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Richard B. Allen. 2014. European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850. Athens: Ohio University Press. xviii, 378 pp.
The volume under consideration is a quantitative study of the European slave trade in the Indian Ocean world. Allen outlines and estimates the scale of a phenomenon that, almost fifty years after Philip Curtin's groundbreaking Atlantic census, remains largely understudied. Chapter 1 examines the state of the scholarship and estimates that "Europeans were directly involved in trading at least 954,000 to 1,275,900 slaves within and beyond the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1850" (p. 24). In East Africa, which accounted for the bulk of the trade, Europeans were responsible for about half of the total trade, with Arab-Muslim traders responsible for the other half. Chapter 2 considers British slave trading at the hands of the East India Company, "a corporate state willing and able to exercise a comparatively high degree of centralized control" (p. 29). Chapter 3 sheds light on the French slave trade centered in the Mascarene Islands between the early 1600s and early 1800s. The author paints a convincing picture of the islands as the "center of a...