Introduction

In the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, historians have underscored the paradox underlying the revitalization of the slave trade during the Age of Abolition, spanning from the early through the last decades of the late nineteenth century. Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, for instance, using the term “second slavery” to conceptualize the continuation of slavery in the Atlantic world during the Age of Abolition, have attributed the expansion of the slave trade to the effects of the global economic growth engendered by industrialization. Paul Lovejoy, by contrast, has argued that in Muslim West Africa, the greater expansion of the slave trade and enslaving activities during the same period was due not to the global economic growth Tomich and Zeuske expounded, but rather to the region’s own economic autonomy.1 In the Middle East and North Africa, where the volume of slave imports tripled for much of the same century, historians have recognized the expansion of European capitalism as fundamental to the increase of slave import from Africa. Recently, however, Toledano and Ferguson in their study, “Ottoman Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century,” have placed both the growth of the slave import and its eventual abolition at the heart of the long nineteenth-century reforms and transformation processes in the Middle East and North Africa.2 Building on Ferguson and Toledano’s rehabilitation of Ottoman enslavement, the slave trade and its abolition within the context of the long nineteenth-century reforms, this chapter seeks to illustrate the breadth of the nineteenth-century transformation processes on the expansion of the slave import and its abolition in the larger Middle Eastern and North African context. After a cursory overview of the nineteenth-century transformations process in the political, economic, and cultural landscapes, the chapter explores the effects of these transformations on African slavery through the lens of the modern nizam al-Jadid (New Order) army schemes as well as the economic growth fueled by the rise of European capitalism. In the second part, the chapter considers the implications of the transformation processes on slavery with a focus on the suppression of the slave trade and its abolition. Taking the implications of the transformation processes into consideration, the last section explores the various ways in which enslaved Black Africans were employed in the Middle Eastern and North African destinations of the African slave trade.

The Nineteenth-Century Transformations

Preconditions to the vigorous increase in the African slave trade and the process of its abolition in the Middle East and North Africa cannot be disassociated from the specter of political, cultural, economic, and social transformations arising from the European domination of the region. After playing crucial military, economic, and political roles around the western and eastern Mediterranean since the sixteenth century, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to suffer territorial losses. By the late eighteenth century, these incremental yet steady territorial losses, with an occasional reassertion of its military strength, had spilled over to its Middle Eastern and North African territories.3 In 1798, intercontinental imperial rivalry involving France and Great Britain led to the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, signaling a “fin de siècle” and major political, military, and economic shifts dominated by the rise of Europe and its colonization of the region. Brought into the orbit of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, Egypt had for over three centuries been one of the most economically and strategically valuable provinces in the Ottoman Empire. Besides supplying grain to Istanbul through the expansive agricultural production centered on the richness of the Nile River, Egypt was also vital to the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman government) for its strategic location for control of the eastern Mediterranean. Yet, in 1798, when Napoleon’s army invaded Cairo to prevent British access to the eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluks cavalry forces in charge of the defense of this strategically important Ottoman province crumbled and for the first time in over ten centuries al-Qahira al-Mahrusa, the Godly-Protected city of Cairo fell to non-Muslim invading forces. Within three years after the invasion, the Sublime Porte, with the help of Great Britain, retook Cairo in 1801. Under the command of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian general dispatched to Cairo by Sultan Selim III, Egypt was rescued. Soon after, Muhammad Ali, with the consent of Selim III in 1805, declared himself governor of Egypt and thereafter purged the Mamluk forces, who attempted to capitalize on the political vacuum created by the Napoleonic invasion to reassert their full control of Egypt.4

In the course of these developments rapidly shaping the political landscape in the heartland of the Ottoman Empire and its periphery in the Middle East and North Africa, Selim III, reckoning with the imminent political disequilibrium and the shift in the balance of power, recognized the need to modernize the Ottoman state’s institutions by proposing to introduce new military corps called the Nizam al-Jadid army in lieu of the classic janissaries. To fund the creation of this modern army, Selim III instituted revenue sources from state-administered tax farms and government-seized timar lands, although this ambitious goal was thwarted by the powerful anti-reformist forces within the Sublime Porte. Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839), who ascended to the throne at the height of the shift in the balance of power, was better known than Selim III for his keen interest in European institutions, his decisiveness, and willingness to redress the balance of power disfavoring the Ottoman Empire. Convinced by the need to modernize the Ottoman military, Mahmud II promulgated major reforms, disbanded the age-old janissary corps, and created in its wake a fresh nizam al-jadid army organized along the lines of the modern European military institution. The cornerstone of Mahmud II’s reforms came in 1839 in his promulgation of the tanzimat, the “Reordering” (c.1839–1876). With its goal to modernize the state military institutions along western European lines, the tanzimat reforms—aside from the political, military reforms it instituted—echoed ideas of the Age of Enlightenment fashioned after French and American Revolutionary ideals centering Liberty, Rights of Man, and the Citizen.5 By the middle of the nineteenth century, reform-minded elites, inspired by the Enlightenment ideas, grappled with slavery; and citing the tanzimat reforms, many of these elites, while acknowledging the hard task of ridding the empire of slavery, became sympathetic to ending the slave trade.

