Abstract
It would be a mistake to consider that modern colonial slavery emerged only with the rise of the plantation system in the Americas. Long before that, sugar plantations using slave labor were developed in the eastern Mediterranean by both Venice and the Islamic powers. From 1450 increasing numbers of African slaves were shipped to Sicily, Portugal, and Spain, and others to the sugar plantations on the Portuguese-held Atlantic islands. Portuguese and Genoese merchants competed for control of the African slave trade, the Portuguese proving initially the more successful and establishing the pattern for later development of the transatlantic slave trade. On the North African coast they established trading contact with Muslim traders and authorities, transferred slaves from the eastern Mediterranean plantations to the “new” island plantations in the eastern Atlantic, and bought slaves with gold from West African authorities—exactly as the Muslim merchants did in the trans-Saharan trade.1 As early as the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese already traded 80,000 slaves per year along the Mauritanian, Senegambia, and Upper Guinea coasts.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jakob Vogt, The Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979 ).
Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ), p. 37.
Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in Jan S. Hogendorn (ed.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), Table 2.8: p. 66.
Ralph Austen, “The Nineteenth Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” Slavery and Abolition , 9 (1988): 21–44.
Ralph Austin, “The Nineteenth century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in William Gervase Clarence-Smith (ed.), The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade ( London: Frank Cass 1989 ), pp. 21–44.
Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction,” to Gwyn Campbell (ed.), The Structure of Slavery in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. i–xxxii.
Shinan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, “On the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean Region,” in Shinan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (eds.), The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean ( Trenton, NY and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2003 ), pp. 7–18.
Esmond B. Martin and T. C. Ryan, “A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab Slave Trade of East Africa, 1770–1896, ” Kenya Historical Review, 5, 1 (1977): 71–91.
William Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under the Ottoman Control ( Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984 ).
Erik Gilbert, “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean : Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration, and Regional Unity,” The History Teacher , 36, 1 (2002): 5–34.
C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast, Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the East African Littoral, 1798–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977 ), pp. 101, 257.
Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Patterns of International Trade in East and Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975 ).
Pier Larson, “African Diasporas and the Atlantic,” in Jorge CanizaresEsguerra and Erik Seeman (eds.), The Atlantic in Global History, 1500– 2000 ( Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007 ), pp. 129–47.
Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory ( London: J. Currey, 1987 ), p. 37.
Jean-Marie Fillot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle ( Paris: Orstom, 1974 )
Sudel Fuma, L’esclavagisme à la Ré union, 1794–1848 ( Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992 )
Jacques Weber, “L’é migration indienne des comptoirs, 1828–1861,” Etudes et documents IHPOM 11 (1979): 133–59; Richard Allen, “The Mascarene Slave-Trade and Labor Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Campbell, The Structure , pp. 33–50.
Edward Alpers, “The French Slave Trade in East Africa 1721–1810,” Cahiers d’é tudes africaines 10, 37 (1970): 80–124.
Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, “Introduction,” in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (eds.), Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean ( London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013 ), pp. 1–21.
Gareth Austin, “Human Pawning in Asante, 1820–1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa,” in Paul Lovejoy and Tonin Falola (eds.), Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa ( Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2003 ), pp. 187–220.
Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750– 1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ), pp. 295–96.
Bruno Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), pp. 47, 150.
Martin A. Klein, “Introduction: Modern European Expansion and Traditional Servitude in Africa and Asia,” in Klein (ed.), Breaking the Chains. Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia ( Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 ), 11
Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney, eds., Chains of Servitude, Bondage and Slavery in India ( Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1985 ), pp. 25–26.
Monica Schuler, “The Recruitment of African Indentured Laborers for European Colonies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Pieter Emmer (ed.), Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labor before and after Slavery ( Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986 ), pp. 125–61
Herbert Gerbeau, “Quelques aspects de la traite ill é gale des esclaves à Bourbon au XIXe siècle,” Mouvements de populations dans l’Oc é an indien ( Paris: Imprim Champion, 1979 ), pp. 273–96
Louis Maillard, Notes sur l’île de la Ré union ( Paris: Dentu, 1862 ).
Gwyn Campbell, “Madagascar and the Slave Trade, 1810–1895,” Journal of African History, 22, 2 (1981): 203–27.
