Carter, Marina. "Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean". History Compass, Vol.4, No.5 (2006): 800-813.

Carter, Marina. "Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean". History Compass, Vol.4, No.5 (2006): 800-813.

• The entrance of Europeans into the Indian Ocean marked a turning point in the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean, as Europeans were willing to purchase large volumes of slaves produced by the expansionist wars of the Kingdom of Arakan, spurning larger raids on Bengali populations for the purpose of acquiring slaves (801).
• Both the Netherlandish trade in Arakan and the Portuguese habit of raiding small settlements on the Ganges for slaves provoked the ire of the Mughal Empire, which prohibited such activities. As a result, organized slaving in the eastern Indian Ocean had virtually ceased by the turn of the 18th Century (801).
• Europeans replaced these supplies of slaves with new, 'more docile', slaves generated by famines throughout India. Whenever famine compelled people to sell themselves into slavery, the Europeans were willing to purchase and feed those people (801).
• Europeans were not the only merchants engaging in the slave trade produced by famine, as both Hindu and Muslim Indians were involved in the slave trade during this period, providing forced labor to plantations in Indonesia and Southeast Asia (802).
• "The confluence of food crisis and political instability meant favourable conditions for the slave traders – an ample supply of slaves, and distracted local governments unable to enforce restrictions" (805).
• The same factors which had produced large numbers of slaves to be purchased by Europeans throughout prior centuries now constituted a problem for British colonial rule in India, as the newly abolitionist British struggled to stop starving Indians from selling themselves or their children into slavery (802).
• Some sources indicate that slavery of Indians was certainly present in Portuguese society, with one monograph revealing that a number of Indian slaves worked alongside Africans as dockworkers in Lisbon (804).
• The Netherlandish in particular were involved in fulfilling the slave demands of plantations in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and are estimated to have transported between 26,000 and 38,000 Indian slaves to Sri Lanka, Malacca, Java, and elsewhere during the 1600s (805).
• Several thousand of these Indian slaves, mainly Bengalis, came to work in the Cape of South Africa when it was a Netherlandish colony. Life for slaves varied incredibly, between cruel plantation labor, temporary servitude, and intermarriage with the White community in the Cape (805-806).
• The occupations of slaves in the Indian Ocean were diverse, including domestic servitude, construction work, agriculture, as sailors, or manufacturing. Most slaves in port cities worked in the docks, while those in Indonesia were forced into spice cultivation, and slaves in Sri Lanka worked on plantations or built fortifications. Sometimes slaves were bought with specific skills in mind, so that slaves maintained their former occupation (805).
• The social distinctions between slaves and other classes of laborers were not explicitly clear in the Indian Ocean until the 19th Century, with slaves often becoming freed or incorporated into the rest of society, and freemen, especially sailors, often discovering that they had actually been sold as slaves without being informed (810-811).