In a recent forum on slavery, Rebecca Scott, the historian of Atlantic slavery draws our attention to the tension between the social facts of diverse forms of bondage and the absolute legal distinction between slavery and free labor that undergirded Anglophone legal doctrine. Frederick Cooper among others has highlighted the thin line that existed between slavery and freedom in East Africa. Johan Mathew and Matthew Hopper, historians of the migration of bonded labor across the Western Indian Ocean have shown that British imperial officials dealing with slaves who sought manumission on Persian and Arabian sea ports, found it difficult to distinguish between different forms of bonded servile labor and slavery. Despite the difficultly accessing the subjecthood of bonded laborers, Ehud Toledano and Eve Trout Powell have tried to portray enslaved people’s experience in the Ottoman Empire. My presentation will tease out the tension between bonded labor and slavery by focusing on the documentation of bonded migrant labor from East Africa, Iran and parts of the Arabian Peninsula in the pearl fisheries of Bahrain and Kuwait and the docks of Basra during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Basra docks case, representatives of foreign commercial companies as well as British occupying forces, drew on a pool of bonded migrant labor that was often characterized in British official discourse as “coolie” labor. By comparing the differences in the manner by which officials documented and regulated these diverse forms of bonded labor, I hope to flesh out the ways that certain forms of bondage, such as forced labor for purposes of war, were sanctioned while others, such as slavery, were outlawed. I ask two questions: To what extent did the documentation of bonded labor shape official discourses on the regulation of labor (free and bonded); and how did bonded laborers themselves navigate the competing claims of jurisdiction by regional and imperial actors, including ship captains, to claim a certain subjecthood that allows them to jettison their bonded status. I examine manumission documents, Ottoman sources on regulation of labor migration and slavery in the Gulf, Arabic press and memoirs, British regulation of pearl fishing in the Persian Gulf and British documents on the recruitment of bonded labor on the infrastructural development on the docks of Basra during and immediately after the First World War. . --

According to Islamic law, manumission created a legal tie between the owner freeing his/her slave and the person that thereby obtained his/her freedom. Thus, manumission transformed but did not sever the master-slave relationship. While a freed slave immediately enjoyed the same full legal rights as a freeborn person, the manumitted man or woman and his/her descendants remained perpetually indebted to the emancipator and to his/her family, because of the patronage links created by the bonds of clientage (velâ). These patronage ties between the manumitting owner and the freed person created an inheritance relationship, the former owner inheriting from his/her manumitted slaves. The property of the emancipated slave, or of his/her descendants, who died without priority heirs or agnates, reverted to the male or female patron or to the agnatic heirs of the latter, in accordance with the system of devolution. The present study aims to clarify how this arrangement worked out in practice, through a close study of the inheritances of former palace-slaves. Using sharia court records, especially estate inventories and registers of inheritance dating to the period between the 1570s and the late 1700s, this paper evaluates the inheritance relationship between manumitted palace slaves and their former masters. The approach is comparative, as I juxtapose the former palace inmates with ex-slaves not affiliated to the imperial household. According to Islamic law, if the master was no longer alive, his/her inheritance share went to his/her own male heirs. Only if the ex-master had no heirs, was the master’s share cancelled and the freed slaves’ tie with the former owner’s household definitely broken. The situation of palace-affiliated people, however, was different. For if the former owner of a palace slave and his/her heirs were deceased when the former slave died, the master’s share went to the reigning sultan. Hence, this paper demonstrates how imperial household affiliation had an impact on inheritance relationships. It argues that affiliation to the imperial household differentiated the inheritances of former palace slaves from those of other manumitted persons. As freed palace slaves had an unbreakable inheritance relationship with the imperial household, it is safe to argue that this arrangement created an almost eternal bond between manumitted slaves and the imperial household.

In the city of Nizwa and elsewhere in northern Oman, whilst a national historical narrative articulates a territorial domain on the basis of a homogenous citizenry, an unacknowledged slave legacy, an ineradicable residue of the Ibadi shar?‘a past, produces unofficial tribal hierarchies. This paradoxical state of affairs has been further enabled by the active management – rather than its abolishment - of tribal hierarchies and their differential relationships under the rubric of the State. Marriage practices in Nizwa are one of the key sites at which tensions between those who are ‘pure’ tribal Arabs versus those descended from slaves or client tribes ignites hostilities and passions between the two broad groups. While issues of genealogy and blood ties are at the center of these hostilities, modern religiously-grounded family law plays a decisive role in legally endorsing ‘customary’ hierarchical marriage practices between ‘pure’ tribal Arabs effectively marginalizing those descended from slaves or client tribes through the legal principle of kafa‘a or equivalence in marriage status. The result of this paradoxical state of affairs has been debates between Omanis about differences in opinion about the relationship between the Islamic discursive tradition, differential status accorded by tribal genealogies and inter-marriage in ways that are deeply informed by the lived realities of nation-hood, including liberal notions of equality, human rights and capitalist modernity. In this paper, I delve into the debates arising around the notion of importance of tribal genealogy, Ibadi shar?’a and national citizenship in order to examine: 1) the daily tensions that arise between those who emphasize the egalitarian ideals embodied in homogenous citizenship and its ties to human rights verses those whose social relationships are guided by the prescriptions of a ranked Ibadi shar?’a society that defines kinship ties, marital relations and social interactions in terms of status determined by lineage and descent and 2) the ways in which these two broad social movements have opened up a space of contestation in the modes within which Islam is articulated and manifested as part of daily living.

According to Islamic law, slaves in the Ottoman Empire were considered as property. Once a person became a slave, he or she came under the law of property and could be bought and sold like any other commodity. Thus, we can see slaves listed alongside livestock and household goods as part of an estate inventory. With this status, slaves had no capacity to have rights, but capacity to act. They could get the power of attorney to trade or to assign property for example. At the same time, slaves made use of the court to ensure their manumission, to register their contracts, and to protect their inherited property rights. We can also find entries revealing that a current or former slave even sued the heirs of his or her master to contest the apportionment of an estate. With regard to these entries, the clear categorization of slaves as property seems to vanish and the classification of free and unfree or slave and non-slave seems to be more nuanced than regulated by legal terms. Besides this, (former) female and male slaves were affected in different ways indicating differences in terms of slave interagency. For example in the entries of the Istanbul court registers, we can find a more or less equal number of male and female slaves manumitted in the consequence of a pious act, but far less female slaves among those manumitted according to the conditions previously agreed upon in contracts between slaves and slave owners. The analysis of social interactions between slaves and others documented in the entries of the Ottoman court registers of Istanbul in the 16th and 17th centuries should help to break with the focus on polar or binary pairs social and legal categories tend to. Instead, rather nuanced continuums should be reflected. The study of manumissions, records of escapes, proofs of non-slave status, donations, etc., will show that the clear lines of the legal categorization blur when it comes to the terms of the de facto status. The analysis of these records also provides insights into the lives of (former) female and male slaves that were shaped individually by de jure and de facto regulations and allowed different ways of slave interagency.