Under the British protectorate, much of the Ḥaḍramī economy depended upon enslaved labor. British officials in ‘Aden justified eastward expansion in part with the claim that British influence would herald emancipation. In practice, however, the protectorate structure itself depended upon the people enslaved by the Qu‘aiṭī and Kathīrī sultanates. The British suppression of a 1943 rebellion by enslaved people in the Qu‘aiṭī cities of Mukalla and Shiḥr both highlighted the British role in the maintenance of the slavery system and accelerated that system’s unraveling. This paper asks not only what happened during the rebellion, but also what it indicates about the relationship between British imperialism and slavery. It argues that, despite their claims to the contrary, the British tolerated, upheld, and even enforced the slavery system in the Ḥaḍramaut, but that enslaved people, through organized resistance, forced the regime to accept a transition to a new model. Suzanne Miers mentioned the rebellion in a brief 2005 essay, but her work depended largely upon a single, highly-curated Colonial Office file. This paper draws upon the parallel India Office records, which contain several complicating documents, including the minutes of meetings between enslaved leaders, Qu‘aiṭī officials, and the British Resident Adviser. Read with a critical eye and analyzed with models drawn from the Subaltern Studies Collective, the minutes and other documents show that the enslaved people who pilfered weapons and ammunition, threatened the Mukalla marketplace, took over Qu‘aiṭī government offices, and occupied a citadel were not only defending their material stability, but also asserting a right to determine their fates in a Qu‘aiṭī system undergoing budget cuts and scaling down its dependence on enslaved soldiers who, through acts of everyday resistance, had rendered themselves unreliable as tools of imperial control. Other documents testify to the importance of a semi-coordinated uprising in Shiḥr, solidarities between enslaved people and free subaltern communities, “pro-slave” figures in the Qu‘aiṭī royal court, and the enslaved and free women who participated in this armed uprising. This paper has broader implications for not only the histories of the Eastern ‘Aden Protectorate and of enslaved resistance, but also the study of British imperialism in Southwest Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Indian Ocean Region. The paper follows Africanist scholars in emphasizing the dependence of the British on enslaved labor under twentieth century protectorate systems and in thus undermining the colonial narrative that British power was uncomplicatedly an engine of abolition.