,700 ships bound for the East Indies between 1595 and 1795: nearly one million persons took ship from Europe in those two centuries, which averages 5,000 a year. We also know that over a third of a million people took ship in Asia on voyages back to the Republic, with the majority reaching Europe. Still, these figures do not reveal the total number of recruits by the VOC. After all, we do not know how many men—and nearly all the workers concerned in this article were men—were fortunate enough to return to Europe or had the courage to sign on for a second or third voyage. They knew that they were among the lucky few who survived the adventure. Besides industrious quantitative historians today,

contemporaries, definitely by the eighteenth century, were well aware of the risks of servingwith the VOC. This bad reputation resounds in the Malthusian saying: “Holland, indeed, has been called the grave of Germany,” which derives from older German authors. Around the same time that Thomas Malthus wrote, the well-known German playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote about the East Indies: “and from there, as you know, only one out of three men returns.”¹⁴

For a long time the prevailing opinion was that few men would be insane enough to sign on again with the VOC, but the actual data indicate otherwise. Reviewing the Delft chamber's shipping wage logs from the eighteenth century enables an estimate of the numbers who sailed on more than one voyage. Determining this information requires more detailed examination of the numbers that returned. The return rates for recruits from Delft were 30.2 percent for the soldiers and 60.5 percent for the sailors, respectively. The lower survival rates for the soldiers were attributable to the far less stringent selection of soldiers and their extended stays in barracks in Asia, where they were exposed to all kinds of diseases, as will be discussed below.¹⁵

Extrapolating these rates for all soldiers and sailors from the Netherlands enables us to estimate the share of foreigners among the seamen and sailors as well (Table 2).

The vast differences between persons from Delft and those from elsewhere, as noted by K.L. van Schouwenburg, may be attributable to their superior prospects for advancement on board, since many of the officers came from Delft

as well.¹⁷

They may also have helped keep lower-ranking persons from the same town as themselves stick together and return together. Those from Delft may also have helped each other cope with sickness and other adversity.¹⁸ If such cohesion existed between shipmates from smaller places, then it would have been far less true for those from Amsterdam or, alternatively, for sailors from small villages. Van Schouwenburg has stressed the need to differentiate between the mortality rates and rates of return according to geographic origin, although how these patterns should be interpreted for the crew as a whole remains to be determined.¹⁹

The high mortality rate among the VOC crewmembers may appear surprising, since most were young men. Being at sea was not the primary risk, although it was certainly a considerable one. About seven percent did not survive the outbound journey as far as the Cape of Good Hope, and another half of this share died along the rest of the route. Those were the deaths on board, not counting the cases where ships were wrecked, seized, or sold, or failed to reach the Cape for some other reason. Altogether, eighty to eighty-five percent of those embarking in the Republic reached their destination. But arrival at their destination did not mean the crewmembers were out of danger. In fact, the death toll was highest during the days and weeks immediately following arrival in Asia. Nearly 95,000 employees of the VOC died at the hospital in Batavia between 1725 and 1786, for example, an average of over 1,500 a year during a period when about 6,000 Europeans arrived each year. The return trip was less dangerous than the outbound journey, as ninety percent survived.²⁰

The poor survival prospects for European VOC crews bound for Asia correspond with those of their British counterparts, as observed based on the Bengal Army List: “. . . of every four Cadets, during the period 1760–1834, who left the shores of the United Kingdom in order to seek a military career in India, one, and only one, returned to lay his bones in his Mother country.” The figures concerning the civil servants of the East India Company appointed to Bengal between 1707 and 1775 reflect a similar pattern.²¹

Van Schouwenburg has examined in what measure those who returned signed on for a second journey. Based on a small sample, he demonstrates that among the higher-ranking crewmembers, i.e. those who earned at least fourteen guilders a month (no more than ten percent of all those on board) half of those who returned (and this group had a survival rate of seventy-five percent) sailed for the Indies again within the year.²²

Given that seamen were required to sign on with the VOC for at least three years, and considering Van Schouwenburg's observation that half the ordinary seamen from Delft had returned after two years, this group is reasonably likely to have sailed on Compagnie ships again.²³ Van Schouwenburg estimates that very few of the returning soldiers risked their lives a second time. Presumably, some of the seamen who earned higher wages and the artisans (largely from the Netherlands) and to a lesser extent the lower-ranking seamen sailed on two or more voyages. The actual numbers involved are very difficult to estimate, but the VOC may have sent over 900,000 or nearly a million individuals to the East during its years of operation.²⁴

This immense need for workers soon depleted the supply on the Dutch labor market, not so much in numerical terms as because of the major objections among many inhabitants—especially among those in the maritime districts—to employment as an ordinary soldier or sailor. Which factors are likely to have encouraged proletarians nevertheless to sign on or, conversely, to have discouraged them from signing on with the VOC? Wages were low (108 guilders a year around 1650), although food and lodging were included. Overall, earnings matched those of an unskilled laborer ashore (206 guilders around that period) or of a seaman with the navy.²⁵

Such laborers did not earn enough to support a wife and children, unless these family members worked as well. This was standard practice, and one out every five ordinary VOC sailors may have been married.²⁶ Other comparative disadvantages included the extended stay away from home and the high mortality rate. All these drawbacks, however, were offset by continuous employment for at least three years. There was also the opportunity for additional income through private trade and in some cases a share of the proceeds. Career advancement was another very real prospect: each person who died had to be replaced immediately and on site. Those who signed on from outside Holland and Zeeland were attracted by the wages: in the East of the Netherlands, wages were half those paid in the West, and the discrepancy grew further eastward. The prospect of sailing to the Orient as an ordinary sailor or soldier had the strongest appeal among young, single men from abroad. Since wages aboard the VOC ships compared favorably to those ashore for the higher-ranking officers and the artisans, these positions were more likely to be filled by Dutchmen.

