Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaby the Company, the functionaries invoked “Christian compassion”.^34
They added that the freed Filipinos would anyhow be demanded to
cultivate Company-owned sago fields to enable the Filipinos to pay their
ransom cost.^35 Some of these Filipino slaves also “fetch a much higher
price than any others” because of their basic literacy that made them
“useful in keeping their master’s accounts” as one nineteenth-century
British visitor in Sulu observes.^36 An ostensibly religious reason was also
put forward by the Spaniards who had sought and were successful in
eradicating slavery as an institution in the Catholic Philippines by the
late eighteenth century.^37 They were reportedly ready to “ransom every
slave they succeeded in converting to Christianity” in Sulu.^38
The increasing importance of religion in viewing an endemic prac-
tice of slavery also reached the Islamic areas of the region. Scholars have
observed that “Islam, even more explicitly than Christianity, forbade
the enslavement of coreligionists.”^39 As such this religious prohibition
“must have been a powerful incentive” for enslaved captives to convert.^40
Yet in Sulu for instance, such “[Islamic] evangelical work among the
slaves or captives [...] is not known”.^41 Nonetheless there are scat-
tered references to slaves acquiring freedom by becoming Muslim. In
1760s Maguindanao, a captive Filipino from Pampanga was freed after
converting to Islam.^42 In the Company-dominated outpost in Ternate,
a Makassarese named Abdul Malik appealed that a hereditary slave-
- NA, VOC 8137, Letter of the Governor and Council to the Governor-General in
Batavia, September 1769, fols. 2–3. - NA, VOC 8137, Meeting of the Political Council, 6 July 1769, fols. 81–82.
- Spenser St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East (London: Smith, Elder and Co.,
1862): 2.215. - Michel Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and
Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001): 31. - Majul, Muslims in the Philippines, 208.
- Anthony Reid, “The Decline of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia”, in
Martin A. Klein (ed.), Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in
Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993): 70. - Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: 357.
- Majul, Muslims in the Philippines: 213.
- Thomas Forrest, A Voyage to New Guinea, and the Moluccas from Balambangan,
Including an Account of Magindano, Sooloo, and Other Islands (Dublin: W. Price and
H. Whitestone etc., 1799): 216.