Introduction

Historians had long acknowledged the importance of merchant diasporas and trade networks that linked different parts of a geographically vast and socially, economically, culturally, and politically diverse Indian Ocean world that stretches from the East African coast and Red Sea littoral to insular Southeast Asia and beyond.¹ The work of K.N. Chaudhuri and Ashin Das Gupta inspired other historians to examine the Arab, Armenian, East Asian, Indian, Muslim, and other merchant networks that traversed this oceanic world before the nineteenth century.² Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and other Europeans who became active in this part of the globe after the year 1500 have likewise been a subject of substantial scholarly interest. Historians have paid particular attention to the British East India Company (eic) and the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or voc) and their role as agents of European imperialism and colonialism.³ More recent studies have begun to pay closer attention to the diversity of the cargoes carried across this watery realm and examine hitherto unexplored aspects of this activity including how debt, law, and capitalism’s demands influenced trade in the northwestern Indian Ocean between the late eighteenth- to mid-twentieth centuries.⁴

Missing from these discussions are considerations of merchants’ role in large-scale labor migration in the Indian Ocean world. This omission is not unexpected. Historians of the Atlantic slave trades have paid surprisingly little attention to merchant capital’s role in the exportation of some 12.5 million enslaved African men, women, and children to the Americas and have only recently begun to delve more deeply into how these trades were financed and organized.⁵ A similar historiographical lacuna in Indian Ocean studies reflects, in part, the difficulties inherent in reconstructing slave trading in the Mare Indicum, difficulties that include a relative dearth of sources compared to the Atlantic, the often problematic nature of the sources at our disposal, and their dispersal in archival collections scattered around the globe.⁶ These evidentiary constraints have been compounded by a reluctance to situate the specialized case studies that characterize Indian Ocean studies in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts.⁷ The consequences of this conceptual “tyranny of the particular” are magnified further by a Eurocentrism that discourages consideration of how African and Asian peoples shaped the modern world.⁸

Recent scholarship highlights the need to pay closer attention to merchant capital’s role in shaping major developments in Indian Ocean history. Pedro Machado’s argument that Gujarati merchants were crucial to sustaining commercial activity in Portuguese Mozambique and generating the income upon which depended the Estado da Índia (the Portuguese empire in India) underscores the importance of doing so. He notes, for instance, that in the 1770s, one well-informed Portuguese observer commented that without the Vāniyā merchants in Mozambique, “nothing can exist.”⁹ The necessity of examining merchant capital’s role in transoceanic labor migration is also mandated by the fact that millions of enslaved Africans and Asians were trafficked across and beyond the Indian Ocean basin over the centuries and that the volume of this trade increased significantly after 1600.

Interest in the economics of slave trading in the Indian Ocean has hitherto focused on questions of supply and demand and the political economy of slavery during the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Contextualizing the multi-dimensional relationships that shaped this commerce more fully is essential to developing a deeper understanding of this traffic’s nature and dynamics. As a recent survey of financing the Indian Ocean slave trades illustrates, doing so requires us to look beyond the confines of the nation-based histories that dominate Indian Ocean studies and appreciate the social, economic, and political complexities inherent in the region’s history.¹¹ In the case of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mascarene Islands of Ile de France (Mauritius) and Ile de Bourbon (Réunion), these complexities include the islands’ commercial ties with different regions in India (Bengal, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts), Madagascar, the Swahili Coast (e.g., Kilwa, Zanzibar), Portuguese Mozambique, the voc-controlled Cape Colony, the Persian Gulf, insular Southeast Asia (e.g., Batavia), and the Spanish Río de la Plata as well as metropolitan France.¹² The islands also served as a major commercial entrepôt between 1770 and 1810 that attracted shipping from not only elsewhere in the region but also as far away as northern Europe and the United States.¹³ The complexities of these relationships are further illustrated by studies of Asian merchants and brokers’ role in facilitating European trade and commerce in this oceanic world.¹⁴

1. Merchant Capital and Slave Trading

Assessing the value of the merchant capital that circulated in the Indian Ocean is central to understanding the economics and historical significance of slave trading in this part of the globe. It is well known that individual merchants could and did make substantial fortunes.¹⁵ However, determining the value of regional capital flows is a more difficult task. Archival sources that can shed light on such activity are scarce, especially for Arab/Muslim and Asian merchants. While we know more about the economics of European mercantile activity in the Indian Ocean, the historiographical emphasis on nation-based studies has precluded the development of a more comprehensive picture of European merchant capital and its impact on regional social, economic, and political life.

