This article examines slave trading and slave resistance in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) settlements in early eighteenth-century Bengal. VOC and EIC officials exported slaves from Bengal, but also imported slaves from all over the Indian Ocean littoral. The various acts of resistance by settlement slaves show that these slaves utilized their cultural backgrounds as well as their knowledge of diverse cultural and political milieus of early eighteenth-century Bengal in creating a cosmopolitan culture of resistance. These dynamics of slave trading and resistance place Bengal within a trans-regional, Indian Ocean network of slavery.