Ewald, Janet. "Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1914". The American Historical Review, Vol.105, No.1 (2000): 69-91.

Ewald, Janet. "Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1914". The American Historical Review, Vol.105, No.1 (2000): 69-91.

• The author defines the Northwestern Indian Basin as the region of water between the West coast of India, the Arabian peninsula, and the East African coast down to Cape Delgado (72).
• Although intercourse between the Atlantic and Indian sailing community was not common in the early Modern period, life at sea was similar in both areas. Ships acted as independent administrative units with strict hierarchies, and their crews received wages and customary space in cargo to conduct personal trading (72).
• The seasonal breaks in sailing caused by the monsoon in the Indian Ocean spurred a frequent exchange in the Indian Ocean between sailors and dockworkers or other land-based laborers. Frequently, sailors would take on other work during the 2-month gap in sailing caused by the monsoon (73).
• Ships in the Indian Ocean often featured slaves as members of the crew, especially ships based in Arabia, where there was not a large pool of available labor for work on ships (72-73, 78).
• The mobility of labor on the Indian Ocean gave slaves many opportunities for alternatives to servitude. Some fled inland at port cities to join free laboring populations, while others bought freedom from trading, and still others were manumitted for good service on the condition that they remain employees on that boat of their former master (73).
• Most former slaves, in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, remained involved in port work of sailing, partially because other markets were difficult to enter into, and partly because those were the skills that they had acquired (75).
• Prior to the late 1700s, European ships in the Indian Ocean largely depended on local sailors to supply them or make up for lost men, with these Asian or Africans having similar experiences to European sailors. In the late 1700s, however, the British especially created systems of regulation that increasingly restricted labor mobility by requiring eventual return to home ports and created racial distinctions by paying Europeans three to five times the Asian wage (75-76).
• The restrictions on the movement of Asian sailors, enshrined in the Asiatic Articles, made them easier to control and cheaper to recruit than their European counterparts, bolstered by contracts preventing them from abandoning ship at interesting or wealthy ports. Accordingly, Indian Ocean sailing came to be dominated by Asian and African sailors throughout the 19th Century (76).
• The sudden decline in European demand for slaves in the Americas caused a rapid drop in the price of slaves in Africa, prompting a massive increase in the intra-African slave trade and the growth of plantations throughout Africa. Slave plantations became particularly prevalent in the Nile valley, Ethiopia, and the East African coast, specifically the Somalian coast and the area around Zanzibar (77).
• Many of the laborers and sailors responsible for the production and transportation of commodity and consumer goods exported from Africa during the 19th Century were slaves, and by the 1830s the majority of sailors and overland porters were slaves (77-79).
• The practice of slavery, especially in sailing and port cities in the western Indian Ocean, continued well into the 20th Century despite decades of official abolition. Slaves constituted such a large portion of the population and did so many transport-related jobs that their presence was ubiquitous (79).
• The massive need for labor to support the export industry of East Africa during the 19th Century led to increased social mobility for slaves, who as physically mobile populations had more power to make demands of masters. Slaves frequently deserted their masters, leading to more lenient systems of slavery and increased manumission to avoid this scenario (79-80).
• Increased numbers of slaves in the western Indian Ocean were part of a more general trend during that time period of the growth of commerce in the western Indian Ocean. The population of Medina and Zanzibar both likely doubled or quadrupled during the mid-1800s, largely due to increased trade (78).
• The populations of the western Indian Ocean, however, varied seasonally, and it is likely that a large portion of the population would leave after the monsoon had finished, as more were involved in trade than production (78).
• "Steam liners indeed represented the British Empire in microcosm, with European passengers divided by class and crew divided by both rank and race. Order, efficiency, and punctuality relied on hierarchy, discipline, industrial engines, and the labor of imperial subjects" (81).
• The efficiency and punctuality of steam ships was not reflected in the port work to support them, which became more irregular with the increased efficiency of steam transport. Work was intense for a brief period as laborers struggled to get the steam ship ready to leave on time, then quickly became idle when the ship left (82).
• British military activities required another kind of port work, demanded huge numbers of men who could work steadily and intense on a project before it would suddenly end and they would be returned to their home ports. Failing to successfully recruit such large numbers of workers themselves, the British often outsourced their labor demands to local press gangs (82).
• Aden was the largest and most active port in the world by 1900 and serviced nearly all steam ships going between the Suez Canal and India (82). Since Yemen did not have a large enough population to build these facilities, the British imported large numbers of workers and convicts from India, but eventually turned to Arabs and Somalis to fill labor shortages, in particular drawing from populations of escaped slaves (82-83).
• The British depended on the same system of press gangs and labor brokers to supply labor for building the ports of Suakin and Port Sudan in the late 1800s, giving a contract to Greek or Yemeni merchants you brought over large numbers of Yemenis to work on the facilities before sending them back home (84).
• The engine rooms of steam ships came to be almost entirely staffed by African, Indian, and Yemeni labor as justified by racialist arguments that these groups were more amenable to discipline and hard work than Europeans. These arguments were also used to justify the terrible living conditions of engine workers, arguing that it was fine for non-Whites (85).
• Even in engine rooms, the work was divided racially. Africans were more likely than other non-White groups to work in the engine rooms as opposed to on the deck, and the most dangerous jobs in the engine room were almost exclusively reserved for Africans (87-88).
• Steam ships in the 19th Century either used standard terms of hire of the contractual Asiatic Articles depending on their needs for labor. Generally regular line steamers hired Asian or African sailors under the Asiatic Articles to reduce the likelihood of sailors jumping ship at ports, requiring extra time for recruitment, whereas 'tramp' steamers without schedules hired any laborers under standard terms for single voyages, since need for labor varied constantly (86-87).
• Typically, Yemeni and Somali sailors made up the vast majority of the regular laborers on tramp steamers, whereas Indian laborers or other Africans were unable to secure these position due to lack of connections to labor contractors in the ports, and thus labored only under the Asiatic Articles (88).
• Those workers on standard employment had much greater opportunities for labor mobility and resettlement across the British world, whereas workers -- mainly Africans -- employed under the Asiatic Articles were prevented from establishing livelihood outside of certain areas, often restrict them to certain kinds of work (91).
• "Slaves were simultaneously forms of investment, members of entourages, and workers. Even people with relatively little cash could invest in slaves, whose abundance made them cheap. As workers, slaves eased labor bottlenecks in the ports and ships of the expanding, yet seasonal, commercial economy [...] When market prices for slaves rose, their masters could transform workers into commodities and sell them at a profit" (89).