What we know about European specie and bullion exports to the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries provides a starting point from which to gauge the value of the merchant capital that underpinned long-distance trade and commerce in this part of the globe, including the traffic in chattel labor.¹⁶ As Tables 1, 2, and 3 reveal, Europeans shipped large quantities of mostly silver coinage and bullion to the Indian Ocean between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth century. These figures reveal a dramatic increase in such exports as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, a period that witnessed a significant increase in slave trading driven not only by a growing demand for chattel labor in European settlements and colonies within and beyond the Indian Ocean basin but also by European traders’ ability to satisfy local demands after 1750 that at least part of a slave’s purchase price had to be paid in silver coin.¹⁷

Comparing these bullion exports with the quantities of precious metal that reached the Mughal Empire via the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf attests to their increasing importance. More specifically, we may note that during the three periods when better information about bullion imports into the empire is available, the Portuguese supplied 9 percent of such imports between 1588-1602 while the Dutch and English together supplied 13.9 percent of such imports between 1630-1645, a figure that soared to 26.6 percent between 1679-1685.¹⁸ Unfortunately, similar comparisons cannot be made for the eighteenth century. Still, the dramatic increase in the value of the goods that the eic exported to Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century illustrates the growing importance of European merchant capital in the region’s economy.

The volume of transoceanic slave trading in the Indian Ocean is difficult to ascertain precisely. An estimated 2.4 million Africans were exported from the Red Sea and East African coasts to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and western India between 800 and 1600, with another 2,451,000 such exports into the wider Indian Ocean world between 1600 and 1900.¹⁹ Information on transoceanic slave exports from India remains elusive, but the possible volume of such exports is suggested by a conservative estimate that Indian merchants supplied Southeast Asian states with 600,000 slaves between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁰ Little is likewise known about the volume of slave trading in insular Southeast Asia. Estimates that 660,000-1,135,000 slaves, perhaps 50 percent of whom were trafficked by Chinese and indigenous merchants not associated with the voc, were transported to company-controlled areas in the Indonesian archipelago during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest the possible scale of this traffic.²¹ Other indices of this Southeast Asian traffic’s volume include estimates that Bali and neighboring islands exported 100,000-150,000 slaves between 1620 and 1830, and that the years between 1820 and 1850 witnessed 386,000-437,000 exports from Bali, Batak, Kalimantan, Lombok, Manado, the Mentawai Islands, New Guinea, Nias, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Timor and 280,000-384,000 imports into Aceh (Java), Amboina, Bali, the Banda Islands, Lombok, Kalimantan, Riau, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Ternate.²²

The dispatch of 24 Indian slaves from Cochin (Kochi) on India’s Malabar Coast to Portugal no later than 1510 demonstrates that European involvement in slave trading began soon after Vasco da Gama reached Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1498.²³ The volume of this trade remains difficult to ascertain. Published scholarship suggests that Europeans exported at least 473,700-583,100 African, Indian, Southeast Asian, and other Asian slaves to destinations in the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1850 (Table 4). Future research will undoubtedly increase these estimates significantly. The full extent of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean becomes clearer if the 542,668 slaves projected to have been exported from Madagascar, Mozambique, and the Swahili Coast to the Americas between 1624 and 1860 are added to those trafficked within this oceanic basin.²⁴ These combined figures indicate that Europeans exported a minimum of 1,016,373-1,125,780 African and Asian slaves within and beyond the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century.²⁵

