Merchant capital and labor migration in the colonial Indian Ocean world

Abstract

Objective/Context: Historians have long acknowledged the importance of merchant diasporas and trade networks in Indian Ocean history but paid little attention to merchant capital’s role in transoceanic labor migration in and beyond this part of the globe. Research on slave trading in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries highlights the need to pay closer attention to the complexities of economic life in this oceanic world. Methodology. This article surveys relevant historiography and draws on archival research in the India Office Records in London and the Mauritius National Archives in Coromandel. Originality. This article illustrates some of the ways in which Asian and European merchant capital shaped colonial social and economic life. Conclusions. A deeper understanding of the social, economic, and political complexities inherent in Indian Ocean history is contingent upon situating the specialized case studies that characterize this field of study in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts.

Keywords

• colonial economies
• indian ocean
• labor migration
• merchant capital