Ending the history of silence: reconstructing European Slave trading in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Thirty-eight years ago, Hubert Gerbeau discussed the problems that contributed to the "history of silence" surrounding slave trading in the Indian Ocean. While the publication of an expanding body of scholarship since the late 1980s demonstrates that this silence is not as deafening as it once was, our knowledge and understanding of this traffic in chattel labor remains far from complete. This article discusses the problems surrounding attempts to reconstruct European slave trading in the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1850. Recently created inventories of British East India Company slaving voyages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of French, Portuguese, and other voyages involving the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Réunion between 1670 and the 1830s not only shed light on the nature and dynamics of British and French slave trading in the Indian Ocean, but also highlight topics and issues that future research on European slave trading within and beyond this oceanic world will need to address.

Recadrer le xixe siècle

“…As a case in point, the elaboration of the nature and extent of power enjoyed by free Africans in India, as opposed to the enslaved, for example, implies a rethinking of the term diaspora as well as the racial composition of the Indian subcontinent. The existence of different systems of slavery and/or forced work in colonies and kingdoms of the Indian Ocean region demand an accounting of the simultaneity and complexity of political and legal categories for slavery often believed to have succeeded each other (Allen, 2017;Campbell, 2003;Suzuki, 2017). The field also disturbs dominant spatial chronologies in areas such as the history of Islam, which remained focused on the region of West Asia despite the numerical and cultural significance of Islamic practice in other regions, including East Africa (Kooriadathodi, 2016).…”

Private slave trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean world: a study into the networks and backgrounds of the slavers and the enslaved in South Asia and South Africa

“…86 Persons of this caste were engaged in agricultural work and were probably not protected by law from being sold and alienated from the land they worked. 87 The Chego caste seems to refer to communities that originated from Malayalam Buddhists. 88 Some slaves were registered as originating of the Bettua (8%) and Kanaka castes (5%), but only a few were from the Parea (2%) or other castes.…”

“…89 Perhaps the lower prices paid for children might explain the strong preference for slaves of a very young age. 90 The girls were on average somewhat older (15.7 years) than the boys (12.4 years) at the moment they were sold in Cochin. It is interesting to note that slaves from the Chego caste in turn were younger (on average 11.6 years) than slaves from other castes.…”

Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean

“…33 Worden gains new understanding of Cape slavery, placing private estate and household documents alongside Dutch East India Company records, and Harries draws on new knowledge on the Portuguese and French Indian Ocean slave trade recently obtained despite the deliberate destruction of archival records. 34 Kaarsholm obtains glimpses of insight into the subaltern lives of 'liberated Africans' and indentured labourers through records of court cases and colonial scandals unsuccessfully hushed up, and Dhupelia-Mesthrie breaks through the respectable facade of immigration administration by adding perspectives of personal and family biography.…”