The slave trade in the Indian Ocean 187heart of India or the Arab countries, or even more so if employed in the coastal
regions and islands, continued to form an integral part of an oceanic whole
whose unity has been emphasized by Allen.
Here a crucial question arises: was the 'Indian Ocean' slave trade a
factor for destruction or construction? Did it alter, strengthen or undermine
the three 'strata of unity'? The land and sea networks covered by the slave-
trader on the ocean and its precincts must be evaluated with the yardstick of
the history of civilizations within the scope of which I have sought to place this
study of the slave trade. There are additional questions to be borne in mind:
Are those elements which were not originally contained in the crucible going
to melt and enrich the alloy, or are they going to introduce the straw that will
cause future cracks? Those elements are not only the slaves transported from
the heart of Africa but also the Europeans who came late to the Indian Ocean
and settled in other lands.
It is not easy to distinguish between those who are actors or objects in
the traffic and those who are not. The term 'slave trade' may seem quite clear,
yet in fact it is anything but so. At the Unesco meeting of experts in Mauritius,-
in July 1974,^1 we expressed the wish that to the Cartesian notions of 'free' and
'slave' should be added the notions of 'half-free', 'subjected', 'dependent',
'quasi-', 'pre-' and 'post-' slave. The exact term has not yet been found, but
it does correspond to a real situation which can be outlined empirically. Models
exist in Roman antiquity (the client, the freedman) and in the European Middle
Ages (the serf). The characteristic of the intermediate models between free man
and slave seems understandable in the Indian Ocean in terms of a discrepancy
between the legal status and the real position. In Madagascar there were slaves
who owned slaves, and in India other slaves legally ran the State as high
officials and counsellors, before becoming sovereigns. But in the sugar-produc-
ing islands, 'free employees' were marched, with pitchforks at their throats,
to the beaches of Mozambique before being crammed into ships as wretchedly
as their 'freely employed' companions in India and ended up, like them,
in work camps where the commander's stick and the master's arbitrary at-
titude survived the abolition of slavery. In this intermediate category we must
also include the 'patronized' slave of the last years of French colonial slavery
and the affranchi à livret (freedman with papers) of the first years of emancipa-
tion, the 'apprentice' of the English colonies, certain domestic slaves in
Madagascar and certain 'family captives' in Africa. These last four or five
examples, it will be objected, are admissible in a history of slavery but ill-
chosen in a history of the slave trade. In self-defence, I might refer to the sale
of punished domestic servants to slave-traders, but the problem on which we
must concentrate is more general. In order to define it with greater precision,
I shall request a twofold favour : that I be allowed to quote an example chosen
some distance away from the Indian Ocean, and that if the slave trade be taken