Book Review: Richard B. Allen,European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean

The scholarship on slave trading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been occupied mainly with the transatlantic connections between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Asia and the Indian Ocean were linked to the Atlantic world. The importance of Indian textiles to the transatlantic slave trade, for example, is well known to historians. But were there parallel developments in transoceanic slave trade in the Indian Ocean as well? Were these developments related to what was happening on the Atlantic side? References to slave trade do occur in studies on Indian Ocean trade, but a comprehensive treatment of slave trading in the Indian Ocean, and links between Asia and Africa via the trade, has been missing. The oversight reflects the fact that the Atlantic trade was many times larger in size. But it creates a misleading impression that the Atlantic slave trade can be studied as a self-contained subject without reference to the Asian counterpart. European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean successfully challenges that assumption.

By reconstructing trade statistics from a wide range of data sources and archives, the book is able to offer thick descriptions of the trading hubs, organisation of business, and the direction of trade. Using these descriptions, the author makes a number of larger arguments. Three of these are especially important for the historiography of slavery and for the world economy in the early modern times. First, the Indian Ocean slave trade was more important than its relatively small scale may make us believe. It was important especially because it created channels of communication and exchange of people, which survived the end of slave trade. A dedicated study of the trade in the Indian Ocean also shows us how much the European companies depended on the trade and on slave labour. Second, the Indian Ocean was a major theatre of the abolitionist movement. And third, the Indian Ocean slave trade was of greater antiquity than the Atlantic trade, and somewhat related to that point, there were structural links between indigenous labour practices and European trade in Asian slaves.

The book has six chapters. Chapter 1 sets out the historiographical themes and a brief chronological narrative. Chapter 2 deals with the British East India Company and Chapter 3 with the French Company, mainly in the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 studies the overlaps and interactions between European interest in slave labour and local and regional systems of slavery and slave trade. The chapter contains useful discussions of Arakanese, Malayan and Indonesian commerce, and their contributions to the European settlements and their needs for labour. Chapter 5 deals with the survival of clandestine trade in the Mascarenes in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 6 explores the transactions between convict labour, indenture and slave trades in the late eighteenth century especially. Four short appendices supply statistics on demography and slave prices.

One of the arguments is that there were ‘connections between the slave trades in these two oceanic worlds’, that is, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans (p. 181). This is shown, for example, in the role of the Mascarenes from the late eighteenth century not only as an entrepôt, but also as a base for the conduct of slaving expeditions. Another connection can be seen in the British East India Company’s efforts to bring slavery to an end, a movement that drew resources from the abolitionist movement, but was also driven by specific factors such as impressions of famines and destitution in the company territories. These may seem to be somewhat tenuous connections between big segments of the trade, but they do raise the possibility of a truly global history of the trade, and this is no doubt an original contribution.

On the very interesting issue of the supply of slaves, the book is rather speculative. The argument that indigenous systems of employment and labour control were relevant to European slave trade is plausible, but it is not sufficiently illustrated. More controversial is the claim that later ‘migrant labour systems’ such as the indenture ‘were inextricably intertwined with European slave trading’ (p. 195). Taken together, these arguments may imply a deep institutional continuity as employment moved from caste-based coercion to slavery to indenture. The author does not go that far. In any case, a systematic study of either caste or indenture is beyond its scope. Notwithstanding Hugh Tinker’s rhetoric that the indenture was a ‘new system of slavery’, which is cited, the two systems were completely different in institutional terms. Similar ruptures may well exist between European practices and locally rooted conventions of labour. We are left more or less in the dark on the question of where exactly in the grand narrative of institutional change European slavers should figure.

Nevertheless, by drawing our attention to the slave trades of local roots, the use that the Europeans made of these and the transformations that the trade underwent, the book enables asking big questions on two issues: the connections between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and the character of the transition from slave labour to contractual labour in the tropical world of the early nineteenth century.