Webinar Presentation: Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Modern Indian Ocean

A short and very basic introduction to how slavery and racism interrelate in the making of the modern world, particularly the societies of the Indian Ocean. This webinar was originally given to a virtual audience of students at Christ University in Bangalore.

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Comparative African Diasporas: Towards a Thematic Reading List

Dear readers,

Some time ago, I compiled a bibliography for my exams on comparing Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas from Africa. I present here the rough list, in case folks would like to build on this work or utilize it for teaching or an exam question. The problem of comparisons are many, but the rewards when done well are potentially great. One major problem is that there is far more information on Atlantic African diasporas, and the literature is much more voluminous. On top of this, movement and migration in the Indian Ocean predates that in the Atlantic by several millenia. There is also a question of the usefulness of the terms "African" and "diaspora" in an Indian Ocean context. The following is far from a comprehensive list, and is especially weak on the enormous literature on the black Atlantic. I am not sure that "littoral culture" and "African creoles" belong together, but I wanted to give some sense of the parallel processes of identity making and their contexts in each basin.

Lots to chew on here, so happy reading!
-Nati

Framing piece:

Phillip Curtin. Why People Move: Migration in African History. Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, 1995.

Manning, Patrick. Migration in world history. New York: Routledge 2005.

Some general studies on African Diaspora:

Joseph Harris.” The dynamics of the Global African Diaspora.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.

Oliver Bakewell. “In Search of the Diasporas Within Africa.” African Diaspora 1 (2008).

Katharina Schramm. “Leaving Area Studies Behind: The Challenge of Diasporic Connections in the Field of African Studies.”African and Black Diaspora 1(1): 2008.

Patrick Manning. The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. New York: Columbia University, 2009.

Dubois, Laurent & Julius Scott, eds.Origins of the Black Atlantic. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Isidore Okpewho, Ali Mazrui and Carole Davies.The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Michael Conniffand Thomas Davis. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. New York: St. Martens Press, 1994.

Segal,Ronald. The Black Diaspora.New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995.

Segal,Ronald. Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001.

Gilroy,Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Thornton,John. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hamilton, Ruth Simms (ed.)Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007.

Palmer,Colin. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora.” The Journal of Negro History 85, No. 1/2 (Winter -Spring, 2000), pp. 27-32.

The African Studies Review.No. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora, Apr., 2000, pp. 1-202.

Thompson, Vincent Bakpetu. Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness and Leadership in the Americas (from Slavery to the 1920s). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.

Atlantic and Indian Ocean in Historical Context

Egerton, Douglas, Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2007.

Bernard Bailyn. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Greene, Jack and Phillip Morgan. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Alison Games. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” AHR2006, Vol.111(3), pp.741-757. 

KärenWigen, Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, Alison Games, and Matt K. Matsuda,  “AHR  Forum:  Oceans  of  History,”  American Historical Review 111 (June 2006): 717-780.

K.N. Chaudhuri. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Sugata Bose. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Peter Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?”William and Mary Quarterly  63 (October 2006):725-742.

Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, eds. Eyes across the Water : Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha and Edward A. Alpers, eds. Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World. New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Alpers, Edward. East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2009.

Michael Pearson.The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Janet Abu-Lughod. Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350 AD. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, Special Issue: Oceans Connect (April 1999): 215-224.

Arasaratnam, S. “Recent Trends in the Historiography of the Indian Ocean, 1500 to 1800.”Journal of World History 1(2): Fall, 1990, 225-248.

Beaujard, Philippe “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth Century.”  Journal of World History 16(4): 2005, 411-465.

Regimes of labor/Labor Migration/Trade Migration

Marcus Rediker. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Lousisiana State University Press, 2008.

Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas.” American Historical Review 112.5 (December 2007): 1329–1358.

Simpson, Ed. Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh.

Ewald, Jan, et. "Crossers of the Sea: Slaves and Migrants in the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1800-1900." AHR 105(1): 2000, 69-91.

Ewald, Janet. “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation, c. 1840-1900.” Slavery and Abolition 31(3): Sept 2010, 451-466.

Campbell, Gwynn. “The African-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality? AAS 5: 3-4, 2006.

Hugh R. Clark. “Maritime Diasporas in Asia before da Gama: An Introductory Commentary.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49(4): 2006, 385-394.

Slavery/The Slave Trade

Walter Hawthorne. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Stephanie Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

W.G. Smith, ed.The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Tradein the Nineteenth Century. London: Frank Cass, 1989.