Across North Africa, the effects of the transformations arising from the balance of power favoring European domination were equally drastic. In Egypt, for instance, within a decade after he successfully maneuvered and installed himself as the Wali (Governor) of Egypt in 1805, Muhammad Ali embarked on ambitious dreams to rule Egypt as independent from the Porte. By the second decade of the century, along with several grand projects in irrigation, economy, and education all designed to bolster his modernization goals, Muhammad Ali sought to establish a loyal nizam al-jadid army similar to the highly efficient European military institution and recruited foreign army officers to modernize the new Egyptian Army. Egypt was not alone in its modernization goals. Further west in the Maghreb, the Husaynid beys, who rose to power in 1705 and ruled Tunisia until the French occupation in 1881, had similar ambitions. Flanked at the time by imperial rivalry involving France and the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean rim, the Husaynid beys emulating Muhammad Ali sought to strengthen the Tunisian army, composed mostly of Mamluks, and modernize it along the nizam al-jadid scheme underway in Egypt.6

A crucial dimension of the nineteenth-century transformation processes in North Africa was the sudden rise of European economic expansion, particularly in the wake of Lord Exmouth’s military intervention and bombardment of Algiers in 1816. During the three decades leading up to this military intervention, North African corsairs, organized by states and private individuals, taking advantage of Britain and France’s preoccupation with the Napoleonic Wars had intensified the enslavement of seafaring nationals by raiding vessels and villages around the southern Mediterranean. Between 1798 and 1814, the number of corsair campaigns organized by the North African states, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco, while never reaching the scale they had during their apex in the seventeenth century reached alarming rates targeting Mediterranean islands such as Sicily and Sardinia.7 Yet, in 1814, after the wars ended, European countries had gathered at the Congress of Vienna to discuss its political and economic consequences in continental Europe. Among the many goals of the Congress was not only to find solutions for the growing European nationalism that resulted from the Napoleonic Wars but also to address concerns surrounding Europe’s Industrial Revolution, which occurred after the 1760s and led to the profound transformation of methods of commodity production. Advancement in industrial and production methods, for instance, helped Europe’s population to boom. As economic growth reached its peak during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, so did improvements in various industrial sectors, which forced Europeans to look beyond Europe for colonies. By 1815, many European states were searching, if not for colonies, then at least for outlets for trade. North Africa was one of the favorite destinations.8

In the heartland of the Middle East, unraveling effects of the balance of power favoring European political and economic domination were no less significant. In the Arabian Peninsula, for instance, the presence of the Ottoman Empire had been limited to Hijaz, where they administered custodianship of the Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina by providing security for pilgrim caravans to these sites from Cairo, Damascus, and several parts of the Muslim world. Within a few years after its creation, the new Saudi-Wahhabi state seized on the weakening of the Ottoman Empire’s territorial losses and embarked on a campaign for its own territorial expansion to central and eastern Arabia. This prompted Sultan Mahmud II to dispatch Egyptian military forces led by Muhammad Ali's son Ibrahim Pasha between 1811 and 1818. Meanwhile, in the southeastern coast of Arabia, the powerful state of Oman, with the invitation of local rulers expelled the Portuguese from the Swahili coast during the sixteenth century and signed a series of political and economic treaties to favor the British and the French in the region. In 1840, the Sultan of Muscat Oman, after increased trading activities and with the encouragement of Arab merchants, moved his capital to Zanzibar. In the Persian Gulf, the collapse of the Safavid family's central rule in 1722 also paved the way for major political, economic, and social transformations with ramifications on regional trade expansion spearheaded by the southern and northern Iranian heirs of the Safavids. According to Thomas Ricks, this expansion of the economy resulted in the need for enslaved labor for employment in agricultural enterprises and other activities procured through Indian, Jewish, Persian, Arab, and Turkish merchants and seamen, all of whom catered to the Iranian labor shortage.9

Slavery and the Nineteenth-Century Transformations

Modernization of the Military

As stated above, when reckoning with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, particularly on the military front, Sultan Selim III, who sought to redress this political reality, attempted to introduce the nizam al-jadid army to strengthen if not replace the centuries-long system of janissaries that by the mid-eighteenth century had become noticeably ineffective. Selim III, however, faced staunch opposition from the janissary, the religious establishment, and anti-reformist forces within the Porte. The opposition to his broader reforms not only derailed the introduction of his much-desired modern army but also culminated in his murder in 1807. While Selim III’s plans to modernize the military were thwarted by anti-reformists and modernization elements within the Sublime Porte, the Governor of Egypt, whom he appointed prior to his murder, embraced and successfully modernized the military in Egypt as part of his own broader state modernization scheme.

