The slave trade nobody talks about; East Africa and the Arabs during the nineteenth century
Everybody has heard of the nineteenth century cotton plantations in the southern states of America, but nobody knows about the clove plantations of Zanzibar operating at the same time
It is a very strange thing that although we are all of us perfectly familiar with the plantations of the Caribbean and those in America’s Deep South, not one person in a million seems to have heard of the plantations of Zanzibar, which were as dependent on African slaves in the 1800s as were those other plantations, across the Atlantic Ocean. We are so keen to think about the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa, that we quite forget the one in East Africa which may have been more extensive.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to History Debunked, with Simon Webb to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.