Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

This book brings together new research from established and emerging scholars whose work focuses on Britain’s history and memory of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade. These chapters focus on the ‘small stories’ of slavery and abolition within the ‘local’ experiences of individuals and communities who were nonetheless part of the ‘national sin’ of slavery. Broken down into two parts, Part One considers some small scale specifics of Britain’s history of slavery and the slave trade, and Part Two considers how this history and its legacies has been remembered (or not) through individual people and in particular places. The book contains chapters which consider how people became involved in the slave trade, slavery and the campaign to end it, and covers such places as the Channel Islands, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Buckinghamshire and Portsmouth.

Slavery and similar forms of unfreedom were normative everywhere in the world during these centuries, including Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Indigenous American societies from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and much of Mediterranean and eastern Europe. In most of Asia and Africa, society was stratified into more diffuse “spectrums of unfreedom,” a system that created various levels of dependency, some of which were analogous to Western and Islamic notions of slavery. In the Christian and Islamic worlds, the opposition of “slave” and “free” was often more stark, though in the Islamic world slaves might have higher-status roles than was common in Christendom. In the Christian world, the status of “serfdom” likewise blurred the line between freedom and extreme dependency, especially in the East, where serfdom grew stronger during this period. The only part of the world that did not ostensibly tolerate institutionalized slavery during the centuries under question were those parts of western Europe that developed a “free soil” principle by the later Middle Ages. In that territory, slavery, serfdom, and labor obligations were crowded out by wage labor, and slavery was positively proscribed by the sixteenth century, with some exceptions. The (trans-)Atlantic slave trade remained small-scale during these centuries, picking up only at the very end of our period, while the trans-Saharan trade was already ancient by 1350, and orders of magnitude more extensive. North African and Egyptian merchants acted as middlemen for sub-Saharan African slaves, selling them to the Ottomans and other Middle Easterners in increasing numbers throughout our period. Before 1453, Black Sea markets selling Caucasian and Asiatic “pagans” provided the major source of slaves for Italian middlemen, who passed them on to Italian, Levantine, and Egyptian buyers. With the Balkans, the Black Sea region remained a significant source of high-value slaves for the Ottomans. After 1440, Iberians sailed directly to West African slave markets. After 1500, Mediterranean piracy and shipborne raiding became a major source of slaves. In this bibliography we will confine ourselves to slave trades in which European and peri-Mediterranean lands served a locus of supply, demand, and/or resale. Most historians of slavery now prefer to look at “types of unfreedom,” in which formal notions of slavery did not always play a part. We will focus on systems that saw people treated as sellable property and/or as captives; we will say relatively little about serfdom (in which people owed services based on their bond to a parcel of land), and we will ignore the fact that the rights of wives, children, and servants might be indistinguishable from those of chattel slaves in many of the societies we address. Even thus limited, ours remains a complex topic on three major axes: conceptually, geographically, and historiographically. Conceptually, we run against usual questions such as “What is a slave?” and “When should serfs be counted as slaves?,” but also “When should captives be counted as slaves?” and “How do religion, ethnicity, and gender interplay in Mediterranean slavery and unfreedom?” Geographically, we run into the fact that there were many different “slave trades” going on in our part of the world during the three centuries under scrutiny. Like other commodities, slave populations can be categorized as “flows” and “stocks.” As noted, one principal flow ran from the Black Sea (where mostly “pagan” slaves from the Eurasian interior were sold) to the Levant and Italy; other flows included several distinct trans-Saharan routes; trans-Mediterranean routes both northward and southward; and Atlantic flows that might involve the Canaries and other Atlantic islands, parts of West Africa from Gambia to Angola, and later the New World. For these Atlantic flows, southwestern Iberia often served as a terminus or trans-shipment point. Only the trans-Saharan trade remained relatively steady (gradually increasing), the rest waxed and waned significantly during these three centuries. Most of the time, slave stocks were not auto-reproducing and required inflows to maintain populations. Most slave stocks in Europe were found in and around a few southern trade hubs such as Livorno, Malta, Seville, and Lisbon. A few slave stocks were largely auto-reproducing, as on Romanian monasteries. Historiographically, we are faced with a persistent division between historians trained as medievalists and those trained as early modernists. These often tell stories focused on different groups of slaves and unfree people. For example, early modernists tend to focus on piracy, capture, and galley slavery (and male slaves), while late medievalists focus on domestic slavery (and female slaves). Despite some attempts at synthesis, literatures on captives, slaves, and serfs remain distinct. Though there have been increased efforts to write about “Mediterranean” slavery as a whole in recent years (see section on General Works), many works remain limited to a single topic (e.g., ransoming, galley slavery), and/or to a single country or region. All of this makes gaining a lay of the land relatively challenging.

