Slavery in Indonesia

Slavery and slave trade is known to have existed during the Ancient Hindu-Buddhistic states in Indonesia, though the information is somewhat limited.

The rulers in the Hindu-Buddhist states in Indonesia are known to have used slave labor to cultivate their land, which was common in the Indonesian states, where there was no lack of land but rather of people and laborers to cultivate it, and slaves are noted to have existed in both royal palaces and temples in ancient Indonesia.

[6] The Royal harems in South East Asia where generally relatively small with the exception of the one in Aceh, which reached a considerable size in the 16th- and 17th-centuries.

[8] The court of Aceh also used enslaved dancing boys (Nias) of the age 8–12, who were also used for sexual slavery, as late as in the 1870s.

[10] Banten acquired their concubines by enslaving girls from 'those villages which during the period of Islamisation had refused to embrace the new religion, and had thereupon been declared to be slaves'.

[15] A Chinese non-Muslim man had a female Indonesian who was of Muslim Arab Hadhrami Sayyid origin in Solo, the Dutch East Indies, in 1913 which was scandalous in the eyes of Ahmad Surkati and his Al-Irshad Al-Islamiya.

[18] It is not known when the custom of slave concubines ended in South East Asia, but the custom of harems, polygyny and concubinage was met with criticism from the 1870s among the local indigenous elite after it had been identified by the colonial powers as a reason for the decay of the local indigenous rulers.

[27] In practice however the Dutch colonial authorities never truly had full control over the East Indies, and chattel slavery is known to have existed in some parts of the archipelago as late as the 1940s.