Slavery and the African Diaspora Beyond the Atlantic

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.

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.

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.

Slavery & Abolition, 2016

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. Introduction: labour, coercion and mobility Throughout the Vereenigde Oostindische Company ('Dutch East India Company', VOC) empire, mobility and coercion were key elements in mobilizing labour and maintaining imperial order. 1 With the exception of the Cape of Good Hope, most attention has been devoted to the European workers, employed in wage labour relations in which sailors and soldiers were free to enter, but not free to leave before the end of their contract ranging between three and seven years. 2 Over several decades, a significant body of literature has excavated the work and lives of slaves, free Asians and free blacks at the Cape. 3 For other regions, the scale of such scholarship is more modest. Only recently are historians broadening their scope more systematically to include the thousands of Asians, Europeans and Eurasians working through systems of slavery, corvee and convict labour. 4 Several studies have pointed out the

Springer eBooks, 2023

The chapters of this handbook presented slavery both as a global practice having existed from Old Babylonia to the present day and as an institution with globalizing effects connecting people, places, and commodities, sometimes over great distances. The contributions have shown how people have entered enslavement, been exploited as slaves, and attempted or managed to exit slavery across time and space. At any given time, people have been born into slavery and captured or kidnapped by soldiers, warriors, or pirates. They have been sentenced to slavery or sold themselves into it to escape poverty or debt. In all parts of the world, slaves' bodies and their ability to perform labor have been violently exploited; they have lived in segregation or side by side with other coerced people, and they have served the needs and pleasures of their masters and the respective slaving systems. And throughout history, people have struggled to leave this status of total submission by working and negotiating for their ransom or manumission, or by planning their escape or revolt. Obviously, all these individual and collective stories of enslavement cut across linear narratives tracing slavery from the Graeco-Roman context directly to Atlantic slavery and abolition. Rather than appearing as a human institution following a simple path of gradual evolution and dissolution, slavery proves to be a chameleon, quickly adapting to shifting circumstances and frameworks

Current Anthropology

This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology. On October 12-18, 2018, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research hosted its 158th symposium at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal. The symposium gathered scholars from different disciplinary and geographical homes and was convened by Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw. It was designed to be an intellectual challenge to academic traditions within anthropology and offer models of what anthropology could become in order to have greater impact in policy, public culture, and action. It was intended to engage an uncomfortable and painful past whose buried memories continue to linger in the present. To do that, it was structured to accommodate a broad spectrum of cultural sensibilities and political subjectivities that lay bare the positionality of the researcher. The ultimate goal was to provoke, revisit, and redirect debates on Atlantic slavery and modernity across racial, cultural, class, and gender, as well as methodological and theoretical, boundaries for the twenty-first century and beyond. Following the statement of the goals and orientations of the symposium, all participants were asked to prepare papers that were circulated prior to the meeting. Paper presentations during the meeting were followed by thematic focus group discussions. The history of Atlantic slavery is tightly linked to that of European colonization of the rest of the world that went hand in hand with the production of Eurocentric knowledge. European global voyages, ca. 1400, were largely motivated by commerce and later colonization that meant economic and political control over new resources, territories, and their inhabitants. That colonial expansion was built on unequal relations legitimized by Eurocentric views of the world in general, elevating European over different others, particularly Black Africans and Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere. Physiological, biological, and phenotypical differences were translated into discriminating racial, ethnic, and national distinctions that were naturalized first on the basis of religion and physical appearance and later by way of anthropological and historical knowledge that, by the nineteenth century, became a powerful medium for representing and controlling non-European others (Cooper 2005; McClintock 1995; O'Brien 2010; Pratt 1992; Schlanger and Taylor 2012; Stoler 2002a). Eurocentric knowledge was strategically mobilized to intrude, search, analyze, dissect, and ultimately consume Black bodies according to European demands, needs, and standards (Curran 2011). Anthropological gaze born of modernity is a direct outcome of that colonial history that continued to reproduce canonized discourses and representations that locked people of African descent and Indigenous communities of the Western Hemisphere into the imagination of others (Mudimbe 1988, 1994; O'Brien 2010; Trouillot 2003). Hence, it is critical to interrogate how these legacies infiltrated the core methodological and theoretical foundations of anthropological discourses (

2017

No other topic in the history of the Atlantic World is more politically, socially, culturally, and emotionally charged than slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. As the Western world (and through the processes of globalization, much of the rest of the world) seems to be moving towards more universal and inclusive principles of human rights, social and political constructions of race still echo with often polarizing power as humanity struggles to reconcile concepts of race, by definition exclusionary, within a more inclusive paradigm. Like all social and political ideas, concepts of race are historically rooted. These seeds of these concepts were carried deep within the bowels of the ships, which one recent historian describes as “complex, technologically sophisticated instruments of torture,” that transferred millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean over the course of four centuries. Much of the history of what is now termed the Atlantic World has been directly affected by the consequences of the conceptions of race that solidified as African men and women were offloaded, weary and emaciated, from the decks of those floating gulags. To understand the Atlantic World today, it is imperative to trace the ways these concepts have manifested historically and continue to shape the ways that humanity conceives of itself socially, politically, and culturally.

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

"Recent Trends in the Study of the Atlantic Slave Trade," Indian Historical Review (New Delhi), vol.XV, no. 1-2 (July 1988 & January 1989), pp.1-15

Slavery & Abolition