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

This section presents Pennington’s thoughts on the history and future of the Black race. It contains the following texts: 2.1: A Text Book of the Origins and History of the Colored People (1841), one of the earliest “race histories” that combats notions of African inferiority. 2.2 and 2.3: A “Review of Slavery and the Slave Trade” (The Anglo-American Magazine, 1859) and A “Lecture Delivered before the Glasgow Young Men’s Christian Association” (1850). Both texts describe the barbaric history and present effects of slavery. 2.4. and 2.5: two 1850 essays for The Anglo American on the accomplishments, struggles, and future of Black people in the United States and globally. 2.6: three letters from a series of letters on Black education, the Colored Convention Movements, and racial uplift, published in The Colored American in 1838. 2.7: Pennington’s “Preface” for Ann Plato’s Essays: including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry (1841).

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

Common knowledge would have it that slavery did not exist in medieval Europe. However, there is a thriving body of scholarship which demonstrates that slavery was practiced widely in various forms in Europe during the Middle Ages, alongside captivity, serfdom, and other types of unfreedom. Where then did the common knowledge come from? In the first instance, it derives from the late-18th- and 19th-century abolitionist assumption that as Christianity spread through Europe during the Middle Ages, it must surely have driven out slavery. Among scholars, this common knowledge is sometimes reinforced by Marxist historical narratives, according to which slavery was the mode of production characteristic of the Roman period, while serfdom characterized the medieval period. Yet into the 14th and 15th centuries, medieval Europeans continued to own slaves, trade in slaves, and enslave each other as well as non-European others. They used slaves for agricultural and artisanal labor as well as domestic, sexual, reproductive, and military service. However, the composition of enslaved populations, their demographic and social significance in relation to free populations, the precise legal meaning of slave status, and the practices associated with slavery all varied significantly by region and era. Though Europe was not the only slave-holding region during the medieval period, scholarship about the history of slavery in medieval Byzantium, the Islamic world, Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Americas is substantial. Each of these regions merits a bibliography of its own. Moreover, though slavery was not the only form of unfreedom that existed in medieval Europe, captives, hostages, prisoners, and pledges have also been the subjects of much research and merit dedicated bibliographies, too. Finally, though the academic study of medieval slavery came into being in the 19th century alongside the abolitionist discourse that ignored its existence, this bibliography will highlight recent works, especially those produced within the last fifty years. Many older works remain useful as reference points and guides to the archival sources, but contemporary scholars have brought fresh analytical perspectives to bear on slavery studies, each contributing to the flourishing field that exists today.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.

This special issue focuses on the broader context and interconnectedness of different slave regimes in early modern Asia. Various transnational commercial and imperial projects influenced the waxing and waning of individual slave regimes, while internal and interpersonal conditions within polities also played important roles. The well-known European seaborne empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England were major drivers of this early modern slavery, but they coexisted and competed with other groups of trader-raiders. These included merchants from the Islamicate world and Chinese coastal regions, which connected Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and other regions. These extensive markets linked different regions together, such as the Malabar Coast with East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea. While the focus is on the Iberian expansion and its impact on the slave trade, this special issue acknowledges that slavery in Asia should be understood as a result of multiple overlapping and interacting regimes. Each article examines a particular regime while emphasizing its interactions with neighboring regions during the early modern period. The main focus is on the encounters between different slave regimes facilitated by early modern commercial networks. The history of slavery in early modern Asia involved clashes and cross-pollination between disparate slave systems. A further contribution relates to the terminology used to define and understand slavery in non-European contexts, which is still a subject of debate. The concept of “regimes of bondage” is adopted as an umbrella term to encompass the various forms of coerced, subaltern, and dependent labor in Asia during this period. Finally, by using local categories and sources, including European and non-European language materials, the special issue aims to recover marginalized perspectives and highlight the complexity and challenges of studying slavery in Asia.

Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives

What were the experiences of those in Africa who suffered from the practice of slavery, those who found themselves captured and sold from person to person, those who died on the trails, those who were forced to live in fear? And what of those Africans who profited from the slave trade and slavery? What were their perspectives? How do we access any of these experiences and views? This volume explores diverse sources such as oral testimonies, possession rituals, Arabic language sources, European missionary, administrative and court records and African intellectual writings to discover what they can tell us about slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Also discussed are the methodologies that can be used to uncover the often hidden experiences of Africans embedded in these sources. This book will be invaluable for students and researchers interested in the history of slavery, the slave trade and post-slavery in Africa.

