Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean (original) (raw)
Related papers
Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean
History Compass, 2006
The Indian Ocean, a relatively neglected and unexplored theatre of the slave trade, has only belatedly drawn the attention of historians, for so long preoccupied with its Atlantic counterpart. Recent studies have emphasized the African dimension of the trade to the almost complete exclusion of Asian sources of supply and have therefore done little to probe the diverse and unique features of slavery in the region. In particular, the presence and role of Indian slaves has hitherto been given scant attention, despite its significance in the colonial history of the region. The present paper provides an overview of the literature on the slave trade in Indians, and suggests a number of avenues for further research, in particular in developing linkages between the various strands of migration of Indian slaves, convicts, and indentured labourers throughout the Indian Ocean littoral.
Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean World
The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 2021
The study of the early modern and modern slave trades in the Indian Ocean world (henceforth IOW) has received increased attention in recent years. In particular, historians have sought to draw more attention to the global significance of the Indian Ocean slave trade among scholars of the early modern period who have long been drawn to the study of slavery in the Atlantic. Within the subfield of Indian Ocean slavery studies itself, historians have underscored differences in the economic and social structures of Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave systems and also critiqued African-centric approaches to the Indian Ocean that neglect practices of slavery and the slave trade in South and Southeast Asian societies. For the purposes of this chapter, the IOW includes the seas, islands, coastal regions, and their immediate hinterlands from East and northeast Africa (including Egypt and the Red Sea) to China and the Indonesian archipelago. While this chapter will give some overview of how slaving activities spanned the breadth of this vast system, the focus will be on the western Indian Ocean, its Red Sea artery, and the slave trade between northeast Africa, East Africa, southern Arabia, and the west coast of India. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the chronology and geography of the slave trade from a pan-IOW perspective and situates slave trading within the broader medieval IOW economy. The focus of the chapter then narrows to analyze the development of the slave trade in specific regions from late antiquity through, primarily, the fourteenth century. These discussions will bring some methodological considerations to the fore. In particular, it is essential to parse the multiple strands of the IOW slave trade and to examine its periodic ebb and flow to apprehend its overall dynamics. Wholesale maritime slave trading was rare, while diplomatic exchanges of the enslaved are more conspicuous during time periods when new states and dynasties forged relationships with other regional * Thanks to Elizabeth Lambourn, Roxani Margariti, and Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any mistakes are my own.
University Press, 2014, xviii * 378 pp., $90 (hardback), ISBN g7}-o-82t4-2106-1, s_q-95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-82 t4-2107-g The recent discovery of the Portuguese slaver Sao Jose,which sank in 1794 with Mozambican captil-6 offTable Bay' near Cape Town, has brought Indian Ocean slave traffic international attention. This makes Richard Allen's assertions of a 'tyranny of the Atlantic' or Atlantic-cen trism in European Slav,e
Transition from Slavery in Zanzibar and Mauritius
2016
This book presents a comparative history of slavery and the transition from slavery to free labour in Zanzibar and Mauritius, within the context of a wider comparative study of the subject in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Both countries are islands, with roughly the same size of area and populations, a common colonial history, and both are multicultural societies. However, despite inhabiting and using the same oceanic space, there are differences in experiences and structures which deserve to be explored. In the nineteenth century, two types of slave systems developed on the islands ? while Zanzibar represented a variant of an Indian Ocean slave system, Mauritius represented a variant of the Atlantic system ? yet both flourished when the world was already under the hegemony of the global capitalist mode of production. This comparison, therefore, has to be seen in the context of their specific historical conjunctures and the types of slave systems in the overall theoretical c...
Detecting the cultural impact of slavery from Africa in the Indian Ocean
Although interest has recently increased, studies of the Indian Ocean slave trade remain scattered and weak compared with the massive volume of materials on the Atlantic trade. The proposal aims to explore this topic from a multi-disciplinary point of view, incorporating evidence from archaeology, ethnobotany, anthropology, linguistics, genetics and ethnomusicology and their synthesis into a broader assessment of the impact of slavery on the culture of in the Indian Ocean.
Comparative Literature, 2012
at the ACLA meeting. I am focusing here on the literary elements that are more appropriate for Comparative Literature. I thank the journal and our Association for this opportunity to share a small aspect of the literary history of my country of origin, Mauritius, the Ile de France of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's time. The island's two-hundred-year tradition of Francophone literature remains little known to most scholars working in the United States today. This essay is an adapted and translated version of a section of my 2012 book Le su et l'incertain. I thank Alexis Pernsteiner for her help with translations. See also Lionnet, "'New World' Exiles" for a discussion of both eighteenth-and twentieth-century authors from the Mascarene region. 2012 ACLA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS FRANçOISE LIONNET Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean T hE INDIAN OCEAN has always been the most "global" of all oceans. It is the oldest in human history and has enabled contact among travelers, scholars, and merchants of the most diverse origins for more than 5000 years. It figures in a sizable corpus of travel narratives and other literary genres that have influenced the direction of European literary movements from the eighteenth century to the present. Yet it remains, among U.S.-based humanists, the least studied of the large bodies of water that link continents, archipelagos, and their inhabitants. historian Michael Pearson has suggested that a better name for the Indian Ocean might have been the "Afrasian Sea." More apt geographically, this designation is more inclusive. It removes the implication that one area, India, is privileged and refocuses attention on the African, Middle Eastern, Arabian, and other Asian elements of the whole region. In addition, the rival interests of warring European empires led them to lay claim to islands and continental littoral areas, ensuring their continued presence as "Indian Ocean Rim" nations. 1 For the