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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
that is, they do not even recognize the close friends of their master. Their life and death is only what their master commands. If the master orders them to cut off their own heads, then they promptly do so. By nature, they carry knives and are skilled at killing others. When their master goes out and orders them to guard his door, they will not leave it, come fire, flood, or death... They also are skilled at entering the water and with a rope tied to their waist taking things out [from the sea].

     The number of these and other slaves was never small. Each settler house in their Indian colony of Goa had, according to one early seventeenth century estimate, 10 slaves. The last Spanish fort on Taiwan had c. 400 men, just 50 of them Spanish and 200 of them slaves. The Dutch settlement in Batavia consisted half of slaves, which by the mid-seventeenth century were mainly from India and Ceylon, but Portuguese-speaking. And on Taiwan, the Dutch had brought some slaves.

     The absence of a large slave force on Taiwan at this time, then, is not due to European reluctance. Nor is it due to any East Asian aversion to slavery. While Chinese and Japanese arguably practiced more indentured bondage than outright slavery, the first half of the seventeenth century had seen a large increase in rural and urban servitude in south China, including Fujian. Also, the kind of pirates who plied the waters of East Asia, from the early Japanese pirates of the thirteenth century whom I mentioned last week to their seventeenth century Chinese variety, were known for kidnapping coastal residents and selling them into foreign slavery. Certainly, Chinese and southeast Asian trading ships were largely manned by slaves picked up at the various ports. Their origins are seldom commented on, but one presumes some came from East Asia.

     The basic problems with introducing slaves and maintaining them for a long term, however, were those of cost and supply. An African slave, according to a late Ming source, cost 50 to 60 pieces of gold; that is, perhaps a few decades income for an ordinary Chinese peasant. Other slaves were less expensive, at least on the China mainland. But even so, Chinese slavery more was more often a means of indentured servitude than outright slavery. On Taiwan itself, the young aborigines did not farm. That work they left to women and old men (40 to 60 years old), so they could spend their time hunting deer and headhunting against rival villages. Even if captured, it is most unlikely that any of these men would have been suited to work the land in a way that would have pleased a Dutch master.

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