The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery
2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0144039x.2012.734112
ISSN1743-9523
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoAbstract Despite the considerable distance and danger in transporting slaves from the southwestern Indian Ocean region to the Americas, ships carried nearly 550,000 slaves to the Americas between 1624 and 1860. Prior attempts to understand the place of the Indian Ocean in the transatlantic slave trade have been limited in scope, but the transatlantic slave trade database provides us with access to unprecedented statistics and estimates that shed new light on this forced migration. The study of this slave trade also offers insights into the much larger movement of slaves across the Indian Ocean as a whole. DaysNumber of casesEighteenth centuryWest Africa71.43357 East Africa123.530Nineteenth centuryWest Africa45.2796 East Africa70.7114The mortality figures were PercentNumber of cases1700West Africa11.83137East Africa27.5281800West Africa8.62200East Africa18.1306View correction statement:The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery Acknowledgement The authors thank Michael Reidy for his comments on this article. Notes The eight [as defined by Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)] are Senegambia anywhere north of the Rio Nunez; Sierra Leone, the Rio Nunez to just west of Cape Mount; the Windward Coast, Cape Mount up to and including the Assini River; the Gold Coast, east of here up to and including the Volta River; the Bight of Benin from the Rio Volta inclusive to just west of the Rio Nun; the Bight of Biafra, Rio Nun to Cape Lopez inclusive; west-central Africa, the rest of the western coast of the continent south; Southeast Africa, east of the Cape of Good Hope. These regions are elaborated in the online essay: David Eltis, ‘Geographic Data’, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/methodology-09.faces(accessed July 24, 2012). Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org(accessed July 24, 2012). Most notably, Richard Allen, ‘The Constant Demand of the French: The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of African History 49, no. 1 (2008): 43–72. Joseph Miller, ‘A Theme in Variations: A Historical Schema of Slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions’, Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 172–3. Most historians cite Lovejoy, who used numbers provided by various historians doing research during the 1970s. There has been considerable work done on specific trades but little effort at synthesis since then. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–2, 155–8. Larson provides the most recent set of estimates, described below: Pier Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 41. Estimates for the slave trade from various regions include Esmond Martin and T.C.I. Ryan, ‘A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab Slave Trade of East Africa’, Kenya Historical Review 5 (1977): 71–91; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Currey, 1987), 223–5; Ralph Austen, ‘The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census’, in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Clarence-Smith (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 21–39; Richard Allen, ‘The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 36–8; Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 236–41; Robert Collins, ‘The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands’, African and Asian Studies 5, nos. 3–4 (2006): 325–46. For instance, Abdul Sheriff, ‘Localisation and Social Composition of the East Africa Slave Trade, 1858–1873’, in Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 136. The lack of attention given to Madagascar is touched on in Larson, Ocean of Letters, 38. See especially Edward Alpers, ‘The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean: A Comparative Perspective’, in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Shihan Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), 20–6; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World’, Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): ix–xxiv. On these networks in East Africa, for instance, see Pedro Machado, ‘A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave-Trade, c. 1730–1830’, Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2004): 17–27. ‘A Guide to Understanding and Using the Voyages Database and Website’, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/guide.faces(accessed July 24, 2012). For spreadsheets and an essay on the construction of estimates, see the ‘Estimates spreadsheet’ section of the download page at http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/download.faces(accessed July 24, 2012). José Capela, O tráfico de escravos nos portos de Moçambique, 1733–1904 (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2002). The author kindly made available the notes that underpinned the appendix to this book to Pedro Machado who worked with the compilers of Voyages. On the database: David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 4–9. For the 911 voyages, see http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1866&mjbyptimp=60800 (accessed July 24, 2012). Gwyn