Ketting has recently demonstrated that in the late sixteenth century nearly all those on board came from the seaside districts (especially from the towns there). The activities of the Compagnie increased so much, as did the need for soldiers, that the tight labor market of the Republic soon became insufficient in the course of the seventeenth century. While the absolute number of crewmembers from Holland or Zeeland did not diminish, their relative share did. During the 1640s the area of recruitment expanded to include Flanders and Brabant in the South and Northwest Germany and Denmark in the North. Later on, Norway and inland Germany were added, thereby expanding the VOC labor recruitment pool to include nearly all of Western Europe.²⁷

Only the numbers recruited from the British Isles remained low. How many of the approximately 140,000 foreigners who survived their VOC expedition according to the estimate above returned to their native soil or remained in the Netherlands is unknown.²⁸

The international labor market that emerged in the Republic was not the work of the VOC alone and was not even exclusively attributable to the shipping trade in general.²⁹

Throughout the maritime districts, labor from elsewhere was in demand to varying degrees and would remain so into the nineteenth century. In shipping many foreigners worked for the navy, while smaller numbers found employment on the trading vessels bound for the West Indies and the Mediterranean. The general principle governing recruitment into the maritime services of the Dutch Republic appears to have been that the larger the ships and the longer the voyages were, the lower the remuneration was and the higher the percentage of foreigners employed. Half the male labor market in the western core parts of the Republic depended on foreigners.³⁰

This pattern of recruiting labor primarily through free immigration was fairly unique in early modern Europe.³¹

This situation may have contrasted the most sharply with the one in Eastern Europe, where unfree labor prevailed, and was somewhat less pronounced with respect to the large tracts of land in France and the Western part of Germany, where people tended to work in small-scale industry and agriculture. In most other countries in maritime Western Europe, such as Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and England, the demand for labor was generally filled by the domestic labor market, even when large numbers were required for colonial settlement, as held true for Spain and later for England. Enough free farmers and city dwellers could be lured away from their traditional occupations. At the height of the expansion in the eighteenth century, England recruited increasingly from Ireland and Scotland. Labor recruitment and proletarianization, however, were largely limited to the British Isles. In maritime Southern Europe, such as in Portugal and the Ottoman Empire, not enough free labor was available, and unfree workers were used extensively as well. Although this practice also occurred in the Venetian Republic, the situation there was most comparable to that of its rival in the North, which recruited countless free workers across great distances. The Dutch Republic is thus associated with a specific model of proletarianization, not primarily through protoindustry and not at all through unfree labor, but through its achievement of an international labor market. Everything described thus far concerns proletarianization in Europe. The repercussions in Asia and Africa will be addressed below.

1.2 Local staff in the Netherlands

In this article about global labor history, we will not dwell extensively on the VOC staff employed ashore at the different chambers.³²

This is not to suggest that their numbers were negligible; the enterprises were large by contemporary standards. In Amsterdam the VOC was the largest employer, while the second largest was the navy, which employed 1,200 people there in 1781 (i.e. during the war).³³ At its peak, the VOC is unlikely to have employed more than 3,000 people in the Netherlands, mostly on various shipping wharves. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 1,450 new ships were built, averaging seven a year. Most ships built in the eighteenth century measured between 700 and 1,000 tons. The Amsterdam Chamber was obviously at the vanguard with its massive wharves and employed approximately 1,500 in the eighteenth century. The following approximate breakdown holds true for the middle of that century. The head office in the city center (the “Oostindisch Huis”) had a staff of 180, dedicated primarily to keeping records and processing personnel and goods. The same number worked in the warehouses, including the ones on Rapenburg. By far the largest contingent, however, was on the Oostenburg wharf, where in addition to the staff of 180, 1,100 workers were employed.³⁴ The origins of the workers are unknown. To the extent that a cosmopolitan population such as the one in Amsterdam may be described as native (in the seventeenth century this rate was less than forty percent, while in the eighteenth century it was just over fifty percent), most VOC workers in Amsterdam are likely to have been born there, and sons probably succeeded their fathers in the Compagnie.³⁵ The role of the VOC in the labor markets in the towns of Holland with VOC chambers did not end here. The VOC purchased food, clothing, and other necessities from third parties. As a result, the importance of the VOC for the labor markets in Holland and Zeeland was far greater than the actual number of employees might suggest.

1.3 Local staff overseas: free labor

A comprehensive list of the VOC staff overseas is impossible to provide at this time, except for the workers recruited in Europe (see the many question marks and estimates in Table 1). Europeans who survived the outbound journey and the first critical weeks following their arrival usually served at one of the many VOC sites from the Cape to Japan or on a ship in between. After all, Europeans who signed on with the VOC did so for at least three years.

This did not, however, fill the needs of the VOC, neither ashore or at sea, although European personnel was preferred and was in some cases cheaper.³⁶

In the course of the seventeenth century, workers were recruited from Asia and Africa in increasing measure. Most recruits were free labor, which is the category addressed in this subsection. The stock boys and other workers at the trading posts differed from the seamen and soldiers.