Sparks, Randy J. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Edda L. Fields-Black. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Judith Carney. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Janet Ewald. "Slave Trade: The Indian Ocean, c1750-1880." Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns (Spring, 2008), Oxford University Press.

Gwyn Campbell, ed. The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia.London: Frank Cass, 2004.

Alpers, Edward, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, eds. Resisting Bondage in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2006.

Campbell, Gwyn, ed. Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa andAsia. London: Routledge, 2005.

Allen, Richard B. “The Constant Demand Of The French: The Mascarene Slave Trade And The Worlds Of The Indian Ocean And Atlantic During The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries.”Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 43–72.

Alpers, Edward A. “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean world, c.1750–1962.” Slavery &Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 24(2): 2003, 51-68.

Pier Larson, "Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora," Journal of World History  19(4): 2008.

Kim Butler. “From Black History to Diasporan History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context.” African Studies Review 43(1): Special Issue on the Diaspora (Apr., 2000), 125-139.

Miller, Joseph C. “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities  through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil.” In Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, eds. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. 81–121.

Vernet, Thomas. "Slave trade and slavery on the Swahili coast (1500-1750)." In Slavery, Islam and Diaspora,edited by Paul Lovejoy, Behnaz A. Mirzai and Ismael M. Montana, 37-76. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. (Revised and expanded version of 2003 article.)

Vernet, Thomas. 2013 "East African Slave Migration." In Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, edited by I. Ness. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Littoral Culture/African Creoles

Michael N. Pearson. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

John K. Thornton.The Kongolese Saint Anthony : Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Africans in colonial Louisiana: the development of Afro-Creole culture in the eighteenth century.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece, eds. Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York : Palgrave Macmillan 2007

Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Shahan de Silva Jayasuriya.“Trading on a thalassic network: African migrations across the Indian Ocean.”International Social Science Journal 58(2): 2006, 215-225.

J. LorandMatory, “Introduction,” and “The English Professors of Brazil: Of the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation,”Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

Enseng Ho. The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Ed. John Hawley. India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Piers Larson.Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Paul C. Johnson. Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Erik Gilbert. “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration,and Regional Unity, 1750-1970s.”The History Teacher 36(1): (Nov., 2002), 7-34.

Jane Landers.Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Linda Heywood and John Thornton.Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Lee Haring.“African Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean Islands.”Research in African Literatures 33(3): Autumn, 2002, 182-199.

Megan Vaughn. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius.Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds.Trans-Atlantic dimensions of ethnicity in the African diaspora.London ; New York : Continuum 2003.

African Return/African culture in Diaspora

Melville Herskovitz. The Myth of the Negro Past.Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 (1958).

Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.

Michael Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Ehud Toledano, ed. African Communities In Asia And The Mediterranean: Identities betweenIntegration andConflict. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012.

James Sweet. Domingos Alvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Alpers, Edward.“Recollecting Africa in the Indian Ocean World.”African Studies Review 43(1): 2000, 83-99.

Alpers, Edward. “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research.”Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And Middle East Bulletinxv(2),1997.

Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds.The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.

J.A. Langley. Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Brent Edwards. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

McKnight, Kathryn J. and Leo J. Garafalo,  eds. Afro-Latin Voices: Narratives from the Early modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009.

Johnson, Paul Christopher. “On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The ‘BlackCaribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007): 174-211.

Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Sidbury James. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

 Catlin-Jairazbhoy,Amyand Edward A. Alpers. Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians. Noida, India: Rainbow Publishers, 2004.

Hanchard,Michael. “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture, No. 27, 1999, pp. 245-268.

Eshun, Ekow.Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa. New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

Meriwether, James H. “Ghana: African Independence, 1957-1958,” Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Nelson, Gersham A., “Rastafarians and Ethiopianism,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Sidney Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., pp. 66-84.

Lake,Obiagele.  “Toward a Pan-African Identity: Diaspora African Repatriates in Ghana.” Anthropological Quarterly 68(1): (Jan., 1995), 21-36.

Alpers,Edward and Vijaya lakshmi Teelock (eds.) History Memory and Identity. Mauritius: Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture ; University of Mauritius 2001.

Johnson, Robert Jr. Returning home : a century of African-American repatriation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press c2005

Kwasi Konadu. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press 2010.

Jayasuriya Shihan de Silva and Jean-Pierre Angenot. (eds.) Uncovering the history of Africans in Asia. Leiden ; Boston : Brill 2008.

