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The 19th Century Slave Trade in Eastern Africa

2025· reference-entry· en· W4407663632 on OpenAlexaff
Stephen J. Rockel

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Maritime and Colonial Histories
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLate 19th centuryGeographyHistoryArtPeriod (music)Aesthetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Eastern Africa was a source of enslaved African laborers for Indian Ocean markets for nearly two thousand years. However, it was only from the late 18th century that rising demand became closely linked to the industrializing economies of the Western world and their demand for tropical products. The slave trade in the 19th century consisted of two overlapping sectors. The first was a trade in enslaved Africans to markets along the Indian Ocean coast from northern Mozambique to southern Somalia, as well as export to destinations around the Indian Ocean. The plantations of the French Mascarene Islands were an early destination. From the first quarter of the 19th century, the main market for enslaved labor shifted to the clove plantations of the Omani Sultanate in Zanzibar and Pemba, as well as to coastal grain production. The second sector was an internal trade that provided labor for commercializing African societies and the infrastructure required for long-distance trade. For reasons related to the region’s geographical characteristics and disease environment, caravan transport by human porters was the only viable transport option to move ivory exports and cloth imports. Although in most regions east of Lake Tanganyika, caravan porterage was the work of Nyamwezi and Swahili waged laborers, enslaved labor increasingly characterized commercial agriculture, domestic work, and concubinage along the coast and in trade centers in the interior. Porterage west of Lake Tanganyika was largely the work of enslaved laborers. Slaving and the accumulation of enslaved individuals by commercially minded chiefs, warlords, farmers, and big traders followed the three main caravan routes as far as the Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika regions, the eastern Congo, and south-central Africa. As elsewhere in Africa, the trade rested on violence as labor demands increased. The long-distance trade system rapidly expanded due to the constant search for new sources of ivory and rising African consumption of imported products. Both sectors—the export of enslaved individuals and their accumulation at interior trading centers—were thus stimulated by the rapid integration of the region into the expanding capitalist global economy.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.374
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.319
Teacher spread0.275 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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