It is unsettling to think of how widespread slave trade was in the Bengal and adjacent regions in the 16th-17th c, and its near absence from contemporary public memory. From the older eunuch trade in Sylhet (to Persia, and then other W Asian courts), to merchantile slave trade.

In this brief intense period of Luso-Arakan slave trade, with the Dutch VOC as major buyers, ports as significant as Hugli would serve as slave ports. As would Pipli (Odisha), Sagor, Sandwip and Chittagong. Some of the "cargo" could travel to Goa, the rest to Arakan and beyond.

The slave ships would travel to Achin, Johor, Batavia (Jakarta), South Africa.

Beyond the immortalization of the Maghs in "magher mulluk" or the Harmads in the connotation that the word has, how there so little memory? Did the shock of British colonialism change things?