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Themes
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More from the World Economy, 1760-1880
Many themes of the Atlantic world recur in that of the Indian Ocean, although the
timing is different. Plantation slavery, anti-slavery efforts, mercantile versus
industrial capital, and the nature of the African diaspora in the Americas invite
comparison with their counterparts in Arabia, India, East Africa, and Mauritius. An
important difference is the Muslim view of slavery that was common in the region. In
Muslim societies, slaves were treated as social inferiors, but they also belonged to
Islamic communities. Yet the nineteenth-century slave trade in eastern Africa was
notorious for its brutality. Ironically, efforts to abolish the slave trade further
distorted local economies. The cultural legacy of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean
is a topic that historians are now avidly pursuing with new lines of research.
In general, in the evolving world system, "forces from the Atlantic increasingly
and directly affected the Indian Ocean world" (Ewald: 71), but there is still much to
be learned about this process. For an understanding of the history of capitalism, it is
probably wise to remember that the timing of transformations in the Atlantic and Indian
Ocean worlds was quite different. Zanzibar was a mercantile empire and served as "a
commercial intermediary between the African interior and the capitalist West," but
its remarkable transformation occurred when mercantile capital in the West was already
giving way to industrial capital (Sheriff: 1).
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