The limited information on slave prices at our disposal makes it difficult to calculate the value of these trades with any precision. Prices could vary widely depending on supplies and the kind of slaves being sought and sold. In 1622, for example, slaves who cost 8 rials each along the Coromandel Coast sold for 20 rials at Surat in Gujarat. Political instability, warfare, and natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and the famines that followed in their wake could depress prices substantially as large numbers of war captives or individuals who sold themselves or their children into slavery in desperate attempts to stay alive flooded Indian markets. In 1618, for example, one pagoda could purchase three or four children around famine-ravaged Tirupapaliyur in southern India; almost two centuries later, a British official reported that the victims of the famine-racking Purnia district and surrounding areas in northern India sold “for [a] less sum than would purchase a Cat or Dog.”²⁶

2. Merchants, Merchant Capital, and the Mascarene Slave Trade

The historiographical and evidentiary problems noted earlier make assessing merchant capital’s role in labor migration in the Indian Ocean a fraught exercise. Published data about the value of regional slave imports and exports is limited to private-sector slave trading at Makassar during the mid-eighteenth century.²⁷ However, the French Compagnie des Indes’ bankruptcy in 1765, the advent of royal rule in the Iles de France et de Bourbon in 1767, and subsequent decrees that opened the colony to free trade by French subjects in 1769, to United States citizens in 1784, and to all other foreign nationals by 1787 generated a body of documentation that allows us to explore the economics of the Mascarene slave trade in some detail.²⁸ Demographic realities underscore the need to do so. In addition to being the destination of two-thirds to four-fifths of all European slave exports to settlements and colonies in the Indian Ocean basin, the Mascarenes consumed approximately 25 percent of all French slave exports between 1770-1810, 40 percent of such exports between 1811-1848, and one-fifth of total French exports between the 1670s and the end of French slave trading in the early 1830s.²⁹

The decrees that opened the Mascarenes to free trade had a profound impact on the islands’ economy. The number of négoçiants (merchants or traders) in Port Louis, the colony’s capital and commercial center, increased more than sevenfold, from 25 in 1776 to 183 in 1808, while the number of ships calling at the port annually rose from 101 in 1773 to a high of 347 in 1803.³⁰ Archival sources confirm the intensity of this traffic in other ways. In addition to the 678 voyages currently known to have delivered slaves to Mauritius and Réunion between 1770 and 1810, another 120 probable/possible and 39 more unsuccessful slaving ventures can be linked with the islands during this period.³¹

Both metropolitan and colonial merchants/merchant houses organized these ventures. At least 230 confirmed/probable/possible voyages involving the islands can be linked explicitly to mercantile interests in France. A majority of these voyages (123) involved merchants/merchant houses in Bordeaux, while others were associated with mercantile interests in Bayonne, Brest, Dieppe, La Rochelle, Le Havre, Lorient, Marseille, Nantes, St. Brieuc, and St. Mâlo. At least 34 of these metropolitan merchants/merchant houses participated in multiple slaving voyages to the islands. Surviving cargo manifests and other sources provide additional insight into the economic aspects of these undertakings. The poleacre L’Agilité, for example, departed Marseille on or about 24 September 1781 with a cargo of wine, foodstuffs, clothing, and other merchandise valued at 124,013 livres 12 sols on a voyage financed by 13 investors who lived in Cadiz (Spain), Paris, Geneva, Genoa, Marseille, Paris, and Vevey (Switzerland). After a six and a half-month-long stay at Port Louis, the ship sailed to the Querimba Islands off the Mozambican coast, where it loaded 270 slaves, 266 of whom survived the return voyage to Port Louis where it arrived on 2 December 1782.³² Seven years later, Le Scipion also left Marseille for Port Louis with a cargo of wine, liquors, soap, foodstuffs, Swedish iron, paper, and other merchandise valued at 126,783 livres 6 sols. Following a six-week-long sojourn at the port, the ship continued to Mongalo (Mgao) on the Swahili Coast, where it loaded 264 slaves from whence it returned on 27 November 1790 via the Seychelles, where it stopped to “refresh” its slave cargo, with 188 slaves still alive.³³