Soon after he rose to the governorship of Egypt in 1805, Muhammad Ali was determined to rule the province free from the sway of the Sublime Porte. Hitherto, the Mamluks had governed Egypt for almost three centuries as viceroys of the Ottoman imperial government after the Ottoman conquest in 1516. Wary that the Mamluks, as the janissary had opposed Sultan Selim’s efforts to modernize the army at the Sublime Porte, might seize the opportunity of the political vacuum created by the Napoleonic invasion to reassert themselves in power, he massacred their ruling establishments in the Citadel in March 1811. To eradicate any further threats the remaining Mamluks might pose to his political ambitions, he also purged regular Mamluk troops throughout Egypt. Not long after he eliminated the perceived threats of the Mamluk ruling class, by late 1815 an unexpected mutiny instigated by Albanian and Turkish soldiers forced him to consider creating a loyal army and special army of his own. To achieve such a goal, the Pasha, as Muhammad Ali was also known, resorted to the long-standing practice of the use of enslaved Black Africans, in North Africa particularly, as soldiers for political ends. Ultimately, he commissioned his generals to purchase enslaved Blacks for conscription into the nizam al-jadid army. By 1819, he established military camps in Aswan and Isna where enslaved captives, drawn predominantly from the Nilotic Sudan were to be trained by officers of the slave regiments. As the scheme proved successful by the early 1820s, Muhammad Ali embarked on the conquest of Sudan with the clear purpose of obtaining more slaves and gold to fund the establishment of the infantry regiments composed exclusively of enslaved Blacks. To secure the slaves needed to build this unit, Muhammad Ali banned the regular sale of slaves in the Cairo slave market, except for the Egyptian state. Between 1820 and 1824, a period that marked the peak of this operation, the Egyptian historian Emad Ahmed Helal put the number of enslaved Black Africans conscripted into the nizam al-jadid army at over 25,000 slaves.10 According to Helal, the Egyptian government organized the enslaved conscripts into “six brigades, each containing five battalions composed of about eight hundred soldiers.”11 These figures, however, do not take into consideration other thousands of enslaved captives who either perished within Egypt or en route from Sinnar, Kordofan to the military camps where they were to be trained by the Pasha’s foreign military advisors. According to Helal, of the 6566 documented to have died during the four-year period, 4102 were military conscripts while the other 1464 belonged to those employed in factory work within the military complex of the nizam al-jadid.12

Faced with a pressing demand to replenish these soldiers in the ensuing years, Muhammad Ali instructed the invading Egyptian army in Sudan to supply more captives for conscription into the nizam al-jadid. Unsurprisingly, the Egyptian invading army terrorized local polities with plunder, conducted ghazw (slave-raiding expeditions), and forced local rulers whom they outgunned to pay tribute in slaves to the Egyptian government. According to Janet Ewald, during the early years of the operations, the ghazw raids culminated in the enslavement of up to 10,000 from the Nubian hills alone, and by the late 1830s, 10,000–12,000 enslaved Black Africans were sent annually to Egypt for the military enterprise.13

The above developments had debilitating effects in intensifying and broadening the scope of enslavement activities to levels never seen before the nineteenth century. Apart from supplying the Egyptian state with enslaved captives, the invading Egyptian army, being poorly funded and compensated in slaves by the government in Cairo, sold surplus slaves to the itinerant Jallaba slave traders. In the course of this practice, captives destined for Cairo but not suited for conscription in the nizam al-jadid were sold to the Jallaba slave merchants. Ultimately, demand for the surplus slaves fueled by the voracious appetite of the soldiers for captives culminated in the recruitment of local Sudanese slave dealers to expand the frontiers of slave-raiding beyond the Nubian hills to Kordofan, and Bahr al-Ghazal.14 Due to the outbreak of cholera and the plague epidemics of 1831 and 1855, which killed up to two-thirds of Cairo's population, Muhammad Ali halted the importation of slaves for enrollment in the nizam al-jadid army. More than any other demographic group in Cairo, the epidemics decimated the enslaved Africans the most, and at a more staggering rate.15 Despite this, the scope of the slave trade broadened as the Jallaba continued to furnish the Cairo slave market with victims of the Egyptian conquest until the late 1880s.

Another major implication of the Egyptian conquest and increasing the enslaving activities in Sudan was that it expanded enslavement from Northeast Africa to other parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Prior to the Egyptian conquest, while Sudan and Northeast had been a main source area for enslaved Black Africans in the Mediterranean basin, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula through the Red Sea and the Nile Valley, after the conquest the scale of enslavement and enslaving activities tripled, surpassing the volume of slave exports of any previous period.

In other parts of North Africa, Muhammad Ali’s nizam al-jadid scheme inspired the Grand Wazir (wazir) Shakir (1836–1837) to urge the Tunisian ruler, Husayn Bey (r. 1824–1835), to increase the size of his nizam al-jadid army with conscripts from enslaved and freed Black Africans. This proposal occurred at the peak of the Ghadamese slave caravans furnishing Tunis slave market with enslaved Africans from the western and central Sudan. While we have no direct evidence of Husayn Bey tapping on the caravan slave trade to augment his nizam al-jadid military scheme already underway, the Tunisian Chronicler, Bin Diyaf reported that the bey did attempt to enlist existing enslaved and freed Black Africans in Tunisia into the army. According to Bin Diyaf, when acting on the bey’s approval, the minister ordered General Salim, but without specific guidance, to recruit freed blacks for conscription into the new military scheme. Within a few days, soldiers dispatched to implement this measure randomly rounded up every Black-skinned adult male they came in contact with, whether free or enslaved, and locked them up like cattle in the Bardo barracks ready to be conscripted into the nizam al-jadid army.16 In the process, even servants of the bey and the French consul were picked up for conscription. This scheme, which caused chaos, led households and shops to shut their doors to protect dark-skinned enslaved and free Blacks under their employment or ownership. Upon realizing the gravity of this indiscriminate act, and after much lamentation about the manner in which General Salim had implemented the scheme, the minister ordered that many of the Blacks gathered in the barracks be freed.17 Despite the failure of this scheme, further evidence points to the enlistment of enslaved and freed Blacks into the nizam al-jadid army during the reign of Husayn’s successor, Ahmad Bey (r. 1837–1855). In April 1846, when Ahmad issued his mass emancipation decree, he instructed the caid (Governor) of Sousse “not to allow any individual to prevent a slave of any kind, be the slaves an askeri (a soldier) or not from obtaining his liberty.” This reference to abīd (Black slaves) in the Tunisian asker (military) in Sousse strongly suggests that in spite of the failed effort of wazir Shakir to recruit freed slaves into the nizam al-jadid army, enslaved Black Africans were still enrolled in the army. Moreover, in 1846 when the inhabitants of Jerba in southern Tunisia vented their resentment toward Ahmad Bey’s abolition decree, their grievance rested on rumors that the real cause behind abolition was not to free the enslaved from their abusive masters for humanitarian reasons, but rather to enlist the male slaves into the nizam al-jadid army.18 Register No. 7789 of the Tunisian majba (tax) census data listing 27 enslaved individuals as asker (army) in Sousse provides further evidence that, despite the fiasco to emulate the Egyptian example of creation of an exclusive infantry unit, the beylic tapped on the slave trade to enlarge it's military, however meager that might have been.19

