Paul Lovejoy has estimated that 800,000 enslaved Africans were sent to destinations in Asia in the nineteenth century as part of the East African slave trade in the Indian Ocean, with Eastern Arabia absorbing the largest proportion of this population. Although the demographic impact of this forced migration is visible throughout the region today, enslaved Africans remain largely invisible in official histories of Gulf states. Museum exhibits in Oman and the Emirates feature images of Arab workers performing work that was historically dominated by African labor, and African influences on regional artistic traditions are often explained through trade relationships with East Africa rather than the lasting impact of imported African populations. A conspicuous absence of social movements among descendants of enslaved Africans in the Gulf which might press for recognition or reparation for slavery or seek wider Pan-African solidarity distinguishes the Gulf from many other post-slave societies. This paper examines memory and slavery in Oman and the UAE and argues against conventional interpretations of slavery in the Middle East which distinguish “Islamic slavery” from slavery in other parts of the world. Classic works on Middle Eastern slavery by Gordon, Segal, Lewis, and Toledano highlight conditions of slavery in the Middle East which contrast sharply with the Atlantic world, particularly the labor performed by slaves—concentrated among elites as soldiers, concubines, eunuchs, retainers and domestics—or work outside of the productive sector. Yet in the Gulf, enslaved Africans were vital to production in the pearl diving and date producing sectors, and labor more closely resembled Atlantic than so-called “Islamic” slavery. How, therefore, can we understand the “forgetting” of the vital role of African labor in contemporary Gulf societies? Drawing on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Eve Troutt-Powell, and using documentary sources from British archives (Gulf Administration papers from the India Office Records in the British Library and the Slave Trade, Admiralty, and Colonial series in the Public Records Office) and published official histories in Arabic from Oman and the United Arab Emirates, this paper argues that the distinction of slavery in the Gulf lies not with either the type of labor or the religious context, but with the shared experience in the region following the simultaneous collapse of the pearl and date industries as a result of global economic forces and subsequent transformations in Gulf slavery.