Thomas Vernet, “Le commerce des esclaves sur la cô te swahilie, 1500–1750,” Azania , 38 (2003): 69–97
Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, the Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 ).
Markus Vink, “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003): 131– 77.
Timothy M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 ).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (New York: Longman, 1993 ); Alpers, Ivory and Slaves
Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770– 1873 ( London: James Currey, 1987 ).
Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” The American Historical Review , 109, 5 (2004): 1405–38.
Seymour Drescher, Abolitions. A History of Slavery and Antislavery ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ).
On this debates, see among the others: Joseph Calder Miller, Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900–1996 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999)
Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage ( Paris: PUF, 1986 )
Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology ( New York: Viking Press, 1980 )
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 )
James Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980 ); Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean.
Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of AmericanSlavery (New York: Norton, 1994), 1: 203–4.
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of Transatlantic Slave Trade ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ).
David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008 ).
Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery ( London: Palgrave, 1987 )
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 ( London: Verso, 1988 ).
House of Commons, “Papers in Explanation of the Condition of the Slave Population, 5 Nov. 1831,” British Parliamentary Papers , 1830–31 (230), 16.1: 59–88.
J. R Ward, British West India Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 ).
Mary Turner, “The British Caribbean, 1823–1838: The Transition from Slave to Free Legal Status,” in Paul Craven and Douglas Hay (eds.), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the British Empire, 1562–1955 ( Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2004 ), p. 322.
Thomas, Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 ).
Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India ( New Delhi: Manohar, 1992 )
Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ).
Edmund Maestri, ed., Esclavage et abolition dans l’ Oc é an Indien, 1723– 1869 ( Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002 ).
Let me provide just a few references from the huge bibliography on Foucault and his interpretation of the Panopticon: Alain McKinlay and Ken Starkey, eds., Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self ( London: Sage Publications, 1998 )
Janet Semple, “Foucault and Bentham: A Defence of Panopticism,” Utilitas 4, 1 (1992): 105–20
Jean-Yves Grenier and André Orléan, “Michel Foucault, L’ é conomie politique et le lib é ralisme,” Annales HSC 5 (2007): 1155–82
Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de l’Etat (Paris: Payot, 1990); Louise Warriar, Andrew Robert, and Jennifer Lewis, Surveillance: An Analysis of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault and Their Present-day Relevance , http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/ybenfou.htm .
Simon Werrett, “Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth-century Russia,” The Philosophic Age Almanac 9 (1999, special issue: The Science of Morality: Jeremy Bentham and Russia ): 106–35. See also
Ian R. Christie, The Benthams in Russia, 1780–1791 ( Oxford: Berg, 1993 )
Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Prince Potemkin and the Benthams: The Project to Create an English Village with Modern Factories in Belorussia,” History Today 52, 8 (August 2003): 38–43
Alessandro Stanziani, “The Traveling Panopticon: Labor Institutions and Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 4 (2009): 715–41.
Kathryn Morrison, The Workhouse: A Study of Poor-Law Buildings in England ( Exeter: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1999 )
M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System, 1834–1929: The History of an English Social Institution ( Athens: Georgia University Press, 1981 ).
Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labor Market Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), p. 114.
J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, 36, 4 (1983): 483–505. For classical interpretations
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957, orig. 1944)
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire ( Middlesex: Penguin, 1969 ).
Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings , Miran Bozevic (ed.) (London: Verso, 1995), Letter 1. See fn. 13.
Kartik Kalyan Raman, “Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence,” Modern Asian Studies , 28, 4 (1994): 739–91.
A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 )
Alan George Levers Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire ( London: Faber 1966 )
Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, eds., Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic ( Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ).
Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ).
Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000 ), p. 5.
Frank Lewis, “The Cost of Convict Transportation from Britain to Australia, 1796–1810,” Economic History Review 41, 4 (1988): 507–24.
Kenneth Morgan, “Convict Runaways in Maryland, 1745–1775,” Journal of American Studies 23, 2 (1989): 253–68.
For an economic analysis comparing white indentured and convict labor in North America, see Farley Grubb, “The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor,” The Journal of Economic History, 60, 1 (March 2000): 94–122.
Copyright information
© 2014 Alessandro Stanziani
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stanziani, A. (2014). Slaveries and Emancipation. In: Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448446_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448446_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49644-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44844-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)