scholarly journals Slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire: A global comparison

2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik van Welie
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Global Comparison ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.

France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Marvin ◽  
Blake Smith
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
French Military ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The 19Th Century

France was a latecomer to the Indian Ocean among European powers. After some tentative and short-lived initiatives by private merchants, the first French East India Company was founded in 1664 by a French monarchy eager to catch up with England and the Netherlands, which had founded companies of their own at the beginning of the 17th century. Competing with the English and Dutch to replace the Portuguese as the preeminent European power in the Indian Ocean, France gradually established a network of colonial holdings that included the island colonies of the Mascarenes in the southwestern Indian Ocean (Réunion and Mauritius) as well as a network of trading posts along the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Plans to expand this colonial empire to Madagascar, however, met with repeated failure. Established as a regional power by the middle of the 18th century, France would be reduced by the century’s end to the role of a spectator of Britain’s rising hegemony. Nevertheless, France held on to some of its Indian Ocean territories, including Réunion and Pondicherry in South Asia. These outposts of French imperialism would inspire nostalgia, regret, and new colonial ambitions among metropolitan observers, and they would become sites of cultural hybridity and exchange. Indeed, while France’s empire in the Indian Ocean is often overshadowed by the emergence of British dominance in the 19th century, or by the intensity of French investment in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a key area of French military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural interest in the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond.

English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
West Coast Of India ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660-1720

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Maritime Industry ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter analyses slave professions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Indian Ocean. It explores the activities of the English East India Company in the Indian Ocean and the utilisation of slave labour within the company itself. It tackles the use of slaves in maritime industry; the obfuscation of slavery with titles that resembled employment; the movement and forced migration of slaves; the routes into slavery; methods of slave-stealing; and the slave professions - sailors, soldiers, interpreters, doctors, builders, gardeners, domestic slaves, and concubines. It concludes that slaves were a source of revenue for the company, and were forcibly relocated both to quell resistance and to further distribute and exploit their skillsets.

scholarly journals Slavery and Post-Slavery in the Indian Ocean World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Gulf Region ◽  
The West ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Unlike the Atlantic, slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean persisted over centuries, from antiquity to the present: slavery involved many actors, not necessarily attributed to tensions between the “West and the rest.” Multiple forms of bondage, debt dependence, and slavery persisted and coexisted over centuries, since ancient times, then with the expansion of Islam in the 8th century, and reached a peak with the intrusion of European powers between the 16th and the 19th centuries. However, even after the official abolition of slavery in the western colonies, forms of bondage and illegal slavery have persisted and were openly practiced in the Gulf region through much of the 20th century.

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

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