Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean

158 journal of world history, june 2003
age. 66 On the African mainland, non-Muslim, Bantu-speaking peoples
of the interior of east and central Africa fell victim to slave raiding by
rival Muslim and Afro-Portuguese coastal networks. The real takeoff
in the southwest Indian Ocean, however, did not occur until the late
eighteenth century with the rapid expansion of Omani and French
agricultural plantations, the demand of Brazilian merchants, and a
series of severe droughts and epidemics. 67 No slavery existed in South
Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans among the local Khoikhoi
and San populations. Slaves therefore had to be imported from outside.
In the pastoral region of the Cape Colony, however, increasing
numbers of Khoikhoi and San on the interior “highveld” were dispossessed
and employed by Dutch colonists as indentured laborers in the
eighteenth century. Though this system of “inbooking” (inboekstelsel)
was not formalized until 1775, local company magistrates approved of
the practice long before this date. 68
Inheritance and judicial punishment were the most common
sources of forced labor in the closed systems where a money economy
was little developed. There existed, however, no institutional obstacles
against the sale of slaves on a massive scale once a strong external
demand made itself felt along with the spread of a money economy in
the absence of a strong state. All major indigenous powers prohibited
66 Van der Zwan, Madagascar, pp. 26–37; Armstrong, “Madagascar and the Slave
Trade,” pp. 213–16; Barendse, “Slaving on the Malagasy Coast,” pp. 149–50; I. Rakato,
“Etre Ou ne pas être: L’Andevo Esclave, un Sujet de Non-Droit,” in I. Rakato, ed.,
L’Esclavage à Madagascar: Aspects Historiques et Résurgences Contemporaines (Antanarivo,
1997); P. M. Larson, “A Census of Slaves Exported from Central Madagascar between 1775
and 1820,” in idem, pp. 131–46; S. Evers, “Stigmatization as a Self-Perpetuating Process,”
in Evers and Spindler, eds., Cultures of Madagascar, pp. 158, 166–67; M. Bloch, “Modes of
Production and Slavery in Madagascar: Two Case Studies,” in Watson, ed., Asian and
African Systems of Slavery, pp. 104–107.
67 S. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic
History (New York, 1993), pp. 196–200; A. Isaacman, Mozambique—The Africanization
of a European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos, 1750–1902 (Madison and Milwaukee,
1972); Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, pp. 128–35, 220–30; Manning, Slavery and
African Life, pp. 52–54; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 38–46; Sherriff, Slaves, Spices and
Ivory, pp. 33–76; Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves.
68 S. Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803
(Cambridge, 1999); E. Boonzaier, C. Malherbe, et al., The Cape Herders: A History of the
Khoikhoi of South Africa (Cape Town, 1996); C. Malherbe, “Indentured and Free Labour in
South Africa: Towards an Understanding,” South African Historical Journal 24 (1991):15; H.
Giliomee, “Processes in the Development of the Southern African Frontier,” in H. Lamar
and L. Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared
(New Haven and London, 1981), p. 85; Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 136; Worden,
The Chains that Bind Us, pp. 44–45, 49; and Elphick and Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of
South African Society, pp. 3–65, 134–39, 185, 299–301.