A transhistorical overview of this topic can be found in Gwyn, Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans-Indian Ocean World Slave Trade,” in Prabha Ray, Himanshu and Alpers, Edward A. (eds.), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Oxford, 2007), pp. 286–305. Campbell’s more recent article “East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered,” in Campbell, Gwyn (ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World (Cham, 2016), pp. 275–303 is a study, as the title suggests, of East Africa and the history and historiography of the Indian Ocean Slave trade to Iraq and the greater Middle East. For Yemen and its IOW connections, we now have Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves at the Najahid and Rasulid Courts of Yemen (412–553 AH/1021–1158 CE and 626–858 AH/1229–1454 CE)” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Vienna, 2019). Moorthy-Kloss brings a wealth of data and previously untranslated material to light. She builds on earlier scholarship that includes slavery within its frame, but focuses more broadly on society, economy, and culture. See also works by Roxani Margariti, R. B. Serjeant, Rex G. Smith, and Éric Vallet that are cited in Moorthy-Kloss’s bibliography and in this chapter’s notes.

The fact that scholarship on IOW slavery is embedded within more general studies of trade and communication reflects the nature of historical sources and the structure of this slave system itself. With some notable exceptions, historical sources generally treat slavery incidentally. Moreover, enslaved people were trafficked in the IOW as one commodity among many luxury goods. Thus, more research and further synthesis of the literature is needed to write general histories of the greater IOW slave trade. A recent work that integrates the slave trade into medieval global history is Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (New York, 2020).

Though it is mainly concerned with later periods, Reilly, Benjamin, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (Athens, 2015) analyzes the slave trade between Africa and Arabia over the longue durée. Another work that sheds light on the topic of slavery and the slave trade is Power, Timothy, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate AD 500–1000 (Cairo, 2012). Kusimba, Chapurukha M., “Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa,” The African Archaeological Review, 21 (2004): 59–88 studies evidence from later centuries, but his methods and conclusions should be considered among other perspectives that differ over to what extent archaeology can illuminate the history of slavery. For instance, see the works of J. Alexander, Mark Horton, and John Middleton as cited in Campbell “East Africa.” Documentary sources also contribute greatly to our knowledge of IOW slavery, see the materials related to the topic in Prasad, Pushpa, Lekhapaddhati: Documents of State and Everyday Life from Ancient and Early Medieval Gujarat, 9th to 15th Centuries (New Delhi, 2007) and the sources cited in Perry, Craig, “Historicizing Slavery in the Medieval Islamic World,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017): 133–138, esp. n. 9.

For slavery in South Asia, Chatterjee, Indrani and Eaton, Richard Maxwell (eds.), Slavery & South Asian History (Bloomington, IN, 2006) contains several chapters on slavery before 1500. For links between slavery here and the greater Indian Ocean region, one must consult the many different works of cultural and material history that are cited in this chapter’s notes and that are too numerous to reiterate here. In addition, see Ray, Himanshu Prabha, “Trading Partners across the Indian Ocean: The Making of Maritime Communities,” in Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (ed.), The Cambridge World History, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 2014–2015), Vol. 5, pp. 287–308.

For the transition from the medieval to the early modern period, see Vink, Markus, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History, 14 (2003): 131–177; Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2019); Vernet, Thomas “Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500–1750,” in Mirzai, Behnaz A., Lovejoy, Paul E., and Montana, Ismael Musah (eds.), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ, 2009), pp. 37–76; Allen, Richard B., “Ending the History of Silence: Reconstructing European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean,” Tempo 23 (May 2017): 294–313; Bouanga, Ayda, “Gold, Slaves, and Trading Routes in Southern Blue Nile (Abbay) Societies, Ethiopia, 13th–16th Centuries,” Northeast African Studies, 17 (2017): 31–60; and Tegegne, Habtamu Mengistie, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians: Ethiopia, 1548,” in Lambourn, Elizabeth (ed.), Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe (Kalamazoo, 2017), pp. 73–114.