Indrani Chatterjee has written that ‘arguments over territorial jurisdiction of law as well as “customary” social practices in the conduct of diplomatic relations between the British government of India and the “princely states” of the subcontinent constituted many different barriers to [the] delegalisation [of slavery].’ Colonial officials, she suggests, ‘tried to play the abolitionist card selectively’ and, as a result, the British residency system led to ‘few general prohibitions or proclamations against the land-based trade or the keeping of slaves’. This chapter explores these ideas further, arguing that although Chatterjee's assessment is accurate for domestic slavery when imagined as a static internal institution, where the land-based trade involved the coercive acquisition of slaves and the illegitimate movement of people across territorial boundaries, it exercised significant British attention, being subsumed into wider colonial conceptions of criminality, itinerancy and stability. It will use the example of the debates that took place over slavetrading between the Rajput and Maratha states and British India to explore the various political, ideological and ‘moral’ imperatives that informed British officials’ attitudes towards slavery and slave-trading in India. In particular it will look at the implications of these debates for our understanding of the limits of British ‘authority’, using the example of illegally procured slaves to demonstrate the fluid manner in which individuals could move, or be moved, between British and Indian controlled spaces, physically and metaphorically, and the extent to which British influence was in practice limited, both spatially and ideologically.

The way in which official EIC policy was implemented, as well as the pragmatic considerations that informed their debates about slavery and slave-trading, suggest that their primary concern was not with abolitionism or emancipation but with preventing a volatile and destabilising trade across their borders, and settling, rather than eradicating, the practice of slavery and slave-ownership within their provinces. The British did not seek to prevent the sale or transfer of children altogether, therefore, but rather to end involuntary, coercive or deceitful modes of acquisition and the subsequent movement of illegitimately procured slaves across territorial boundaries. Thus, although most British officials maintained a theoretical opposition to slave-trading in principle, in practical terms it was not the transfer of domestic slaves that they objected to, but illegitimate, coercive and destabilising means of acquiring them.