• DOI:10.1353/jwh.2003.0026
• Corpus ID: 145450338

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

@article{Vink2003TheWO,
  title={"The World's Oldest Trade": Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century},
  author={Markus P. M. Vink},
  journal={Journal of World History},
  year={2003},
  volume={14},
  pages={131 - 177}
}

• Markus P. M. Vink
• Published 27 May 2003
• History, Economics
• Journal of World History

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.