Effects of European Capitalism

Besides the vivid effects of the introduction of the nizam al-jadid on the increased enslaving activities, the integration of the Middle East and North Africa’s economy into the expanding European capitalism had a much greater impact in stimulating demand for slaves from the trans-Saharan, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean trading network. Beginning in the last decade of the eighteenth century, for instance, the import of European goods by European merchants into North Africa such as Spanish wool, coffee, sugar, spices, clothes, and manufacturing hardware were retailed in large quantities across the Sahara by Ghadames merchants conducting the caravan trade with the African interior. In 1798, the growing momentum of the retail commerce between the North and the African interior was so strong that the British Foreign Office instructed British consuls in Tunisia, Tripoli, and Morocco to report on each country's commerce with the African interior, including its share of the slave trade.20 Responding almost a year later, Robert Traill, British Consul in Tunis, provided a detailed account revealing that in addition to ostrich feathers, a much-needed commodity in Britain, trade caravans returning from the African interior were furnishing the Tunis market alone between 1000 and 1300 slaves per annum.21 We learn from Traill’s report that most of the enslaved imported into Tunis, mostly boys and prepubescent girls, were re-exported across the Mediterranean and overland to the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the Middle East. Besides the regular enslaved individuals, Traill reported that each of these caravans brought a few eunuchs.22 Unlike the regular enslaved individuals, the eunuchs, highly prized and valued, were bought from Gwari south of Katsina in the central Sudan only upon special commission by the state or wealthy families. Like the regular enslaved individuals, most of the eunuchs were re-exported as hadāya (gifts) for employment in the imperial harems of the Sultan and ruling families, particularly in Istanbul.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the above European commercial activities in the region dramatically affected the expansion of the African slave trade. After suppressing corsairing activities hampering European and American commerce around the Mediterranean and with Exmouth’s bombardment of Algiers in 1816 and freeing Christian slaves, European commercial activities fueled by industrialization in Europe boomed. By the 1830s, while Exmouth’s military intervention ended Christian slavery, during the same period, a sudden rise in demand for enslaved Blacks in the Ottoman Empire fueled by the growth of European capitalism in the region spearheaded a rigorous expansion of the slave trade. At its peak during the 1840s and 1860s, enslaved imported into the heartland of the Ottoman Empire came from several principal source areas, including Libya, Tunisia, and from the Nilotic Sudan via Egypt to the Porte. Because the demand for enslaved Blacks in the Ottoman Empire coincided with the growing commercial prosperity in North Africa as well as the abolitionists’ efforts to ban the slave trade, slave dealers partnered with European consul agents manning port facilities in Benghazi, Tunis, Derna, and other places to transport slaves aboard steamships to Izmir, Istanbul, and other Middle Eastern destinations of the slave trade. To elude the British naval authorities patrolling the Mediterranean basin, the enslaved Black Africans aboard these steamships and vessels were disguised as passengers.

Other effects of the growth of European capitalism on the slave trade were also apparent in the cotton boom in Egypt in the period between 1861 and 1864.23 After the eruption of the American Civil War in 1861, cotton prices spiked globally, resulting in a second wave of mass import of slaves into Egypt from Northeast Africa for cotton cultivation. According to Kenneth Cuno, who analyzed Egyptian census data from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, during the five years of this experiment, Egypt imported up to 5000 annually, totaling between 25,000 and 30,000 slaves to satisfy the demand for labor generated by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation.24 Unlike the military conscripts, the enslaved Black Africans imported for employment in the cotton agricultural plantations settled in four Egyptian villages in the eastern Delta province of al-Daqahliyya.25

In Arabia and the Persian Gulf, commercial prosperity driven by the rise of European capital expansion increased demand and importation for slaves from Northeast Africa into Persia, Hijaz, and Yemen in western Arabia. A most important and dominant factor contributing to the increased importation of enslaved Black Africans from the Swahili coast and Northeast Africa into Arabia and then Persia, however, was the ascension of the Sultanate of Oman as a commercial empire in Zanzibar.26 Originally based in southwestern Arabia, in the late sixteenth century, the Omanis had been instrumental in ousting the Portuguese on the Swahili coast. Although the Omanis had been trading extensively with the Swahili coastal city-states, the ascension of Sayyid Said ibn Sultan (1791–1856), who rose to power in 1806, altered the extent of their commercial presence on the Swahili coast. After ascending to power following a prolonged internal and dynastic conflict in Oman, Said ibn Sultan, capitalizing on the Omani presence on the Swahili coast, established commercial relations with the British and the French to curtail Portuguese influence on the Swahili Coast. Then, in 1840 he moved his capital from Muscat (Oman) to the offshore Island of Zanzibar. This move, which made Zanzibar a substantial commercial base, also marked a significant turning point for slave imports from the Swahili coast into Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Following the move of his capital to Zanzibar, he encouraged Omani Arabs and Indian financiers to settle on the nearby islands of Pemba, where he established a series of plantations for cultivation and export of cloves and grain using slave labor procured from within the region. From the 1830s until the British pressured them to halt the increased enslaving activities, the Omanis attracted merchants from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Through the Omanis’ influence, Arab slave raiders penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Swahili coast in search of slaves. Aided by African intermediaries, the merchants went as far west as the eastern part of the Zaire River basin in central Africa and further south into the Zimbabwe highlands in Southern Africa. At the height of the slave trade, between 1859 and 1872, the Arab slave raiders procured and furnished Zanzibar with nearly 20,000 slaves annually. While up to half of the enslaved were put to work on the commercial agricultural plantations, the rest were destined to other parts of the Swahili coast, Arabia, or the Persian Gulf.

Consequently, as the slave trade across the Atlantic world diminished by the middle of the nineteenth century, the volume of slave imports into the Middle East and North Africa reached its apex and rose steadily until the 1870s. Accordingly, slave imports during this century from the Western, Central, Nilotic Sudan, and Northeast Africa via the Sahara, Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean trade systems into the Middle East and North Africa, while they cannot be quantified with exactitude, are estimated be have reached two million, with the upper Nile Valley, hotbed of the Egyptian enslaving activities along with Ethiopia, accounting for half of this figure.27 Of this, the heartland of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces or domains were as Ferguson and Toledano disaggregate as follows: from Swahili coasts to the Middle East and India 313,000; across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden 492,000; into Egypt 362,000; and into North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) some 350,000.28 Excluding the slave imports ending up in India and taking Morocco into consideration, the total number would indeed have been around two million during the nineteenth century. While historians may disagree over these estimates, there can be no denying that the thriving European commerce across the western and the eastern Mediterranean shores coupled with political conditions arising from the Nilotic, Western, and Central Sudan, especially the Islamic Jihad movements, played a crucial role in the dynamics of the slave trade and triggering calls for its abolition.

Enslaved Labor

Throughout the preceding centuries, enslaved Black Africans had performed various tasks in agriculture, pearl diving, maritime, military, and domestic service, and a range of casual and menial jobs. While these pre-existing forms of labor persisted down to the end of the eighteenth century with regional and gendered variations, in the course of the nineteenth century, they expanded exponentially in new and vigorous ways resembling in some cases conditions of labor historians attribute to transatlantic slavery. One such area where enslaved Black Africans’ labor expanded was in the army. As the modern Middle East’s rulers sought to build independent empires or modern states, they found in the enslaved brought en masse to the region a cheap source of labor to bolster, enlarge and strengthen their armies. In Persia and the Arabian Peninsula, while the use of enslaved Black Africans as soldiers in local and regional forces was not new, it expanded considerably. In North Africa, the scale of enrollment of enslaved Black Africans into the army was even more remarkable.29 In Tunisia, for instance, historians are yet to uncover the full scope of duties enslaved Black Africans listed as asker (soldiers) in the Sahel cities of Sousse and Mahdiyya performed. In Morocco, by contrast, we know that Malay Sulayman revived the disbanded abid al-Bukhari soldiers established by his predecessor, ʿAlawī ruler Sultān Ismāʿīl (reigned 1672–1727), and used them in his expeditions to the countryside to enforce security and order.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, where close to 10,000 enslaved Sudanese were sent annually for conscription into Muhammad Ali's nizam al-jadid army for decades, their duties and working conditions received much attention from historians. According to Sikainga and Helal, immediately after completing their military training in Aswan, the enslaved Sudanese conscripts were drafted into infantry battalions and were also integral in domestic security and Egypt’s foreign military campaigns. Domestically, they were used to enforce internal security, including quelling the peasant revolt of 1824 Banja in Upper Egypt. Between 1823 and 1835, they were vital in Muhammad Ali’s foreign wars and were part of the expedition to suppress the Bedouin and Wahhabi movement’s revolt in Hijaz against the Ottoman Empire. When Ottoman Sultan commissioned Muhammad Ali to put down a similar rebellion in Greece in 1824, up to 8000 of the enslaved Sudanese soldiers formed part of the Egyptian and Turkish soldiers that landed in Morea (Greece) to suppress that rebellion.30 In 1863, they fought alongside the French army in Mexico. In Sudan, their original homeland, they replaced many of the invading Egyptian and Turkish soldiers who could not withstand the hot climate. While in Sudan, the enslaved Sudanese soldiers performed casual and menial jobs, collected gum Arabic and taxes, worked in mining, and logged lumber to build boats.31 Enslaved Sudanese women brought to Egypt to serve as marital partners to the enslaved Sudanese conscripts also performed military-related factory duties.32

Other than the army, European travelers’ accounts shed light on other forms of labor that enslaved Black Africans fulfilled as servants, retainers, attendants, eunuchs, and nannies in the harems and royal courts of the political class. In 1844, an English woman Miss Smith who accompanied Mrs. Reade, wife of Sir Thomas Reade, the British consul in Tunis, and visited a harem outside Tunis, gave a glimpse into the lavish lifestyle involving enslaved Blacks as domestic servants and pages. When recounting her interaction with princess Lillah Karimat in the women's quarters, Miss Smith wrote that “a black page entered and kissed the Lillah's hand, who then arose inviting us to go upstairs into her gallery.” Miss Smith “counted more than fifty Black attendants dressed in the gayest colors” in the courtyard of the harem attesting to the large cohort of domestic slaves and servants that filled the inner space of these grand facades.33 Besides those working in the harem as servants and pages, others served as palace guards for the outer space of the harems and as bawwaba (doormen) in the royal courts. In the heartland of the Middle East, eunuchs of Sudanic African descent appointed by the Ottoman Sultan administered the two Holy sites in Mecca and Medina well until the 1960s.

With the burgeoning economic growth occurring by the middle of the century, the wealthy and well-to-do middle-class families, particularly in the urban metropolis throughout the Middle East and North Africa, relied increasingly on enslaved Africans, mainly women, and prepubescent girls, to supplement their domestic service. Typically, a household of six family members or less could own one to three slaves, while wealthy aristocratic households mimicking the harems of the ruling class often had dozen or enslaved Black African as servants, attendants, gardeners, and caregivers. Historians have emphasized the use of enslaved women within the domestic arena for sexual pleasure. Theoretically, enslaved women acquired for sexual pleasure could become a Harim (concubine), securing a position as that of a wife. An enslaved woman not acquired as a concubine but bores a child to the owner if the owner acknowledges paternity becomes an umm al-walad (Mother of the Child). As the Mother of the Child, her child following the legal dispensation of the father is free, and she cannot be sold, inherited, and becomes automatically free upon her owner's death. Generally, such was the fate of a number of domestic servants, a rampant phenomenon that lasted until the twentieth century.

Economically, enslaved Black Africans fulfilled intensive labor in the Atlantic-style plantations and commercial agriculture. In Pemba and Zanzibar, where the Omanis set up several agricultural plantations, they used enslaved Africans as farm laborers, and porters to transport export products such as grain, sesame, and cloves from the plantations to dhows or steamships bound to the Middle East. Within Arabia and the Persian Gulf, enslaved Africans also labored in agriculture, irrigation, canal works, and mining. As a result of the commercialization of cotton, grain, and olive oil, more enslaved Africans were put to work on commercial farms in North Africa and parts of the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the effects of the expanded commercialized agriculture were noticeable in transforming the traditional clientele mode of enslaved labor, particularly in North Africa. Before the expansion of commercial agriculture, freed and former enslaved Black Africans who had been manumitted through the local Islamic framework or the pressure of European abolitionism while often remained with their former owners could work under the latter as Khammass (sharecroppers or tenant farmers). Under such arrangements, the Khammass received a one-fifth share of their agricultural labor. As commercial agriculture intensified, demand for labor disrupted the existing sharecropping arrangements between former enslaved Black Africans and their owners. In Tunisia, for instance, state authorities promoting commercial agriculture were forced to regulate sharecropping practices, thus attracting sharecroppers to labor in commercial agriculture. Consequently, instead of working for or with their former owners, many former enslaved Black Africans contracted through brokers and middlemen to work in the commercial agricultural schemes. By the end of the century, a few unfortunate former enslaved who could not find their niche and had to support themselves relied on casual and menial jobs for survival, including prostitution.

Abolition and Exit from Slavery

Over the previous centuries, Islamic legal and juridical works had devoted sections in legal compendiums dealing with wide-ranging avenues of manumission through which the enslaved could attain Hurriyat (freedom). Accordingly, the sharia considers freeing one’s slave an exemplary religious act. And slaves, theoretically, could earn their way out of bondage by means of Mukatabah (contract), which entails working until they paid their owners the agreed-upon price in labor. As indicated above, a female slave who gave birth to her owner’s child immediately attained status as Umm al-Walad (Mother of the Child); she could not be sold or inherited and automatically gained her own freedom upon the death of her owner. According to Islamic law, the ulama considered being the conscience of the community, had the legal right to free the enslaved, especially from abusive owners or conditions. Enslaved persons fleeing abusive owners and seeking the intervention of religious authorities have historically taken refuge in zawiyas (Sufi convent) where they could not be forcibly removed and could attain freedom through the intercession of the ulama.

Despite the above-established avenues and pathways through which the enslaved could attain freedom, what paved the way for most enslaved Africans during the long nineteenth century to exit bondage was the pressure of European and western abolitionism, which triggered political, economic, and cultural reforms in the region. After the mid-nineteenth century, the number of intellectual elites exposed to European Enlightenment ideas and ideals of “liberty, equality, and freedom” grew and were increasingly in favor of ending the slave trade. Intellectuals such as Bin Diyaf, the chronicler who accompanied Ahmad Bey of Tunisia to Paris in 1846, vigorously supported abolition and considered it “timely, necessitated by the circumstance of the time, which did not necessarily contradict the sharia.”34 Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, proponents of modernization and like-minded reformists were sympathetic to ending the slave trade. Their opposition to the slave trade and slavery, nonetheless, fell short and did not culminate in an organized anti-slavery movement. At the same time, conservative Muslims during the nineteenth century, critical of the effects of the reforms and modernization designs underway, staunchly rejected abolition, and defended slavery as a permissible act regulated by the Sharia.35

In the absence of a fully grown indigenous abolitionism, British humanitarians taking their cue from outlawing the transatlantic slavery in the Americas campaigned for the extension of the abolition of the African slave trade in the western coast of Africa to the Middle Eastern and North African destinations of the slave trade. As an emerging superpower in the western and eastern Mediterranean following its defeat of Napoleon, Britain acting on the abolitionist pressure signed a series of treaties with France, Holland, Spain, and other European powers to impose a global end to the slave trade out of Africa. In 1838, it directed its attention to the Ottoman Empire, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf, which had been importing enslaved Africans to their slave markets at increasing and soaring rates. Immediately after turning its attention to these regions, Britain signed a series of treaties with the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian government prohibiting the African slave trade into the Porte, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, abolitionist groups around the Mediterranean composed mostly of merchants and missionaries were unsatisfied with Britain’s cautious approach to outlawing the slave trade through treaties. Under the aegis of the British Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), founded in 1839, the abolitionists organized their first anti-slavery convention in London in 1840 aimed at outlawing slavery in the Muslim context. During the convention, the BFASS outlined strategies to outlaw the slave trade out of Africa to Middle Eastern and North African destinations. Key among these strategies was to inundate the British government with petitions from its membership scattered throughout Malta, Sicily, Naples, Gibraltar, Smyrna, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo. In response to these petitions, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, cautiously instructed Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador in Istanbul, to approach the Porte to take measures to limit the slave trade to the Ottoman Empire and its domains. As a principal supplier of the slave trade to the Porte, the BFASS also directed its campaign on Muhammad Ali, pressuring him to end procurements of slaves in the Nilotic Sudan for conscription into his nizam al-jadid army.

While the BFASS was pressuring the British government to cajole the Ottoman sultan and Muhammad Ali to take measures against the slave trade, the trafficking of slaves from the North African coast across the Mediterranean aboard steamship vessels registered under European flags, spurred by the growth of European capital infusion in the region after the third decade of the nineteenth century, was reaching an alarming scale. Rather than deal with Britain’s cautious and diplomatic approach to outlaw the slave trade, the BFASS changed its strategy by appealing to public opinion through a barrage of newsletter coverage highlighting the scale of the broadening scope of the nefarious traffic across the Mediterranean. Among the numerous cases the BFASS brought to public attention was the detention in April 1841 of Miltiades, a Greek vessel bound for Istanbul from Tunis carrying fourteen enslaved Africans. Investigation into the Miltiades Affair lasted close to a year and stretched from Tunis to London to Greece. The case of the Miltiades implicated Tunisian statesmen, European citizens, consular agents, and a network of slave traders scattered across Tripoli, Tunis, and Istanbul. As the report on the Miltiades Affair revealed both the extent and scope of the traffic taking place since the mid-1830s across the Mediterranean basin, it triggered fresh concerns for the British humanitarians working to end the slave trade. Under the energetic and influential role of James Richardson (1806–1851), a prominent abolitionist who headed the British Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society, the BFASS with the assistance of Thomas Reade (British Consul in Tunis) worked with the progressive ruler of Tunis, Ahmad Bey to abolish the slave trade. Immediately after the conclusion of the investigation into the Miltiades Affair, the bey banned the slave trade. Within five years, he implemented a series of decrees prohibiting slaveholding and, by 26 April 1846, abolished slavery altogether in the Regency of Tunis.36 Under similar pressure, the Shah of Persia followed suit, issuing an anti-slavery decree in August 1846, although not until the Brussels Convention Act of 1890 did Iran formally abolish the slave trade.37 Faced with daily reports pouring in from BFASS’s agents stationed across the caravan slave routes in Murzuk, Tripoli, detailing both the volume and mortality of enslaved Africans, the British government finally adopted a more realistic approach toward the slave trade and slavery in the Ottoman Empire. After issuing a series of provisional measures against the slave trade, in 1847 the Ottoman sultan issued an imperial ferman abolishing the import of slaves. A few years later, in 1854, under British pressure, Egypt banned the public sale of slaves but did not outlaw the slave trade until 1877. In Northeast Africa and the Swahili coast, intense abolitionist pressure forced the Omanis in Zanzibar and Pemba to ban the slave trade by 1877, even though the clientele and paternalistic culture the Omanis instituted in the region kept a vast majority of the enslaved dependents on their former masters well into the early part of the twentieth century. In the Arabian Peninsula, slavery lingered well into the 1960s.

It must be emphasized that while manumission had been a common occurrence under the provisions of the sharia, during the process of formal abolition, the enslaved developed abolitionist consciousness by increasingly escaping to European consulates and legations. While evidence of enslaved Black Africans seeking refuge under European consuls before the 1840s is hard to come by, after 1841 resort to European consuls became a daily affair, with some European consuls using fugitive slaves to interfere in local affairs. Thus, when Ahmad Bey wrote to the highest religious office (al-Majlis al-Shar'i), justifying his compulsory emancipation and abolition of slavery, one of his key three arguments rested on al-maslaha al-siyassiya (public good) to prevent unhappy slaves from resorting to non-Muslims who used those incidents to interfere in state matters.38

