We are pleased to announce that ISA Guest Researcher Dr. Magdalena Moorthy Kloss, as part of the “Indian Ocean in the Age of Empire” seminar at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, will present her paper, “Oceanic Famine and Inland Slavery in 20th‑Century Hadhramaut (South Arabia).”

This lecture examines how Indian Ocean ties shaped the lives of people held in slavery in the South Arabian interior. While earlier scholarship has focused on Hadhramaut’s cosmopolitan diaspora, I argue that the region’s remittance economy created a layered hierarchy of dependence which bound the survival of the enslaved to the fates of a far-flung elite. The fragility of this system became apparent during the 1943-1944 famine. As a deteriorating drought coincided with wartime disruptions of financial lifelines from Southeast Asia, enslaved people were the first to starve. When exploiting their labour no longer sufficed to keep their owners afloat, many enslaved men, women and children were sold and trafficked overland to Imamic Yemen and to Saudi Arabia. Others fled in search of food or greater freedom.

By categorizing slave trading as a maritime matter and inland slavery as a domestic issue, British officials in South Arabia isolated evidence on bondage from evidence on the broader socio-economic history of the region. To overcome this archival gap and the silences it generated, I analyse records from two separate British policies in Hadhramaut – famine relief and slave emancipation – together. Tracing the fragmentary biographies of enslaved and freed people through the deteriorating crisis of 1943-1944 reveals the Indian Ocean dimensions of largely hidden forms of inland bondage in South Arabia. Through this research approach, the Hadhrami interior becomes legible as a site of profound and layered oceanic dependence.