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Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed. 26 The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia. 27 Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s

Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed.The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia.Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Many of the ethnic groups in the ethnicity sample do not map cleanly into one country. The quantitatively most important ethnic groups that fall into this category include: the Ana, Ewe, Fon, Kabre, and Popo, who occupied land in modern Benin and Togo; the Kongo, who resided in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola; the Makonde, localized within Mozambique and Tanzania; the Malinke, who occupied lived within Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Guinea Bissau; the Nalu, from Guinea Bissau and Guinea; the Teke, living in land within Gabon, Congo, and Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Yao from Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. In cases such as these, the total number of slaves from each ethnic group was divided between the countries using information from George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. Ethnic groups were first mapped to his classification of over 800 ethnic groups for Africa. Using a digitized version of a map provided in his book and GIS software, the proportion of land area in each country occupied by the ethnic group was calculated. These proportions were then used as weights to disaggregate the total number of slaves of an ethnicity between the countries. Using the ethnicity sample, an estimate of the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country that would have come from each inland country is calculated. Using these figures, the number of slaves that came from all countries in Africa, both coastal and inland, is then calculated. Because over time, slaves were increasingly being taken from further inland, the estimation procedure is performed separately for each of the following four time periods: 14001599, 1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1900. In other words, for each time period, the shipping data and ethnicity data from that time period only is used in the calculations. In the end, the procedure yields estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in each of the four slave trades for each of the four time periods listed above.

Even more important, slavery evolved into a complex system of labor, commerce, and society that was legally, socially, and ethnically distinct from other forms of servitude, and that was almost always applied to the condition of nonfree Africans. Two patterns of colonies developed throughout the western hemisphere: colonies designed as microcosms of European societies and colonies designed primarily for the efficient production of export commodities. The first group of colonies constituted the settler colonies. In these colonies, slaves constituted a minority of the population and did not necessarily represent the dominant labor sector. In the second group were exploitation plantation colonies, marked by their overwhelming proportion of nonfree members, and in which slavery formed the dominant labor system.

, foreign traders, and even Sakalava chiefs to secure a supply of East African and Malagasy slaves for the Merina market. Provincial officials in Bara and Sakalava country were also implicated in kidnapping for the slave export trade. When Ramboamadio, one such Merina officer stationed at Mahabo near Morondava, was summoned to the imperial capital in 1874 to answer charges of collusion with Tovenkery, the local Sakalava king, in slave-raiding in

e 1,000 A 2,000 et se subdisient en groupes de 50 A 100 A l'approche des regions h

has estimated a 12 to 21 percent mortality among Malagasy and East African slaves during shipment to the Mascarenes at the start of the nineteenth century, and it is likely that this figure increased slightly in later decades. Although the treatment of East African slaves aboard Arab dhows supplying the Muslim

However, whereas French colors were prominent on slavers catering for the French plantation islands, other flags were also used for the shipping of slaves to Madagascar. Although subject to much harassment prior to the 1882-1885 war, slavers carrying Arab colors flourished there

Prior to the establishment of freed-slave-Christianity, Missionary work on the coast had made little progre

Prior to the establishment of freed-slave-Christianity, M

ch failures in understanding between the CMS and the British agents over the question of ex-slave centres at the coast continued until the arrival of W. S. Price as superintendent of the mission in late 18

Price was lucky in that Kirk, on a visit home in late 1873, had also met with the leaders of the CMS in London, who had persuaded him to agree to co-operate with their mission in East Af

return to the coast, Kirk agreed to assist Price to purchase a mission centre and he also agreed to hand over to him as many ex-slaves as Price required

his strained relationship between the mission and the consul over the issue of slavery had not been resolved when the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA) started work in 1888. The situation at the coast was, however, complicated by other factors.

One of these factors was the problem of

On the other hand, the slaves who were still in bondage in Mombasa, could easily compare their lot with that of their neighbours in the mission centres like Freretown and become envious.

