The heart of this paper seeks to explore the ways in which enslaved knowledge and labor served as a foundation for nineteenth century empires in the Nile Valley, through perhaps the least likely of sources: European travelogues. Orientalists traveling in the Middle East and Africa, wrote extensively about the lives, customs, and culture of the people they lived among, sparking off an entire industry of travel writings. Historians and other scholars depended on these writings as key sources for their tomes, at least until Edward Said’s famous Orientalism offered an alternative reading of these texts. Rather than serving as objective facts, they were probed as reflections of the authors’ desires and concerns rooted and inherent to imperialism. Understandably, scholars of Northeast Africa increasingly set aside these problematic sources in favor of Arabic, Amharic, Ottoman, or others which centered indigenous knowledge. But is there a way to analyze this massive, problematic source base for localized knowledge? Following in the methodological footsteps of Ann Stoler and Marissa Fuentes, this paper revisits European travelogues by reading them “along the archival grain.” It examines six of these journeys in the Nile Valley as sites of indigenous knowledge production, specifically, enslaved knowledge production. Nineteenth century European travelers may have translated existing hierarchies into legible European categories, but their own journeys—the routes, the labor, and often the language skills—depended on local geographies, work, and interpretation. The freed slave working as an interpreter, the woman captured while fleeing her village and forced to serve as guide, porters rented from slavers for the day, week, or month to carry the shells for trade or grain for sustenance: enslaved knowledge and labor built empires in Northeast Africa. During a period of rapidly shifting empires, expansion and consolidation required intermediaries and slaves often forcibly filled these roles. Looking across the Nile Valley, from Egypt to Ethiopia, this paper does not attempt to “uplift” enslaved voices from the archives of history, but rather to illuminate how these archives are embedded within their knowledge.

In late 1875 and early 1876, Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia dealt the Egyptian army a pair of devastating defeats, marking the beginning of a process that would culminate in the ouster of Khedive Isma‘il amid mounting debts and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. This paper examines the conflict through a history of information. It begins by situating the local production of knowledge at Egyptian outposts in present-day Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia within the information regime of the Egyptian Empire at its apex. Turning then to the battlefields of Gundet and Gura, it examines how news of the catastrophe circulated between the imperial frontier and the metropole at a moment just before the rapid expansion of the Arabic mass press in Egypt. Finally, the paper briefly considers how the events of 1875-6 figured in public discourse at subsequent moments of renewed scrutiny of Egyptian-Ethiopian relations, charting in the process a history of official forgetting. While the manufacture and dissemination of knowledge were integral to the plan for imperial expansion, the paper argues, imperial shrinkage fertilized a new logic of silence. Its echoes have reverberated in the century and a half since. This research draws on close reading of maps, government correspondence, memoirs, and printed journals, most notably al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriyya, the Egyptian official gazette. Approaching the circulation of information from above (government officials and cartographers) and below (soldiers), the paper weighs the significance of conduits both human and machine, the effects of rumor, and the role of the state in promoting and suppressing accounts of the empire’s ebb and flow. By underscoring the significance of places long deemed peripheral to Egyptian history, it makes the case for a more porous definition of Middle East studies.

This paper will cross-analyze Na’um Bey Shuqair’s (1863-1922) Amthāl al-ʻawāmm fī miṣr wa-al-Sūdān wa-al-Shām (1894) [Common Proverbs in Egypt, Sudan, and the Levant] and Jughrāfīyat wa-tārīkh al-Sūdān (1903) [The Geography and History of Sudan], widely considered the first full history of Sudan, to demonstrate the formative role that both indigenous and foreign transnational notions of Arabness played in shaping racialist discourse in early twentieth-century Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Shuqair was an Ottoman subject born in Syria and an officer of the Egyptian Military. He became the head of the historical department of the military’s intelligence services upon the 1896 transfer of the department to the Sudan Government. In the preface to Amthāl, Shuqair states that in writing the book, he sought to gather an encyclopedic body of information on the shared histories, cultures, myths, and literary traditions of the three regions, stressing that they were bound by their common Arab heritage. Shuqair’s racialization of Sudanese Arab groups in the first part of Tārīkh al-Sūdān, “geography,” in which Shuqair conducts an ethnographic study of the five Sudanese races he names (“the Blacks, those who look like the Blacks, the Nubians/Berbers, the Beja, and the Sudanese Arabs”) echoes this sentiment. He posits Blackness in constant and contradictory opposition to Arabness. This offers an opportunity to complicate the “colonized colonizer” triptych that has come to define the triangulated relationship between Great Britain, Egypt, and Sudan through the foregrounding of nineteenth-century histories of enslaving in Ottoman-Egyptian Sudan (1821-1884). These works demonstrate how colonial mediators like Shuqair—whose disposition was informed by his experiences living under Ottoman rule and amongst burgeoning ideas of a politicized Arab identity—worked within local (yet hegemonic) understandings of race and Blackness to define and shape colonial understandings of the racial “essence” of Sudanese groups. This article will ask: what histories were erased by this prescription of Arabness onto Sudan? What were the parameters and metrics by which Blackness and Arabness were defined against one another? How did civilizational discourse inform the imagined distance between the two racial characters? In doing so, this analysis will center the decisive role that Arabness and anti-Blackness played in Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese racial formations to demonstrate how grammars of colonial racial hierarchies were informed by a multitude of discourses and epistemologies.

The limitations and assumptions of area studies continue to deepen the stark divisions between Middle East Studies and African Studies today. However, the Red Sea stands as a challenge to this false premise by requiring its researchers to transcend divides between the writing of the history of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Instead of perceiving the Red Sea as a border separating Africa from Arabia or a bridge connecting them, this paper aims to situate the Red Sea region and its histories within a wider world of connections, networks and interactions. To do so, I began with a set of quite specific clues and interpretive puzzles that emerged from a discovery in the Ottoman archives regarding the death of a former French consul at Aden, Henri Lambert (d.1859), on a small island off the coast of the Horn of Africa. The individuals and events surrounding the death of Lambert would open Pandora’s box on the “authority”—a term that indicates something smaller than sovereignty and might reflect better the nature of political realities in the Horn and the Red Sea in the 19th century—issues of Zeila, bringing the Ottomans, the French, the British and local powers together at this historical moment. This was the period in which Muhammed Ali’s reign (r. 1805-1848) brought some stability in the area and consequently led to the revival of the Red Sea trade. Moreover, the volume of oceangoing traffic between India and the Red Sea increased exponentially with the dawn of the steamship area and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Therefore, many powers set their eyes on both sides of the Red Sea. The focus of this paper will be on a local rivalry between two chiefs, Sharmarke (d. 1861), a Somali magnate and merchant, and Abu Bakr (d.1885), an Afar notable and a notorious slave merchant. Both of them were well-entrenched in politics through the Horn of Africa and a variety of trading networks in the Red Sea littoral. Through their trading and political partners in various places ranging from Paris to London, Istanbul to Bombay, I argue that tracing their rivalry over trade and the governorship of the Ottoman-controlled Zeila allows us to surface multiple unexplored connections between local, regional, and global histories in the Red Sea region.