While the Atlantic slave trade has dominated the reparations debate, the Indian Ocean slave trade represents an equally significant and far longer-running dimension of African enslavement that receives almost no attention in discussions of reparations.
East African coastal communities had been integrated into Indian Ocean trading networks for centuries before European arrival. Arab, Persian, and later Indian merchants traded along the Swahili Coast, and enslaved people were among the commodities exchanged. Enslaved Africans were transported to the Arabian Peninsula, to Persia, to India, and to islands in the Indian Ocean including Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands.
The Omani Arab sultanate based first in Oman and later in Zanzibar dominated the East African slave trade from the seventeenth century onward. Under Omani rule, Zanzibar became the largest slave market in the world in the nineteenth century, processing tens of thousands of enslaved people annually. Enslaved people were traded north to Arabia and the Gulf, and were also used extensively in the clove plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba.
The scale of the Indian Ocean trade is difficult to quantify precisely, but historians estimate that between one and two million enslaved Africans were transported through Indian Ocean routes in the nineteenth century alone, at the same time as the Atlantic trade was being suppressed by the Royal Navy. The trade continued in parts of East Africa and Arabia into the early twentieth century.
Britain did eventually apply diplomatic and naval pressure to suppress the Indian Ocean trade, as it had the Atlantic trade, though with less sustained effort. The point for the reparations argument is not to deflect from British responsibility for the Atlantic trade, but to insist on an honest and complete historical picture rather than a selective one.