In its quest for local staff, the Compagnie drew a different distinction between Europeans and Asians than we might expect: the “Europeans” in Table 1 included Asian-born descendants of Compagnie employees who were of European or mixed European-Asian heritage. Around 1700, Asian-born “Europeans” are believed to have accounted for one sixth of all persons employed there, i.e. about 2,500 persons. In 1786 on Ceylon, which had a fairly large “European” community, fully two thirds of the civil servants were from the East Indies and Ceylon, as were half the soldiers.³⁷

One factor contributing to this situation was the VOC prohibition on bringing back Asian women on the return journeys. Europeans who wished to stay with their Asian wives thus had no choice but to remain in the tropics.³⁸ Aside from the “full” Asian and African employees discussed below, there were many mestizos and even—albeit in very small numbers indeed, due to the minimal numbers of European women immigrants admitted by the VOC—Asian-born persons with two European parents. Since the sources do not always note this distinction, the information below is based on impressions.

The Asian and African employees ashore are difficult to quantify. As apparent from Table 1, the figures fluctuated so much, e.g. between 1687/88 and 1700, that their accuracy is questionable. Europeans almost seem to have been included in some figures but not in others. At any rate the numbers were modest, especially when divided among the dozens of sites where the Compagnie operated. Nor were the Asian seamen very numerous, although they did increase toward the end of the eighteenth century. In Batavia (now Jakarta) many artisans were probably Chinese; in the shipbuilding yards alone, hundreds of Chinese ship's carpenters were employed in the eighteenth century. Despite the high wages they demanded, they were hired for lack of Europeans.³⁹

Generalizing about the extent of free Asian labor employed by the VOC is difficult, since the prevalence of free labor varied from one region to the next. Over time, the Compagnie's preference for Europeans, Eurasians, and Asians reflected its needs.⁴⁰

Seamen

Before describing Asian seamen with the VOC, we should consider that the shipping industry was already vast before the Dutch and even before the Portuguese entered the scene. Far from disappearing afterwards, the trade appears to have increased. Presumably, the Europeans took over the broad network with larger ships, while the Asians set up a more intricate network of smaller ships with their own crews. In 1774–1777, for example, the VOC accounted for only fifty-one percent of the shipping volume at fifteen Javanese ports. Javanese and Chinese operated most of the other half. These 8,000 Asian captains probably employed 65,000 to 70,000 men, including eighty-five percent Javanese, who worked as fishermen for part of the year as well. The labor market for Asian seamen was therefore substantial.⁴¹

In the seventeenth century Asian seamen were rarely reported as working for the VOC, except for the crews on the hongi expeditions, which will be reviewed in the discussion about the Asian soldiers. For the voyage from Batavia to Cochin in 1669, 134 Ambonese and other Indonesian seamen were recruited, despite the objection that indigenous seamen were unreliable. If they did not like a situation, they simply abandoned ship.⁴²

Another example concerns an expedition to Pondicherry, equipped from Negapatnam in 1693. The crew consisted of 1,579 sailors and soldiers, including 592 Asians. By 1690 there were complaints that half the sailors were indigenous on ships departing from Bengal, and that they demanded high wages into the bargain. Many indigenous sailors were recruited on Ceylon as well.⁴³

In the eighteenth century, the rising mortality rate among the Europeans led to such a severe shortage of sailors and soldiers that Asians were accepted as crew members for the return voyages. At least this is suggested by the prohibition that was apparently deemed necessary 1715.⁴⁴

While the practice took a while to become widespread, Asians were certainly indispensable on the intra-Asian voyages from the 1740s onward.⁴⁵ In 1744 an official indigenous corps of Christian sailors and soldiers was established. Especially at the VOC sites in India, groups of Muslim and other seamen, known as lascars and supervised by their own foremen, were recruited. The pattern became so prevalent that a hospital for Moors opened in Batavia in 1751. In 1756 following a trial period, Chinese seamen (many of whom lived on Java) were allowed to sign on. More specific statistical data are available for the years 1784–1793 (Table 3).

In the long run, Asians became indispensable on the returning vessels. In 1781 the VOC decided to take non-Europeans on board at all five ports from where ships departed directly for Europe: free Christians in Coromandel, Muslims in Bengal, Muslims on Ceylon as well, Macao Portuguese in China, and Javanese and Chinese in Batavia. On board the return fleet of 1792 at the Cape were 233 lascars, 101 Javanese, and 504 Chinese seamen, in addition to 579 European ones, which meant that a majority of fifty-eight percent was not from Europe! The number of Asians appears to have increased steadily to an average of twenty-five in the late 1780s and thirty to forty in the final years of the Compagnie. These data suggest that around 1790, when about fifteen large ships departed from Asia each year, at least 1,000 Asian seamen were en route between the Netherlands and Asia in one direction or the other. This is indeed a minimum, as it is very likely that Asians also sailed on the many smaller vessels.

Soldiers

While the demand for Asian seamen was strongest in the eighteenth century, the need for soldiers arose far earlier. Regardless of how many soldiers the Compagnie tried to lure in Europe, territorial expansion in Asia forced the VOC to recruit additional soldiers on site. Forced was indeed the key word, as the VOC was suspicious of these Asian soldiers and feared they would copy tricks from the Europeans to use against them when the time came.⁴⁸

There were three possible ways to obtain indigenous soldiers. The first was to hire them individually or as groups of individuals, the second was to recruit entire units at once, often—as was also the case in Europe—led by an aristocratic commander or a sovereign, and, third, the VOC could meet its needs by entering alliances with Asian rulers. In this article I focus on the first and second categories. This does not mean that the last category was unimportant. On the contrary: during the first Javanese War of Succession (1704–1708), the VOC had 100 Europeans and 2,500 indigenous troops and no fewer than 10,000 Javanese and Madurese troops as allies.⁴⁹ Employment of the latter, however, was not subject to the staff policy of the Compagnie.