Jayasuriya, Shihan de Silva.The African Diaspora in Asian trade routes and cultural memories. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

Young, Jason R. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic religion in Kongo and the lowcountry South in the era of slavery.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Esedebe,P. Olisanwuche. Pan-Africanism : the idea and movement, 1776-1991. Washington, D.C. : Howard University 1994.

Kelley, Robin and Patterson, Tiffany Ruby .“Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.”African Studies Review43(1): 2000, 11-45.

Zeleza, Tiyambe. "African Diasporas: Toward a Global History.”African Studies Review 53(1): 2010, 1-19.

Zeleza, P.T. "Rewriting the African Diaspora Beyond the Black Atlantic." African Affairs 104(414): 2005, 35-68.

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The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World

At the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City there is a great exhibit currently running on Africans in the Indian Ocean World. If you can't check out the exhibit, the accompanying website is a beautiful introduction, with stories, images, maps and multimedia. Over forty years after the publication of Joseph Harris's The African Presence in Asia, the study of Africans in the Indian Ocean world has grown in important ways. It has expanded beyond simple vindicationist studies, it has increasingly been driven by its own theoretical concerns, it is more and more grounded in knowledge of local languages and cultures. The African presence in the Indian Ocean can tell us a lot about cultural change and social hierarchy in societies of the Indian Ocean littoral, and has the potential to influence how we conceptualize and perpetuate the study of diaspora itself. If anyone has a bibliography they would like to contribute on the subject, I would love for you to post a link in the comments section. I am currently working on compiling a comprehensive bibliography. Thanks to Ishraq Ali for the link!

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African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Book Review)

This book review from Dr. Alamin Mazrui can also be found at JSTOR. I reproduce it in full here because it speaks to the methodological issues that scholars of slavery and the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean must continue to wrestle with. 

The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. JOHN HUNWICK and EVE TROUTT POWELL (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002), 282 pp. Price PB £17.50. ISBN 1–558–76275–2.

In 1993, a major newspaper debate erupted in Kenya between two of the nation’s most prominent intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Bethwel Ogot. It concerned whether the Arab-Muslim world should be held accountable for its role in African enslavement to the same degree as the West, and whether there were differences of scale and culpability between the two that should strategically make the West the initial focus for the African campaign for reparations. What was particularly noticeable is that the only general sources on African slaves in Arab-Muslim lands that the two scholars invoked in support of their different positions were those of Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971). These two, in fact, continue to be among the tiny handful of book-length studies of the issue available in the English language. In a real sense, then, the study of African enslavement in the Arab-Muslim world is still virtually in its infancy, and the publication of Hunwick’s and Powell’s The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam is a very welcome contribution to the scholarship on this important subject.

This book distinguishes itself from the others, however, in its documentary approach, essentially being a compilation of primary sources. The only interpretive portions are the two introductions by the authors. Hunwick’s introduction, ‘The Same but Different’, is an excellent overview of some of the factors that may have led to the dearth of research in this area, the interplay between race and enslavement, the roles that slaves played in the Arab-Muslim world, and the quality of experience—a rather mixed record—that enslaved Africans encountered. If there is an Arab literature on the inferiority of ‘blackness’, there is also a literature that speaks of its virtues, leading Hunwick to conclude that ‘there is a lack of consistent literature that theorizes the inferiority of black people. Islam did not have its Gobineau’ (p. xx). Powell’s introduction, ‘The Silence of the Slaves’, on the other hand, discusses not the absence of scholarly works on the subject, but the absence of the voices of the enslaved themselves, whether in fictional or non-fictional format. Among the rare exceptions, discussed by Powell, is the slave narrative of Sister Josephine Bakhita, an enslaved southern Sudanese woman who finally converted to Catholicism.

The rest of the book is divided into fifteen sections, each containing extracts of documents on a specific theme. The first four sections provide a conceptual frame of reference about slavery in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean region. Section I looks at what the canonical Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, say about the institution of slavery. It concludes with al-Ghazali’s reading of the texts, that that ‘the rights of the one possessed are that he should share in the owner’s food and clothing and should not be assigned work above his capacity. [Nor should the owner] look at him/her with arrogance or disdain’ (p. 9). Section II, ‘Some Muslim Views on Slavery’, is a small sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim responses, mostly apologetic, to Western association of slavery with Islam. But how did the above doctrines of Islam combine with the prevailing medieval culture of Islam to translate into actual law dealing with slaves? This question is the subject of Section III, though all the documentary material included here is from the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. Section IV amplifies the scope of Section II, looking at perceptions of Africans in some Arabic and Turkish texts, some equating blackness with slavery and others rejecting such an equation. Even more provocative, however, are the ‘theories’ on the origins of blackness, ranging from versions of the Hamitic myth to environmental explanations (articulated particularly forcefully by Ibn Khaldun.

