This study examines the ways that British military officers included specific groups of Sudanese elites in the process of planning the British-led conquest of the Sudan and in the early construction of colonial state power. During the planning of the conquest, British intelligence officers charged with collecting and analyzing information on the Mahdist state recognized two categories of informants as authoritative, European males who had acquired first hand experience of the region and elite Sudanese merchants who were able to travel to Cairo. As a result of pre-war intelligence that had, in part, been provided by Sudanese elites, British military officers believed that Sudanese elites could be divided into two categories, political rulers and religious leaders, and that a stable colonial state could only be built by incorporating the former while marginalizing the latter. Before the conquest, British officers planned a war reconstruction program that would use land registration laws, taxation regulations and a curtailing of earlier British led abolitionist programs to enlist indigenous political rulers as allies. While British military officers who staffed the newly created colonial state began to implement a reconstruction program designed to increase the wealth and local power of indigenous political rulers, these same officers implemented programs that either ignored or openly undermined the interests of indigenous religious leaders. When, in 1901, the rise of a new, urban-based millenarian religious sect led the new colonial government to engage directly with indigenous religious leaders, the British military officers who formed the first generation of colonial administrators sought to continue to curtail these leaders’ influence over state policy. Though the colonial government sought the advice of Omdurman-based Kadis as to the nature of the new religion and as to the appropriate punishment for apostasy, the Kadis’ ruling had no influence on government policy. British military officers simply implemented the punishment they had selected prior to consulting with the Kadis.

“Among Muslims you have centuries of hatred to overcome; among pagans, centuries of fear.” So declared Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers from 1867 to 1892, and founder of the Pères Blancs, France’s most prolific missionary society in Africa, while describing to his disciples the obstacles they would face in bringing Christianity to Africa through anti-slavery missions (Kittler: 95). His audience well understood the justification for France’s occupation of Algeria, partly staged as a defense against Barbary pirate sieges, whose European captives had once numbered in the tens of thousands. As such, they also understood long histories of French encounters with Islam articulated in the context of race, slavery, redemption, and emancipation. Though this so-called ‘White slavery’ had dwindled to almost nothing by the time of French invasion (especially compared with Black slavery in Algeria and throughout the French Empire), then-salient anti-slavery sentiments furnished French aggression with a chivalrous 'mission libératrice.' This paper will consider the significance of religious reclamation, emancipation, and slave redemption as powerful tropes in this period of French imperial enterprise in Africa, particularly within the language and techniques of the Pères Blancs, and other widely-circulated Church-funded literature issued to advance the cause of Catholic missionising in the Maghreb. The boundaries between ‘European’ and ‘Barbarian,’ between Muslim and Christian, and between ‘White’ and ‘Moor’ were notoriously thin and porous, and Lavigerie and his followers positioned themselves – with great success, in the eyes of their European audiences – at the front guard of this spiritual and temporal battle. Though archival and other sources related to these histories are rich, they remain untapped, as the exploits of the Pères Blancs specifically – and, more broadly, the influence of religious movements on the development of French race-based ideologies of Nation and Empire – have been strangely neglected. Recent scholarship by Patricia Lorcin, Todd Shepard, Julia Clancy-Smith, and others, has addressed this lacuna. Lorcin, for example, has argued compellingly that the nineteenth-century project of racially delineating Mediterranean bodies involved the reinscription of mythologies of Roman-Latin antecedence. This paper represents an effort to deepen this general thesis by emphasizing the role of the Roman-Catholic anti-slavery mandate. Consequently, the wider aim of this paper is to shed light on some origins of perceptions of Muslim-Christian alterity across the French-Algerian transnational space, especially as they inform colonial and postcolonial notions of citizenship and assimilation.

At first glance, nineteenth-century Brazil and the Ottoman Empire appear as two opposing and unrelated societies: one, a young, Christian state in the New World, and the other, a seven hundred year-old Muslim empire spanning across parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. There was however at least common element in both societies: African slavery. While the experiences of these slaves are in no way entirely congruent, within African slave communities in both Brazil and the Ottoman Empire, there existed female-dominated religious communities based largely on African spiritual beliefs. The most popular of these in Brazil was Candomblé, and in the Ottoman Empire, the Zar/Bori. Evidence suggests these practices played important roles in the spiritual beliefs, social organization and cohesion in their respective African communities. As a result of the relatively advanced state of slavery studies in Brazil, a great deal is known about Candomblé; For the Zar / Bori of the Ottoman Empire, however, much less is known, as scholars have only just begun to address its existence. Even a quick reading of the secondary studies suggests some exciting avenues for comparative research. In this paper, I argue that these two African-based religious practices are comparable and thus the Ottoman historian can draw upon the more advanced research from Brazilian studies to help formulate new research questions and approaches. The first task is thus to detail their similarities. Particular research questions include: What are the origins of these two religious practices? What was their role in the African communities? Who were the attendees? How did the members of the mainstream society view these practices? What was their societal function? What was their position vis-à-vis the state and how did they help to organize resistance against slavery? And most importantly, in what ways do these religious practices challenge contemporary class and gender structures? The implications of demonstrating the comparative nature of the Candomblé and Zar/Bori are twofold. First, it bridges the artificial boundary separating Atlantic and Middle Eastern slavery studies. Second it aims to advance the discussion on the common experiences of the global African Diaspora.

The main purpose of this proposed project is to look at an object, the sewing machine; its arrival and reception in the late Ottoman Empire. The sewing machine, from its inception in 1850s until the mid-twentieth century had a peculiar character, it would seem, not only in the Ottoman Empire but throughout the world: it was modern, yet at the same time traditional, it was consumed but for the purpose of production, it was foreign, yet it was quickly nationalized during the times when the nationalist sentiments were at their highest. Such was the case when Singer Company introduced a model called Hürriyet, meaning freedom, during the proclamation of the Second Constitution in 1908, which had been demanded with the slogans of “Freedom, Justice, Equality and Brotherhood.” Hürriyet heralded not only the return to the constitutional regime and representational government but also, in literal terms, the official ending of slavery in Ottoman Empire. Yet, before Hürriyet, nameless other models of the sewing machine, arriving in the empire roughly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and advertised at least in the 1890s as a domestic item, presumably had touched Ottoman Empire’s largely domestic slave population. This project aims, through a series of questions, to understand the nature and possible outcomes of these presumed encounters. For instance, what sort of sewing techniques did the sewing machine replace in the domestic settings? How was it advertised? What did women and, in a more indirect way, men think about the domestic usage of the sewing machine? How and where did they learn to use it? Who was it that bought it? More specifically, what were the implications of hard stitches and endurable clothing? How did it, or did it, change people’s ways of dressing or life-styles? In short, by positing such questions and inquiring about some of the forces that governed and transformed the Ottoman household, this project hopes to shed light on how slaves themselves were transformed to fit into an advancing new social and economic order.