U. Freitag & W.G. Clarence-Smith (Eds.), Hadrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean

Along the shores of the western Indian Ocean, trade relations between the people of the Asian, Arabian and East African coasts were innumerable and stretched back to time immemorial. Such links and relationships of trade and power were to be sought in the multiple elements that constituted the equilibriums of the western Indian Ocean, that is, in the monsoons, in the presence of commercial thalassocracies (the well known merchant-states), in the predominance of mercantile laws, and in the trade routes of spices, ivory and slaves. Starting from the sixteenth century onwards, the European desires for conquest of commercial monopolies in the slave trade, and in all those factors essential to the creation of several ties, contributed to the consolidation of a red thread which would link three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa.