Africans in India

Certain alternate histories are barely touched upon because of their position outside our mainly eurocentric point of view. So with this Alternate history I am trying to bring up a mixture of two very unused areas into one alternate history. I am not quite sure how to put this but I am trying bring up the possibility of Indian kingdoms making use of African slaves on pretty widespread basis.

My thoughts on this were:

What time period would be best for slavery on the subcontinent?

I know the Egyptians often relied on nubian slave labour, what situation would allow Indians to also take advantage of slave labour in a similar fashion?

Does the monsoon nature of the indian ocean prevent or help trade (I am not sure how they work at all)?

If it occured later would Arabs be the slavers and simply sell their goods in India?

This is just the first thoughts I had if anyone else has an idea bring them up please. Also feel free to call this all ASB, I think it might be.
 
There actually *is* a group in Pakistan of partial African descent in OTL, the Siddi, who are the decedents of slaves and live in Southern Pakistan.
 
Certain alternate histories are barely touched upon because of their position outside our mainly eurocentric point of view. So with this Alternate history I am trying to bring up a mixture of two very unused areas into one alternate history. I am not quite sure how to put this but I am trying bring up the possibility of Indian kingdoms making use of African slaves on pretty widespread basis.

My thoughts on this were:

What time period would be best for slavery on the subcontinent?

I know the Egyptians often relied on nubian slave labour, what situation would allow Indians to also take advantage of slave labour in a similar fashion?

Does the monsoon nature of the indian ocean prevent or help trade (I am not sure how they work at all)?

If it occured later would Arabs be the slavers and simply sell their goods in India?

This is just the first thoughts I had if anyone else has an idea bring them up please. Also feel free to call this all ASB, I think it might be.

They did, to a certain extent. However, when you already have a large peasant population there's no point in bringing in unskilled labour from overseas. Black slaves tended to be considered posh overseas imports- slavery in India wasn't the same sort of mass agricultural slavery system as seen in the Americas.

As for your question about the monsoons, basically it works this way. The December monsoons send you one way and the March ones send you the other (I can't remember which is which). Thus, trade goes from SE Asia to India to Arabia and East Africa at one point of the year and the other way at another point in the year. This is why the South Indian maritime cities were such important trading centres- they were at the midpoint of this cycle.
 
Well, maybe we could tweak this a bit.

Since you already have an extensive working population on the subcontinent, perhaps India sends ships out and discovers Australia in perhaps the 1300s. Colonization ensues, I'm sure there'll be problems with this theory, but perhaps you could have Arabian/Omanese traders bring slaves to Indian Australia where the workforce is not extensive?
 
How about African slavery being part of some Muslim scheme to have a loyal army about. It could get to the extreme of Muslims resettling Africans into especially agitated provinces.

But also I thought that India's population explosion is a relatively recent event, and that much of the subcontinent was jungle and uninhabited. Similar to how Europe was mainly forest until the 18th or 17th centuries. Could the population boom have occurred earlier if Africans supplemented the labor pool?
 
I dunno, while I agree that both Africa and India are both underutilized in AH, it kinda rubs me the wrong way the way the thread title and the thread content interact with each other. It gives the connotation that the only significant effect or input Africans could have had on India (and by inference, every else) was as slaves. I don't think that was the intent but that was my initial reaction.

You know, that settlement idea might almost work. Somehow I imagine the reverse happening: a powerful sultanate/s defeats a Hindu power, decrees that as not People of the Book they should be enslaved. They end up with way more slaves than is economically useful, and decide to offload them somewhere for cheap. These slaves are sold throughout the Muslim world, and a significant number wind up in Africa.
 
I dunno, while I agree that both Africa and India are both underutilized in AH, it kinda rubs me the wrong way the way the thread title and the thread content interact with each other. It gives the connotation that the only significant effect or input Africans could have had on India (and by inference, every else) was as slaves. I don't think that was the intent but that was my initial reaction.

You know, that settlement idea might almost work. Somehow I imagine the reverse happening: a powerful sultanate/s defeats a Hindu power, decrees that as not People of the Book they should be enslaved. They end up with way more slaves than is economically useful, and decide to offload them somewhere for cheap. These slaves are sold throughout the Muslim world, and a significant number wind up in Africa.

