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.

In the 1870s, Ismaʿil (r. 1863-1879) of the Egyptian Khedivate actively pursued expansionism in Africa. In 1875, a Khedival expeditionary force was sent to the Eastern African Coast under the authority of the Zanzibar Sultanate and occupied several towns. Trying to secure the goodwill of the Eastern African residents, the Khedival army declared that they were sent by the (Ottoman) Sultan of Muslims to protect poor Muslims and promised the revival of the slave trade, which was restricted by the Sultan of Zanzibar under British influence. At first glance, this approach contradicted the anti-slavery policy of the Khedivate, one of the main justifications to convince European powers, especially Britain, of its expansionist activities in Africa. However, later measures of the occupation troops showed the typical ambivalence of the Khedival anti-slavery policy. Once having a firm footing, the Khedival regime prohibited the sale of slaves, breaking the promise. At the same time, this order was not thoroughly enforced. Several reports informed that slave caravans were entered by land, and vessels with slaves were allowed to leave ports. This paper argues that the stance of the Khedivate on the slave trade shown in the East African expedition reflected its general policy direction regarding anti-slavery. On the one hand, the Khedivate instructed its governors to restrict the slave trade and actively revealed the will for anti-slavery to Western figures. On the other hand, it did not fully restrict the flow of slaves until the 1877 convention with Britain, because of its own need, such as the demand for slave soldiers. In this context, the promise of the revived slave trade and the seeming breach of it represented the general Khedival attitude in microcosm. Mainly based on British and Egyptian archival materials, along with several memoirs, this study intends to analyze an embodiment of the ambivalent Khedival approach to anti-slavery. Through this analysis, how a specific policy direction of the Khedivate was adjusted for its ultimate goal, establishing a stable and expanding imperialist power in Africa, will be examined. This study will also reveal the influences of the Khedival ambivalence about the slave trade on the sociopolitical situations of the Eastern African Coast. In doing so, the strategic approach of the Khedival imperialism and its ramifications can be clarified further.

Medieval Islamic geographies like those of al-Idrisī have been made famous by a splendid heritage of illuminated manuscripts and serious scholarly attention. Less illustrious is the unillustrated and largely untranslated legacy of Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (d.1286), contemporary of al-Qazwīnī (d.1283), the writer of Wonders and Rarities. Ibn Sa‘īd’s Geography, like his histories and anthologies, once attracted only students of al-Andalus, where his family, the Banū Sa‘īd of Alcalá la Real, claimed a long lineage. Yet the similarities between someone like al-Qazwīnī, who carved out a career in the wake of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, and someone like Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī, who fled a chaotic peninsula for a relatively welcoming “East,” are testaments to the highly-developed sophistication of Islamic cosmopolitanism in the seventh/thirteenth century. This culture of learning withstood political upheaval and provided points of connection where more explicitly political forms of power could not. Yet not all were “included” in this “cosmopolitanism,” as the authors of these texts (the creators of/participants in that discourse) readily acknowledged. Like his interlocutors, Ibn Sa‘īd ascribed inferiority to both the “black” people living in Southern places of extreme sunlight and the “white” or “blonde” people living in Northern places of little sunlight. While climatology’s astonishing persistence from Antiquity to Early Modernity is well-known, the concept’s centrality for medieval Muslims, the way in which they renegotiated the idea for their own reasons, remains grossly underappreciated. Drawing on his descriptions of Ghana, Eastern Africa, Britain and the white Amazons, I argue that throughout his Geography, Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī ascribed moral corruption, stupidity and plain physical weirdness to white people (sometimes Ifrānj/Franks, or Ṣaqāliba/Slavs) and black people (sometimes called the Zanj, or those of Bilād al-Sūdān). While these “color lines” are familiar, the racial thrust of Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī’s project lies not with his personal distaste for these phenotypes, or even the unrealistic and unpleasant creatures he imagined to inhabit what is today Ghana or Germany. Rather, it is the system of climatological division, and the hefty explanatory power ascribed to environmental factors like sunlight, heat, and even plant life, that participated in the essential, hierarchical and collective theory of human reproduction I am calling race.

