East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered
Year: 2016
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Slavery studies have focused overwhelmingly on the Atlantic slave trade (Miller 1999) wherein between circa 1500 and 1880 some 12.5 million sub-Saharans, mostly young adult West African males (Lovejoy 2012) were shipped to New World plantations and mines, where they formed a concentrated chattel class that constituted the basis of a slave mode of production (Davis 1970; Patterson 1982; Meillassoux 1991). Scholars investigating slavery in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) have largely applied paradigms and perspectives derived from Atlantic slavery studies, and concentrated their attention on the east African slave trade to Arab- and European-run enterprises (e.g. Cooper 1997; Harms et al. 2013) and on the African slave diaspora in the IOW (Jayasuriya and Pankhurst 2003; Jayasuriya and Angenot 2008; Hawley 2008). The African slave export trade is generally held to have constituted an inequitable exchange whereby Arabs and Europeans took East Africa’s prime human resources, and valuable raw materials such as ivory and gold, in return for cheap, generally low-quality cloth and other manufactures, thus creating what some have termed a “proto-colonial” system that established the basis for the “underdevelopment” of the continent (Sutton 1972: 11).
Source: Springer eBooks
Author: Gwyn Campbell
Institution: McGill University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2567319901