ABSTRACT
The African diaspora in the Indian Ocean differs from its Atlantic counterpart because it includes a small-scale forced migration stretching into antiquity, a massive historic slave trade, and a modest tradition of labor migration and travel by free persons that continues to the present. The slave trade and associated African diaspora in the western Indian Ocean began as a trickle from wider north-eastern Africa to Egypt and the Red Sea as early as Pharaonic times. Making histories of the slave trade and Africans abroad in the East requires that social scientists pay particular attention to the diaspora concept. From the middle sixteenth to eighteenth century, Omani involvement in the slave trade intensified and European slaving began on a large scale, especially along Africa's south-eastern coast. While the African slave trade to most Islamic lands remained steady, slave imports to Oman and Yemen grew significantly to stock armies and meet the demands of date and cotton production.
