THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

Serious interest in European slave trading in the western Indian Ocean dates to the 1960s when several scholars investigated French activity along the East African coast.Footnote ⁷ J. M. Filliot's 1974 study highlighted the vastness of the catchment area, which stretched from West Africa to the Indonesian archipelago that supplied the Mascarenes with chattel labor. Filliot also estimated that 160,000 slaves reached the islands between 1670 and 1810, with 69 per cent of all such imports occurring between 1767 and 1810.Footnote ⁸ His figures gave substance to Edward Alpers's argument that the Mascarene demand for servile labor was a major spur to the dramatic expansion of the Malagasy and East African slave trades during the late eighteenth century,Footnote ⁹ and underpinned estimates by Réunionnais historians that more than 200,000 slaves reached that island between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰

Subsequent work has expanded our knowledge about slave trading in the western Indian Ocean.Footnote ¹¹ The movement of Malagasy slaves to Southeast Asia has been outlined,Footnote ¹² while Gwyn CampbellFootnote ¹³ and Pier LarsonFootnote ¹⁴ have probed the exportation of Malagasy slaves to other parts of the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Major studies of the Mozambican and East African tradesFootnote ¹⁵ have been supplemented by research on the movement of slaves from Mozambique to Portugal's possessions in India,Footnote ¹⁶ some of whom subsequently reached Mauritius and Réunion.Footnote ¹⁷ Historians have long noted the presence of Indian and Malay slaves in South AfricaFootnote ¹⁸ and the Mascarenes,Footnote ¹⁹ but only a handful of studies have attempted to explore the movement of slaves from India and Southeast Asia into the wider Indian Ocean.Footnote ²⁰ The illegal slave trade to Mauritius and Réunion during the early nineteenth century has also been a subject of scholarly interest.Footnote ²¹

If the ‘history of silence’ that surrounds slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean is not nearly as deafening as it once was,Footnote ²² our understanding of the traffic in chattel labor in this part of the world nevertheless remains far from complete. This state of affairs stems partly from the relative scarcity of archival sources on slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean compared to those that exist for the Atlantic.Footnote ²³ It also reflects what has been aptly characterized as the continuing ‘tyranny of the Atlantic’ in slavery and African diaspora studies.Footnote ²⁴ Recent arguments that Filliot underestimated the volume of the Mascarene trade and that perhaps as many as 388,000 slaves were exported to Mauritius and Réunion between 1670 and 1848Footnote ²⁵ underscore the importance of this region to understanding an African diaspora that, as Joseph Harris noted 35 years ago, reached across the Indian Ocean as well as the Atlantic.Footnote ²⁶ Suggestions that concern about suppressing the Indian slave trade, and the trade in enslaved Indian children in particular, to the Mascarenes may have contributed to the development of the British abolitionist movement during the late eighteenth century underscores the need to explore the dynamics of slave trading in lands washed by the Maris Indici in greater detail.Footnote ²⁷

The compilation of an inventory of 641 slaving voyages involving Mauritius and Réunion between 1768 and 1809 affords an opportunity to explore the workings of the Mascarene trade in greater detail and to situate this traffic more firmly in regional and global contexts. This inventory sheds new light on the complex trading networks that moved African, Indian, Malagasy and Southeast Asian slaves throughout the Indian Ocean. These data also demonstrate that colonial, as well as metropolitan, merchant capital underwrote slave trading ventures in the region, a development that raises questions about the role of locally generated and/or non-Western capital in financing the movement of chattel and ultimately ‘free’ labor throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world. Lastly, this inventory reveals that the Mascarenes were at the center of a substantial and dynamic slave trading network that reached not only across the Indian Ocean, but also into the Americas in ways that raise questions about how we view the relationship between the ‘worlds’ of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

SOURCES

Information on slaves and slaving trading in the Indian Ocean is often fragmentary. The British East India Company archives, for example, contain only scattered and rather oblique references to Company involvement in slave trading during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ²⁸ Data on French slave trading can be equally elusive. Philippe Haudrère's magisterial study of the French Compagnie des Indes makes no reference to slave trading by the Compagnie and demonstrates that information on even elementary aspects of Mascarene trade and commerce between 1735 and 1767 are basically non-existent.Footnote ²⁹ Documentation becomes much more abundant after 1767, but the Mauritian archival record has suffered over the years from the official ‘weeding-out’ of documents during the nineteenth century and the loss of others because of neglect, insect predation and the damage wrought by cyclones and the island's tropical climate.Footnote ³⁰ Much of the eighteenth-century Réunionnais archival record has also been lost.

The sources that speak to Mascarene mercantile activity from 1767 to 1810, of which the declarations made by ship captains upon reaching Mauritius are the most important, are themselves frequently problematic. Not all captains who arrived at Port Louis made such déclarations d'arrivées, and both the quantity and the quality of the information in these statements varies widely. Declarations made to Admiralty officials were often more detailed than those made to other authorities, but this detail usually consists of reports on weather conditions and damage to the vessel in question. In other instances, captains' statements are vague about whether the number of slaves being declared represented the number who had been loaded or who were being landed. Official record keeping became even more lax between 1789, when royal authority in the islands collapsed, and the reassertion of metropolitan control in 1803.Footnote ³¹

Auguste Toussaint, the foremost student of Mascarene maritime history, ignored the slave trade in most of his work on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French commerce and trade in the Indian Ocean.Footnote ³² The one exception is his 1967 La route des îles in which he tallied a total of 515 slaving voyages to the islands between 1773 and 1810.Footnote ³³ Unfortunately, Toussaint neither listed the vessels and/or voyages in question nor discussed these undertakings in any detail, and limited his analysis of the data at his disposal to compiling six rather simple tables that summarize information about the tonnage of the vessels involved, the size of their human cargoes and slave mortality en route to the islands.

This study draws upon the same archival materials that Toussaint used,Footnote ³⁴ together with other documentary sources that seemingly escaped his attention and the data contained in the important repertoires compiled by Jean Mettas on the eighteenth-century French slave tradeFootnote ³⁵ and José Capela on the Mozambican trade.Footnote ³⁶ These sources yield a total of 641 slaving voyages between 1768 and 1809 that involved the Mascarenes, either as the recipient of slave cargoes or as a base from which slave trading expeditions to South Africa and the Americas were mounted (Table 1). The 549 voyages currently known to have transported slaves to the Mascarenes may represent 50–55 per cent of all such voyages during the period under consideration. Further research in French, Portuguese and other archives will undoubtedly allow the data presented in this paper to be refined and expanded upon.

