200 Hubert Gerbeauthe auspices of Unesco, is invaluable, but unfortunately the volumes are appear-
ing rather slowly and there are still many gaps in the geographical field covered.
The authors of this guide themselves are hoping that an inventory will be made
of the wealth of documentation preserved in Africa itself. But we should go
further and try to secure the participation of all the countries bordering on
the Indian Ocean or involved in its history. Portuguese archives are still little
known. Godinho's thesis^5 gives an idea of their volume and mentions the
enormous amount of inventory work that remains to be done in certain record
offices such as that of Torre do Tombe. There is still much material to be
discovered and catalogued in the National Archives of India (Keswani, in
press). This would seem to be equally applicable to most of the archives in the
Far East. A very helpful list concerning the Indian archipelago was drawn up
by Denys Lombard at the request of Unesco. Y. A. Talib and H. N. Chittick
have stressed the need for new editions of Arab sources. It has emerged from
discussions on this subject that it would be useful not only to make inventories
and publish new texts, but also to devote specific attention to the texts already
available. This applies to the many accounts of travellers as well as to printed
documents of parliamentary of legal origin.^6
However much the inventories of archives in some European countries
may have progressed, research on the slave trade encounters a number of
difficulties. Since the store of documents has grown with the centuries, those
subsequent to the eighteenth century are often abstracted rather briefly and
sometimes catalogued in an approximate fashion. The ideal would be to have a
common index for all the record offices, and the computer may perhaps make
this possible. Then research workers would simply have to press the keys
marked 'slave trade' and 'Indian Ocean' in order to receive a plan of the itin-
erary to be followed round the world, with trails blazed so that they would not
get lost in the voluminous but scattered archives obtaining in large cities, such
as London, Lisbon and Paris. Sometimes the working tools already exist but
funds for their publication are wanting. This is true of the remarkable inven-
tories that have just been made at the French National Archives, Overseas
Section, and which relate in Paris to the 'Réunion' series, and in Aix-en-
Provence to the 'Madagascar and Dependencies' collection. One example
should be cited, namely the Bibliography of Mauritius (1502-1954) by A Tous-
saint and H. Adolphe, published in Port-Louis in 1956. The work includes a
list of archives concerning Mauritius to be found in collections throughout
the world. This volume, which it is hoped will be updated, is a prototype of
what might be attempted for the whole of the Indian Ocean.
An evaluation of the wealth produced by the slave trade in external
economic systems could be made only in conjunction with a study of the receiv-
ing countries. This question was of concern to those who lived in the years
immediately following emancipation of the slaves. They carried out studies on