As the archival record reveals, locally-based merchants often facilitated these metropolitan-financed ventures. Their ability to do so stemmed partly from maintaining multi-faceted commercial and other relationships in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. When La Petite Dorade sailed from the Ile de France for Mozambique to trade for slaves in May 1788, it did so with a 22-man crew supplied by Janvier Monneron, a prominent local merchant acting on behalf of Louis Bourdon of Bordeaux.³⁴ The following year, Pitot Frères et C^ie, another prominent local merchant house, sold the 395 slaves consigned to it from the cargo of La Ville de Bordeaux, outfitted by the Bordelaise firm of Henry Romberg, Bapst et C^ie, for 428,460 livres to two ship captains who, acting on behalf of two other Bordelaise merchants/merchant houses, planned to deliver these slaves to Saint Domingue.³⁵ On 21 May 1787, Port Louis négoçiant René André Oury authorized Sieur Catel, an officer on the Spanish corvette La Pepita, to dispose of the ship’s cargo. It included the slaves that Nicholas Thomas Baudin, the ship’s owner and captain, planned to acquire and carry to Louisiana if Baudin died or failed to return to the Ile de France.³⁶

As the history of Janvier Monneron and his brothers attests, Mascarene merchants actively cultivated commercial relationships throughout the Indian Ocean as well.³⁷ Portuguese Mozambique exported an estimated 125,306 slaves to the Mascarenes between 1733-99.³⁸ Archival sources confirm that 228 cargoes of Mozambican origin reached the islands, at least 31 of which arrived on Portuguese vessels, and point to the arrival of another 73 probable/possible such cargoes, mostly between 1770 and 1809.³⁹ The Mauritian notarial record provides other examples of these Mascarene-Mozambican links, such as Captain Manuel Justinian Dasnevez (or Dasneves) selling the 250-ton Bailli de Suffren, also called La Stella d’Affrica, to Port Louis négoçiant Jean Philippe Pilliet in May 1786 for 100,000 livres after having received permission from the Portuguese governor at Ibo to do so.⁴⁰

Gujarati merchants in Mozambique also became involved in the Mascarene trade no later than 1780 when the Portuguese La Ste. Antoine d’Alinas left Mozambique with a 28-man crew supplied by Assan Valy, a resident négoçiant maure (Muslim merchant), and 217 slaves freighted to Port Louis merchant Pierre Antoine Monneron.⁴¹ As the activities of Sobhachand Sowchand attest, these Gujarati merchants became increasingly involved in the Mascarene trade, often as financiers, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In late 1805 or early 1806 Sowchand purchased the ship General Isidro from Joaquim do Rosário Monteiro, a prominent merchant originally from Goa who began to trade slaves between Mozambique and Mauritius in 1788. In November 1806, the ship, which had already carried three slave cargoes to Mauritius in 1803-04 and two such cargoes to the Cape Colony in 1804-05, sailed again for Port Louis loaded with Mozambican slaves only to be captured by the British. In 1806 and 1807, Sowchand also purchased two slavers in Port Louis in partnership with Portuguese merchants.⁴² Other examples of Indian merchant involvement include the Mahamay Kamat family in Goa facilitating the transshipment of Mozambican slaves to Mauritius via this Portuguese enclave no later than 1777.⁴³

Colonial merchants’ involvement in the trade stemmed from their ability to mobilize the financial resources needed to mount these ventures. L’Aventurier, for example, carried cargo worth 35,871 livres when it sailed from Port Louis to Querimba in January 1777 to purchase slaves, with the total known expenses incurred during the voyage (including 28,884 livres to buy 318 slaves) amounting to 70,590 livres.⁴⁴ In 1783, Emmanuel Touche du Pujol and his associates invested more than 109,000 livres in sending Le Bollé to Mozambique; ten years later, dispatching Le Bon Père to Mozambique required almost 154,000 livres.⁴⁵ Their ability to mobilize these resources allowed some local merchants/merchant houses to become deeply involved in the trade. Sieurs Armand Cloupet, Bouchet, and Le Blanc and Rolland, for example, each organized at least five slaving voyages. Also, the firms of Le Roux K/morseven, Oury et C^ie and Janvier Monneron et C^ie both organized at least four such ventures. The capital resources available to Mascarene-based merchants are perhaps best illustrated by Port Louis merchant Paul de la Bauve d’Arifat’s organization of a consortium of four firms that mobilized more than 3.8 million livres to send seven ships to China in 1782 and 1783 to trade for porcelain, silk, and tea.⁴⁶