Table 1. Slaving voyages involving the Mascarenes, 1768–1809

Notes: ^a Madagascar, including Angontil Bay, Bombetoc, Fort Dauphin, Foulpointe, Matatam, Ste. Luce, Ste. Marie, Tamatave.

^b Mozambique, including Mozambique, Ibo, Inhambane, Querimba, Quelimane.

^c Includes 20 voyages from the Île de France to Mozambique presumed to have returned to the Mascarenes.

^d Includes 24 voyages from the Île de France to Mozambique presumed to have returned to the Mascarenes.

^e Swahili Coast, including Côte d'Afrique, Kilwa, Lindi, Mafia, Mombasa, Mongale, Mouttage, Zanzibar.

^f Including Anjengo, Bengal, Cochin, Coringa, Coromandel Coast, Goa, Goudelour, Karikal, Mahé, Malabar Coast, Pondichéry, Yanam.

^g Multiple provenances, e.g., Kilwa and Madagascar, Madagascar and Mozambique.

^h Via Mozambique.

ⁱ Angola, Cabinda, Malimbe.

Sources: Mauritius National Archives: F 4, Municipalité du Port Nord-Ouest – Registre pour l'enregistrement des déclarations d'arrivées de capitaines de navires et des cautionnements, 7 juillet 1794–20 septembre 1803; F 10, Amirauté – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 18 janvier 1791–18 novembre 1793; F 30, Amirauté – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 30 avril 1794–28 septembre 1803; GB 26, Bureau Central de Police – Registre pour servir à l'enregistrement des déclarations d'arrivées de capitaines, 7 vendémiaire XII (30 septembre 1803) – 15 octobre 1810, 10 janvier 1811–19 avril 1815; GB 40, Amirauté (Tribunal de Première Instance) – Registre pour servir aux déclarations d'amirauté, 8 vendémiaire XII (1er octobre 1803–8 mai 1809); HB 12/9, fo. 64, Chargement sur la flute du Roy L'africain, Foulpointe, 11 novembre 1770; HB 12/12, fos. 113–14, Etat des Vivres et autres Objets d'Envois de Madagascar au Compte du Roy … [la flute du Roi Le Nécessaire, 15 septembre 1788]; HB 16/9, Compte des noirs particuliers embarqués par connaissement sur la Corvette La Normande – Année 1769; OA 44, Bureau du Domaine – Comptes de recettes et dépenses, 1772–5; OA 91, fo. 27v, Bureau de Police (Jurisdiction Royale) – Journal pour la consignation des rapports de police, 23 novembre 1769–10 juin 1775; JH 1, Dépots civils, 1772–7; JH 12, Dépots civils, 1791; JH 13, Dépots civils, 1792; OB 21, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 11 février 1782–1 mars 1784; OB 23, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 7 avril 1784–1 mai 1786; OB 28, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 4 juin 1788–17 janvier 1791; OB 29, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 28 septembre 1773–27 novembre 1777; OC 24B, Journal de navigation du vaisseau l'Espérance, cap. Desmolière, faisant la traite à la côte d'Afrique, 5 novembre 1774–30 mai 1775 (incomplete); OC 40, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 28 novembre 1777–6 février 1782; OC 48, Amirauté (Jurisdiction Royale) – Registre des déclarations d'arrivées et autres, 5 mai 1786–30 mai 1788.

Mettas, Répertoire des expeditions négrières françaises; Capela, O Tráfico de Escravos, 311–27.

TRADING SLAVES TO THE MASCARENES

The Dutch first introduced slaves into the Mascarenes during their attempts to colonize Mauritius between 1638 and 1710.Footnote ³⁷ The legal status of the Malagasy laborers who reached the Île de Bourbon during the 1660s and 1670s remains uncertain, but slavery was a de facto reality on the island by 1687.Footnote ³⁸ Slaves reached Mauritius again soon after the island was colonized by the French late in 1721, and at least 23 cargoes of Malagasy, Indian, Mozambican and West African slaves reached the Île de France between 1722 and 1735.Footnote ³⁹ No fewer than 21 cargoes of Malagasy, West African and Mozambican origin were also landed on Réunion between 1729 and 1735.Footnote ⁴⁰ These and subsequent imports led to a steady increase in the number of slaves on the islands, from 1,800 in 1725 to 7,221 in 1735 and then to 22,599 by 1757–8.

The advent of royal rule in 1767 and the issuance of a decree in 1769 that opened the islands to free trade by all French nationals had a dramatic impact on regional slaving interests as the treaty that Jean-Vincent Morice signed with the Sultan of Kilwa in 1776 illustrates.Footnote ⁴¹ The extension of free trade privileges to Americans in 1784 and to all other foreign nationals in 1787 turned the islands into a major regional commercial entrepôt that attracted shipping from northern Europe and the Americas.Footnote ⁴² The demand for laborers to produce the foodstuffs and maritime stores needed by the increasing numbers of French and other vessels operating in the western Indian Ocean, coupled with high rates of slave mortality,Footnote ⁴³ spurred the importation of even larger numbers of slaves into the islands. The Mascarenes housed 71,197 slaves by 1787–8, a figure that climbed to almost 133,000 by 1807–8 and peaked at some 136,400 in 1815 before beginning to decline. Mauritius held 61,162 bondmen, women and children when slavery was abolished in the colony early in 1835; thirteen years later, slave emancipation freed 62,151 men, women and children on Réunion.Footnote ⁴⁴

The global scope of the Mascarene trade is illustrated by early nineteenth-century accounts that noted the presence of ‘blacks of every ethnicity’ on Mauritius: Anjouanais from the Comoros; Abyssinians from the Horn of Africa; Bambaras, Guineans and Wolofs from West Africa; Bengalis, Malabars and Talingas from India; Malays and Timorese from Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴⁵ Slaves from Madagascar and eastern Africa, the two most important sources of Mascarene bondmen and women, came from a wide range of ethnic or cultural backgrounds. An 1817 Mauritian slave register reveals that those of Malagasy origin included individuals taken from among the Ambanivolo, Amboalambo (Merina), Andrantsay, Antaisaka, Antalaotra, Antanosy, Antatsimo, Betanimena, Maninga (sic), Marvace (sic) and Sakalava.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other sources also refer to Antateime (sic), Betsileo and Hova (Merina) among the island's Malagasy chattel laborers.Footnote ⁴⁷ Slaves of ‘Mozambican’ originFootnote ⁴⁸ likewise came from a large number of ethnic or cultural groups, some of which were located as far away as modern Malawi and eastern Zambia. The 1817 Mauritian register refers to persons drawn from the Bisa, Ekoti, Kamanga, Lolo (Lomwe), Makonde, Makua, Maravi, Mrima, Mujao (probably Yao), Ngindo, Nyambane, Nyamwezi, Sagara and Sena, as well as other groups whose modern identity remains uncertain.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition to ‘Malays’Footnote ⁵⁰ and Timorese, the 1817 register and other sources record the presence of slaves from Bali, Java, Macassar (Celebes), Nias and Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago, and even from as far away as China.Footnote ⁵¹

While the great majority of slavers that reached the Mascarenes sailed under French colors, cargoes also arrived on foreign-flagged vessels. Evidence of foreign nationals transporting slaves to the islands during the late eighteenth century is often circumstantial. The Mauritian archival record reveals at least 11 Portuguese vessels made a total of 15 voyages from Mozambique or the ‘African coast’ to the islands between 1775 and 1796.Footnote ⁵² Known Portuguese-flagged slavers appear to have first reached the Île de France in 1793;Footnote ⁵³ the first recorded arrival of such a slaver dates to 1802 when the Ana Jouaquin landed 310 Mozambican slaves at Port Louis.Footnote ⁵⁴ Two other Portuguese vessels – Le Gé néral Isidre (General Isidro) and L'Embuscade (Emboscado) – reached Port Louis the following year with a total of 520 slaves.Footnote ⁵⁵Le Général Isidre returned to Mauritius on two occasions in 1804 carrying a total of 628 slaves and again in 1806 with a cargo of unknown size.Footnote ⁵⁶ Altogether, at least 12 Portuguese slaving voyages were reported as having reached Mauritius between 1802 and 1807.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Spanish La Bonne Espérance carried slaves from Mozambique to Mauritius in 1804,Footnote ⁵⁸ while the following year the ‘Arab’ ship Salihi arrived at Port Louis from Zanzibar with 150 slaves on board.Footnote ⁵⁹ Vessels from the United States likewise participated in the Mascarene trade. An unnamed American vessel transported slaves from Mozambique to the Île de France in 1797,Footnote ⁶⁰ while the Al ciope (sic) reached Port Louis in June 1807 with 200 Mozambican slaves on board.Footnote ⁶¹ Mauritius also served as the base from which the Juliana, out of Boston, sailed to Mozambique in 1805 to trade for slaves subsequently carried to Montevideo.Footnote ⁶²

Previous scholarship has shed little substantive information on the size of the cargoes that reached the Mascarenes. A re-examination of the archival record yields information on the size of more than 200 slave cargoes destined for the islands. As Tables 2 and 3 indicate, those from Madagascar were usually substantially smaller than those arriving from eastern Africa. The largest cargo known to have been loaded in Madagascar contained 264 slaves,Footnote ⁶³ while in Mozambique and along the Swahili Coast cargoes of 400 or more men, women and children were not uncommon. The 475-ton Le Saturne, for instance, landed 444 Mozambican slaves at Port Louis in 1792 and 469 slaves of East African origin the following year.Footnote ⁶⁴ On occasion, even larger cargoes were shipped to the Mascarenes; when Le Duc de la Vallière left Mozambique for the Île de France in 1779, it did so with 600 slaves on board.Footnote ⁶⁵

Table 2. Size of slave cargoes from Madagascar, 1768–1809

Sources: see Table 1.

Table 3. Size of slave cargoes from Eastern Africa, 1773–1809

Sources: see Table 1.

Information on the demographic structure of these cargoes is limited largely to 1769–75, and especially 1772–5 (Table 4). Scattered references to cargoes reaching Réunion in 1733 and 1735 indicate that males could outnumber females by a ratio of 3:1 during the early years of the Mascarene trade.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the 1770s, however, the 2:1 male-to-female ratio that generally characterized eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic cargoes also prevailed in the Mascarene trade.Footnote ⁶⁷ ChildrenFootnote ⁶⁸ apparently comprised approximately one-fifth of Malagasy and Indian cargoes, a pattern also consistent with that in the Atlantic during the same period.Footnote ⁶⁹ There are indications that children may have comprised a higher percentage of cargoes of Mozambican origin during the early 1770s, but the extent to which such a pattern persisted cannot be ascertained.Footnote ⁷⁰ Isolated reports suggest that the general demographic structure of the Mascarene trade did not change significantly between the mid-1770s and the early nineteenth century. The 411 slaves handed over to Mr. Durouzou (?) by the captain of Le Perier in 1792 included 225 men, 54 male youths, 31 boys, 69 women, 16 female youths and 16 girls.Footnote ⁷¹ Information on 235 of the 350–5 slaves found on the Portuguese brig La Santa Delfina in 1808 indicates that males outnumbered females by a margin of 2:1 and that children comprised approximately one-fifth of the vessel's cargo.Footnote ⁷²

Table 4. Composition of slave cargoes to the Mascarenes, 1769–1775

Note: ^a Négrillons and négrittes, plus cargoes in which négrillons and négrittes were mentioned but not differentiated from one another.

Sources: see Table 1.

Information on the logistics of the Mascarene trade is limited. Slavers destined to the islands from Mozambique and the Swahili Coast were usually less tightly packed than those crossing the Atlantic where cargo densities normally ranged from 1·5 to 2·5 slaves per ton.Footnote ⁷³ The low slave-per-ton ratio on vessels sailing from Madagascar reflects the fact that slaves were usually just one component of cargoes that included large quantities of rice, foodstuffs and/or cattle. Although the Mascarenes were situated relatively close to their Malagasy and eastern African sources of supply, the problematic winds and currents that prevailed in the western Indian Ocean, and especially in the Mozambique Channel and along the East African coast, meant that slavers could be at sea for extended periods of time before reaching the islands.Footnote ⁷⁴ Frequent reports that slavers had been obliged to put into the Seychelles or other ports to ‘refresh’ their cargoes highlights the difficulties that shipping slaves from eastern African ports, and Mozambican ports in particular, could entail.Footnote ⁷⁵

The regional middle passage often entailed considerable hardship for the men, women and children caught up in this traffic. In some instances, their suffering stemmed from the poor physical condition of the vessels in question. The destruction of a substantial portion of Le Petit Gustave's food supply when the brig began to take on water in 1804, for example, forced the ship's captain to reduce the daily rice ration for both crew and slaves to just 5 ounces.Footnote ⁷⁶ As in the Atlantic, significant numbers of slaves died en route to the Mascarenes. In 1791, Captain Charles Maugin of L'Eugénie reported that various afflictions, including smallpox, seringos (a form of dysentery endemic in Africa), scurvy and gangrenous wounds, killed 71 of the 252 slaves he had acquired at Kilwa.Footnote ⁷⁷ Other causes of death included abscesses, ‘exhaustion’, ‘malign fevers’ and ‘maladies vermineuses’. Some captives also committed suicide by throwing themselves overboard if the opportunity to do so arose, as happened on board La Bonne Espérance after two men were released from their chains.Footnote ⁷⁸

Smallpox was a particularly virulent killer that could resist even the most determined efforts to contain it.Footnote ⁷⁹ In other instances, inclement weather and shipwrecks decimated slave cargoes. The unexpected calm that left Le St. Pierre drifting for weeks north of Madagascar in 1779 resulted in the death of 200 of the 400 slaves on board.Footnote ⁸⁰ Almost thirty years later, 166 slaves were literally battered to death in La Minerve's hold when it encountered a violent storm.Footnote ⁸¹ On occasion, cargoes were devastated by a combination of factors. Such was the case on Le Bélisaire which, after leaving Ibo with 246 slaves, lost 92 slaves while becalmed for a month off Anjouan, another 11 during a refreshment stop in the Seychelles, and a further 66 when the ship was wrecked near Ibo upon its return to the Mozambican coast.Footnote ⁸²

The overall mortality rate among Mascarene-bound slaves appears to have been higher than the 14·9 per cent average that prevailed on French slavers operating in the Atlantic.Footnote ⁸³ Toussaint reported average mortality rates of 12 per cent on 27 voyages from Madagascar between 1775 and 1808, and 21 per cent on 64 voyages from eastern Africa between 1777 and 1808.Footnote ⁸⁴ Filliot in turn estimated that mortality rates averaged at 20–25 per cent from India and 25–30 per cent from West Africa.Footnote ⁸⁵ Several factors contributed to lower death rates en route from Madagascar: the Grande Île's proximity, less problematic winds and currents than along the East African coast, and the attendant shorter duration of expeditions to the island.Footnote ⁸⁶ A review of extant sources confirms Toussaint's figure for cargoes of Malagasy origin (Table 5). These sources also point to a possibly substantially higher average mortality rate among cargoes from eastern Africa than Toussaint reported. The inability to reconstruct his data base in its totality suggests, however, that the higher mortality rates among cargoes from eastern Africa reported in Table 5 must be used with care. Isolated reports indicate that mortality rates on board ships that engaged in the illegal slave trade that flourished between 1811 and the early 1830s remained much the same as those that Toussaint reported for 1775–1808.Footnote ⁸⁷

Table 5. Slave mortality en route to the Mascarenes, 1770–1808

Notes: ^a Mozambique and the Swahili Coast.

^b Slave deaths en route exclusive of shipwrecks.

^c Slave mortality en route exclusive of shipwrecks.

Sources: see Table 1.

Shipboard revolts were yet another hazard slavers had to face. Unlike for the Atlantic trade,Footnote ⁸⁸ relatively little information exists about insurrections on Mascarene-bound vessels. The records of only 23 of the voyages under consideration include references to overt acts of shipboard resistance by slaves, a number that undoubtedly under-represents the extent of this activity. The absence of more such cases in the archival record may reflect the fact that some captains apparently viewed shipboard revolts as nothing unexpected. Antoine Vauverd's account of events on the 120-ton snow Les Deux Amis late in 1778, for example, is strikingly terse; he reported simply that 80 slaves had thrown themselves overboard while the ship was at sea and that the crew had recovered all of the slaves except for 15 who had been eaten by sharks.Footnote ⁸⁹

Uprisings occurred not only on the high seas, but also while ships were at anchor trading for slaves. Shipboard revolts occurred on at least five occasions in the Mozambique roads, once at Ibo, once at Kilwa and twice at ports (Foulpointe and Ste. Luce) along the Malagasy coast. Some crews contained these uprisings by themselves, but in other instances captains had to call on local authorities for assistance in doing so. The revolt that broke out on the morning of 6 November 1787 aboard Le Tigre at Foulpointe, for instance, ended the following morning only after the local chief and his men attacked the brig after peppering it with musket fire throughout the night.Footnote ⁹⁰

The significant loss of life that occurred during some revolts attests not only to the desperation and/or determination of the slaves involved,Footnote ⁹¹ but also to the fact that some uprisings were well organized and well led. Crews reported on a number of occasions that revolts began with ‘a great cry’ when large numbers of slaves were on deck being fed or exercised. The decision by the officers of the Portuguese ship La Ste. Antoine to execute a slave named Bororo after a failed insurrection on the high seas provides a brief but tantalizing view into the internal dynamics of such an insurrection.Footnote ⁹² Captain Joseph Caetanne Rodrigue reported that Bororo had given the signal that began an uprising which led to the death of several crew members before it was suppressed. His reputation as a ‘sorcerer’ among the 200 slaves still in the ship's hold raised fears that he might lead another uprising that the crew would be ill equipped to handle. These fears prompted the ship's officers to hold a summary hearing that resulted in Bororo being tied to a mast and shot before all of the slaves on the vessel, after which his body was thrown overboard.Footnote ⁹³

Not all of these revolts failed. On at least one occasion, slaves took control of the vessel on which they were being transported and returned to their homeland. The lives of the surviving crew members on Les Bons Amis were spared in October 1790 on the condition that they would sail the ship to Viboulle (sic) on the Malagasy coast, which they did.Footnote ⁹⁴ The ultimate outcome of a second revolt is less certain. Fear that their ship might catch fire, coupled with their inability to put down the slave uprising that began at 6.0 p.m. on 4 October 1793 off the Malagasy coast, forced the crew of La Constance Adelle to abandon the brig at 5.0 p.m. the following day.Footnote ⁹⁵ Unfortunately, we do not know what subsequently happened to the vessel and the men, women and children on it.

