The slave trade in the Indian Ocean 195The bell tolled for the Portuguese in northern Mozambique when the
Jesus Fort in Mombasa fell in 1698. The conquering Arabs from Oman settled
along the coast and, in the eighteenth century, there was a rebirth of Swahili
civilization. Save in a few exceptional cases, this return in force of Islam was
final. The Islamic trading stations in the north-west and north-east of Madagas-
car had been prosperous since the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century,
operations were divided up—Arab traders on the west coast, particularly at
Majunga, imported African slaves, and European traders, mostly French, on
the east coast exported them to the Mascarene Islands (Valette, 1970; Vérin,
1972).
The period running from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth
is better known in many respects than the previous one. Nevertheless, the slave
trade in the eastern part of the African continent from the Cape to the Red Sea
still faces us with many enigmas. Research should be focused mainly on the
Arab and Portuguese sources, with archaeology still being the most essential
auxiliary. The traffic towards the Far East should be studied in detail. An
investigation into slavery on the eastern side of the Ocean would be rewarding.
For example, slavery seems to have been stimulated in the Indonesian archi-
pelago by the spread of Islam from the sixteenth century onwards and the
formation of large sultanates (Lombard, personal communication).
The long nineteenth centuryRecent studies on Madagascar and the archipelagos in the south-western part
of the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century give a fairly accurate picture of
this area. For the nineteenth century, however, these islands seem to call for
more sustained attention. The eastern part of the African continent, which was
the centre of a ferocious and massive slave trade at a time when world slavery
was dying out, has been the subject of a number of works over a period of more
than a century. This does not mean, however, that everything has been clarified.
The measures taken by the French Revolutionaries against the slave
trade and slavery had a paradoxical effect in the Mascarene Islands, in that the
hindrance to the two systems was offset, to say the least, by the feverish reac-
tions of the advocates of colonial organization. At the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth century, slave labour continued to be imported
into the islands from Madagascar and especially from the African mainland. The
British occupation in 1810 led to a half-hearted application of the prohibition
of the slave trade as decided by the British Government in 1807. The return of
Bourbon to France in 1815 and the continued possession of Mauritius by
Great Britain had little effect on slave-trade activity. Farquhar, the Governor
of Mauritius, even tried to persuade the English authorities to grant legal
recognition to 'clandestine' traffic. France, which in her turn abolished the