This capital came from various sources. Profits from the colony’s trade with Africa and India during the 1780s and 1790s were such that local voyage investors were often promised 25-35 percent returns on their investment.⁴⁷ Individual slaving ventures could be very profitable. L’Aventurier’s owners and investors hoped to sell the ship’s slave cargo for 150,000 livres, a potential profit of 112 percent over known expenses. In 1820, Le Succès realized a 133 percent return over known expenses from its first voyage to Zanzibar.⁴⁸ The promise of such lucrative returns induced some of the colony’s inhabitants to invest in such ventures; between April and June 1784, Pierre Bertrand and Pitot Frères, co-armateurs (outfitters) of Le Maréchal de Castries destined to Kilwa to acquire slaves, secured 118,000 livres in amounts ranging from 3,000-15,000 livres from 22 local investors who were promised a 4 percent per month return on their investment.⁴⁹ The intracolonial trade could also be remunerative. The 36 slaves purchased in Mauritius and then carried to Réunion in May 1787, probably by Louis Bonneau, yielded a 12.8 percent return on the original purchase price of 32,400 livres.⁵⁰

Privateering during the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Anglo-French wars provided additional capital resources. One Nantais merchant realized a net profit of 1.3 million livres from his investment in four Mascarene-based privateers during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748).⁵¹ In September 1781, Pitot Frères reported that the prizes taken by Mascarene-based privateers since 1778, when France declared war on Britain during the American War of Independence, had been sold for 12 million livres, a sum equal to only one-half of their true value given the depredations that occurred on board of these vessels at the time of their capture.⁵² Individual privateering voyages could be extraordinarily lucrative. In September 1781, Pitot Frères reported that a share in the privateer La Philippine purchased for 1,200 livres was now worth 7,481 livres.⁵³ Privateering during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras was equally, if not more, lucrative. According to one contemporary source, Mascarene-based privateers captured Anglo-Indian and allied shipping worth £2.5 million between 1793 and mid-1804.⁵⁴ Maritime historian Auguste Toussaint estimated that Mascarene-based privateers and French frigates operating in the Indian Ocean took prizes worth 47.7-72.0 million francs between 1793 and 1810.⁵⁵

The fact that some of these prizes carried large quantities of specie and bullion further enhanced colonial merchants’ capital resources and liquidity. The treasure removed from the Laurel, an English ship captured in 1797, included 954 pounds of silver ingots, 6,063 écus d’empire (probably silver Maria Theresa thalers or dollars [MT$]), 5,642 écus turcs, 10,610 Indian rupees, and 1,879 other gold and high-value silver coins of Arab, Indian, Turkish, and Venetian origin, as well as so much smaller denomination coinage that it was weighed rather than counted.⁵⁶ Adequate supplies of specie were crucial to facilitating regional trade. Surviving cargo manifests reveal that some French ships left port with large quantities of piastres or Spanish silver dollars ($) on board. Such was the case when Le Consolateur sailed from Marseille for the Ile de France, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal on 12 January 1784 with $50,000 on board; three years later, L’Olimpe left Marseille for Mauritius carrying $13,005, while in February 1792, L’Indien loaded six chests containing $18,600 at Bordeaux before sailing to the Ile de France and India.⁵⁷ Ships destined for the Mascarenes early in the nineteenth century could likewise carry large quantities of piastres, as was the case with the Le Général Moreau, outfitted at St. Mâlo, which left for Mauritius on 27 January 1803 with $7,810 on board. References to the number of piastres carried on French slavers that operated from the islands attest to the need for and availability of large quantities of coinage. In 1792, Le Saveur de l’Ile de France left Port Louis for Kilwa with $8,074 on board; the following year, the captain of Le Paquebot reported that his second mate had saved $2,000 and 20 slaves when the ship’s cutter sank while returning to Kilwa from Guingera [sic] where he had purchased slaves.⁵⁸