Many of them took the risk of crossing the creek which separated the two places and tried to settle in or near the mission. The risk involved in running away seems to have been ignored by the critics of the missions who regarded them as deliberately receiving and harbouring the slave

Also ignored by those critics was the fact that some Arabs raided the mission centres and took many ex-slaves back into slavery, as happened once in Freretown.7

A timely raid on the Giriama by the Maasai may have ave

crisis, but did not resolve the dispute

Streeter declared he would not prevent any fugitive settling near the mission, and made it clear that he would not allow any to be repossessed

In reporting the matter to the CMS, Streeter indicated that what East Africa needed was first a 'law-breaker' and then a 'law-make

The departure of Price led to Binns's appointment as Lay Secretary and head of the mission. He immediately found himself in trouble with his colleague, C. W. Lane, whom he accused of misappropriating funds. Lane accused Binns of running the mission single-handedly, like Price before him, and most other mis-

sionaries sided with Lane. The situation deteriorated to the extent that Binns wanted to resign rather than work with Lane, while Lane asked for a transfer to Uganda.14 The mission was therefore much unsettled in 1883, and during this time, the influx of fugitives into mission settlements continued.

his ambiguity by the Society was expressed by the CMS Committee of Correspondence, which resolved in April 1888 that while the East African missionaries could fight for the just treatment of slaves by their masters, and, if possible, fight for their manumission, they could not "arrogate to themselves any authority in the matter, and are not justified in receiving runaway slaves..."16

The same instructions had been given to Price before, and were repeated to all the other missionaries

The concern of the missionaries was with the freed and bondaged slaves upon whom the future of their work depended; the concern of the company was peace and order upon which a viable economic growth depended, based upon slavery. The concerns of the mission and of the company, therefore, conflicted radically with regard to the issue of slavery, and it is this issue which more than anything else dominated their relationship.

Realities Most notably, the Brussels Act did not bind signatories to suppress slavery. None of the colonial powers was prepared to commit itself to this, although they all believed that it should be ended, and they all knew that as long as there was a market for slaves the traffic would continue. British experience with abolition had not been happy. In plantation colonies, freed slaves, instead of becoming more productive wage labourers, had where possible, opted to work for themselves as artisans or in other occupations, or to become subsistence farmers. Production had declined. In the tiny British footholds on the West Coast of Africa fear of losing their slaves threatened to drive away the native merchants upon whom the colonies depended, while in South Africa abolition had been a factor in promoting the Boer exodus known as the Great Trek. In their Indian empire, however, the British devised a form of emancipation which minimized these dangers and provided a model to be used in Africa as new territories were acquired. 5 They merely declared that slavery no longer had any legal status. This meant that no claims could be countenanced in court on the basis of slavery, hence slaves who wished to leave might do so. But slave holding was still legal, and slaves were not actually freed. This model of abolition was ideal for the government. It was cheap - no compensation needed to be paid to owners. The impact could be delayed by not informing the slaves of their rights. There was thus no large scale sudden departure and very little disruption of the economy or alienation of masters. The humanitarians, also disappointed with the results of outright abolition in the colonies, were willing to accept this solution because slavery in India was considered 'benign' - that is less cruel than its counterpart in the Americas — and slaves would not be suddenly freed without means of support. This, therefore, became the model of abolition used in most of British Africa. 6 As the empire expanded colonies, in which slavery had to be outlawed, were kept to a minimum and new annexations became 'protectorates' in which full colonial administrations did not have to be introduced, and 'native' customs including slavery could continue even if it had lost its legal status. Other powers found similar legal subterfuges to avoid freeing slaves, or 'they outlawed slavery but then did not enforce their laws. 7 As the scramble for Africa gained momentum none of the colonial rulers had the resources to risk alienating slave-owning elites, upon whose cooperation they often depended, or disrupting the economies of their nascent dependencies. They justified their failure to attack slavery by claiming that African slavery was also benign, and that once robbed of its cruellest features - slave raiding, kidnapping, and trading

There was a flourishing system of slavery in Madagascar, the economy of which Mutibwa has described as "dependent largely on the use of slave labour." Thus there was a vigorous slave trade until the imposition of French colonial rule over Madagascar at the end of the nineteenth century. It is important to note, however, that slave labour on Madagascar did not serve only the domestic economy of the island. The Hova hierarchy was deeply involved in commercial agriculture for export, especially in the rice trade to Mauritius, and the entire economy was orientated outward after the early 1860s. Like the slave trade to Zanzibar, then, that to Madagascar cannot be dismissed simply as the product of an anomalous Arab or Malagasy slave economy, but must also be seen in the context of Madagascar's becoming an economic satellite of the West.2