Campbell, ‘Madagascar and Mozambique in the Slave Trade of the Western Indian Ocean, 1800–1861’, in Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 173–5. Edward Alpers, ‘“Moçambiques” in Brazil: Another Dimension of the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World’, in Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, ed. José Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005), 43–5. Allen, ‘Mascarene Slave-Trade’, 35. For the development of these estimates, readers are referred to the estimates page of Voyages as well as two files from the download page: David Eltis and Paul Lachance, ‘Estimates of the Size and Direction of Transatlantic Slave Trade’, and the accompanying excel spreadsheet, Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/downloads/estimates-method.pdf(accessed July 24, 2012). A slightly different set of estimates developed from an earlier iteration of the data (together with a further summary of the procedures used) may be found in Eltis and Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Extending the Frontiers, 1–54. Jane Hooper, ‘An Island Empire in the Indian Ocean: The Sakalava Empire of Madagascar’ (PhD thesis, Emory University, 2010), 105–7. Alex Borucki, ‘The “African Colonists” of Montevideo: New Light on the Illegal Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro and the Rio de la Plata (1830–1842)’, Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 3 (2009): 427–44. The middle passage voyage lengths were[colcnt=4] The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic SlaveryAll authorsJane HooperJane Hooper is the David H. Burton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA 19131, USA. & David EltisDavid Eltis is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Email: deltis@emory.eduhttps://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2012.734112Published online:14 August 2013Table Download CSVDisplay Table Source for these figures: Voyages. Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 658–62; David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and Kimberly McIntyre, ‘Transport Costs and the Slave Trade to the Caribbean’, Journal of Economic History, 70, no. 4 (2010), 940–63. Hooper, ‘Island Empire’, 107. In 1639, the English East India company had advised ships to purchase a few slaves at the Comoros of Madagascar: Documents anciens sur les îles Comores: 1591–1800, supplement/II, ed. Anne Molet-Sauvaget (Paris: Institut des langues et civilisations orientales, 1996), 38. In 1663, the EIC again gave orders to buy slaves for St Helena: records held in the British Library, India Office Records (IOR), ‘IOR/E/3/86’, Letter book, f. 154. Trading in Southeast Africa was illegal under the charter of the most East India Companies, but it was much easier to escape the attention of authorities on the east coast of Africa where the volume of trade and shipping was far below that of the western African coast. Dennis Maika, ‘Encounters: Slavery and the Philipse Family: 1680–1751’, in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. Roger Panetta (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2009). See Voyages for the Philipse family's ventures. On Philipse's representatives in Madagascar, labeled pirates by 1690, see ‘HCA 1/98’, which contains correspondence from English ships dispatched to end the piracy on Madagascar, found in the National Archives, UK. For a list of 91 slaving voyages to Madagascar including their owners where available, see Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1866&mjbyptimp=60811(accessed July 24, 2012). Jean Mettas and Serge Daget, Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Société française d'histoire d'outre-mer, 1978–1984) 2: 894, 898–9, have records of 15 voyages carrying captives from West Africa to the Mascarene Islands. As Allen points out, it is likely that ‘significant numbers’ of French slave merchants used the Mascarene Islands ‘as a staging point to mount expeditions to acquire slaves for France's colonies in the Americas’. Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, 62. Almost all the 125,000 captives carried off to the Americas before 1575 passed through bulking centers in the Cape Verde islands or São Tomé. For Spanish activity in the Indian Ocean after 1810, see Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1810&yearTo=1866&natinimp=3&mjbyptimp=60800(accessed July 24, 2012). Alex Borucki, ‘The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata, 1777–1812: Trans-imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare’, Colonial Latin American Review, 20, no. 1 (2011): 81–107. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 106–7. For British captures of slave ships, 1810–1815, see Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1810&yearTo=1815&fate3=3(accessed July 24, 2012). The first discussions of abolition in the Indian Ocean date to 1774: Richard Allen, ‘Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 66, no. 4 (2009): 873–94. In this article, we have assumed that it is the specific meaning of ‘Mozambique’ that was intended so that our totals for Mozambique Island are certainly subject to some upward bias. See Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 168–77; E. Philip LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, 1821–1865: Impact and Implications (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 11–14, for a discussion of ‘bulking’. On the pre-existing slave trade, see Thomas Vernet, ‘Le commerce des esclaves sur la côte swahili, 1500–1750’, Azania 38 (2003): 69–97. On early European slaving voyages to Madagascar, see various documents in Collection des Ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar, ed. Alfred Grandidier and Guillaume Grandidier, 1 vol (Paris: Comité de Madagascar, 1903), describing Portuguese visits; for details about the English, see the Orders by the East India Company, found in the British Library, India Office Records: ‘IOR/B/21’, Court book, 1643–1646, ff. 131–2; and Molet-Sauvaget, Documents anciens, 37–8, 50–2, 56. On Dutch purchases, see especially Collection des Ouvrages, vol. 3: 31–3; 191–8; 333–6; 381–3. Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 102–4. Sakalava rulers also opened up new slave trading ports at Saint Augustine's Bay and Morondava, although these did not rival the ports of the northwest portion of the island, especially those around Boina and Baly Bays. As shown in EIC trading records of attempts to secure slaves for Asian holdings: Hooper, ‘An Island Empire’, 108. See colonial records of the Mascarenes discussing the early slave trade with Sofala in 1710, Archives Nationales, Paris (henceforth AN), ‘COL C/3/3-4’; the ship records of the Vierge de Grace, which visited Mozambique Island in 1733, found in ‘MAR 4JJ/86’, AN. Matilde Zimmermann, ‘The French Slave Trade at Moçambique, 1770–1794’(Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1967), 10–18. Campbell, ‘Madagascar and Mozambique’, 174–7; Allen, ‘The Mascarene Slave-Trade’, 34. On the Mascarene trade, see J.M. Filliot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: ORSTOM, 1974), 125–6; 168; Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, Table 1, on p. 50. Cargoes from Madagascar were relatively small than those from Mozambique or Asia. See Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, Table 2, on p. 54. On the impact of this trade on East Africa, see Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 95–6. Free trade was opened to Americans in 1784 and then to others in 1787, attracting European and American merchants to the shores of the islands. Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, 52. Borucki, ‘The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata’, 81–107. Frederick Barnard, A Three Years’ Cruize in the Mozambique Channel (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1971, originally published in 1868), 37–9. Barnard is referring specifically to Quelimane, a port which enabled easy river access to slave-supplying regions inland. Slave cargoes from East Africa to the Mascarenes also tended to be far larger than those from Madagascar: Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, 54. For instance, the French and Dutch sought slaves from Kilwa and Zanzibar. See M. Morice, Projet d'un establissment a la cote orientale d'Afrique, Rhodes House, ‘MS.Afr. 6’, copy held at the Zanzibar National Archives, ‘BZ 2/1 1777’, ff. 21–34. Zimmermann, ‘French Slave Trade at Moçambique’, 4–6; Allen Isaacman, Mozambique: the Africanization of a European Institution, the Zambesi prazos, 1750–1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 83–93; Nancy Hafkin, ‘Trade, society, and politics in Northern Mozambique, c. 1753–1913’ (MA thesis, Boston University, 1973), xii–iv. Zimmermann, ‘French Slave Trade at Moçambique’, 4. On the growth of this trade, see Isaacman, Mozambique, 93; Zimmermann, ‘French Slave Trade at Moçambique’, 12–38; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, 104–35. Hafkin, ‘Trade, Society, and Politics’, 25. Ibid., 26. Campbell, ‘Madagascar and Mozambique’, 176. Particularly by the 1870s: François Renault, ‘The Structures of the Slave Trade in Central Africa in the 19th Century’, in Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, 146. Zimmermann, ‘French Slave Trade at Moçambique’, 14; Allen, ‘Mascarene Slave-Trade’, 36. Portuguese slavers also carried cargoes between East Africa and the Mascarenes between 1775 and 1796: Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, 53. In 1767, one observer in the Mascarenes complained that French ships sold slaves from Madagascar and the island colonies to the Cape: see memoirs in French colonial archives, the microfilmed collection held at AN, ‘COL C/4/19’. This trade continued during the 1770s under the orders of Benyowsky, head of the French trading post at Antongil Bay, although it was still technically illegal. See ‘COL C/4/36’, ‘COL C/5A/5’, ‘COL C/5B/1’ (AN). Machado, ‘A Forgotten Corner’, 23–4; Michael Charles Reidy, ‘Admission of Slaves and Prize Slaves into the Cape Colony, 1797–1818’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997), 36–101; Patrick Harries, ‘Negotiating Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, Slavery & Abolition (forthcoming). Ships from the Cape are listed in Studer, including in 1799 and 1804. Elena de Studer, La trata de negros en el Rio de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aire, 1984), see tables included with the book. Janet Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’, American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 69–91; Campbell, ‘Introduction’, xi. Lascar sailors worked on voyages into the Atlantic, as indicated by British legislation that prevented lascars from settling in Britain. These laws were passed in 1814, 1823 and 1834. Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea’, 76. Sheriff, ‘Localisation’, 136–7. For voyages to the Americas, see Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1800&yearTo=1866&mjbyptimp=60800(accessed July 24, 2012). M. Ali, ‘Archéologie de l'esclavage aux Comores’, in Mémoire orale et esclavage dans les îles du Sud-Ouest de l'océan Indien: silences, oublis, reconnaissance, ed. Sudel Fuma (St. Denis, Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines, Université de la Réunion, 2004), 197–9. Austen, ‘The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade’, 23–5, 32–5. The 12.5 million figure is found in Robert O. Collins and James McDonald Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229. The regions delineated are based on Austen, who includes the Brava coast of southern Somalia in Swahili coast (East Africa) category. Austen, ‘19th century Islamic Slave Trade’, 22–5. Larson is excluding slaves headed into Zanzibar and Pemba. Pier M. Larson, ‘Enslaved Malagasy and “Le Travail de la Parole” in the Pre-Revolutionary Mascarenes’, Journal of African History 48, (1997): 459. Larson, Ocean of Letters, Table 12 on p. 41. Comparisons of the totals in Table 2 and Panel 2 of Table 3 show that bringing the first into alignment with the second is not a simple process of re-grouping data. While we have estimates of 543,000 slaves leaving the Indian Ocean for the Americas, we can identify the actual ports from which they left for only 70 percent of this total. Thus, Panel 2 presents estimates based on the ratios of departures from Madagascar and the mainland calculated from Table 2 multiplied by the total number of slaves carried off given in Table 1. A spreadsheet showing the derivation of Panel 2 is available from the authors. These comments assume that the impact of the trans-Saharan traffic was evenly distributed across East and West Africa. For estimates of departures from the western half of the continent, 1501–1866, see Voyages, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo=1866&embarkation=1.2.3.4.5.6.7. (accessed July 24, 2012). For an estimate for 1801–1866, see Ibid., http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1801&yearTo=1866&embarkation=1.2.3.4.5.6.7 (accessed July 24, 2012). One noteworthy exception is Thomas Vernet, ‘Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500–1750’, in Slavery, Islam and Diaspora, ed. P. Lovejoy, B.A. Mirzai, and I.M. Montana (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2009). Could, perhaps, the same be true of the trans-Saharan slave trade, about which we know even less than the Indian Ocean maritime traffic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? And if so, what are the implications for Eurocentric conclusions of the World systems scholarship? On the expansion of the slave trade in Northeast Africa, see Collins, ‘The African Slave Trade’, 335–6. Estimates are also provided by British captains seeking to eradicate the illegal slave trade during the nineteenth century. See George Sullivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa: Narrative of Five Years’ Experiences in the Suppression of the Slave Trade (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1967, originally published in 1873); Philip Colomb, Slave-catching in the Indian Ocean: A Record of Naval Experiences (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968, originally published in 1873). Toledano notes a rise in the demand for slave labor in the Ottoman Empire, diverting slave trade into Ottoman-controlled territories in the Middle East and North Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 5–8. Abdul Sheriff questions that the slave trade into the Persian Gulf continued to expand during the nineteenth century to the degree British abolitionists described: Abdul Sheriff, ‘The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf’, in Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2005), 104–6. M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (New York: Routledge, 1992), 128–30. These imports were primarily coordinated by Antaloatra and Karany merchants in western and northwestern Madagascar. See Campbell, ‘Madagascar and Mozambique’, 166–8; B. Manjakahery, ‘Premiers résultats des enquêtes effectuées chez les Makoa de la ville de Toliara (Madagascar)’, in Mémoire orale, 48–51; I. Tabibou, ‘Les Makois à la Grande Comore’, in Mémoire orale, 221–5. Miller, ‘Theme in Variations’, 172–3. See also Gwyn Campbell, ‘Introduction: Abolition and its Aftermath in the Indian Ocean World’, in Abolition and Its Aftermath, 1–3. Gerald Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise 1810–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Allen, ‘Constant Demand’, 47. Vernet, ‘Slave Trade’, 42–9. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJane HooperJane Hooper is the David H. Burton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA 19131, USA.David EltisDavid Eltis is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Email: deltis@emory.edu
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