THE ECONOMICS OF THE MASCARENE TRADE

The active participation of both metropolitan and local mercantile interests in the Mascarene trade further illustrates the complex dynamics of slave trading in the western Indian Ocean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Merchants from ports including Bordeaux, Le Havre, Lorient, Marseilles, Nantes and Saint-Malo organized slave trading expeditions to the region, but the limited and often problematic shipping data at our disposal make it difficult to ascertain the scale of this activity with any precision.Footnote ⁹⁶ Perhaps 15 ships are known to have left Nantes to trade for slaves in the Indian Ocean between 1769 and 1782.Footnote ⁹⁷ Only 23 vessels are known to have sailed from Bordeaux for the Île de France between 1790 and 1792; Bordelais underwriters, on the other hand, insured at least 87 voyages to the Indian Ocean in 1791 and 1792.Footnote ⁹⁸ Information on metropolitan-based slaving ventures to the region during the early nineteenth century is equally problematic. Éric Saugera reports that 14 such expeditions landed slaves on Mauritius between 1800 and 1805, a figure that may or may not ultimately be at variance with his subsequent report of a total of 19 slaving voyages destined for the Malagasy coast or Zanzibar via the Île de France during the same period.Footnote ⁹⁹ Saugera's estimate that the East African coast attracted only 3 per cent of metropolitan-based French slavers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will undoubtedly need to be revisited in light of the arrival in Mauritius of at least 685 vessels from France between 1773 and 1810Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and the identification of at least 164 known slaving voyages in the western Indian Ocean between 1769 and 1809 linked explicitly to mercantile interests in France (Table 6).

Table 6. Metropolitan French ports and known slaving voyages in the western Indian Ocean, 1769–1809

Notes: ^a Brest, La Rochelle, St. Brieuc.

^b Different ports of armement and departure (e.g., Lorient/Bordeaux).

Source: see Table 1.

If the extent to which French slavers operated in the Indian Ocean remains to be determined, there can be little doubt that metropolitan merchants engaged in this traffic because of its potential profitability. The fact that metropolitan-based vessels such as Les Boynes transported multiple cargoes to the Mascarenes in the mid-1770s attests as much.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Evidence on the profitability of individual voyages remains elusive, but scattered information on slave prices along the Malagasy and East African coasts during the late 1760s and 1770sFootnote ¹⁰² indicates that slaves could sell in the Mascarenes for twice their original purchase price, if not more.Footnote ¹⁰³ Such was probably the case when Port Louis merchant Joseph Pichard sold 230 male and female slaves for 60 piastres ($) each in 1786.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The local demand for servile labor meant that even unhealthy slaves could command significant sums on the auction block. Louis Bernard, captain and outfitter of Le Lion, for one, realized 13,551 livres 10 sols in 1775 from the sale of 27 Mozambican slaves who were readily acknowledged to be in poor health.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The purchase of slaves on the Île de France for resale on the Île de Bourbon could likewise be a profitable undertaking; the sale of 36 slaves on Réunion, probably by Louis Bonneau in May 1787, yielded a profit of 4,150 livres, or 12·8 per cent, over their purchase price of 32,400 livres in Mauritius.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The voyages of Le Général Moreau, outfitted at Saint-Malo by Sieurs Deschais and Cosson, afford an opportunity to examine the activities of metropolitan-based slavers in greater detail. The ship left Saint-Malo on 27 January 1803 with $7,810 in specie on board. After taking on rice and other provisions needed to feed a human cargo at the Cape of Good Hope, the ship proceeded to Kilwa where the captain and crew procured 219 slaves, 187 of whom survived the passage to the Seychelles and Réunion where they were sold for $17,511. The ship returned to the Cape where $2,000 was spent to purchase a cargo of wine, eau de vie, butter, iron, cordage, beer, etc., which subsequently sold for $10,740 in Réunion. From Réunion, Le Général Moreau sailed again to Kilwa with $8,000 where it acquired 170 slaves who sold for $13,950 upon the vessel's return to Réunion and Mauritius. The ship then sailed for Mozambique with a cargo of piastres and mixed merchandise valued at $10,751, at least part of which was used to purchase 110 slaves who were carried to Réunion where they were sold for an unknown sum. From Réunion, Le Général Moreau sailed to Foulpointe where it acquired a slave cargo of unknown size that sold for $12,695 on Réunion and Mauritius. The ship's return voyage to Madagascar, however, ended in disaster for its owners; shortly after leaving Foulpointe on 2 December 1806 with a cargo of rice worth $8,000, Le Général Moreau (itself valued at $7,000) was captured by a British vessel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While some metropolitan merchants sought to exploit the local demand for servile labor, others used the islands as a staging point from which to mount expeditions to acquire slaves for France's colonies in the Americas, especially Saint-Domingue. The earliest explicit reference to such activity dates to 1772 when La Digue, outfitted in Lorient, sailed from the Île de France to the Mozambican coast to acquire slaves who were subsequently landed at Cap Français in Saint-Domingue.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In some instances, vessels outfitted in France carried one or more slave cargoes to the Mascarenes before returning to the African coast where they acquired slaves destined for the Americas. On at least 16 occasions between 1776 and 1791, the Île de France itself served as a ‘refreshment’ station for vessels carrying slaves from Kilwa and Mozambique to the Americas. The extent to which the Mascarenes functioned as a staging point for American-bound ventures is difficult to determine but, as Table 1 indicates, there is reason to believe that significant numbers of metropolitan vessels did so.

Port Louis merchants were clearly instrumental in mounting some of these voyages. The permit that authorized the captain of the 200-ton brigantine La Petite Dorade to leave the Île de France for the African coast in May 1788 (where it took on a cargo of 242 slaves at Mozambique) noted that the 22-man crew had been provided by Janvier Monneron, a prominent Port Louis merchant acting for Louis Bourdon of Bordeaux.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ On 6 July the following year, Pitot Frères, another prominent local merchant house and consignee of the 395 slaves who comprised the cargo of La Ville de Bordeaux, sold 386 of these slaves to Captains Jean Valeau, acting on behalf of MM. Letellier Frères and Jean Dufourg, acting on behalf of MM. Pierre Bourbon aîné and Jean Laroche (both Bordelais merchants), for 428,460 livres.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Valeau and Dufourg had formed a partnership two days earlier to purchase La Ville de Bordeaux's cargo, load it onto L'Honorine, captained by Dufourg, as soon as the monsoon permitted, and transport it to Saint-Domingue where, they agreed, the slaves who survived the voyage were not to be sold in the southern part of the colony.Footnote ¹¹¹

