Indian Ocean Trade Triangle

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 159-160: Nusantarian commerce in the western Indian Ocean did not suddenly vanish, leaving the settlements cut off from their roots. Ships from Java and Sumatra continued to play a role in Indian Ocean trade at least until the thirteenth century, not least in the slave trade. In the mid-tenth century an Arab ship encountered off Mozambique a group of raiders described as ‘Waqwaq’. ‘Waqwaq’ was a vague term used by Arabs to denote peoples from the extreme south or east, hence probably Nusantarian. (Waqwaq was the subject of myths about islands where girls grew on trees.) East Africa was a source of slaves for hundreds of years, with the Baghdad-based Abbasid empire the main market. The Zanj slaves became so numerous that they became a major factor in the long-lasting anti-Abbasid rebellion which led to the sack of Basra in 871. This horrific event was widely written…