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The slave trade in the Indian Ocean :

problems facing the historian

and research to be undertaken

Hubert Gerbeau

Problems facing the historian

Disruption, violence, silence—keywords conveying the suffering which the
laws of the slave trade seemed to inflict on their victims. Keywords, too, which
the traditional historian of the Atlantic slave trade was able to use without
compunction when he wrote a paragraph of commercial history, in so far as he
was not troubled by the silence of the two-footed commodity transported
across an ocean which was more of a barrier than a connecting link between
two continents.
These simple observations introduce us to problems with three basic
aspects which should be stressed. The first is a truism : the Indian Ocean is not
the Atlantic. The second is a question: is it possible to write the history of
silence? The third is a postulate : interest in the history of the slave trade grows
if we do not insist on reducing it to a paragraph in commercial history but
place it at the level of a history of civilizations.
The preponderance of the Atlantic slave trade still weighs heavily on
historians because it was on such a large scale, and especially because it has
been more thoroughly studied than that of the Indian Ocean. The very dates
that have been suggested to me are an additional sign of this. If I were to confine
myself to the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, it would
mean adhering too closely to an Atlantic pattern. An 'Indian Ocean' perspective
implies that the phenomenon should be relocated in a continuous process
starting well before the fifteenth century and overlapping into the twentieth.
Seeing the subject in this same perspective, we are reminded that while the
uprooting from 'Mother Africa' was perpetrated in an identical fashion by
way of the oceans to the east and to the west, the receiving countries were
quite different. On the one side was a New World, on the other the lands
bordering on an ancient ocean. In the latter, there were three stata of unity :
'a kind of racial unity resulting from Malay and other emigrations ... a
cultural unity spreading out from the Indian sub-continent... and a religious
unity created by Islam' (Allen, 1969).
The historian of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean is concerned with a