Yeah, I didn't mean it that way at all.

Good idea about Indians in Africa though, I think either way there would probably be alot more cross Indian ocean connections which would be very interesting.
 
Rather than coming as slaves, the Africans could come as traders. The Empire of Aksum (or Axum) participated in the sea trade routes between the Middle East and India during the first centuries AD. If they came to dominate it more, they could get harbors and trade enclaves along the coast of India.

In OTL they were surpassed by Arabs traders, and were isolated from contact with the Mediterranean culture by the rise of Islam. It might take butterflying Islam away to keep Axum being isolated.
 
But also I thought that India's population explosion is a relatively recent event, and that much of the subcontinent was jungle and uninhabited. Similar to how Europe was mainly forest until the 18th or 17th centuries. Could the population boom have occurred earlier if Africans supplemented the labor pool?

It's just that the population was more concentrated. There were fewer settled areas but the areas that were settled were extremely intensively settled.
 
Well, maybe we could tweak this a bit.

Since you already have an extensive working population on the subcontinent, perhaps India sends ships out and discovers Australia in perhaps the 1300s. Colonization ensues, I'm sure there'll be problems with this theory, but perhaps you could have Arabian/Omanese traders bring slaves to Indian Australia where the workforce is not extensive?

Again, in this case why not just import serfs from back home? The belief about not being able to "cross the black water" without losing caste wasn't widespread at all- the reason it pops up in discussions about the British Indian Army was that that belief happened to be held by the Bengali martial castes which were heavily recruited by the British. A whole lot of other Indians had no problem with maritime ventures.
 
How about African slavery being part of some Muslim scheme to have a loyal army about. It could get to the extreme of Muslims resettling Africans into especially agitated provinces.

But also I thought that India's population explosion is a relatively recent event, and that much of the subcontinent was jungle and uninhabited. Similar to how Europe was mainly forest until the 18th or 17th centuries. Could the population boom have occurred earlier if Africans supplemented the labor pool?

Muslim polities often used slave armies, but not in the way you're probably thinking. Usually it was a self-replicating "artificial" social class that was generally in control, like the Mamelukes or Ottoman Devshirme (from which the Janissaries were drawn). In a place like India, there isn't much point to importing agricultural slaves, which in any case were almost never employed in the Muslim world, except Zanzibar.

The biggest problem is that in earlier times it was very hard to acclimatize armies to distant environments. As an example, Mehmed Ali conquered the Sudan in 1820 with one of his primary objectives being the creation of a Black slave army. Unfortunately, the "recruits" died like flies when moved to Egypt. Later when more modern transportation made the journey less arduous the survival rate was better.

Indian rulers didn't need slave armies since there was already a large population available and the wealth of India could attract plenty of willing volunteers. For instance, the Nizam of Hyderabad had a large number of Hadhrami troops (the Hadhramaut is a region of South Arabia in what is not Yemen).

In any case, almost all slavery was domestic.

What's actually far more likely (and happened to an extent in OTL) is importation of Indian labor to Africa. Indians were considerably more resistant to the African climate than Europeans, so were considered ideal for railroad construction and various other commercial activities.

Indians predominated in the financial sector of the Zanzibari Empire, with an Indian heading the critical customs administration with a tax farming contract.

The monsoon would help, not hinder this slave trade. It only reached to about the border of Mozambique, though, and sailing ships couldn't go against the prevailing winds, so you could only go in one direction for half the year.
 
Yeah, I didn't mean it that way at all.

Good idea about Indians in Africa though, I think either way there would probably be alot more cross Indian ocean connections which would be very interesting.

Indians began arriving in South Africa about 1840, and Arabs had existed trading up and down the East Coast of Africa, as far as present-day Zimbabwe, for centuries. Perhaps Indians end up arriving in what is now Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa in the 1500s, as the black Africans came from the North. Combine that with the Afrikaners a couple centuries later and then the British after that, and you have POD city here. Quite a different modern South Africa, that could be. :D
 
Top