Satisfying the “Want for Labouring People”: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850

A review of published scholarship on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean indicates that between 1500 and 1850, Europeans shipped a minimum of 431,000 to 547,000 slaves of African, Indian, and Southeast Asian origin to destinations within this oceanic basin. These data and available information about the nature and dynamics of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean region point to the development of an increasingly integrated global movement of chattel and other kinds of forced labor from the sixteenth through mid nineteenth centuries.