Japan's Indian Ocean Raid 1942

This book examines how slave traders interacted with and resisted the British suppression campaign in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean. By focusing on the transporters, buyers, sellers, and users of slaves in the region, the book traces the many links between slave trafficking and other types of trade. Drawing upon first-person slave accounts, travelogues, and archival sources, it documents the impact of abolition on Zanzibar politics, Indian merchants, East African coastal urban societies, and the entirety of maritime trade in the region.

This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges.