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The slave trade in the Indian Ocean 189

While these migrations are still rooted in disruption and violence, the
silence of those concerned is less heavy. Research on them would probably be
rewarding. To attempt to make an inventory of them would lead me too far
from my subject, and I shall therefore confine myself to drawing attention to a
problem which is one both of vocabulary and of classification. It would be
convenient to exclude from my study all those who were not slaves in the legal
sense of the term. But caution is advisable—an unduly meticulous legal ap-
proach may distort reality to the point of making a travesty of history.
In the list of research projects to be undertaken—which I shall therefore
restrict here to slaves properly so called—I shall have to deal with extensive
geographical and chronological sectors in which the state of knowledge varies
considerably. Sometimes such knowledge is like a building, strong and firm
yesterday, but today rocked by the effects of new research. Often the accumula-
tion of problems to be solved seems overwhelming but the specialists who are
going to tackle them will surely manage to clarify them. Yet will light be
fully shed on the Arab slave trade, on the slave trade in the Far East and on
the clandestine slave trade of the nineteenth (and twentieth) century?
The Bureau of the Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General
History of Africa, at its meeting in Fez in February 1975, expressed the wish
that we should not ' attempt to sum up the wealth of material already published ',
but it seems to me that the best way of presenting the ' forms to be assumed by
the research on this vast subject and the avenues such research might explore'
is to cutline, in a periodic framework relating to the Ocean, what is already
known and what might be learned, before concluding with a brief synopsis.

Forms and avenues of research to be undertaken

To the end of the fifteenth century

When H. N. Chittick expresses the opinion that the Indian Ocean constituted

the 'largest cultural continuum in the world during the first millenium and a

half A.D.' he keeps us to the straight and narrow path of our problem: what

place does the slave trade have in this continuum, and is it a factor making

for dispersion or for cohesion?

There is no doubt about the age-old nature of the slave trade. Its move-

ments were governed by the regular alternation of the monsoons observed as

early as the first century by the Greek, Hippalos. Four months a year, in

winter, the north-east winds blew ships coming from Arabia and north-west

India towards the east coast of Africa. For about six months in the summer,

winds blowing from the south-west favoured the return journey.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an anonymous work by an Egyptian

Greek written between the first and the beginning of the third century A.D.,