"The world's oldest trade": Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian ocean in the seventeenth century*

Headnote

This article discusses various aspects of slavery and the slave trade of the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean world: the markets of supply and demand or geographic origins and destinations of slaves; the routes to slavery or the diverse means of recruitment of forced labor; the miscellaneous occupations performed by company and private slaves; the size of Dutch slavery and the volume of the accompanying annual slave trade; and the various forms of slave resistance and slave revolt. The discussion transcends the ahistorical, incomplete, descriptive, static, one-dimensional picture and conventional generalized abstractions of slavery that characterize much of traditional scholarship. Instead, an alternative historicized, holistic, analytical, dynamic, multidimensional, and open model is suggested-one that is sensitive to chronological and geographic variations, socioeconomic and political contexts, and cross-cultural interactions.

"Compared with the Atlantic trade, none of this Indian Ocean flow of captive labor, legal or illegal, has been well researched, and there are no conclusive quantitative studies of its volume . . ."

P. Finkelman and J. C. Miller eds., MacMillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (New York, 1998), p. 851.

"In comparison with the literature on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a number of topics in the slave trade in Asia and Oceania remain under-researched . . ."

S. Drescher and S. L. Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York, 1998), p. 364.

"The evidence of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean is scanty and periodic, and could reflect the nature of the trade. There are huge gaps in the evidence, which might reflect the spasmodic and periodic nature of the slave trade but also the sheer lack of information for long stretches of time."

S. Arasaratnam, "Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century," in. K. S. Mathew ed., Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History (New Delhi, 1995), p. 195.

Slavery, far from being a "peculiar institution," has deep and farreaching roots, stretching back at least to the beginnings of historical times in many parts of the world. In his five-volume magnum opus on the Dutch East Indies, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien (1724-26), Calvinist minister Francois Valentijn appropriately called the enslavement of human beings "the world's oldest trade" (den oudsten handel in de wereld).1...