Is slavery the world's oldest trade?

The history of slavery is not a pleasant subject.

The suffering of slaves and the brutality of slavery is a black page writ large in American history, and most SUNY Fredonia freshmen come into Markus Vink’s history classes carrying powerful images of slavery as it was practiced in their own country in the 19th century.

But Dr. Vink takes them on a different journey across time and space. In his research seminar, he directs their attention eastward across the Atlantic, across the continent of Africa and into the world of the early modern Indian Ocean. He points them back to a time earlier than the American colonies. Here they find a world in which slaves are already ubiquitous, and where the practice of slavery is traditional.

“Slavery,” Dr. Vink maintains, “is the world’s oldest trade.”

Dr. Vink has spent part of his scholarly career looking at slavery in the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1800, one form of cross-cultural exchange during the earliest seeds of globalization, when trading societies began to connect. “When the Dutch moved into the Indian Ocean, they found the system of slavery and bondage already firmly in place,” he said.

In January of 2003, the prestigious Journal of World History published Dr. Vink’s seminal, 40-page article, “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century.” In that article, he traced slavery as far back as 1500 B.C.E., to the beginnings of (recorded) history to the times of stateless peoples, hunter-gatherers, and pastoral nomads. A steady stream of captive humanity continued to flow through the rise and fall of empires, sultanates, confederations and kingdoms.

When powerful European chartered companies, like the Dutch East India Company, arrived in the Indian Ocean around 1600 C.E. they didn’t create new forms of slavery, but instead grafted on to systems already thriving. “Of course, they were more than happy to oblige and use it for their own purposes,” Dr. Vink said.

In contrast to the Atlantic Ocean slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade has been neglected by historians and is thus less well understood, if not largely neglected.   A major reason for this “history of silence” is that the original records are few and far between, lost amidst the passing of time and the ravages of the tropical climate.

Most scholars are mining sources that exist in Europe, including those of the Dutch East India Company, a veritable treasure trove, which in 2004 was included in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register.”

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Dr. Vink has made a career out of studying the records of the Dutch East India Company at the National Archives in the Hague in the Netherlands. “Since Dutch is my native language, I see one of my tasks as integrating these Dutch archival materials into the scholarly community at large” he said.

Last weekend, he presented an overview on the historiography of the Indian Ocean at the Conference on Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean, sponsored by the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “I’m describing the current state of the field, pointing out some future directions, and the potentialities and pitfalls of ocean- and sea-based studies,” he said.

Back in his classes at Fredonia, he widens students’ horizons, teaching them to compare events and processes that occurred at different times and in different societies throughout history. “I’m constantly hammering on this,” he said. “How does one case study compare to the other and what can be learned from that?”

There’s a reason history is important, he said. “All human societies and cultures have struggled with the same basic questions. Maybe we can learn from each other, or at least reach a modicum of understanding.”