Author: Robert O. Collins.

Unlike the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the transportation of slaves from Africa to Asia and the Mediterranean was of great antiquity, but the intense historical interest in the Trans-Atlantic Trade for the past two hundred years has over-shadowed the study of the Asian slave trade which, until this past decade, has been largely ignored despite the fact that the total number of Africans exported to Asia was spread out over thousand years (between 800 AD and 1900 AD) but has been estimated at approximately the same as the number of Africans sent to the Americas in four and a half centuries i.e. 12,580,000. This paper describes the African slave trade to Asia across the Sahara Desert, over the Red Sea, and from the coast of East Africa, and how this trade was conducted in each of these regions. History is not a social science, but a member of the humanities family. It is the search of every available source using any discipline to narrate a story and not bound by any rigid theoretical or methodological concepts. In the compilation of this essay, I have employed the latest information and interpretations on the African slave trade to Asia to write the history of that institution as to what happened, where, when, how and why.