Despite countless examples of recruitment of Asian soldiers, starting with the Japanese in 1612, few statistical conclusions can be reached at this time. These would require a complete account of all available material, as has been compiled for the European seamen and is well under way for the Asian seamen. In a fundamental article about this issue, Remco Raben notes that the VOC records do not enable scholars to infer how many Asian soldiers worked for the VOC. In his view, though, there must have been hundreds of thousands.⁵⁰

I will therefore merely provide several examples, which will at any rate make clear that Raben is probably right. On Ceylon, for example, many non-European soldiers served the Compagnie from the various ethnic groups on the island, as well as from India and Indonesia. Back in 1639, 252 Asian soldiers were sent to Goa and Ceylon.⁵¹ Once the Portuguese had been driven out, the island became the main supplier of cinnamon, and the numbers of soldiers soared (see Table 5).

On Java, the hub of the VOC in Asia, many indigenous troops were employed directly by the VOC as well.⁵³

Seventeen companies of indigenous soldiers were stationed in Batavia, including one comprising free indigenous individuals (mostly freed slaves originating from India) and the other sixteen probably recruited as entire companies at once. Altogether, there were probably about 2,500 men in 1685, primarily from Ambon.⁵⁴ These examples will have to suffice.

The biggest difference between soldiers recruited individually or as army units concerned the terms of employment. While the VOC bore sole responsibility for remuneration of the individually recruited soldiers, it shared this task with the aristocratic or sovereign commander for those recruited as army units. The contract that the Compagnie signed with the Sultan of Ternate in the late 1770s for 300 soldiers to be stationed on Sulawesi stipulated that the sultan would receive eight guilders a years for each soldier, and that the Compagnie would provide them with food and uniforms.⁵⁵

Wherever the VOC had territorial sovereignty, it was in a position to recruit soldiers directly. These soldiers would be paid in cash, in kind or through the provision of farmland, as happened around Batavia and on Ceylon from 1678 onward in lieu of direct payment.⁵⁶

However many Asian soldiers may have worked for the VOC, other potentates surpassed the importance of the VOC in the course of the eighteenth century. Sepoys were recruited by the French and British rivals in far greater numbers. In Bengal the EIC had 25,000 sepoys in 1768 and 40,000 in 1784. Contemporary Indian sovereigns successfully modernized their armies as well at the time.⁵⁷

1.4 Unfree labor overseas

As is the case with the Asian soldiers, the quantitative history of the unfree workers of the VOC has yet to be written, although the doctoral thesis of Remco Raben and the recent article by Markus Vink are a good start.⁵⁸

Again, conditions at the different operations from the Cape to Japan and from Persia to China varied widely.

As a trading company, the VOC did not aim primarily to organize production of colonial products and therefore had little interest in controlling unfree workers directly in most cases. The Banka tin mines, for example, had long been run by Chinese combines. There were, however, significant exceptions. In some places, such as on the Banda Isles in the Moluccas, on the Cape and on the northeast coast of Java and under certain conditions elsewhere, substantial unfree labor existed under the VOC administration.⁵⁹

The small Banda Isles were the only place in the world where mace and nutmeg could be obtained until the early nineteenth century. In 1621 virtually all inhabitants were massacred or driven out by the VOC, which subsequently established a plantation settlement, where the seventy plantations (perken), each tended by about twenty-five slaves brought in from elsewhere, were entrusted to retired officers of the Compagnie (perkeniers). The VOC protected its monopoly by joining forces with rulers of the northern Moluccas to check whether any nutmeg trees (of which the fruits provided mace and muscat) were secretly grown outside Banda. Any such trees found were destroyed. Illegal cultivation of cloves outside Ambon was controlled in the same vein through the hongi–voyages, organized as labor services one month a year. Because the VOC was directly involved in all aspects of production, including the supply of slaves, this unfree labor appears in Table 1 as well, although one might argue that they in fact worked for the perkeniers and only indirectly for the VOC.

On the Cape slaves were used first of all on the farms that provisioned the ships that replenished their supplies half way between Asia and Europe. Here, too, the VOC owned hardly any slaves and left this arrangement up to the former servicemen or settlers who had come directly from Europe for this purpose. Approximately 60,000 slaves were brought in (originally mostly from India, Indonesia, and Madagascar, with only a few from black Africa⁶⁰

, averaging a few hundred a year during just under a century and a half of VOC operations on the Cape.⁶¹ The VOC imported only a small share of them (3,000 throughout the eighteenth century) for its own use, and the rest were for the “freemen.” Like the perkeniers on Banda, the freemen were also former servicemen of the VOC. The difference was that the freemen on the Cape were far more likely to be of exclusively European heritage. Differing demand for imported slaves between the Compagnie and the free residents of the Cape colony also surfaced in the size of their respective slave populations. The slave population of the VOC peaked in 1789 at 946 but fluctuated throughout the rest of the century from 500 to 750 (including the “bandits,” i.e. criminals or political prisoners). Slaves owned by freemen, however, increased from 1,000 at the start, through 5,000 in the middle, to nearly 20,000 toward the end of the eighteenth century. The freemen also used the labor of the Khoisan, indigenous inhabitants of the Cape who were deprived of their lands and pasturage and reduced to laborers, whose circumstances were often worse than those of the slaves.⁶²

In an effort to obtain much-needed wood, the VOC took over the logging industry on Northeast Java in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, instead of waiting for what it considered to be overpriced supplies from local rulers. It later arranged its own supply of other products as well, such as rice.⁶³

The exploitation became so severe that a major uprising ensued in 1741. Certain segments of the Javanese population and impoverished Chinese joined forces in a unique effort against the Javanese, Chinese, and Dutch elites.

At the large VOC settlements, such as those in Batavia and Colombo, slaves were put to work mainly as servants, artisans, and unskilled workers (coolies) or farmers. Each year the VOC purchased hundreds of slaves in Batavia from Asian dealers to have them perform duties for which they were unable to recruit Europeans. In 1694 on the small island of Onrust, 215 Compagnie slaves (including 133 men, 63 women, and 19 children) worked on the wharf, as well as 953 others (including 360 women and girls) elsewhere in the city. They worked under their own foremen (who were also slaves and were known as mandadors or mandurs, as were the supervisors of indigenous seamen). In addition, there were 383 forced laborers, known as chain gang workers, whose duties included dredging the city canals. Finally, also in 1694, the VOC hired another 579 slaves (known as coolies) from civilians. The justification for all these unfree workers—over 2,100 altogether—was, as reported by Van Dam, the high cost of free labor. He even complained about the cost of the leased slaves.⁶⁴

The VOC also used slave labor at some of its industries, such as in the gunpowder mills in Batavia, on Ceylon, in Bengal, and in a few other places where slaves used niter (saltpeter or potassium nitrate) to produce gunpowder, as well as in the gold mines on Sumatra. Others besides the Compagnie used slave labor. As was the case on the Cape, these other parties owned far more slaves than the Compagnie did. In the mid-eighteenth century, Batavia, a city with 20,000 inhabitants inside and 100,000 inhabitants outside its walls at the time, had 30,000 slaves, including 13,000 inside its walls. The Compagnie owned only 1,850 of them. The rest were equally divided between Arab, Indian, and Indonesian owners on the one hand and European and Chinese owners on the other hand. In 1779 the total number for Batavia and Ommelanden had even risen to over 40,000, an all-time maximum.⁶⁵

Overall, direct use of slaves by the VOC (i.e. slaves owned or rented by the Company) was rather modest compared with the total number of staff, although slaves still accounted for thirty-five to forty percent of the staff recruited in Asia. As Vink has demonstrated, the VOC did far more to perpetuate and expand slavery than the size of its work force would suggest. While Compagnie slaves numbered in the thousands, the slaves owned by private parties from whom the Compagnie purchased its monopoly products totalled tens of thousands in the eighteenth century, especially on the Cape, as well as on Banda and elsewhere on the Moluccas. These private parties came from various backgrounds: on the Cape they were of European and on Banda of mixed European-Asian heritage, in Batavia European slave owners were in the minority, and elsewhere most slave owners pertained to the local Asian elite. After all, slavery was widespread in the areas where the VOC operated. The VOC neither invented (although it may have in fact done so on the Cape) nor abolished the practice but is far more likely to have caused unfree labor to increase than to decline. This is eminently clear for Banda, the Cape and northeast Java and may be assumed to hold true for Batavia as well, although it is less obvious for Ambon.⁶⁶

The popularity of slavery spread. At the end of the eighteenth century, coffee cultivation on Java increasingly came to resemble a system of forced labor.⁶⁷

Examining the slave shipments provides the clearest indicator of the significance of slavery in the VOC-controlled area. While most VOC ships transported entirely different cargo, Vink estimates that at the end of the seventeenth century the total annual slave trade amounted to at least 3,730 to 6,430 people, with slightly more men than women. Until around 1660, they came mainly from South Asia, later on somewhat more from Southeast Asia (predominantly by Makassarese and Balinese traders), and toward the end of that century, Madagascar became an important source of supply. Vink infers that “the volume of the total Dutch Indian Ocean slave trade was therefore fifteen to thirty percent of the Atlantic slave trade, slightly smaller than the trans-Saharan slave trade, and one-and-a-half to three times the size of the Swahili and Red Sea coast and the Dutch West India Company slave trades.”⁶⁸

2. Working conditions, career, and labor relationships

Generalizing about the universal working conditions and career opportunities of the VOC workers as a whole is difficult. This would require a complete catalog of all the different working conditions, from shipyard workers in Amsterdam to slaves on the Moluccas, from scribes in Middelburg to soldiers in Bengal. Many of these conditions were commonplace: thousands of shipbuilding carpenters and office clerks were employed in the Republic outside the VOC, hundreds of thousands if not more soldiers were stationed in Asia, and slaves on that continent are sure to have numbered in the millions. The VOC stood out for its effort, with due regard for profit and loss on its trade, to exert a central influence on the working conditions of all its tens of thousands of workers. This applied the most to the operations and labor relationships aboard its ships, which were meticulously regulated.

Asians were exceptional amid the countless seamen from all over the world. Although as we have noted their presence dates back to the mid-seventeenth century, their number rose to at least 2,000 by the second half of the eighteenth century and to 2,500 by the end of the century. At first the VOC recruited mainly Indians, although later on Chinese recruited in Indonesia dominated, especially on the long voyages. Indonesians appear to have been the smallest group. All these Asians sailed primarily between India, Ceylon, Indonesia, and China, although several reached Amsterdam toward the end of the VOC. A wide gap separated these people from the Europeans.⁶⁹

The Asians were recruited by their own foremen (called “mandadors” by the Javanese and Chinese, “tandels” by the Indians, assisted by a boatswain, also known as a tandel) in crews of twenty-six and operated under their command on board the ship as well. In Batavia the VOC recruited Javanese and Chinese through a few central agents, paying them 7.5 stuivers a month for each recruit. The agents undoubtedly profited from “their” men in other ways as well. After all, they arranged the wage payments and in return were required to provide equipment and food and care for the family members the seamen left behind. From 1788 onward, a single Chinese entrepreneur had a monopoly on the supply of Chinese seamen to the Compagnie. Not only were the Europeans, Chinese, and Javanese on board the ship on very bad terms with each other, but the Asians were mistreated by the officers as well. Desertion was therefore high, especially among the Javanese. The Compagnie urged better treatment for the crew to avert getting ever more substandard recruits in Asia as well as in Europe.

While Asians alone were a diverse group, to say nothing of Asians and Europeans together, the Europeans themselves were far from homogenous. We will therefore overlook the separate category of the passengers, and similarly attribute no special significance to the artisans. Instead, we will cover the majority on board: sailors and soldiers. In the 1630s the VOC began its ongoing effort to recruit large numbers of soldiers. From this point onward, the soldiers were at odds with the sailors. According to Ketting, these differences became especially pronounced after 1650. A probable exacerbating factor was that the soldiers were recruited increasingly from inland areas, unlike the seamen, who continued to be recruited mainly from the coastal regions.⁷⁰

On board the ship, seamen were divided by the steward (the bottelier: the petty officer responsible for distributing food and drink) into so-called “bins” (bakken) of seven men each. Rations were distributed according to these units, and eating utensils and cups were shared by the group. Bins usually comprised men with similar or related responsibilities. Soldiers and petty officers were therefore usually assigned to separate bins. Officers dined after the common folk had finished in the cabin. Assigning a name to each bin is likely to have promoted cohesion.⁷¹

The very smallest unit was the informal but highly essential system of mates: amid the intensely hostile environment of the ship with its continuous putrid stench, where creaks and squeaks were heard constantly, and death always lurked, each sailor tried to find a mate or sometimes a few mates whom he could trust. If a crewmember fell ill or was on his deathbed, his mate or mates cared for him.⁷²

Until well into the eighteenth century, the VOC had no fixed provisions for advancement. Nor was formal training provided, except to navigating officers, surgeons, sick visitors, and presumably bookkeepers. The only hope of advancement among the lower-ranking staff was therefore through experience on board. With the exception of the captain, everybody on board may have started at the bottom. Most petty officers probably started as ordinary sailors. What were the prospects for advancement?

Keeping the ship in good working order required dividing all duties and responsibilities very specifically, if only to prevent hundreds of people from getting in each other's way all the time in such a small space. Still, seamen could switch duties, simply because deaths and accidents kept leaving vacancies that needed to be filled.⁷³

On the outbound journey, some of the thirty to thirty-five officers whose monthly wages were fourteen guilders or more would have to be replaced by lower-ranking men. On the return voyage, the likelihood of advancement was greater still, since only two thirds of the Dutch officers actually returned. Even though ships made their return voyages with fewer crewmembers and officers, at least one third of the officers on the return journey probably made the outbound journey as an ordinary sailor. Of course this system had a cumulative effect for officers who signed on for a second or even a third voyage. Ordinary seamen who returned to the Netherlands and were interested in sailing on another voyage undoubtedly stood a good chance of being promoted. Protection from one's superiors was a definite prerequisite, and those who came from the same place as the officers enjoyed a distinct advantage. As a result, Germans and other foreigners suffered a disadvantage, as Van Gelder has noted. Germans tended to have a bad reputation, the VOC preferred to fill the highest ranks with Dutchmen, Germans had a poor or nonexistent command of Dutch and to make matters worse were usually Lutheran or Catholic, whereas the VOC favored Calvinism.⁷⁴

Nonetheless, several Germans did well in the VOC, as acting Governor-General Thedens, Governor-General Van Imhoff, Indies council member Dithard van Rheden, and the Cheribon resident Sönke (Seneca) Ingersen have illustrated.⁷⁵

The remarks about working conditions for all VOC staff members ashore in Asia, Africa, or Europe also apply to labor relationships: again, I will focus on sailors and soldiers on board. The following lines, however, concern the other VOC personnel.

First I will discuss those working ashore in the Republic. Gawronski has demonstrated that although over one thousand people were employed on the Amsterdam wharf, duties were highly decentralized. As soon as the 1,100 workers and 180 staff members crossed the only bridge to the wharf on the artificial island of Oostenburg, 312 days a year, the masses drifted off into different directions. One example concerns the ship's carpenters, who used wood and ironwork from other divisions to build ship frames. The master ship's carpenters received assistance from the two master journeymen, as well as from “commanders” (commandeurs)—thirteen in 1743, including one woman. These commanders received annual wages of 500 guilders, nearly double those of a good artisan at the time. The commanders in the carpenter's yard with its three shipbuilding berths were supervising the actual ship's carpenters. In addition, there were separate groups of drillers and panel builders (for the interior panelling), each with their own commander. Altogether, there were 350 skilled workers. The commander and his assistant in charge of the 150 woodchip gatherers were also indispensable, as they coordinated the supply and disposal of timber.

The relatively favorable position of the VOC carpenters is apparent from their wages of 300 guilders a year—slightly less than their peers at other wharves, but then they had steady employment—and from the fact that they could not be dismissed without due cause. If the work diminished, they received very decent severance pay and old-age provisions.⁷⁶

Remarkably, the actual ship's carpenters were allowed to join the ship's carpenters' guild, even though they were definitely not independent masters. The same held true for the admiralty wharf. This guild offered good social provisions as well.⁷⁷

Whenever social turmoil arose, the Amsterdam ship's carpenters, including those of the VOC, were a prominent pro-Orangist force and opposed the urban regents as such. They took this stand in 1748, as well as in 1787 and in 1813. On 20 December 1787 they marched through the city in large groups rigidly segregated by specialization, numbering 4,000 altogether.⁷⁸

The conduct of the ship's carpenters ashore may very well have affected the situation on board the ships. After all, several artisans accompanied each ship, including a few ship's carpenters. They are unlikely to have cast their traditions overboard the moment they boarded the ship.

The workers in Asia were not automatically equivalent to the work force in Europe or to the crews on the ships. The abundance of slaves in the Batavia shipyards was not the only difference. Even though we know very little about the Asian shore work force, we should not presume that they were unable to protect their own interests when confronted with supremely powerful foreigners. The wonderful study by Ravi Ahuja about the successful organization of the indigenous crew of the ships that sailed back and forth between the East Indiamen on the roadstead and the Madras harbor provides convincing evidence of the contrary.⁷⁹

The same holds true for the defiance of unfree VOC workers.⁸⁰ This is even highly worthwhile with respect to the emergence of labor relationships in each of these remote regions. The question is how they influenced each other, especially considering the European staff. We will start by discussing labor relationships concerning this category of workers before addressing the far broader issue of international and interethnic solidarity.

Organizations of seamen during the shipping era have already been covered extensively in the historiography with important implications for labor history. Herman Ketting has based his exemplary study about the men who sailed on the VOC ships in the first half of the seventeenth century on these organizations. Many authors have questioned in what measure seamen were comparable to other workers. As large numbers of seamen were necessary and moreover had to work together in close quarters well before the Industrial Revolution—at least this is what has been presumed, most recently by Rediker and Linebaugh⁸¹

—one would expect the first signs of alienation and consequently of collective action among these workers. The lack of any leeway whatsoever throughout the voyage meant that seamen lived, according to the terminology of Erving Goffman, in “total institutions,” such as military camps, prisons, or even cloisters. Aubert and Arner have added that the place of work of the sailors was physically isolated from the family, that the turnover rate was much higher than on land, that positions on board were extremely graded and specialized, and that upward occupational mobility was formal and based on qualifications and skills.⁸²

The early rise of class consciousness is subject to two critical reservations. The Spanish historian Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína has observed that merchant navy seamen in the Middle Ages and later received a share in the proceeds of the voyage and were therefore coparticipants rather than wage workers. Accordingly, they operated alongside rather than under the captain, which is manifested in part by their frequent recourse to the court in the event of wage disputes. Even assuming that they became true proletarians in increasing measure from the seventeenth century onward, they did not necessarily acquire a sense of class consciousness. Rodger argues that class consciousness was nonexistent in the Georgian navy, simply because such awareness did not yet exist ashore either. Other scholars (e.g. Weibust, inspired by Homans) argue that sailors managed to cope with the countless frustrations by rituals, rather than by protest.⁸³

Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh express an entirely different view. Following the run-up in the mid-seventeenth century, they mention countless forms of resistance during the eighteenth century that culminated toward the end of that century in a strong sense of class consciousness among seamen, albeit in a very specific setting. In the Atlantic region, they noted a “multiethnic class,” “not yet racialized,” which included all insurgents, from rebellious slaves to textile workers in England, associated through constant migrations and of course through the travelling proletarians par excellence: seamen. Their manifestations of protest, which according to Linebaugh and Rediker included not only mutiny but even piracy, have therefore received special consideration.

Ketting has also wondered to what extent the labor relationships of the seamen with the VOC were more comparable to the ones on Spanish ships in the sixteenth century, as described by Pérez-Mallaína than they were to the ones on eighteenth-century ships, as interpreted by Linebaugh and Rediker. He observes that the dichotomy deepened on board and writes of an “opposition culture” there but denies that a sense of class existed.⁸⁴

Ketting attributes the undeniable dichotomy between the common folk and the officers to various factors.⁸⁵

The length of the journey meant that justice and its dispensation could not wait until those concerned had arrived back on land. So the process occurred while at sea, and mild and severe corporal punishment and even death sentences were carried out en route. The provost marshal became the anonymous executor of a centrally devised system of order and discipline in an organization of unprecedented size. In some cases the three eldest sailors became involved in the court cases. In addition, all those on board could be forced to participate in the public floggings.⁸⁶

The VOC prohibited the traditional baptism at sea and other “rituals of rebellion” (term from Max Gluckman) and replaced them with celebrations to be initiated exclusively by the those in charge of the ship. Rather than the carnivalesque conduct that might victimize superiors as well, additional food and drink was distributed. The soldiers did not willingly forego these privileges, although the days were over in which the “most respective” on board were “lawlesse and witlesse” for three days in the words of an English seaman of 1615. Around 1640 the berths were replaced with hammocks, thereby greatly improving the visibility of the lower decks and facilitating supervision of the seamen by their superiors.

