Born Then700–1799
Life during the Indian Ocean slave trade
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
For over a thousand years captives from East Africa and Madagascar were sold across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and India. In the 9th century enslaved East Africans in southern Iraq, the Zanj, rose in a long revolt. The trade grew larger in the 18th and 19th centuries with plantations in Zanzibar and the Mascarene Islands.
Deaths: estimates range widely; several million East Africans were taken across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea over a millennium.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Recurrences of the first plague pandemic 558–750
- Early Muslim conquests 632–750
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- An Lushan Rebellion 755–763
- Abbasid prosperity (Islamic Golden Age) 786–1000
- Viking raids 793–1066
- Classic Maya collapse 800–950
- Norse settlement of Iceland 874–930
- Song dynasty commercial revolution 960–1270
- Chola expansion 985–1070
- Polynesian settlement of Hawaii 1000–1200
- The Crusades 1096–1291
- Thule migration across the Arctic 1200–1300
- Rise of Great Zimbabwe 1200–1450
- Mongol conquest of the Jin 1211–1234
- Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire 1219–1223
- Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' 1237–1242
- Polynesian settlement of New Zealand 1250–1300
- Mongol sack of Baghdad 1258
- Mongol conquest of the Song 1268–1279
- Great Famine of 1315–1317 1315–1317
- Hundred Years' War 1337–1453
- Black Death 1346–1353
- Return of the plague 1360–1400
- Conquests of Timur 1381–1405
- Timur's sack of Delhi 1398–1399
- Fall of Constantinople 1453
- Sengoku period 1467–1590
- Expulsion of the Jews from Spain 1492
- Collapse of the Taíno population 1493–1530