Indian Ocean Africa and Its Two Second Slaveries

Two “Second Slaveries” uprooted Africans in the late 18th- and 19th-century Indian Ocean world. An Atlantic-based Second Slavery took captives from Madagascar and the southeastern African mainland to new plantations in the Mascarene Islands, as well as to Cuba and Brazil. The “second Second Slavery” seized people in the hinterlands of the central and northern African coasts, dispatching them to the lands of the northwestern Indian Ocean, from the Swahili Coast to Kathiawar. There, they performed a myriad of tasks in a rapidly commercializing regional economy. In its scale, as well as other aspects, this Second Slavery broke from the earlier northwestern Indian Ocean slave trade. The two Second Slaveries unfolded in similar ways on the African mainland. Capital for the slave trade often originated in India. Cloth, first from India, represented a prestige good with considerable social and political leverage among Africans. Likewise, African ivory was a prestige good, albeit with less clout, first in India, then elsewhere. The social upheaval and violence unleashed by the ivory-cloth trade uprooted people, who became commodities in both Second Slaveries. From the Zambezi Valley to the headwaters of the two Niles, similar processes enslaved Africans and transported them to the Indian Ocean coast, thence to work sites as varied as Persian Gulf pearling vessels and Cuban sugar plantations.