Slavery, antislavery, political rivalry and regional networks in East African waters, 1877-1883

Abstract

This paper explores the dynamic between local, regional, and global forces for the Comoro Islands between the 1873 treaty mandating abolition of the export slave trade from Zanzibar to the imposition of French suzerainty over the Comoro Islands in 1886. Locally, my context is the Comoro Islands; regionally, it takes in the Mozambique Channel and wider southwest Indian Ocean; globally, it is the larger British imperial antislavery campaign in the western Indian Ocean. My paper seeks specifically to understand how the final years of political rivalry and slaving in this region affected matters both local and regional. By examining these events in some detail I hope also to reveal the economic and social networks that connected the people of the Comoros to each other, and beyond the Comoros to Zanzibar and coastal Mozambique. In the process, I illustrate how British abolitionism played out in the Comoros.