The Khedivate of Egypt and the Husaynid Beylik of Tunis adopted anti-slavery policies because of the British pressure to abolish the slave trade and slavery in addition to the internal causes. However, their practical measures were quite different. Although Saʿid (r. 1854-1863) and Ismaʿil (r. 1863-1879) of the Egyptian Khedivate took many actions against slavery and the slave trade, their orders or decrees lacked detailed plans before the ultimate termination of the slave trade in 1877, a result of the Anglo-Egyptian convention. As for the Tunisian Beylik, Ahmad Bey (r. 1837-1855) rapidly took measures against slavery. He prohibited the slave trade in 1841 and abolished slavery itself in 1846. While previous studies on slavery in the Middle East and North Africa have explained the circumstances and conditions related to anti-slavery in each state in the region, comparative explanations regarding the differences between the polities have been relatively scarce. This study focuses on the reasons behind the different approaches to the matter of slavery found in the Egyptian Khedivate and the Tunisian Beylik and argues that the differences of state projects and strategies were decisive. Using British and Egyptian archival sources and published primary sources, such as memoirs, chronicles, and reports, this paper compares three different conditions between the two polities: the scale of the slave trade, the presence of organized slave traders, and the government’s demand for military slaves. While acknowledging that the first two factors had some relatedness, I contend that the different policy directions between the two states mainly resulted from the dissimilar demands for military manpower. The Egyptian Khedivate continuously needed black soldiers, especially for the expansionist projects of Ismaʿil, before the debt crisis and the military defeats in the Horn of Africa, and the slave trade was the most effective way to procure these soldiers. Meanwhile, the Tunisian Beylik did not pursue expansionism, and it was willing to restrict slavery to win the favor of Britain to stave off the French and Ottoman threats. This study elaborates on the influence of such disparate concerns on the procedures of state-led anti-slavery efforts. This comparison will reveal the way that anti-slavery was adopted and adjusted as a part of reform programs and how a specific project was influenced by other state projects and main concerns of rulers in the Middle East and North Africa during the nineteenth century.

In 1687, four Muslims came to the court of Galata with the French ship captain Cazican regarding the redemption of a Muslim captain named Hüseyin Reis. Hüseyin Reis’ ship had been attacked in the Mediterranean by Venetian corsairs and he himself was captured. Cazican had ransomed him for 900 esedi guruş of his own money, to be paid back by Hüseyin Reis in Istanbul. In their statement, the four Muslims at court stated that Hüseyin Reis could not pay the ransom amount as he had lost everything during his captivity and was now destitute, owning nothing but the clothes on his back. They explained that they were now at the court because of charity (merhameten) to help him repay his debt. While they were not capable of paying the full amount, they collectively agreed to take shared responsibility for 400 guruş of the debt. After this, Cazican renounced the remaining 500 guruş in Hüseyin Reis’ presence, stating that it was simply impossible to collect it from him. By utilizing extensive unpublished legal court records belonging to the court of Galata as well as mühimme defterleri (registers of important affairs) and the ahkâm defterleri (registers of edicts), this paper provides an analysis of the social support and solidarity enlisted on behalf of Ottoman captives by their families, friends, neighbors, or the wider community in Istanbul during the seventeenth century. It argues that this social support was essential to the functioning of ransom networks in the Ottoman Mediterranean, as most captives were in financially dire conditions and could not afford to pay their ransom price or ransom-related debts after their redemption. In many cases, a captive’s ability to gain freedom, repay debts to intermediaries, resolve or settle disputes with them, and get back on their feet depended on social networks composed of friends, neighbors, and community members. This social support proved particularly valuable in the absence of systematic institutional intervention from the Ottoman state on behalf of captives. While the political and economic aspects of captivity and ransoming in the Ottoman Mediterranean have received significant historiographical attention, the social aspects of ransoming—especially as they related to conceptions of charity—have not been analyzed to the same extent. This contribution seeks to ameliorate this gap in the literature.

