Human Trafficking at Sea

The editors of the At Sea issue of WSQ were inspired in combining these two books for a single review. They are totally different in discipline, period, geographic focus, and style of research and writing. But there is an enormous synergy between these two works. They both, in their unique ways, focus on human trafficking and the difficult passages across the sea that individuals have had to endure in the past and continue to suffer from today.

Many readers will not be aware of the persistence of slavery at sea. Many think that slavery was ended with the British prohibition on the slave trade in 1807. But this was far from the end of slavery in the nineteenth century as Mathew's copiously researched book points out. Moreover, labor trafficking, a contemporary form of slavery, endures on the fishing boats that sail the vast seas to fill the increasing world population's insatiable desire for fish and seafood.

Johan Mathew, a historian, has pored through historical records of the Arabian Sea in order to understand a phenomenon that is rarely discussed—the persistence and endurance of illicit trade. Looking at the trade routes that linked Indian traders with the Arab world and East Africa, we learn of phenomena that are familiar to us—human trafficking, child exploitation, and arms trade—but in a context that few of us are familiar with.

In Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea, Mathew is writing about the period after the 1807 Slave Trade Act. This act had an impact that went far beyond the borders of the island kingdom. Britain at that time was not only a major colonial power with a global empire but had an influence on many countries because of its dominance of the sea. British financial and diplomatic pressure ensured that by the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna, Holland, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain had all taken steps against the slave trade (Quirk 2011, 60). But often these legal actions were mostly symbolic. For even after the passage of this law, a significant illicit trade persisted in many regions of the world in the nineteenth century, including West Africa, East Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, and India, and slaves were shipped to North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It is the linkages of East Africa, the Arabian Sea, and India that are Mathew's particular focus in the historical record.

The British efforts to suppress the slave trade started in the Atlantic Ocean and later extended to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. In 1822 Britain began the effort to ban the slave trade in the Arabian Sea. The British negotiated with the Sultan of Muscat and Zanzibar, and efforts continued for the next few decades to curtail slavery in East Africa. But these efforts were often no more than window dressing, Mathew concludes, after examining the trade records of the region. A slave trade went in two directions. Child slaves were imported from Hyderabad in India, a trade that was justified in terms of the welfare of the children and the absence of food in their home country (Mathew 2016, 53–54) and "[t]he export of slaves from East Africa continued on a significant scale for a quarter of a century even after the abolition treaties of 1873" (55).

According to Mathew, key to the continuation of the slave trade was the British desire not to promote discontent among the local elites in the region who benefited from the slave trade (54). Therefore, despite their rhetoric, the British were complicit in the endurance of the slave trade. This insight is just part of the valuable picture that Mathew constructs for the reader.

In Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea, Couper, Smith, and Ciceri examine the human trafficking that is now so pervasive on the...