Global Slavery, Old World Bondage, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer

Abstract

Criticism on Abdelazer has suffered from the critical assumption that New World plantation slavery was the norm for the early-modern world, and that slaves were, by definition, subjected to extreme forms of physical labor and material degradation. This assumption has hindered Behn scholars from considering other important forms of slavery in the early-modern world, especially those found in the Islamic Mediterranean, in which some bondsmen were invested with substantial power and responsibility. I argue that Behn presents Abdelazer as a similar type of elite military slave, a liminal figure who is given some power, but who is also subject to the authority of his masters and is regularly an object of contempt and ridicule. The fact that modern critics have not generally recognized that Abdelazer is, in fact, a slave means that we have some work to do to recapture a more developed picture of global slave practices in the period and a more nuanced delineation of early-modern English understandings of slavery.