Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean World (original) (raw)

2021, The Cambridge World History of Slavery

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.