Ketting has analyzed the courts convened aboard ships to determine whether conflicts and conflict management reflected what he refers to as the rising polarization on board.⁸⁷

Based on the records of 400 trials, he concluded that incidents justifying a trial occurred an average of once every four weeks on each voyage, and that “labor and authority” were called into question once every eight weeks. Considering the circumstances and the composition of those on board, this frequency appears rather low, even though unofficial reprimands (including a single blow, which superiors were authorized to mete out with impunity) are omitted from the registers. Most disputes (forty-five percent) were personal. When they got out of control, those concerned would pull knives, primarily to leave a permanent, visible scar on their adversary. Among the thirty stabbing incidents where the attackers were identified, twenty-six cases concerned settlement of a grievance between the common folk, involving forty-seven seamen and five soldiers. Only once was a knife pulled on an officer and only three times on a petty officer.⁸⁸ Both these incidents and the many cases of theft from others on board reveal that mutual solidarity was rare. The figures reported for theft from others on board (twelve percent) are an absolute minimum, as a theft charge required catching the perpetrator in the act or extracting a confession.⁸⁹ Approximately the same share of cases (thirteen percent) concerned theft from the Compagnie, usually food or drink. Finally, labor disputes (thirty-five percent) concerned orders issued arbitrarily, disagreements as to whether the work performed was satisfactory, problems adjusting to the pace of work based on the waiting system, and the amount of the rations. Collective actions were rare. They either involved refusing to work or going on strike or seizing control (temporarily or permanently). Altogether, at least fifty such actions appear in the records.⁹⁰

According to the data available, at least 250 Europeans were involved, which was very low compared to the total number on board the ships. These actions were concentrated in the periods 1611–1616 (on at least four ships), 1628–1640 (on at least fourteen ships), 1652–1654 (on at least five ships), and 1782–1790 (on at least six ships). Why acts of collective resistance occurred at twelve to eighteen-month intervals during these specific periods and far less frequently at other times remains unclear. In some but not all cases they seemed associated with periods of war. No rising trend or learning effect is apparent over the long term. I attribute this primarily to the high turnover rate. In addition, nearly all experienced seamen started at the bottom of the hierarchy and worked their way up to petty officers. An army of inexperienced, heterogeneous seamen was thus up against experienced, homogeneous officers. Ketting does not believe that these collective actions reveal class consciousness, considering the emphasis on enforcing old privileges. I am struck by how often petty officers and even officers became involved in the disputes to get even with those of a similar rank. Moreover, while the actions in the first half of the seventeenth century were rather violent, this was even more the case for the ones in the second half of the eighteenth century. Five of the actions in the eighteenth century involved Asians.⁹¹

Considering the circumstances of their recruitment, the absence of Asians from earlier actions is hardly surprising. Nor is the lack of support they received from any of the higher-ranking officers remarkable. In fact, the Asian mutineers were severely punished, even though all those concerned were aware that their grievances were justified, and received no support whatsoever from Europeans. On the voyage of the Java from Batavia to the homeland in late 1783, the crew of 143 comprised twenty-five Chinese (who spoke Malay and were therefore presumably from Java) and twenty-five Javanese sailors. The Chinese suffered such serious abuse from the officers that they went berserk on Christmas Eve of all days. In a lightening operation they killed six officers or their wives and wounded five others. They then swiftly discarded their weapons and went to sleep in their hammocks as if nothing had happened. Of course they were caught and thrown overboard without any due process (i.e. against all the rules). The Javanese they had tried to include in their campaign insisted that they knew nothing. This carefully prepared campaign raises several questions. Communication between the Chinese and the other sailors on board obviously left much to be desired. How else could the instigators have cherished any hope of undisturbed rest in their hammocks after their act? At any rate, this mutiny is anything but grist to the mill of Linebaugh and Rediker.

Conclusion

This account of recent literature on the VOC, an organization that has had one and a half to two million in its direct employ altogether and was consequently the largest multinational of the early-modern period, gives rise to a few conclusions relevant for devising a global labor history.

While the extent to which proletarianization increased in Europe, Africa, and Asia between 1600 and 1800 remains unclear, the establishment of an international labor market by the VOC is indisputable in my view. The debate on proletarianization has been revived since scholars such as Bas van Bavel presented justified assertions that the extent of proletarianization during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period was far greater than hitherto assumed. His conclusions are valid only for the Netherlands at this time, but the fact that nearly sixty percent of the people in the inland farming regions were proletarianized is food for thought.⁹²

Nonetheless, the VOC, with its eternal demand for labor, is likely to have promoted rather than to have inhibited proletarianization.

Undeniably, however, the Dutch labor market and its demand for seamen and within that market in turn the demand for VOC staff was international in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The VOC certainly boosted international labor migration within Europe. Whether the same held true for its sites overseas is less obvious. It was certainly the case in Batavia, on the Cape and perhaps on the Moluccas and Ceylon as well. At all other sites, however, the VOC was but one of several operators. Indian and Chinese merchants and entrepreneurs and their demand for labor, regardless of the actions of the VOC, were probably of far greater significance, especially in India. Moreover, the European and Asian segments of the labor market set up by the VOC were hardly integrated with one another. The Asian labor market did become better integrated: not only did Chinese continue to come to South and Southeast Asia, but the exchange of both free and unfree workers probably intensified between South and Southeast Asia, as well as between these areas and South and Southeast Africa.

The labor relationships were less straightforward. At this time we can go no further than to ascertain that the information available does not confirm the conclusions of Linebaugh and Rediker regarding the radicalized labor relationships in the Atlantic, and that the approach of Pérez-Mallaína appears more worthwhile. On our quest for answers, we will need to explore labor relationships in the period 1650–1795 at least as thoroughly as Ketting has done for the preceding period. Especially the labor relationships in Asia that directly or indirectly concerned the VOC, ranging from slaves in Batavia, Ceylon and South Africa, serfs on the Moluccas under local rulers, Chinese combines on Banka, soldiers under their own commanders, and sugar mills leased to Chinese to the firm's own staff merit separate, detailed studies. A veritable el dorado awaits global labor historians!