In Egypt, prisons did not house culprits alone. Provincial prisons doubled as processing stations for thousands of conscripts who passed through each year. To break the association between conscription and carcerality, the colonial state directed low-level officials to stop putting conscripts in chains and otherwise treating them like prisoners. However, the very repetitiveness of such instructions suggests their failure. Once drafted, many conscripts spent their terms of service living in Egypt’s large central prisons, as guards. If they tried to escape, they would be imprisoned. This chapter argues for a capacious understanding of colonial carcerality. It follows convicts and conscripts on their many intertwining journeys to identify the overlap between these forms of unfreedom. They labored on the same projects, lived in the same spaces, and suffered from the same regimes of bodily punishment. Anticolonial activists turned these intertwined forms of servitude into a potent critique of colonial governmentality, which they suggested depended on violent coercion more than the rule of law. However, these critiques also reveal the limits of nationalist visions of emancipation. Colonial officials deliberately divided unfree workers by race, privileging Sudanese over Egyptian conscripts and thus upending local racial hierarchies. In response, Egyptian nationalists demanded their compatriots be treated on par with Europeans, and better than Sudanese. Colonial carcerality requisitioned unfree labor to serve British interests and reified preexisting racial divisions.

Drawing on primary sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and English, such as governmental correspondence, petitions, and consular reports, this paper examines the impact of Ottoman governmental practices on an important aspect of the Red Sea slave trade, namely the trafficking of slaves from the Horn of Africa to the Ottoman Province of Yemen from the 1880s to the beginning of World War I. While historians have argued that during this period the Zaraniq community in Yemen’s coastal plain (Tihama) and the expanding French colonial state in what is now Djibouti were instrumental in shaping and controlling the slave trade between the Gulf of Tajoura and Southwest Arabia, the role of Ottoman governmental practices and policies in this context have remained entirely unexplored. I argue that the slave trade with Ottoman Yemen remained significant throughout the 1880s and 1890s, in large measure because Zaraniq slave traders maintained alliances with powerful Yemeni-Ottoman elites who were at the same time an integral part of the apparatus of Ottoman governance in the Tihama. More specifically, I show that for a share in the profit, the major of Hudayda, Sayyid Ahmad Shura‘i Pasha, as well as prominent sayyid families in the town of Marawa‘a (to the north east of Hudayda) protected Zaraniq slave traders by informing them about imminent Ottoman and British military operations against them and by allowing them to hold a slave market in Marawa‘a. While the Ottoman government was aware of the involvement of these elites in the slave trade, they tolerated these practices because Shura‘i Pasha and the sayyids of Marawa’a, in their capacity as tax farmers, army contractors, and mediators between the provincial government and the Zaraniq, were simply too central to a form of governance meant to preserve a limited but vital degree of state control over the Tihama. I show that on one level the slave trade between the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by a form of imperial governance that reflected the fragile position of the Ottoman state in this part of the empire’s frontier: in Yemen the state was unable to implement the centralizing practices of the Tanzimat and depended on the cooperation and knowledge of local elites to uphold its sovereignty and to harness the resources necessary for the war against its most prominent local opponents, the Zaydi imams.

The atrocities of the Arab-led slave trade can be traced long before the transatlantic slave trade and even prior to the advent of Islam, which persisted systematically into the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first century according to some scholars. Arab enslavement included Africans of various ethnicities as well as other ethnic groups of people of varying skin colors. Throughout the thirteen centuries of the Arab-led slave trade, whose perpetrators included Muslim, Christian and Jewish men, the number of enslaved Black and Afro-Arabs continued to increase while the number of enslaved white and lighter-skinned ones gradually decreased in the Arabic-speaking world. Notably, despite the long duration and atrocity of the Arab-led slave trade against Black-skinned individuals, there is a dearth of serious engagement with slavery and anti-Black racism in Arabic scholarship. Unlike previous Arab novelists, who treated slavery and anti-Blackness as marginal, sensitive topics in canonical Arabic literature, contemporary Arab novelists re-center the Black experience in their narratives, attempting to advance the conversation on anti-Black racism in the Arabic-speaking world. After examining a corpus of contemporary Arabic novels, I argue that the atrocity of enslavement and the suffering of enslaved Black and Afro-Arab individuals remains disregarded in Arabic literature and criticism. The lack of engagement with such an issue—among others—renders Black and Afro-Arab people to feel marginalized as if they were not part of the history and present-day of the Arabic-speaking world. This presentation focuses on the traumatic impact endured by Black and Afro-Arab characters as depicted in contemporary Arabic narratives. By utilizing the lens of literary trauma theory, which is relatively disregarded in Arabic literary criticism, I investigate the psychological suffering and traumatized experiences that Black and Afro-Arab protagonists endure during abduction, enslavement, and even after the end of enslavement. For an in-depth analysis of enslaved traumatized characters, I select Salmeen as an example of a contemporary Arabic novel produced in 2015 by Yemeni author ʻAmmar Ba Tawil. Ba Tawil highlights an active period of enslavement during the Arab-led slave trade in which Afro-Yemenis silently yet intolerably suffer racial subordination and traumatic stress in the twentieth century. By offering a close reading of Salmeen, my goal is to examine the persistence of intrusive traumatic memories and discuss the construction of the traumatized Black identity under enslavement.