On Wednesday, 6 December, researchers from the International Institute for Social History (IISH) will present the first version of the international Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) database, reconstructing the slave trade in Asia. This is the first time that so much data about the Asian slave trade has been brought together and made accessible to researchers and the public. In doing so, a long underexposed slavery history is made visible and literally mapped out.
The database contains information on over 4,000 slave trade voyages that transported an estimated 600,000 enslaved people between destinations mainly in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago in the period from 1621 to 1856. Much of the data relates to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Dutch colonised territories. There are also many records about the slave trade by French, British, and other countries as well as private traders.
Important milestone
The project’s researchers estimate that this may have identified five to ten per cent of the slave trade in Asia. So, this reconstruction is just the beginning. Nevertheless, they see it as an important milestone.
Merve Tosun (IISH), the ESTA project coordinator: ‘This data work is of huge importance. This is the first time that so much data has been brought together and made accessible. It opens the way to more accurate reconstructions of the Dutch–Asian slave trade in this period. To arrive at a more complete picture still requires years of work, but this database has laid an initial and lasting foundation. For example, it can help to trace the life histories of displaced and enslaved persons.’
New insights
Matthias van Rossum, IISH researcher and co-project leader, emphasizes the new insights that this database is already leading to. ‘We see the role of European colonial expansion in the early modern slave trade in Asia. This also directly touches on slavery in the Atlantic world. At the same time, we see that the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was not one-way, but rather multi-directional. The slave trade thus touched many different societies, and led to forced relocations throughout the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago. That has had a massive impact.’
The launch is not the end of the project. Van Rossum: ‘Establishing this database helps societies gain insight into their slavery histories. This is important not only for the Netherlands, but for the whole world. We are now working to find funding to continue this in the coming years.’
Background information
The data were collected by the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) project at the International Institute for Social History (IISH). This is an international project that aims to map the global slave trade. To this end, the IISG has been collaborating since 2016 with researchers worldwide and with partners at the Linnaeus University (Sweden), ENS Lyon (France), Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Germany), and Rice University (United States). The first phase of the project was conducted thanks to the NWO fund for Internationalization in the Humanities (2018–2022).
