This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans....

The image of Arabs in East Africa has been forged through economic and social relations dating back many centuries, but particularly since the rise of the Omani Arab Sultanate of Zanzibar in the 19th century and the British decision to replicate that social order along the coastal strip of...

This article examines the enslaved African population in early New York City, with a particular focus on those who may have been Muslims. Beyond exceptional individuals, the information on African Muslims is scarce and speculative, but it would appear that there were such individuals, mostly...

The conventional historiography claims that the East African slave trade came to an end in the 1880s as a result of the British Royal Navy’s diligent patrols in the Indian Ocean. This paper argues instead that the slave trade from East Africa to Eastern Arabia endured long after the 1880s, in...

The trans-Atlantic slave trade is considered by many to have been a major shock to Africa, one that transformed African economies and contributed to long-term poverty. In this paper I combine data from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and the Anglo-African Trade Statistics to document some...

The profits of the Liverpool slave trade are infamous, if somewhat more realistically represented in recent literature. Contemporaries and historians have posited that these higher profits were required to entice merchants into the trade because of the higher risks. However, there is very little...

What is the root cause of Africa’s current state of under-development? Is it the long history of slave trade, or the legacy of extractive colonial institutions, or the fallout of malaria? A precise answer still eludes us. This paper investigates the relative contribution of these historical...

This paper attempts to discuss the implications of the European slave trade in the Indian Ocean from 15th century onwards; duplicity of the European policy of slave trade; the conflict of interests among the Europeans themselves; and how the slave trade had flourished, to replace Indian...

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave...