The long-running system that carried enslaved Africans and others across the western Indian Ocean to Arabia, Persia, South Asia, and the islands — older and longer-lasting than the Atlantic trade, different in its uses, and far less remembered.
Most people know the Atlantic slave trade. Fewer know the one that was older, ran longer, and scattered its descendants from Iraq to India — an enormous system that carried enslaved people across the Indian Ocean toward Arabia, Persia, and India for more than a thousand years. It is the great forgotten counterpart to the trade the West cannot forget.