Abstract
The Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR) is an environmentally unified geographic area whose natural features historically supported a closely-linked, multifaceted socio-economic. The SRSR is currently divided between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia (Somaliland), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan. In the seventeenth century, the SRSR entered a two-hundred-years-long mega-drought that precipitated a protracted food crisis. Since states traditionally played key roles in the redistribution of food resources in the SRSR, this food crisis resulted in a region-wide political crisis at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Centralized states in Sudan and Ethiopia collapsed. The Yemeni Imamate lost control of the rural countryside. In Arabia, the drought facilitated the first Saudi-Wahhabi military conquest of Ottoman territory, which resulted in the first period of Saudi-Wahhabi control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This far reaching political crisis fundamentally changed the SRSR socio-economic system.
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Notes
- 1.
For a survey of the uncovered ruins of ‘Aydhab, see Peacock and Peacock (2008, 32–48).
- 2.
Once enslaved, these famine victims were formally treated like any other slaves belonging to the Negus. However, in practice their treatment was fundamentally different, as these famine-slaves did not occupy the same roles as slaves brought from distant lands. They remained in their homes and on their land. As slaves, their new and central obligation to Sahle Sellase was to provide three days labor every three months. Even this did not prove permanent. When the acute crisis abated, these famine-slaves no longer needed direct support from Sahle Sellase, so they began agitating for a return to the status quo ante. Ultimately, the Negus emancipated approximately 4700 of his enslaved subjects (Pankhurst 53–55).
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Acknowledgments
Researching and writing this chapter was made possible by grants from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History.
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Serels, S. (2018). Food Insecurity and Political Instability in the Southern Red Sea Region During the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840. In: Collet, D., Schuh, M. (eds) Famines During the ʻLittle Ice Ageʼ (1300-1800). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54337-6_6
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