Scholars of Iranian history have recently given some attention to the presence of enslaved Africans in wealthy household and in the royal court in the nineteenth century. This research is developing as a new field in Iranian studies. Yet unlike the literature on American slavery, little attention has been given to the theme or resistance and rebellion within these households. Most studies have assumed that enslaved domestic workers and concubines, overwhelmingly women, were adopted into Iranian families and lived as as resigned or satisfied, possibly even content, servants. For example, there is Haleh Afshar’s important portrait of a woman who became a domestic servant in her family’s household after leaving the shah’s palace. This paper will attempt to recover what can be known of the life of one African woman, Gulchihrih Khanum, who was enslaved in the court of Nasir al-Din Shah. She was appointed as the nannie of Aziz al-Sultan (Malijak), the delinquent boy favorite of the king. She encouraged and participated in the boy’s antics and was known as the “clown-slave” (kaniz-e dalghak). Her life at court provides an example of coerced emotional labor expected of slaves, especially women. The memoirs of Taj al-Sultana and other court figures also provide us with a picture of subtle, and in at least one case, spectacular, resistance undertaken by Gulchihrih. These discoveries demand we apply new sensitivities to ongoing research on enslaved women in Iran.

This paper explores foreign missionaries’ narratives of slavery in the Nile Valley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I approach these narratives as a distinct genre defined by the unique position of the missionary as a storyteller and the utility of slavery as a vehicle for conveying suffering. Taking inspiration from Lata Mani’s work on debates over sati and its abolition, I argue that the enslaved, much like the women of colonial Bengal, were neither the subjects nor the objects of the missionaries’ writings, but served as a discursive canvas for missionaries to situate their activities in a world of suffering and violence. Slavery, as a this-worldly trial with an allegorical relationship to the bondage of sin, lent a temporal urgency to the spiritual project of the missionaries, merging post-manumission beneficence with the salvation of souls. Through representing slavery as a particularly egregious form of violence, Western missionaries worked to obscure, and even justify, their own relationships with colonial violence. In this paper, I focus in particular on the “Report on Bianca Lemuna” published by Father Daniele Comboni in 1881. Lemuna, a young girl with albinism and a former slave, was exemplary of the story that missionaries like Comboni wanted to tell about the slave trade. The daughter of slave trader, Lemuna was abducted by rival slave traders from her home in equatorial Africa, eventually arriving at Comboni’s mission station in El Obeid, Sudan after being intercepted the forces of by General Charles Gordon. Comboni’s narrative, focusing on Lemuna’s abduction, perilous journey, the evil of her traffickers, her heroic rescue, and her later Christian life at the mission, offers a harrowing story of rupture, violence, and redemption. These elements were put to work for the threefold purpose of celebrating the liberatory capacity of colonial violence in Sudan, condemning Islam for its ties to the slave trade, and linking the redeeming power of Christianity to a narrative of bondage and liberation. Through the suffering of the journey, the nefarious villains, the valiant heroes, the promise of redemption, as well as his fixation of the racial spectacle of Lemuna’s skin, Comboni constructed a trope of the vulnerable African for consumption by Western audiences. I argue that Comboni’s “Report,” serves as an archetype of the genre, with significant parallels in slave narratives produced in other missions operating in the Nile Valley including the British Church Mission Society and the American Presbyterians.

The Occupation of Iran during World War II, not only led to the abdication of Reza Shah, but also the captivity of over two hundred high ranking intellectuals, judges, lawyers, minsters, technocrats and journalists in 1941-1946. Most of these captives were held in Arak, in a concentration camp style area formed by the British, and they were erroneously called the "Fifth Column." This study examines how these captives, amongst them a past and a future prime minister, (Ahmad Matin Daftari and Ja'far Sharif Emami), as well as many movers and shakers of the second Pahlavi period, stood out as anti-colonial activists in the aftermath of the wrongful occupation of Iran by the allied forces. Most histories of World War II in Iran do not mention these captives and how the allied forces took their freedom, and placed them in concentration camps in Arak (Sultanabad). This study wishes to address this lacunae in modern Iranian history, and shed light on ideas expressed by some of the most vociferous opponents of anti-colonialism. These were voices that defined modern Iran, and ideas that contributed to the progress of the country, after the end of the second World War.