More detailed information about these voyages to the Americas via the Mascarenes is scarce. Thirty-three Mascarene-based voyages are known to have landed some 6,700 Mozambican and 1,700 East African slaves in the Americas between 1772 and 1790, while eight voyages that entailed visits to the Île de France subsequently landed more than 3,800 slaves from Angola and Cabinda in the New World between 1776 and 1790.Footnote ¹¹² We have information on the composition of only two of the Mozambican cargoes in question; 44 per cent of the 340 slaves involved were adult males compared to 26 per cent adult females, 18 per cent boys and 12 per cent girls. Data on mortality en route to the Americas is equally sketchy. L'Euphrasie, which arrived at the Île de France with 188 of the 222 slaves it had loaded at Mozambique, landed 145 slaves when it ultimately arrived at Port-au-Prince.Footnote ¹¹³La Petite Dorade in turn reached Cap Français with 159 of the 242 Mozambican slaves originally in its hold.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Local merchants also participated actively in the slave trade. Port Louis housed a sizeable merchant community by the early nineteenth century; in 1805, 74 of the city's white inhabitants declared their occupation to be that of négoçiant (merchant or trader) compared to 26 who had done so in 1776.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Explicit references to their involvement in slaving ventures date mostly to the 1770s and 1780s when déclarations d'arrivées often included the name of a vessel's armateur or outfitter. Among those named as armateurs based on the Île de France were Sieurs Closnard, Cloupet (four voyages), Collique, Drieux, Geoffriou, De La Rochelle, Le Blanc et Rolland (five voyages), Le Bouchet (two voyages), Le Bourdé et Dahuy (?), Janvier Monneron et C^ie (two voyages), Morice et Société (two voyages), Laurent Raphaël, Solminiac et La Corte, and Vally. One merchant based on Réunion, Sieur Mannier, is also mentioned. In other instances, independent ship captains such as Sieurs Pichard, Antoine Vauverd (two voyages), and Jean Olivier (two voyages) served as their own armateurs. Voyages were also occasionally family enterprises: brothers Sebastien and Thomas Boileau were co-armateurs of La Marianne which Sebastien also captained.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Partnership agreements from the early 1780s demonstrate that local merchants could mobilize significant capital resources for such ventures. Fulerand Dejean and Emmanuel Touche du Poujol each contributed 100,000 livres to the commercial enterprise they established on 12 October 1780.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Two years later, Louis Joseph Pigeot de Carey, his brother Isidore Pigeot de St. Vallery, and Paul Trebillard de la Relandière contributed a total of 400,000 livres to capitalize the commercial partnership they were establishing for three years.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Specific references to the ways in which local merchants financed slaving voyages are scarce, but those that exist suggest that substantial sums could be raised locally without undue difficulty. Early in 1784, for example, a surgeon at the royal hospital invested 19,000 livres in Le Bélisaire, a slaver bound for the African coast and then the Cape of Good Hope.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Nine years later, Sieur d'Hotman, proprietor and armateur of Le Bon Père destined for Mozambique to purchase slaves, acknowledged receiving 51,352 livres 5 sols 10 deniers from Gabriel Burquel for his one-third share in the voyage.Footnote ¹²⁰ The multiple slaving voyages undertaken by individual vessels likewise demonstrate the ready availability of financing. Both L'Eugénie and La Favorite made at least 13 voyages to Madagascar between 1802 and 1807, while La Charlotte, Le Créol and La Fanny each made at least eight voyages to the Grande Île between 1803 and 1809. Six other vessels made a minimum of three voyages to Madagascar during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

While it is impossible to determine the extent of their involvement with any precision, there is good reason to believe that Mascarene merchants underwrote the costs of a substantial majority of slaving voyages to Madagascar, and that they were frequently involved in voyages that brought slaves from eastern Africa and southern Asia to the islands. Vessels financed by Port Louis merchants also participated in the trans-Atlantic trade. In December 1781, La Caroline, fitted out by Sieur Cloupet, left Port Louis for Querimba where it loaded 280 slaves destined for the Americas before ultimately being forced to return to the Île de France by contrary monsoon winds.Footnote ¹²¹ Five years later, the Mauritian-based L'Eléonore landed 120 slaves in Saint-Domingue who had been acquired at Kilwa.Footnote ¹²²

A distinguishing feature of the slave trade with Madagascar was its intimate connection with the beef and rice trade that was crucial to the islands' survival. Mauritius depended heavily upon imported foodstuffs to feed its population throughout the period of French rule (1721–1810),Footnote ¹²³ and continued to do so after the advent of British rule in 1810. A survey of 135 déclarations made by captains returning from Madagascar between 1802 and 1809 demonstrates the extent to which these trades were inextricably intertwined; only three of these statements suggest that the cargoes in question consisted only of slaves.Footnote ¹²⁴ More detailed information about individual cargoes underscores this point. The 900-ton L'Eléphant, for instance, loaded 200 slaves and 343 cattle when it visited the Malagasy coast in 1782.Footnote ¹²⁵ Twenty years later, Le Reparateur carried a cargo of 150 cattle, 4 sheep, 5 goats, 400 fowl, 20,000 pounds of rice, 60 barrels of salted meat and 11 slaves when it left Fort Dauphin.Footnote ¹²⁶

Although voyages to (or from) the East African coast apparently focused largely on slaves, these ventures also dealt at least occasionally in foodstuffs and other merchandise. The Portuguese chassemarée La Perriquitto, for instance, carried leather, tallow, cinchona, soap and candles as well as 35 slaves when it arrived at Port Louis from Mozambique late in April 1806.Footnote ¹²⁷ The following year, the hold of La Diane, another Portuguese arrival from Mozambique, contained Madeira wine, whale oil, butter and sheep tallow as well as 30 slaves for sale.Footnote ¹²⁸

The slave trade from India during this era incorporated elements of both the Malagasy and East African trades. Unfortunately, information exists on only a handful of voyages known to have carried slaves from South Asia to the Mascarenes. In some instances, ships carried sizeable numbers of slaves away from the Indian subcontinent; Le Chandernagore, for instance, landed 135 Bengali slaves on the Île de France in July 1772.Footnote ¹²⁹ The early 1790s in particular witnessed a number of large-scale slaving ventures along the Indian coast as merchants sought to exploit the opportunities created by the famine that raged in the northern Circars. In February 1792, Les Amies Réunis (sic) sailed for Mauritius from the Coromandel Coast with about 300 slaves;Footnote ¹³⁰ that December, two French ships left the Coringa roads near Yanam with 800–900 slaves on board.Footnote ¹³¹ In other instances, slaves were clearly just one of many commodities being sought and exported from India. Captain Alexis Joseph Bartro of Le Chevalier d'Entrecasteaux, for example, was instructed in April 1789 to acquire 3,000 sacks of rice, a wide assortment of textiles, and 80 male and female slaves between 12 and 18 years of age during his forthcoming voyage from the Île de France to Bengal.Footnote ¹³² The snow L'Heureux Marie (sic) reached Mauritius from Bengal late in December 1792 with a cargo of textiles, ghee and 7 slaves.Footnote ¹³³ The following year, the cargo of Les Deux Amis comprised 150,000 lbs of rice, 75,000 lbs of wheat and 18 Bengali slaves,Footnote ¹³⁴ while that of Le Dioré included 32 Bengali slaves, 30,000 lbs of salt, 20,500 lbs of sugar and assorted cotton and silk textiles.Footnote ¹³⁵