The next three sections give us a glimpse of the experience of Africans in the intervening period from the moment of capture (Section V), to the perilous journey especially across the Sahara Desert (Section VI), to the slave markets in the Arab-Muslim world (Section VII). Here we see how slave merchants went well beyond the provisions of Islam by capturing and enslaving individuals who could not be classified as war captives, the horrific cruelty that accompanied the transport of the enslaved, and the humiliation and abuse suffered at the slave market.

The book then proceeds to look at the actual master–slave relationships and the functions that enslaved Africans played. In Section VIII, on eunuchs and concubines, the authors make a compelling observation in their introductory remarks that, ‘It is a curious irony [of slavery in Arab-Muslim lands] that the best path to an easier life for male slaves was to be deprived of their sexuality, whereas for female slaves it was to have their sexuality exploited’ (p. 99). The aberration of castration, of course, was part of the Mediterranean culture of the time, but it acquired new proportions of frequency and cruelty in African enslavement, the increased authority that eunuchs later enjoyed in the houses of their masters notwithstanding. As for the concubines, they were there for the sexual enjoyment of the master at his will. Nonetheless, the documents indicate that many virtually acquired the status of additional wives, especially if they bore children: ‘A woman who bore such children could not thereafter legally be sold, and was automatically free on her master’s death’ (p. 99).

In addition to eunuchs (who were used to guard the harem) and concubines, the majority of enslaved Africans—especially women who, we are told, constituted about two-thirds of those who crossed the Sahara desert in the nineteenth century—are said to have provided other types of domestic service (Section IX). With regard to their treatment by their owners, the documents in this section indicate that these domestic slaves were far less fortunate than eunuchs and concubines. In addition, male slaves provided agricultural labour in North African oases, sometimes forced to carry out dangerous work like cleaning wells and underground irrigation systems (Section X) and military service in North African armies of the royal state (Section XI). In performing these various roles as slaves, most Africans eventually converted to Islam: in the process, their Islam sometimes became hybridized, combining practices of the faith they encountered in the new society with the spiritual beliefs from their original homeland (Section XII).

Islam made the freeing of slaves an act both of piety and atonement. Section XIII looks at the life of Diaspora Africans after such emancipation. The three case studies of the section demonstrate how post-enslavement life varied according to personal circumstances, the fortunes of the masters, and the pre- existing relationship between slave and master. It was not until the mid-1800s that some Arab governments moved decisively to abolish slavery in their countries; Section XIV considers the legacy of abolition in Tunisia and Egypt, sometimes in response to British appeals. The book concludes with a lengthy excerpt of the slave narrative of a certain Fulani slave, Griga, recorded in French by a French commandant, detailing his life from the moment of bondage to freedom. This narrative raises one fundamental limitation that cuts across the larger portion of this book. All the documents from Section VII onward are, in fact, based on records of European observers of one shade or another. The authors themselves acknowledge this problem, claiming that their reliance on this documentation is due to the dearth of other sources. While this kind of evidence cannot be wholly discounted, its Euro-Christian origin and its construction at a time of intense Muslim resistance to European colonial rule raises questions about the extent of its reliability.

The documents in this book offer an excellent opportunity for a comparative study of slave systems between the Atlantic world and that of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. What was the place of race in the two slave systems and what kind of comparative space did they provide for the assimilation of subsequent generations of the enslaved? Can there be different scales of slavery, just as there are different scales of murder in law? If so, how do the two fare relative to each other? And should the campaign for reparations, therefore, begin with the first degree of African suffering? What was the balance between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation between the two paradigms of slavery? This landmark publication is likely to shed light on some of these burning questions in the history of African enslavement. In the meantime, however, readers should bear in mind Edward Alpers’ words of caution against imposing on the slavery system of the Arab- Muslim world ‘paradigms developed from the experience of Africans in the Diaspora of the Atlantic world, with its particular forms of Euro-American racism and concomitant black responses’ (‘Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the Indian Ocean World’, African Studies Review, 43.1 (2000), 83).

Alamin Mazrui
Ohio State Universtiy

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