Despite the limited and problematic information at our disposal, it is possible to estimate the Mascarene slave trade’s value and regional economic impact. Calculations based on slave prices, projected African and Malagasy slave exports to the islands, and an 1820 report that 35 percent of a Malagasy slave’s purchase price had to be paid in coin, suggest that Malagasy, Mozambican, and African dealers on the Swahili Coast realized at least $3.5-$4.7 million and perhaps as much as $4.0-$5.9 million from the sale of slaves destined for the Mascarenes between 1770 and 1810, at least $1,241,000-$2,047,00 of which was paid in silver coin.⁵⁹ This last figure is in line with Pedro Machado’s estimate that French slavers paid as much as $1.5 million in coin to Portuguese and Gujarati merchants in Mozambique during the 1790s, silver which contributed to Gujarati bankers’ ability to discount the bills of exchange that were crucial to commercial activity in the region.⁶⁰ These estimates undoubtedly understate the trade’s economic impact because they do not consider the taxes, commissions, brokerage fees, and other expenses that a voyage incurred. A report that it cost $31 in 1818-19 to ship a Malagasy slave purchased for $50 to Mauritius, coupled with information about the taxes, brokerage fees, and other expenses that Le Succès incurred during slaving voyages to Zanzibar in 1820-1821 (see below), suggest that the Mascarene trade’s financial impact between 1770 and 1810 can be increased by at least 40 percent, to a minimum of $4,962,000 and perhaps as much as $8,228,000.

Comparing the amount of specie that the Mascarene trade may have injected into the regional economy with the amount of precious metal exported from France to India during the late eighteenth century provides a fuller sense of its possible regional economic impact. French ships carried coined money and ingots worth 41,455,000 livres to India between 1770 and 1790.⁶¹ Calculations based on an average exchange rate of 7 livres 7 sols to the piastre during this period suggest that the Mascarene trade consumed the equivalent of at least 11.0-18.2 percent of the value of the precious metal shipped from France to India during the 1770s and 1780s.

Mauritius and Réunion’s capture by a British expeditionary force in 1810 inaugurated a new era in the history of the Mascarene trade. In 1811, the islands became subject to the 1807 parliamentary act that prohibited British subjects from trading slaves, a ban that remained in place in Mauritius and its lesser dependencies, such as the Seychelles, following their cession to Britain in 1814. Slave trading to the Ile de Bourbon became legal again following that island’s return to French control in 1814 and remained so until 1818 when France abolished its slave trade. Despite these bans, an estimated 119,000-145,000 East African, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves were exported to the islands between 1811 and the early 1830s.⁶²

Both metropolitan and colonial mercantile interests participated actively in this illicit traffic. The 89 ships known to have been involved in the illegal trade to Réunion between 1818 and the early 1830s hailed from Bordeaux, Honfleur, Marseille, Nantes, Paimbeuf, and St. Mâlo while the island’s residents outfitted at least 79 of the 212-216 known/probable slaving voyages during this period.⁶³ Unfortunately, the number of illicit voyages to Mauritius remains unknown. Still, the scale of this traffic is suggested by reports that Le Coureur landed an average of 150-200 Malagasy slaves on the island during each of six voyages in 1819 and 1820, and by an estimate that 52,550 slaves reached the island between 1811 and circa 1826.⁶⁴

Papers recovered from the captured slaver Le Succès provide an opportunity to examine the financial aspects of this illicit traffic in greater detail. Constructing and outfitting the ship in France cost 156,586.89 francs, of which 34,222.30 francs went to procuring approximately $6,518 piastres. The ship’s captain purchased 248 slaves for $6,474 at Zanzibar between 28 June and 30 August 1820; taxes, brokerage fees, and miscellaneous expenses at Zanzibar raised this cargo’s cost to $9,465. Disembarkation fees, food, guards, a doctor’s services, “gratuities” to local authorities, and commissions added another $5,592.55 in expenses when the ship arrived at Réunion, where the 226 slaves who survived the middle passage sold for $35,157, a 133 percent return on the voyage’s known expenses. On December 28^th, the ship loaded $5,548 and 4,452 écus d’empire before beginning a second voyage to Zanzibar, where it acquired 309 men, women, and male youths between 10 February and 4 March 1821 for $6,947. Taxes and expenses increased the cost of this cargo to $10,314. This investment proved, however, to be a total loss when hms Menai captured the ship on 21 March 1821 near the Amirantes in the Seychelles archipelago.⁶⁵ Other indications of the illegal trade’s profitability include contemporary observers’ reports that slaves purchased for $20-$25 on the East African coast sold for $100-$200 in Mauritius and that Mozambican slaves who sold for $150 on Réunion in 1821 fetched $300-$400 in the Seychelles.⁶⁶

