Sources for Slaving in Eastern Indonesia

Eastern Indonesia (east of Bali) was a major source of slaves for the Southeast Asian market and beyond. Up to the 19th century, a plethora of indigenous forms of coerced labour coexisted with European, mostly Dutch, slavery. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the potential of underused written sources to trace the migrations of coerced labour in the 17th–18th centuries. These texts include proto-demographic data, ships’ logs, daily records at colonial ports, and trade geographies. The article discusses types of sources, their possibilities and limitations, and explains the connectivities between regional and wider slaving circuits. The depth of the data allows us to draw conclusions about numbers of traded slaves, slave demography in indigenous and colonial communities, and the workings of slave trade in micro perspectives