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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title: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
Author:Allen, Richard B.ISNI
Year:2008
Periodical:The Journal of African History
Volume:49
Issue:1
Pages:43-72
Language:English
Geographic terms:Indian Ocean
Mascarene Islands
Subjects:slave trade
1700-1799
1800-1899
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/40206613
Abstract:If the 'history of silence' that surrounds slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean is not as deafening as it once was, an understanding of the traffic in chattel labour in this part of the world nevertheless remains far from complete. This reflects what has been characterized as the continuing 'tyranny of the Atlantic' in slavery studies. Recent arguments that perhaps as many as 388,000 slaves were exported to Mauritius and Réunion between 1670 and 1848 underscore the importance of the region to understanding an African diaspora that reached across the Indian Ocean. Analysis of an inventory of 641 (mainly French) slaving voyages involving Mauritius and Réunion between 1768 and 1809 reveals that the Mascarene Islands were at the centre of a substantial and dynamic regional slave trading network that also reached into the Americas in ways that raise questions about the relationship between the 'worlds' of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The fact that colonial, as well as metropolitan, merchant capital underwrote Mascarene-based slave trading ventures raises additional questions about the role of locally generated and/or non-Western capital in financing the movement of slave, and ultimately 'free' labour throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonial world. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]
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