Assessing the illegal trade’s regional economic impact is problematic. Projections based on known slave prices, estimated exports to the islands between 1811 and 1848, and the 1820 report on the Malagasy demand for payment in silver coin mentioned earlier suggest that East African, Malagasy, and Mozambican traders realized $3,523,000-$5,056,000 from the sale of slaves destined for the Mascarenes between 1811 and circa 1833, at least $1,233,000-$1,769,000 of which was paid in coin.⁶⁷ These figures are broadly consistent with Machado’s estimate that as much as $2.9 million in specie circulated in the region between 1811 and 1831.⁶⁸ If allowance is made for the taxes, brokerage fees, commissions and other expenses inevitably incurred during these voyages, the total value of the illegal Mascarene trade may be increased to an estimated $4,932,000-$7,074,000.

The Mascarene trade influenced political as well as economic life in the region. The trade’s dramatic expansion after 1770 played an important role in the rise of the Merina kingdom in highland Madagascar during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its subsequent relations with Britain and France.⁶⁹ The capitation tax levied on slaves exported from Tamatave was a significant source of government revenue, adding almost $33,000 to royal coffers in 1821.⁷⁰ The kingdom’s adoption of autarchy during the 1820s has been attributed to the loss of this revenue after an Anglo-Merina treaty banned slave exports from Merina-controlled ports in 1820.⁷¹ The 1822 Moresby Treaty, which restricted slave exports from the Omani possessions on the Swahili Coast, cost Sultan Seyyid Said mt$40,000-mt$ 50,000 a year in lost revenue. This loss figured prominently in his decision to establish clove plantations in Zanzibar and Pemba, a development that spurred a massive expansion of slave trading in East Africa during the nineteenth century.⁷²

3. Merchant Capital and Post-Abolition Labor Migration

The illegal Mauritian and Réunionnais trades’ demise circa 1826 and 1832, respectively, and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 spurred the migration of more than 2.2 million African, Chinese, Indian, Melanesian, and other indentured or contractual workers throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world between the mid-1830s and the early twentieth century.⁷³ This labor diaspora’s origins are usually traced to British abolitionists’ desire to end slavery by demonstrating the superiority of “free” contractual over slave labor in the production of tropical commodities, especially sugar, for imperial and global markets. Mauritius, which received more indentured laborers than any other colony (452,602 two-thirds of whom were Indian), was the crucial test case for the use of such labor after 1834.⁷⁴ Réunion would receive 113,404 indentured laborers between the 1840s and 1880s, two-thirds of whom were also of Indian origin.

Interest in the indentured labor system, often characterized as a “new system of slavery,” has focused principally on these workers’ recruitment, living and working conditions, the nature and dynamics of labor control and resistance, and debating whether these laborers were “free” or “unfree” persons.⁷⁵ Unfortunately, these discussions had ignored the economics of indentured labor migration before the early 1840s, when private commercial interests governed this system’s operation. Recent scholarship highlights the need to pay closer attention to merchants and merchant capital’s role in early indentured labor migration. More specifically, we may note that the eic played a major role in facilitating the first experiment using these agricultural laborers when it became responsible for recruiting and transporting 200 Chinese workers to Trinidad in 1806. Although this experiment failed, the company’s interest in indentured Chinese laborers led to plans to obtain such workers for its colony of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. In 1809, officials on St. Helena asked British merchants at Canton to engage 50 Chinese to work on the island, and the following year the island housed 53 Chinese workers, a number that increased to 643 in 1817 before declining during the 1820s.⁷⁶

