The East India Company’s Slaves

In 1771, Dr. Robert Gordon, the chief medical officer of the East India Company’s settlement in Canton (Guangzhou), China died. In his last will and testament he divided his property among family and friends in Britain and China, leaving behind many of the kinds of things we would normally expect to find in an eighteenth-century will: money, clothing and linens, books, a gold stopwatch, a sword, and a pipe. But Dr. Gordon also included a more surprising bequest. “To my servant Domingo,” “to my Chinese Asson,” and “to my Cooley Attay,” Gordon left small sums of cash. In addition to these gifts, Gordon decided to release Attay “from the payment of his bond to me for seven hundred dollars…” Dr. Gordon also left his horse, a dog named Prince and small boy named Lorenzo to his friend in Canton. Who were Lorenzo, Domingo, Asson, and Attay and where did they come from? Why did Gordon refer to Lorenzo as “ the boy,” to Domingo as a “servant,” a familiar British social category; to Asson as a “Chinese,” an ethnic affiliation; and to Attay as a “cooley” or coolie, a pidgin term for a lowly laborer borrowed from an Indian dialect via the Portuguese in the seventeenth century? Were they really servants or in fact slaves? And what did it mean that this was happening in Canton, an imperial port city controlled by China? By examining the wills of East India Company mariners and the small British community living in Canton and Macao from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, this paper will reveal hidden aspects of East India Company history, break new ground in the history of slavery in China and East Asia, and explore blurred categories of unfree labour during the early modern period.