Indian Ocean slave trade
[5] Pliny the Elder's Natural History (published in 77 CE) also describes Indian Ocean slave trading.
[4] The ancient Indian Ocean slave trade was enabled by building ships capable of carrying large numbers of human beings in the Persian Gulf using wood imported from India.
[6] Gujarati merchants evolved into the first explorers of the Indian Ocean as they traded slaves and African goods such as ivory and tortoise shells.
[4] Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote in his Christian Topography (550 CE) that Somali port cities were exporting slaves captured in the interior to Byzantine Egypt via the Red Sea.
By the 11th century, Kilwa, on the coast of modern-day Tanzania, had become a fully-fledged affluent center of a Muslim-governed trade in slaves and gold.
These traders captured Bantu peoples (Zanj) from the interior in the present-day lands of Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania and brought them to the coast.
8th and 9th century chronicles mention Seng Chi slaves reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of Sri Vijaya in Java.
[20] The 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi recorded that the ruler of the Persian island of Kish "raids the Zanj country with his ships and takes many captives.
[23] The rebellion grew to involve more than 500,000 slaves and free men who had been imported from across the Muslim empire and claimed "tens of thousands of lives in lower Iraq".
[25] As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, they began to consider agriculture and other manual labor work as demeaning.
[26] The Zanj were needed to cultivate: the Tigris-Euphrates delta, which had become abandoned marshland as a result of peasant migration and repeated flooding, [and] [sic] could be reclaimed through intensive labor.
[35] Most of the slaves were from the Majindo, Makua, Nyasa, Yao, Zalama, Zaramo, and Zigua ethnic groups of Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi.
[36] 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta met a Syrian Arab girl from Damascus who was held as a slave of a black African governor in Mali.
[47] In the 1760s, the Arab Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie enslaved other Muslims en masse while raiding coastal Borneo in violation of sharia, before he founded the Pontianak Sultanate.
An Indian girl slave named Mariam (originally Fatima) ended up in Zanzibar after being sold by multiple men.
[58] Eunuchs, female concubines, and male laborers were the chief roles of slaves sent from Ethiopia to Jidda and other parts of Hejaz.
[59] The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia.
[64] The principal sources of these slaves, all of whom passed through Matamma, Massawa, and Tadjoura on the Red Sea, were the southwestern parts of Ethiopia, in the Oromo and Sidama country.
[13][page needed] Both non-Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia during the end of the 19th century bought Japanese girls as slaves; they were imported by sea to the region.
Muslim men sometimes sold their own wives into slavery while on pilgrimage to Mecca, after pretending to be religious to trick the women into marrying them.
In the 21st century, activists contend that many immigrants who travel to those countries for work are held in virtual slavery The East African slave trade flourished greatly from the second half of the nineteenth century, when Said bin Sultan, an Oman Sultan, made Zanzibar his capital and expanded international commercial activities and plantation economy in cloves and coconuts.
He firstly introduced a new currency "Maria Theresa Dollar" to supplement the exiting "Spanish Crown", which simplified commercial activities.
He signed commercial treaties with western capitalist countries, such as the United States of America in 1833, with Great Britain in 1839, and France in 1844.
[76][77] It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal.
[80] Some historians estimate that during the 1600s as many as 150,000 Malagasy slaves were exported from Boeny in Northwest Madagascar to the Muslim world including the Red Sea Coast (Jeddah), Hejaz (Mecca), Arabia (Aden), Oman (Muscat), Zanzibar, Kilwa, Lamu, Malindi, Somalia (Barawa), and possibly Sudan (Suakin), Persia (Bandar Abbas), and India (Surat).
[81] Given the unique racial composition of Madagascar, which was populated by a mix of Austronesian and Bantu settlers, the Malagasy slaves included people with Southeast Asian, African, and hybrid phenotypes.
[82][83] At different times and to varying degrees, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English, and Ottoman merchants were known to have taken part in the Malagasy slave trade too.
[84] The European slave trade in the Indian Ocean began when Portugal established Estado da Índia in the early 16th century.
[89] (These locals were referred to as Baribah and Barbaroi (Berbers) by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively (see Periplus of the Erythraean Sea),[19][90][91] and were no strangers to capturing, owning and trading slaves themselves.
During the 19th century, the East African slave trade grew enormously due to demands by Arabs, Portuguese, and French.
