European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850
FAIN: FB-56133-12
Richard B. Allen
Framingham State University (Framingham, MA 01702-2499)
Slavery and slave trading have been an integral part of the human experience for centuries. While historians have worked actively during the last fifty years to reconstruct and understand the movement of more than twelve million enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic to North and South America and the Caribbean between 1500 and the 1860s, they have largely ignored European slave trading elsewhere in the world. This project, which will result in the first comprehensive study of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean from 1500 to 1850, examines the activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who shipped slaves from eastern Africa, Madagascar, India, Malaya, and Indonesia throughout the Indian Ocean basin and beyond. In so doing, these traders laid the foundations for the establishment of an increasingly integrated worldwide system of free and forced migrant labor that is a hallmark of the modern global economy.