The involvement of European chartered trading companies and private entrepreneurs in purchasing, owning and trafficking Indian slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been largely been overshadowed, at the time and since, by the European imperial nations’ more intensive and notorious activities in the Atlantic. As Richard B. Allen points out, histories of the French, Dutch and British East India Companies make scant reference to their involvement in slave-trading, and studies that address the incorporation of Indian slaves as items of commerce or sources of labour for European mercantilism and empire-building are rare. When acknowledged at all, slavery in colonial India is usually presented as an indigenous institution, whose roots were deeply embedded in local social, cultural and religious custom, rather than European commercial, mercantilist or capitalist networks. This dissociation between Indian forms of slavery and European colonial practice is not new, of course: in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain the assumption was that ‘chattel slavery either did not exist in India, or only existed in a limited degree which hardly concerned white men’. Thus, Indian slavery has been distanced from colonial society and commerce, and located instead within traditional, pre-colonial Indian economies of domestic and agricultural production. In the process, both the transformative impact that colonialism had on these ‘traditional’ structures and the connection between European slave-trading and wider histories of European imperial expansion have been elided. Yet, European commerce in Indian slaves was integral to the development of colonial societies in the Indian Ocean, and was connected to wider networks of trade and empire around the world. There is ample, if frustratingly unquantifiable, evidence of European complicity in slave-trafficking around the region. Indeed, EIC records relating to slavery in both the Bengal and Madras Presidencies in the late eighteenth century deal primarily with European, rather than Indian, slave-trading.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans of various nationalities exported Indian slaves to their colonies in South-East Asia, the Mascarenes, the Cape and elsewhere. South India saw a lively commerce in slaves, while coastal regions of Bengal, and especially Arakan, were also subject to slave raiding by Europeans and their agents.