At least 510 vessels reached the Mascarenes from India between 1773 and 1810,Footnote ¹³⁶ and there is good reason to suspect that many of the estimated 19,750–23,900 Indian slaves exported to the islands during the eighteenth century arrived in relatively small groups as part of larger mixed cargoes.Footnote ¹³⁷ Unfortunately, the archival record has remained largely silent about the movement of the Balinese, Javanese, Malay, Sumatran, Timorese and other slaves of Southeast Asian or East Asian origin who reached the Mascarenes.Footnote ¹³⁸ Toussaint tallied 175 vessels arriving from the Indonesian archipelago during the period under consideration and, like their Indian counterparts, many, if not most, of the Southeast Asian slaves who reached the islands before 1810 probably did so in small groups as part of larger mixed cargoes.

THE MASCARENE SLAVE TRADE IN PERSPECTIVE

The picture that emerges from this study is of an important and vibrant trade in chattel labor that integrated Madagascar, Mozambique, the Swahili Coast, India and the Mascarenes into an increasingly complex web of social, economic and political relationships during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Colonial censuses confirm the scale of this trade; the Mauritian slave population soared from 18,100 in 1766 to 60,000 in 1809,Footnote ¹³⁹ while that on Réunion also tripled, from 21,150 in 1765 to 65,140 in 1808.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ I have argued elsewhere that slave imports into the islands before 1810 were 12–27 per cent higher than Filliot estimated, and that 160,500–186,800 slaves may have been exported to the Île de France and Île de Bourbon between 1770 and 1810.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Projections based on the average size of Mascarene-bound cargoes and the number of vessels known to have reached Mauritius support these estimates, suggesting as they do that some 101,000 slaves could have been exported to the Île de France between 1773 and 1809. The dearth of information on the Réunionnais trade makes it difficult to ascertain how many slaves reached the Île de Bourbon during this era. However, the fact that 1,747 merchant vessels called at Réunion between 1773 and 1810 leaves little doubt that many tens of thousands of bondmen and women also reached this island during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴²

This traffic's significance transcends its obvious impact on Mauritian and Réunionnais society and economy. The frequent references to slavers using the Seychelles as a refreshment station, for example, raises the question of whether the colonization of this archipelago in 1770 was driven, at least in part, by the anticipated need for such facilities following the promulgation of the 1769 decree that opened the Mascarenes to free trade by all French nationals. Histories of the Seychelles are largely silent about the reasons behind the islands’ settlement.Footnote ¹⁴³

The Mascarene trade also raises other questions that are central to understanding the movement of slave labor in the western Indian Ocean before the early nineteenth century. As noted earlier, Edward Alpers argued more than 35 years ago that the Mascarene demand for chattel labor was the driving force behind the dramatic expansion of the East African and Malagasy trades after circa 1770, a position to which historians of the Mascarenes, the Indian Ocean and the African slave trades have continued to subscribe. Recently, however, Thomas Vernet has challenged this argument by asserting that slave trading along the Swahili Coast was an important, large-scale business long before French and Omani slavers made additional demands on this commercial system during the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Vernet's assertion is not without its problems, including a readily acknowledged scarcity of archival materials on the period from 1698 to 1750. Nevertheless, his thesis, together with what we now know about the Mascarene trade, points up the need to reassess the structure and dynamics of slave trading along the eastern African coast during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The existence before 1750 of a more developed commercial system along the Swahili Coast than hitherto believed helps to explain, for instance, why the Mascarene trade became such a dynamic and sophisticated system in the wake of the 1769 free trade decree. In so doing, Vernet's argument lends additional, albeit indirect, support to revised estimates of slave exports to Mauritius and Réunion between 1770 and 1810.

The Mascarenes' place in such an integrated commercial network has other implications. Firstly, it helps to explain why the suppression of the Mascarene trade during the early nineteenth century took as long as it did and how and why this illicit traffic shaped Anglo-Malagasy, Franco-Malagasy and Anglo-Omani diplomatic relations after 1810 to the extent that it did. An estimated 52,500 slaves were landed clandestinely on Mauritius between 1811 and circa 1827 by what British authorities acknowledged was a well developed and highly resilient slave trading system;Footnote ¹⁴⁵ another 45,000–50,000, if not more, slaves also reached Réunion between 1811 and 1848, mostly before circa 1831.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Secondly, the extent to which a well-developed commercial system existed before 1750 bears directly on the origins, structure and development of what Gwyn Campbell has characterized as a ‘southern’ slave trading complex along the eastern African coast.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Campbell views this complex as basically a nineteenth-century phenomenon, a characterization that must necessarily be re-examined in light of what we now know about the slave trades that flourished in the southwestern Indian Ocean before 1800.

The extensive participation of metropolitan and colonial mercantile interests in the Mascarene trade highlights the need to include developments in the Indian Ocean in any meaningful discussion of European slave trading from Africa, and the French slave trade in particular, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exportation of perhaps as many as 364,000 men, women and children from Madagascar, Mozambique and the Swahili Coast to Mauritius and Réunion between 1670 and 1848 requires us, at a minimum, to revise estimates of slave exports from eastern Africa between the late seventeenth and mid nineteenth century. Adding the number of men, women and children exported to the Mascarenes in French vessels to those embarked on French slavers plying the Atlantic, for instance, increases French slave exports from Africa by some 29 per cent over current estimates of 1·25 million.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

