The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

One of my interests is the history of slavery in the Middle East, and specifically, slavery and trafficking out of Africa into Arabia. Historically, the pattern of enslavement, especially during the Ottoman empire, was quite different than the transtlantic slave trade. Chattel slavery was not very common, and most slaves ended up either guarding women in the harems, or worked as domestic servants and in agriculture. Some of them even became the merchants' assistants and proteges, learning trading from their "masters", and being responsible for the upkeep of the books, and for making the trade connections across the world. Most commonly, however, they were used in the military as soldiers. In fact, at one point, slaves constituted the majority of the Ottoman military.

So, this new book by Ehud Toledano to be very interesting with regards to slavery in the Middle East.

Until very recently, the "authority" on Islamic slavery was Bernard Lewis' "Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry," in which he argued that the current racial prejudice in the Arab world, and the association of blackness with a state of inferiority, can be explained historically. After the death of Muhammad, Muslims expanded geographically, and enslaved non-Arabs, who were mostly black. In the process of their conquests, they established contact with more advanced whites and inferior blacks, whom they also enslaved. After the abolition of slavery in Europe, the development of slave trading resulted in the overrepresentation of Africans in the slave population. Therefore, Lewis attributes all three factors to the eventual association of race with slavery and prejudice in the Arab world.

I disagree with Lewis' treatment of the history of slavery, not only because he misses some historical data, but because he is very simplistic in his treatment of race and slavery. The argument is more complex than that, and has a strong religious motivation that Lewis is not very attentive to.

Either way, this new book by Toledano should prove interesting. He has previously written extensively on slavery in the Ottomon empire, but this seems like it adds a new comparative dimension with the transatlantic slave trade that is not very well discussed in the literature.

From the blurb on the Yale website:

This groundbreaking book reconceptualizes slavery through the voices of enslaved persons themselves, voices that have remained silent in the narratives of conventional history. Focusing in particular on the Islamic Middle East from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Ehud R. Toledano examines how bonded persons experienced enslavement in Ottoman societies. He draws on court records and a variety of other unexamined primary sources to uncover important new information about the Africans and Circassians who were forcibly removed from their own societies and transplanted to Middle East cultures that were alien to them. Toledano also considers the experiences of these enslaved people within the context of the global history of slavery.

The book looks at the bonds of slavery from an original perspective, moving away from the traditional master/slave domination paradigm toward the point of view of the enslaved and their responses to their plight. With keen and original insights, Toledano suggests new ways of thinking about enslavement.

Ehud R. Toledano is professor of Middle East history and director, The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University.

I haven't seen any reviews of it yet, but I'm curious as to how it stands out to other treatments of the subject material.