Conclusion

Reevaluating the African slave trade to the Middle East and North Africa during the long nineteenth-century transformation processes allows for a greater understanding of the extent to which the political and economic developments engendered by these processes shaped the exponential increase in the import of slaves and their abolition. As discussed above, these processes that began in the wake of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 not only prompted a significant restructuring of the political, economic, and cultural landscapes of the Middle East and North Africa, but also produced significant repercussions on slavery and its abolition. It must also be stressed that both the expansion of the slave trade and its abolition were inextricably linked to the global effects of this ever-expanding European capitalism. Henceforth, in the same manner that economic growth and demand for sugar and coffee in Cuba, Brazil, and southern United States shaped the continuation of slavery in Atlantic world, progressive modernization coupled with rising European capitalism in North Africa and the Middle East had similar effects in fueling the demand for enslaved Black Africans’ labor well into the last decade of the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, while European advancement in the military, industrialization, and Enlightenment ideals may have inspired progressive modernizers such as Ahmad Bey of Tunisia to lead the way in abolishing slavery in 1846, paradoxically the same European ideals had less than a decade earlier enthused the largest conscription of enslaved Black Africans into the modern nizam al-jadid enterprise as did Muhammad Ali who drained the Nilotic Sudan for captives to fulfill his grand modernization ambitions. Even in the Persian and the Arabian Gulf where the nizam al-jadid scheme did not take off, a parallel demand for slave soldiers and eunuchs to strengthen the modern states or to perform administrative duties in the Holy Cities of Islam in Mecca and Medina surpassed the number of enslaved imports for the same functions in the preceding century.

Along with the grand military modernization schemes, the economic prosperity fueled by the expanding European economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa had even greater implications in stimulating demands for enslaved Black Africans for employment in the upper- and middle-class households in the region. Thus, until the late 1890s when the pressures of abolitionism diminished the slave imports, more and more enslaved Africans bound to the North African and Middle Eastern destinations were put to work in new ways, particularly in the commercialized agriculture engendered by the expansion of European capitalism.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, eds., “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World Economy, and Comparative Microhistories, Part II,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 3, no. 2 [special issue] (2008); Paul E. Lovejoy, “Jihad and the Second Slavery,” Journal of Global Slavery 1 (2016): 29–30.

  2. 2.

    See Michael and Toledano R. Ferguson, Ehud, “Ottoman Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. Stanley L. Engerman David Eltis, David Richardson, and Seymour Drescher (Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 2016).

  3. 3.

    Renée Worringer, A Short History of the Ottoman Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 239–40.

  4. 4.

    Worringer, A Short History of the Ottoman Empire, 244.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 260.

  6. 6.

    See L. Carl Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey, 1837–1855 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

  7. 7.

    See Ismael M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013).

  8. 8.

    See Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

  9. 9.

    See Thomas Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” Slavery & Abolition 9, no. 3 (1988): 60–70.

  10. 10.

    Emad Ahmad Helal, “Muhammad Ali’s First Army: The Expeririment in Building an Entirely Slave Army,” in Race and Slavery in the Middle EAst: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypy, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean, eds. Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 35.

  11. 11.

    Helal, “Muhammad Ali’s First Army,” 24–25.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    See J. Janet Ewald, “The Nile Valley System and the Red Sea Slave Trade 1820–1880,” Slavery & Abolition 9, no. 3 (1988): 73.

  14. 14.

    Ewald, “The Nile Valley System and the Red Sea Slave Trade 1820–1880,” 73.

  15. 15.

    “My Ninth Master was a European”: Enslaved Blacks in European Households in Egypt, 1798–1848,” in Race and Slavery in the Middle EAst: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypy, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean, ed. Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 110.

  16. 16.

    See Ibn Abi Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-Zaman, 9 vols., vol. 4 (reprinted Tunis: al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Kitab, 1999), 262–64.

  17. 17.

    Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey, 1837–1855, 186.

  18. 18.

    Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia, 127.

  19. 19.

    Registre fiscaux et administrative [Tax Census Records]. R.F. no. 819, 1856–1860.

  20. 20.

    Robin Hallett, The Penetration of Africa: European Exploration in North and West Africa to 1815 (New York: Fredeick A. Praeger, 1965).

  21. 21.

    Hallett, The Penetration of Africa, 207.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Zach Sell, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2021), 123.

  24. 24.

    See Kenneth M. Cuno, “African Slaves in Nineteenth Century-Century Rural Egypt: A Preliminary Assessment,” in Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean, ed. Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 81.

  25. 25.

    Cuno, “African Slaves in Nineteenth Century-Century Rural Egypt,” 81–84.

  26. 26.

    See Bernard K. Freamon, Possessed By the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

  27. 27.

    Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ralph A. Austen, “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade Out of Africa: A Tentative Census,” in The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the trans-Saharan Slave Trade, ed. E. Savage (London: Frank Cass, 1992).

  28. 28.

    See Ferguson and Toledano, “Ottoman Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century,” 201–02.

  29. 29.

    Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” 65–66.

  30. 30.

    See Helal, “Muhammad Ali’s First Army”.

  31. 31.

    Ahmad A. Sikainga, “Comardes in Arms or Captives in Bondage: Sudanese Slaves in the Turco-Egyptian Army, 1821–1865,” in Slaves in the Middle East and Africa, ed. Miura Toru and John Edward Philips (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000), 206–208.

  32. 32.

    Helal, “Muhammad Ali’s First Army,” 35.

  33. 33.

    Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 114.

  34. 34.

    Ibn Abi Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-Zaman, 4: 86–87.

  35. 35.

    Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia, 123–24.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 75–95.

  37. 37.

    Behnaz A. Mirzai, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

  38. 38.

    See Ismael M. Montana, “The Ordeal of Slave Slaves’ Flight in Tunisia,” in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Sandra E. Greene Alice Bellamba and Martin A. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).