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

Working the Diaspora: The Impact of Labor on the AngloAmerican World, 1650-1850. By Frederick C. Knight. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 240. Cloth, $48.00.)Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. By Jane G. Landers. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 340. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by W. Bryan Rommel-RuizFrederick Knight and Jane Landers depict blacks in the Atlantic world as active agents who shaped the historical trajectory of the Anglo-American colonies. Working the Diaspora shows that labor skills and were important factors in the slave trade in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Africans in the Anglo-American colonies were able to retain much of their indigenous culture and influenced the development of AngloAmerican slavery. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions explores the history of Atlantic Creoles and their ability to use their unique skills to negotiate a better life as slaves and to take advantage of the tumultuous world created by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions to pursue their freedoms. Both books reveal that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were critical periods in the history of slavery in the Black Atlantic, even as that institution came under assault during the Age of Democratic Revolutions.1Frederick Knight's Working the Diaspora is a thought-provoking study of slavery and culture in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Although historians long have noted that English colonists sought slaves from specific tribes for their labor skills, few have emphasized the ways slaves were attractive laborers because of their African knowledge of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation. In other words, Anglo-American slaveholders in the region Knight studies respected labor skills and that particular tribes brought to their plantations, and wanted them to transplant their culture to Anglo America. Drawing upon the works of historians such as Peter Wood as well as anthropologists, Knight examines material culture and traditional primary sources to demonstrate the ways slaves retained indigenous traditions and customs in the New World. Factors such as high slave mortality and the slaveholders' continued desire for particular Africans revitalized culture in southern Anglo-American colonies until the demise of the international slave trade in 1808.Knight also argues that slaves adapted their cosmology to life in the New World, especially as they understood the natural world. More than just transplanting labor and to cultivate particular staple crops, slaves drew upon an epistemology to make sense of their new life in the Anglo-American colonies. One of the longstanding debates among scholars of American culture centers upon the degree to which the slave trade emaciated culture. Some historians maintain that the slave trade and New World slavery were so brutal that they destroyed any vestige of culture, and the system of slavery itself shaped the black American experience. Other scholars argue that as brutalizing as the Middle Passage and slave trade were, certain cultural systems such as religious beliefs survived this horrific experience, becoming the foundation of a more syncretized and American slave culture.Knight clearly aligns with the latter argument. He advances this contention further by illustrating the ways slave owners were invested in the retention of customs. While historians such as Peter Wood, Charles Joyner, and Philip Morgan have also maintained that black slaves practiced culture and social systems in the colonial Lowcountry, their scholarship portrays planters as passive agents in this process, and retention was largely the result of a black demographic majority and planter absenteeism. …

Slavery and slave trade were widespread throughout the empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Asia. The VOC was not only a “merchant” company but also functioned as military power, government, and even agricultural producer. In these roles, the VOC was involved in the forced relocation (and forced mobilization) of people in direct and indirect ways. This entailed commodified slavery and especially slave trade, in which persons were considered property and sellable, but also a wider landscape of forced relocations (deportation, non-commodified transfers) and coerced labor regimes (corvée, debt, and caste slavery). Much more research into the histories of slavery, slave trade, and wider coercive labor and social regimes is needed to shed light on the dynamics and connections of local and global systems.

This paper discusses the language and communication issues in the history of slavery and slave trade in the Atlantic world. The starting point is the work Arte da Lingua de Angola , published in Lisbon in 1697, authored by the Jesuit priest Pedro Dias, who lived in Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. These Portuguese colonial areas were marked by a multilingual communication, including the “Angola language”, currently designated as kimbundu. In this article, the work is considered as a sign of a wider arena discussed with documents produced by lay and missionary colonial authorities, and with historiographical and theoretical references, especially the Portuguese empire history and the linguistic history. Along with other contemporary documents, we will be able to represent a wide set of linguistic works related to African languages produced in the 17th century. Some historical and social contexts both in Brazil and Angola will reveal the communication issues between different linguistic groups, and the different uses of kimbundu in the Atlantic space. Keywords: Brazilian linguistic and social history, Atlantic world, African slavery, kimbundu.

How the history of slavery and the slave trade in French-speaking Africa, in particular Senegal, is taught has played a part in shaping a collective memory that focuses on the coastal sites of the slave trade. The inland dynamics are overlooked, especially the involvement of local players, states, and African tradespeople in the trade of captives and the centuries-old existence of domestic slavery. The approach, largely based on textbooks, does not provide all the information necessary to understand a painful chapter of the past that keeps resurfacing in the daily lives of Africans, often tragically. The primary sources for studying slavery in French-speaking Africa can be found in the French Overseas Archives (Archives d’Outre-Mer) in Aix-en-Provence and in port cities such as Lorient, the port of the French West India Company (Compagnie des Indes Occidentales). Travel accounts also offer information on slavery and the slave trade in Africa. In terms of domestic slavery, the sources are mainly oral. In addition, there was a major survey on captivity in French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française [AOF]) in 1905, which led to the second abolition of slavery in AOF, after the one of 1848. A significant amount of documents relating to freedom papers and the guardianship of persons freed from slavery can be found in the National Archives of Senegal (Archives Nationales du Sénégal). These official documents do not shed much light on cultural phenomena, and there is scant consideration of the African diasporas, whose tales and legends still carry the memory of the tragedies of the past. The same is true of Africa. Whether in America, in the so-called Islamic lands, or beyond, Africans and their descendants always fought cultural alienation with a resilience that was deeply rooted in religion. The history of slavery needs to be taught as a history of civilizations.