What we know about the Mascarene trade also raises questions about how we conceptualize the ‘world’ of the Indian Ocean. Histories of the Indian Ocean have paid little or no attention to slave trading although labor migration is often regarded as one of the important sinews that tied this huge, diverse region together.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The smaller volume of the various Indian Ocean slave trades during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries compared to those across the Atlantic during these same centuries has led some to argue that slavery and slave trading were not as central to the creation of an Indian Ocean world as they were to that which took shape in the Atlantic.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, the particulars of a trade that reached from Madagascar, Mozambique and the Swahili Coast to the Indian subcontinent and finally to Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago suggests that such characterizations must, at a minimum, be carefully qualified. The need to do so is underscored by Pier Larson's recent review of the Atlantic trade's role in shaping the global African diaspora; Larson reminds us that not only did the total number of African slaves transported across the Sahara and Indian Ocean probably exceed that carried across the Atlantic, but also that these non-Atlantic trades were of far greater antiquity.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The need to do so is further underscored by Campbell's and Larson's work which has revealed the role that slave trading in the southwestern Indian Ocean – and the Mascarene trade in particular – played in the development of the Merina state in highland Madagascar and in that empire's subsequent relations with Britain and France during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵² The Mascarene trade is also crucial to understanding a hitherto ignored diaspora of Malagasy speakers that may have entailed the largest movement of a single African people in the western Indian Ocean.Footnote ¹⁵³

Although fewer than 24,000 Indian slaves were probably exported to the Île de France and Île de Bourbon during the eighteenth century, the significance of this traffic cannot be assessed only in terms of the numbers of men, women and children who were caught up in it. To do so is to ignore the larger interactive contexts within which this trade existed and of which it was an integral part.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The presence of significant numbers of Indian slaves in the islands is a reminder that South Asia was itself a source of the chattel labor that moved throughout the Indian Ocean basin and that slaves could flow towards as well as away from Africa. The presence of Indian and Malay slaves in the Mascarenes and South Africa also underlines the fact that European slave trading in this part of the world was not limited only to Africa, and that both the geographical parameters and level of European involvement in this activity increased with the passage of time.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The trade in Indian slaves to the Mascarenes becomes particularly important if it is viewed as the institutional precursor of the purported ‘new system of slavery’ that scattered more than 2 million African, Chinese, Indian, Javanese, Melanesian and other indentured laborers throughout the colonial plantation world and beyond between the mid-1830s and the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Mauritius was the crucial test case for the use of indentured Indian labor in the post-emancipation colonial worldFootnote ¹⁵⁷ and more than 451,000 of these workers landed on the island between 1834 and 1910; another 75,000 also reached Réunion between the 1840s and 1880s. More than 35 years ago, Benedicte Hjejle suggested that the recruitment of some of these ‘free’ contractual workers cannot be understood without reference to indigenous systems of slavery in India, and argued that a significant number of the migrant workers who reached Ceylon between 1843 and 1873 came from the ranks of South India's praedial slave population.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Entries in the Indian immigrant registers housed at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute confirm the presence of individuals of ‘slave’ caste status among the indentured laborers who reached Mauritius from southern India during the late 1830s.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Arguments that the recruitment of tens of thousands of ‘indentured’ East Africans to work in Réunion's cane fields after slavery was abolished on that island in 1848 was nothing more than the old slave trade in new garb further demonstrate the need to explore structural connections between the slave and indentured labor trades in greater detail.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

The presence of European slavers in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Mascarenes' status as a commercial center from which slaving voyages to the Americas were mounted, and the Mauritian role in the development of the indentured labor trades that reached from the Indian Ocean into the Caribbean during the nineteenth century raise further questions about how we think about the ‘world’ of the Atlantic. The prevailing paradigm does so in terms of a system marked by the ever-increasing integration of Europe, West and Central Africa and the Americas and the rise of the modern plantation complex.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Implicit in such a model is the assumption that once ships sailed eastward past the Cape of Good Hope, they entered a realm separate and removed from whence they had come.

The slave trade to Mauritius and Réunion demonstrates otherwise. Slaves reached the Americas from southern Asia as well as Mozambique and Kilwa; in 1778, for example, 258 men, 49 women, 57 boys and 22 girls from the ‘coasts of India’ reached Saint-Domingue aboard La Cibèle.Footnote ¹⁶² Slaves from western and central Africa moved eastwards into the Indian Ocean as well as westwards across the Atlantic. ‘Guineans’ first reached Réunion in 1702 and West Africans, who continued to arrive in the Mascarenes until at least the 1760s,Footnote ¹⁶³ comprised a significant proportion of the Mauritian chattel population during the early and mid eighteenth century when they were favored as Compagnie and then royal slaves.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Nor were the French the only Europeans to ship West Africans to the Indian Ocean. No later than 1671, the British East India Company ordered the purchase of West African slaves for its factory at Bantam in Java;Footnote ¹⁶⁵ more than ninety years later, on 9 September 1765, the Royal George would deliver 149 Angolan slaves to the Company's factory at Bencoolen on the west coast of Sumatra.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

The increasingly complex interaction between these two worlds during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is made manifest in other ways. Recent work has begun to examine the considerable Brazilian commercial activity in the western Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ activity illustrated by the Africana do Rio's carrying slaves from Mozambique to the Île de France in 1805.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The archival record suggests that some French slavers operated along the Angolan coast only after voyaging to India to acquire appropriate trade goods, especially cotton textiles.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The papers of two Port Louis merchants lend credence to such a suggestion; not only were Sieurs Charoux and Lougnet involved in 1790 in shipping Indian merchandise to both Europe and the New World, but also they held a 25 per cent interest in the armement of Le Paquebot No. 4, a well-known participant in the Mascarene slave trade, which had sailed from the Île de France bound for Angola and the Americas.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

The archival record also gives substance to assertions about the commercial supremacy of Asian over metropolitan merchants in Portugal's eastern empire between 1770 and 1850.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This information, coupled with what we know about the activities of Asian merchants in the Indian Ocean,Footnote ¹⁷² raises tantalizing questions about the extent to which Indian merchant capital underwrote the exportation of 90,000 Mozambican slaves to the Mascarenes and the Americas before 1811, and another 386,000 Mozambican bondmen and women to the New World after 1811.Footnote ¹⁷³ Pedro Machado's recent work on Gujarati merchants in Mozambique underscores the need to pose such questions. Machado reports that merchants such as Sobhachand Sowchand became increasingly involved in the Mozambican slave trade, often as financiers, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Late in 1805 or early in 1806, Sobhachand took possession of the General Izidro (sic), a ship that carried slaves not only to South Africa but also, as noted earlier, to Mauritius in 1803 and twice during 1804, and that would do so yet again in 1806. Sobhachand would also purchase two slavers at Port Louis in 1806 and 1807 in partnership with Portuguese merchants.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In so doing, he demonstrated that the worlds of the Indian and Atlantic oceans could intersect during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.