A commentary on the slave trade 291Related to the problem of sources are the communities of African descent
in various parts of Asia. Here again, those communities may have documents
or know where pertinent material exists; and the inhabitants of those com-
munities can provide oral accounts useful for the nineteenth century and
perhaps earlier. My experience in some of those areas confirmed the presence
of people who acknowledged their slave heritage and African links. Without
a doubt, this approach would provide valuable data on the slave trade.
The cities of Bombay and Surat in India include uncounted persons of
African descent, and while it would be time-consuming and difficult to locate
them to establish their African identity, a rewarding effort is still possible.
One starting-point should be the early census records which are available from
the seventeenth century. Africans may be listed as African, Siddi, Habshi, or
Hubshi. One set of records I studied, for example, referred to a seventeenth-
century settlement of africans in Bombay being forced to move so that Euro-
peans could settle in the area.^4
On several occasions Indians returning from East Africa and Mada-
gascar brought African servants who often remained in Bombay or Surat as
runaways or attached to a family in India. In either case they cultivated links
with other Africans in the city.
Still another approach would be a meticulous investigation of East India
Company records which contain data collected by company agents involved
in attempts to control and later suppress the slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
Those agents sometimes co-ordinated activities in India and the Persian Gulf
and Red Sea areas. These records help to quantify the trade, identify dealers,
origin and the ethnicity of the slaves, and overland slave routes. In addition,
one could expect to find data on the extent to which Africans were sold in
India where Hindu women were purchased or kidnapped and taken to the
Persian Gulf and Arabian regions for sale.
Impact on non-African countriesEconomic ConsequencesAgriculture
Although little has been done, we do know that African slaves worked on date
and coconut plantations around Basra (Iraq), Bandar Abbas and Minab in
Persia, and the Batinah or Trucial coast on the Persian Gulf. The relationship
between date plantations and the slave trade needs serious investigation;
indeed, dates were exchanged for slaves. What other sources of demand
existed? How and when did that demand impact on the slave trade and slavery
—and what were the economic benefits for the producing economies?
There is a very valauble source I should mention here: J. G. Lorimer,