European Slave Trading, Abolitionism, and “New Systems Of Slavery” in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Recent scholarship on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean highlights the need to explore structural connections between pre- and post-emancipation migrant labour systems in the colonial world. Europeans purchased and transported a minimum of 431,000-547,000 slaves of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian origin to destinations in the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1850. These data, coupled with recent research on European abolitionist activity in the region and the movement of convict and indentured labourers throughout and beyond this oceanic basin, point to the development of an increasingly integrated global movement of migrant labour during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Colonization During Colonialism: Developing a Framework to Assess the Rapid Ecological Transformation of Mauritius’s Pristine Ecosystem

“…This ignores the agency of most of the population, indeed, the majority of the colonizers, who shaped the island's ecology. The Mauritian population of enslaved peoples grew steadily, reaching 60,000 in 1809, 80% of the island's inhabitants (Allen, 2012). During indenture, nearly half a million people migrated to the island in only 30-40 years.…”

Panya: Economies of Deception and the Discontinuities of Indentured Labour Recruitment and the Slave Trade, Nigeria and Fernando Pó, 1890s–1940s

“…23 The old and new literature on indenture has provided abundant examples of the creative and fiercely "consistent" ways in which those forced or inclined to sell their labor in a labor market would be "deliberately deceived about their real destination." 24 It is important here to understand "destination" not only as a simple geographic direction but also as a conceptual location in the division of labor, because those who were promised acceptable jobs-such as agricultural work in Nigeria, or desirable placements as trading assistants, clerks and drivers in either Nigeria or Fernando Pó-ended up in a type of indentured plantation labor that was foreign in Nigeria.…”

From abolition of the slave trade to protection of immigrants: Danish colonialism, German missionaries, and the development of ideas of humanitarian governance from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth century

“…We need to know more about the ways in which the European trade in slaves from India linked up with older domestic systems of bonding and the trafficking of unfree labour, and how it interacted with the trade in slaves by Indian merchants from Goa. 16 Much of the seventeenth century Danish trade in slaves from Tranquebar took the form of "mellemhandel" or "country trade," while Danish Company ships were waiting for cargoes to take home, in which slaves would be taken to Aceh for sale on commission on behalf of the Naik of Tanjore, and slaves would also be traded on commission from French merchants in Pondicherry.…”