Gender, Race and Slavery in the Mamluk Households of Eighteenth-Century Egypt

Abstract

Much of the historiography about Mamluk Egypt has focused on the male Mamluks while women’s role and participation were neglected as subjects of serious inquiry. However, the household’s power and stability were in part due to the creation of alliances with other households that constructed a kinship system that was part real and part fictive. Thus, women’s participation as marriage partners, their role in arranging marriages of household members and the importance of their own patronage networks of former slaves were crucial. Race played a major role in the construction of kinship. The Mamluk system was race-based and privileged white slaves—women and men—from Georgia and Circassia. It is nevertheless important to recognize that Islam constructed a legal system as well as the social and cultural context for forms of household slavery that turned slaves into kin and mitigated the harshest aspects of chattel slavery as it existed in the Americas during the same period.