Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition

Abstract

Although a vast amount of historical scholarship has been devoted to the decline of the Atlantic slave trade and the demise of slavery in the New World during the nineteenth century, much less scholarly attention has been focused on the extensive slave trading networks in the western Indian Ocean. The states and islands of the western Indian Ocean have both used and trafficked in slaves since at least the ninth century. At the very time when the slave trade in the Atlantic was declining, the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was growing. One reason why this vast slave trading system has been understudied is that it left behind few documents for historians to use. That situation changed when the British Navy’s anti-slavery squadron moved into the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century.The studies in this volume provide a nuanced and sometimes intimate portrait of slavery and the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean in the age of abolition. They reveal the dynamic interactions between slaveholders, slaves, and anti-slavery forces. The analyses and stories presented here illuminate key themes in the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. Although they may seem new or different to scholars and readers who focus on slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic World, they will not be completely unfamiliar. In both cases, it is a story of epic social and cultural upheaval in the context of massive economic transformation in an increasingly globalized world.