The collapse of the illegal Mascarene trades prompted Mauritian and Réunionnais officials and planters to consider using indentured workers to supply the labor needed by the islands’ rapidly expanding sugar industries. In 1827, Réunion’s governor resurrected an 1820 proposal to introduce such workers to the island. The following year, Mauritian governor Sir Lowry Cole encouraged a Parsi merchant from Bombay to import indentured Indians into the colony.⁷⁷ A year later, in 1829, approximately 1,500 Chinese and Indian indentured laborers recruited by Guillardin and Co. reached Mauritius. By 1830, more than 3,100 indentured Indians had arrived in Réunion via the former French slave-trading enclaves of Pondichéry (Puducherry), Karikal (Karaikal), and Yanam.⁷⁸ Unfortunately, little is known about these workers’ recruitment and transportation to the islands. Several years later, however, James Edward Arbuthnot’s involvement on behalf of Hunter Arbuthnot and Company in Mauritius in recruiting and delivering 36 dhangars or “Hill Coolies” (tribal hill people) to Mauritius in November 1834 indicates that commercial interests in both the colony and India were involved. The Arbuthnot family owned a chain of commercial firms in India as well as having commercial interests in Mauritius.⁷⁹

Conclusion

Historians’ preoccupation with reconstructing the nature and impact of slave and cognate migrant labor systems often obscures that the trades which supplied planters and others with these workers were business enterprises committed to making a profit and that, as the old adage goes, “it takes money to make money.” Examining how merchant capital shaped labor migration in the Indian Ocean bears directly on our understanding of slavery and indenture in this oceanic world and, by extension, other significant developments in this region’s rich and complex social, economic, cultural, and political history. Several historical realities mandate the need to do so: the volume of slave trading in the Indian Ocean world increased dramatically during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the slave, convict, and indentured labor trades became increasingly intertwined with one another during this period, and European slave trading was a truly global rather than just an Atlantic phenomenon.⁸⁰

The Mascarene case study highlights the need to explore the commercial connections that linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in greater detail. As the disposal of La Ville de Bordeaux’s slave cargo and René André Oury’s dealings with Sieur Catel attest, these commercial ties could be complex and reach across vast expanses. The activities of individuals such as Janvier Monneron and firms such as Pitot Frères likewise demonstrate the need to pay close attention to the role that colonial and not just metropolitan mercantile interests played in shipping hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and Asians across and between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins.

The Mascarene case study, together with Machado’s study of Gujarati merchants in the western Indian Ocean and a recent reappraisal of the historiographical significance of Joseph C. Miller’s Way of Death, likewise reveals that historians of capitalism must shake off the Euro- and Atlantic-centrism that dominates discussions about merchant capitalism and pay closer attention to how non-European mercantile interests shaped local and regional, if not global, histories.⁸¹ The Mauritian notarial record provides additional tantalizing glimpses of such activity. On 8 March 1814, for example, Zacharie Arlanda, an Indian merchant originally from Pondichéry but now living in Port Louis, formalized his purchase of the three-masted, 200-ton La Constance from Johan Michael Christjanie, who lived in Gresik, Java, for $15,000 to be paid in silver or gold coin at Java.⁸² Nine years later, Annassamy, a négoçiant indien residing in Port Louis, formalized his purchase of two sugar estates encompassing 765 arpents (798 acres) together with another small parcel of land, 285 slaves, a steam-powered sugar mill and its appurtenances, various livestock, and other equipment for the staggering sum of $178,850.⁸³ In so doing, Annassamy established the precedent for subsequent Indian merchant investment in the Mauritian sugar industry.⁸⁴ Indian merchants and businessmen not only bought and sold local sugar estates but also provided the funds needed to finance estate operations and assumed responsibility for marketing the sugar these estates produced.⁸⁵

Acts such as these demonstrate that to ignore Asian merchant capital’s role in shaping the colonial experience in the Indian Ocean is to leave us with an incomplete, if not potentially distorted, understanding of this oceanic world’s complex history, a point reinforced by scholarship on South Indian Chettiar moneylenders in colonial Southeast Asia.⁸⁶ Such developments indicate that historians of capitalism can no longer ignore the Indian Ocean and Asia or overlook the complexities of the relationships that shaped mercantile activity on the ground in the colonial world.⁸⁷ Equally important, such developments mandate that Indian Oceanists and Asianists strive to expand their conceptual horizons to include addressing the kind of provocative questions that historians of capitalism put before us.