人身抵当証文から見る19世紀ビルマの債務奴隷

──サリン地方の事例──

抄録

This paper aims to clarify the characteristics of debt servitude in pre-colonial Burma during the Konbaung period. Early travelers from the West often found the prevalence of debt servitude in pre-colonial Southeast Asia and left various remarks on the phenomena which looked somehow different from what they thought as slavery in the West. However, studies on the debt servitude in Southeast Asia remained very few, partly because of the lack of indigenous historical materials.

Utilizing 104 manuscripts of human mortgage and related contracts written in the period from 1829 to 1885 in Salin area, this study examines the causes of why people become debt slaves, the terms of contracts and the relationships between creditor and debtor in detail and tries to clarify the actual conditions of debt servitudes in the precolonial Burmese society. The creditors were those who called Salin-myo thu-kaung, members of powerful families in Salin who ruled this area for a long time and accumulated irrigated lands as well as debt slaves by their money-lending business. The debtors were ordinary poor people who resided in villages in Salin and neighboring areas.

One important characteristic of these human mortgage contracts is that after becoming debt slaves, they remained to be principals of making contracts with their owners. A head of family, who was in debt servitude, could make contracts with his creditor to borrow additional money or to put other family members into debt servitude. Among the manuscripts used for this study we do not find such evidence that owners of slaves traded their slaves each other. In this sense, there was no boundary between freemen and debt slaves. Debt servitude was not a social status but temporary situation, so when debtors repaid their debts, they became free again.

However, there is a special clause in some contracts that say children born of debt slave mothers become automatically debt slaves, and thus make some children born into servitude. Even without such a clause in the contract, the heirs of debt slave parents tended to become debt slaves as they could not repay the parent’s debt which usually ballooned with time, because the labor service of the debtor was regarded as paying the interest on the loan and the debt never became reduced. The debtors usually put new loans on the original loan to maintain their subsistence. Therefore, once people got into debt servitude it tended to be permanent.

The existence of the creditors was crucial for the poor people to sustain their living as the creditors rarely refused additional loans or borrowing paddies from their granaries that were set up in many villages. However, the precise records of the money or paddy loan were kept and if people failed to repay these loans, they had no choice other than becoming debt slaves of the creditors.

All terms in the contracts are strictly observed on both sides. If debt slaves ran away and hid themselves, the creditor would chase them thoroughly and make a new written pledge with the run away and joint guarantors.

Judging from the human bondage contracts in Salin, the author argues that the debt servitude in pre-colonial Burma cannot be interpreted simply as one of the patron-client relationships. It is more contractual although the parties concerned were not equal in socio-economic terms.