Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract

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.

Transition from Slavery in Zanzibar and Mauritius

The specificities of the Indian Ocean slave trade and slavery have been highlighted in the numerous works of historians of the Indian Ocean such as Ned Alpers, Abdul Sheriff, Richard Allen and Hubert Gerbeau, and are being recognised even by scholars of the Atlantic region. Within the Indian Ocean, however, the specificities of individual countries need to be highlighted and contrasted with each other. Some Indian Ocean countries, such as Zanzibar and Madagascar, were both importers and exporters of slaves, while others without indigenous populations, like Mauritius and Reunion, were solely importers of slave labour. Before embarking on a comparative study of the transition of these slave societies to freedom, it is necessary to have an understanding of the historical context of the establishment of slavery and the peopling of the islands through the slave trade. This is the focus of this chapter.

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.

New Routes for Diapora Studies, 2012

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

Journal of Global Slavery, 2021

Indrani Chatterjee's groundbreaking research has shown the centrality of obligation and provision to historical forms of slavery in South Asia, deepening our understanding of slave-using societies beyond the plantation systems that have dominated historiography, as well as historical memory. In this interview, Chatterjee explains why the crucial question in the context of South Asian slavery was: who do you serve and for what purpose? Enslavers were obliged to materially provide for their slaves, in return for the enslaved person's service, labor and loyalty, creating varied relationships of dependence. By foregrounding the complex set of relationships and obligations in which slaves were enmeshed, Chatterjee seeks to "make people out of laborers." This has led her to rethink the ways that resistance and agency have been conceptualized in slavery studies and Subaltern Studies, emphasizing the relationships within which a person became an agent. Her research has also deepened our understanding of colonialism and slavery. British colonizers generally ignored slaves' entitlements to certain labor or taxation exemptions from the state, and colonial revenue-collection made the already-interview Journal of Global Slavery 6 (2021) 249-261 burdened doubly burdened. But in a hetero-temporal colonial context, older ways of identifying and forms of relationships endured. Chatterjee argues that this history of the provision of survival in contexts of enslavement is not "romanticizing," but rather historicizes multiple forms of violence and shows a fuller, more varied picture of slavery.

This article explores the local and intercontinental networks that underpinned the private trade in slaves and the transportation of the enslaved in the VOC seaborne empire during the eighteenth century. We rely on two sets of complementary VOC records, with their respective shortcomings, to reveal information about those who were involved in this trade as sellers, buyers and traded. Our focus is on the Cape of Good Hope as a node with a high demand for slaves, and Cochin from where slaves were traded and transported to all regions of the empire, including the Cape. It is apparent from these sources that high ranking VOC officials, the Company rank and file, free citizens and Asians under VOC jurisdiction partook in this lucrative trade. Analyses of regions of origin, age, gender, and caste are provided, giving the reader a rare glimpse into the identity of the enslaved.

International Review of Social History

HumaNetten, 2021