A note on the Sambas finds
K.A. Nilakanta Sastri’s “A note on the Sambas finds” (1949) is the title given in the metadata, but the primary source text actually provided is W. E. Maxwell’s “The Law Relating to Slavery Among the Malays,” published in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1890. The following summary is of the text as supplied.
Summary
Maxwell, then Assistant Resident of Perak, produced this minute in May 1882 as part of a parliamentary paper on slavery in the Protected Native States. Its central argument is that the Malay institution of servitude is fundamentally a pre-Islamic national custom shared with other Indo-Chinese peoples, and that the persistent tension between hukum adat (customary law) and hukum shar’a (religious law) has produced a system in which debt-bondage—wholly opposed to the Koran’s leniency toward debtors—survives as a protected practice. Maxwell distinguishes carefully between the ‘abdi (true slave: war captive, infidel taken by force, criminal unable to pay blood-price, or offspring of a female slave) and the kawan (debt-bondsman, technically a free man mardahika but compelled to serve his creditor in all menial employment), and shows how in practice the two conditions became indistinguishable under the oppression of Rajas and Chiefs.
The narrative is informed by Maxwell’s direct administrative experience in Perak before and after British intervention in 1874, supplemented by earlier observations (Crawford, 1820; the Malacca laws; Sumatran codes collected by British officers) and by his own transliteration and translation of the Perak, Pahang, and Johor legal codes. He documents the specific mechanisms of exploitation: the compounding of debts in tin at the Penang price in Kinta, the marriage of debt-bondsmen’s daughters with the dower going to the creditor while the original debt remained untouched, the hulur privilege allowing the Raja to retain any man-slayer and his family, and the dayang-dayang system whereby young women were forcibly carried off from districts lacking an influential chief to serve in the royal household.
Maxwell’s emancipation scheme, proposed for Council adoption, would have set a universal redemption price of $25 (the customary value of a free man), allowed the Government to advance that sum against labour on public works, and provided for unconditional release after three years for those unable to pay or work. He anticipated that most Malays of good birth would prefer to release their slaves and lose the money rather than face them as quasi-equals before a tribunal of inquiry.
Key Findings
- The customary value of a free man in Perak was fixed at $25 (100 bidor); theoretically no fine could exceed this sum, yet in practice Rajas imposed far larger fines and retained persons in bondage whose relatives would willingly pay the lesser amount (p. 248).
- The total number of slaves and debt-bondsmen in Perak was estimated at approximately 3,000, about one-sixteenth of the whole Malay population (p. 249).
- In the Kinta mining district, a debt of one bahara of tin (worth ~$30 locally) unpaid after six months was recalculated at the Penang price (three times the local value), producing a new debt of three bahara; repeated default compounded the debt indefinitely, reducing the debtor to hopeless lifelong bondage (p. 251).
- The dayang-dayang system required the Raja to dispatch messengers on the occasion of a royal marriage or birth to drag all suitable young women from selected districts (Kampar, Sungkei, Pulau Tiga) into the royal household, where they generally remained for life and were kept in a state of prostitution with the Raja’s knowledge and consent (p. 252).
- Runaway slave redemption rewards escalated by distance: 2 kupang within the town limits, 3 kupang beyond (down to Kanchong or up to Sungei Lentang), rising to 5 mas at Paka, 7 mas at Rantau Abang, and half a tahil at Trengganu; beyond that boundary the reward was one-half the slave’s full value (pp. 269–271).
- Under the Perak Code (Chapter 63), a thief who stole a slave of the Raja was liable to restore fourteen-fold; if the owner was the son of a Raja, seven-fold; a Mantri, five-fold; a Sayyid, three-fold; a common person, two-fold; and if the thief was too poor to pay, he might be killed (p. 280).
Conclusion
Maxwell’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Malay slavery system, though nominally constrained by both customary law and Muhammadan law, was in practice a vehicle of arbitrary oppression sustained by the absence of effective judicial authority before British intervention. The arrival of the Resident in 1874, the Perak campaign of 1875–6, and the subsequent death or banishment of influential Rajas rendered the old laws unenforceable, and Maxwell judged that the institution was “in fair way to die a natural death in the course of a few years” without the need for drastic legislative abolition, provided that a modest redemption mechanism was made available to those still in servitude.
Context
- The primary archival basis is Maxwell’s own minute (Parliamentary Papers, C.—3429, p. 16, 1882) and his extracts from the Perak, Pahang, and Johor Codes, presented to the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and printed here for the first time.
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in providing one of the earliest systematic English-language translations of Malay customary law on slavery, grounded in the administrative reality of a specific state (Perak) at the moment of British intervention, and in documenting the specific local variations (Kinta tin-debt compounding, the dayang-dayang levy, the hulur privilege) that generalized accounts of “Malay slavery” tend to obscure.