Abstract
The Atlantic having dominated slave-trade and slavery studies for so long, it was about time that historians of the Indian Ocean began to assert themselves and make Indian Ocean slaveries and slave trades better known. Among those historians who, in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered Indian Ocean slave trade studies were Hubert Gerbeau, Edward Alpers and Richard Allen. They championed the cause for a rethinking of the ‘Atlantic slavery model’ and its applicability to the Indian Ocean. Hubert Gerbeau stated quite categorically some years ago that L’Ocean Indien n’est pas l’Atlantique (‘the Indian Ocean is not the Atlantic’), and this has been the guiding principle of most scholars of slavery and slave trades in the Indian Ocean. Today, we also seem to have two competing publishing presses on the issue of Indian Ocean slavery in the Anglophone world: Richard Allen’s Indian Ocean Studies Series and Gwyn Campbell’s Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures Series. Several others also exist in the Francophone world focusing on the Indian Ocean. Although all have made a case for countering ‘the tyranny of the Atlantic,’ in the last decade, the number of detailed, empirically sound studies have been few and far between, all suffering from the compartmentalization syndrome and each working in their own area of the Indian Ocean. Worse, from their own individual areas, they have tended to generalize for the whole Indian Ocean. A synthesis of past works, a conceptual overview by an experienced observer of all things Indian Ocean and an assessment of what future students of the Indian Ocean might engage in, was therefore sorely needed. Richard Allen’s book fulfils this need to some extent.
Allen is well placed to do so. After decades of painstaking research and a series of journal articles, he has, as he too modestly points out, compiled and rewritten them, and updated them into the chapters for this book. Richard Allen’s frustration with the neglect by Anglo-American historians of this part of the world is clearly felt. He argues that this neglect has also led to an underestimation of the structural links between the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean slave trades. The frustration has, fortunately for us, led to a work that not only spans centuries, but oceans, and covers indigenous and colonial worlds as well as showing the links between the three different forms of labor migration that existed between those periods. This work quite simply, as stated earlier, sets the conceptual foundation for a more holistic study of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Slave trades and other forms of involuntary migration and servitude. Allen has very skillfully set this out through five chapters while maintaining a certain measure of chronological, thematic and geographical unity and specificity in each. Added to this is the voluminous empirical data drawn from archival sources collected over decades in the United Kingdom, France and Mauritius, statistical data manipulation and material compiled from existing studies. It is now up to future scholars to tap into the as yet unread sources in France and other repositories and complete this work. As Richard Allen has begun to demonstrate in what is hopefully the first of such studies, there was not one slave trade but many slave trades operating at the same time and in the same region and impacting on each other.
This has led to a review of current quantitative estimates of the Indian Ocean Slave trades. It will take no doubt a few more years to arrive at a more definite figure but historians now need to add to Richard Allen’s database as the task of compiling all existing researched data (at least in English) has been achieved by him. This task of creating this Indian Ocean database will require no less than a huge collaborative effort. It is indeed a formidable task, which cannot be accomplished by one historian alone. It is to be hoped that this book will stimulate other scholars to join together and create an Indian Ocean slave trade database on the scale of what has been accomplished for the Atlantic by Philip Curtin.
Allen has also shown the links between the pre-colonial and colonial slave trades, and post-slave labor migration. The impact of the slave trade and slavery on new forms of labor migration and servitude deserved much more scholarly attention than they have hitherto received, and are well brought out here. The complexity and variety of the slave trades and other labor migrations in the Indian Ocean are well-known to those who study them, and there was no single book up to now that brought together in one historical narrative these complexities that go far back to the pre-colonial era and continued to impact on these colonial societies even today.
The chapters cover a series of thematic topics, including the role of East India Companies and colonial governments in the slave trades and the lengths they took to procure slaves. In Chapter 1, Allen present an overview of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean and attempts to ‘uncompartimentalize’ the Indian Ocean slave trade, covering Dutch, Portuguese, French and British trades as well as indigenous systems of ‘slave’ trading. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of the British East India Company in the Southeast Asian slave trade, something little known up to now. Chapter 3 is devoted to the French slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This chapter is perhaps Allen’s weakest, as the French National Archives have not been as fully tapped as have the British National Archives for the British East India Company. The extent to which French traders moved in non-French territory to procure slaves is, however, highlighted, and their dominant role in the Indian Ocean slave trade clearly and strongly brought out.
Chapter 4 focuses on slave trades and unfree labor from India and Southeast Asia (1500–1800), an area of study for which Allen has provided an immense amount of detail. Indian, Southeast Asian and Chinese slaves were sent all the way to the Americas in the eighteenth century, using indigenous forms of slave trading into which European slave traders tapped decades later when they entered the Indian Ocean. We also observe the diverse methods used by traders to enslave Indians and Southeast Asians. Kidnapping, enticement, capturing prisoners of war, famine victims or simply buying particular peoples believed to be of ‘slave’ caste. The Indian slave trade ended by the end of the eighteenth century with British abolition of the trade in the northern Indian Ocean. Allen concludes by stating the astounding figure of 360,000 to 484,000 Asians having been traded as slaves between 1500 and 1810. It is indeed amazing that historians of slavery in the Atlantic world could have ignored this area for so long.
Chapter 5 returns to the Mascarene Islands to examine the illegal slave trade from 1800 to 1835, which continued even though slave trade had been abolished, and Chapter 6 ends with a study of the uneasy relationship between humanitarian concerns, British abolitionism and the establishment of other forms of unfree labor: the introduction of convicts and of indentured labor.
Also of much value is the attempt to quantify the slave trades. The book includes a substantial number of tables, the fruit of painstaking accumulation and correlation of figures since 1995, which will hopefully encourage other historians to take up the daunting challenge of quantifying the slave trades in the Indian Ocean. It has indeed been a protracted attempt to do so: there is little possibility of quantifying the Northern slave trade spanning several pre-colonial centuries, but it may be possible to do so for the colonial slave trade as some figures are available. Sceptics will continue to point to the existence of illegal slave trading, which will always be an issue in quantification.
Although, as Richard Allen states, this may not be the most ‘politically correct’ book, with the current focus on Africa/Atlantic-centered historical scholarship and debates on slavery and reparations, it is nevertheless a very important book for historians of African/Atlantic slavery to read.