"The World's Oldest Trade": Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This article discusses various aspects of slavery and the slave trade of the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean world: the markets of supply and demand or geographic origins and destinations of slaves; the routes to slavery or the diverse means of recruitment of forced labor; the miscellaneous occupations performed by company and private slaves; the size of Dutch slavery and the volume of the accompanying annual slave trade; and the various forms of slave resistance and slave revolt. The discussion transcends the ahistorical, incomplete, descriptive, static, one-dimensional picture and conventional generalized abstractions of slavery that characterize much of traditional scholarship. Instead, an alternative historicized, holistic, analytical, dynamic, multidimensional, and open model is suggested-one that is sensitive to chronological and geographic variations, socioeconomic and political contexts, and cross-cultural interactions.

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