Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean World

CHAPTER 6 SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN WORLD * craig perry introduction The study of the early modern and modern slave trades in the Indian Ocean world (henceforth IOW) has received increased attention in recent years. In particular, historians have sought to draw more attention to the global significance of the Indian Ocean slave trade among scholars of the early modern period who have long been drawn to the study of slavery in the Atlantic. Within the subfield of Indian Ocean slavery studies itself, historians have underscored differences in the economic and social structures of Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave systems and also critiqued African-centric approaches to the Indian Ocean that neglect practices of slavery and the slave trade in South and Southeast Asian societies. For the purposes of this chapter, the IOW includes the seas, islands, coastal regions, and their immediate hinterlands from East and northeast Africa (including Egypt and the Red Sea) to China and the Indonesian archipelago. While this chapter will give some overview of how slaving activities spanned the breadth of this vast system, the focus will be on the western Indian Ocean, its Red Sea artery, and the slave trade between northeast Africa, East Africa, southern Arabia, and the west coast of India. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the chronology and geography of the slave trade from a pan-IOW perspective and situates slave trading within the broader medieval IOW economy. The focus of the chapter then narrows to analyze the development of the slave trade in specific regions from late antiquity through, primarily, the fourteenth century. These discussions will bring some methodological considerations to the fore. In particular, it is essential to parse the multiple strands of the IOW slave trade and to examine its periodic ebb and flow to apprehend its overall dynamics. Wholesale maritime slave trading was rare, while diplomatic exchanges of the enslaved are more conspicuous during time periods when new states and dynasties forged relationships with other regional * Thanks to Elizabeth Lambourn, Roxani Margariti, and Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any mistakes are my own. 123 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 124 craig perry powers. Wholesale and diplomatic exchanges operated alongside a decentralized slave trade in which merchants consigned small numbers of the enslaved, single individuals even, as part of a larger, mixed cargo. The multimodal and intermittent nature of the IOW trade underscores the challenge of estimating the volume and direction of the medieval IOW slave trade, particularly given the fragmentary, discontinuous source base. Finally, the chapter suggests how the nature and dynamics of state formation at the borders of large empires shaped the relationship between centers of demand and regions of slave supply. brief chronological and geographic overview While the Indian Ocean slave trade is at least 4,000 years old, there are three historical periods when this trade expanded significantly: at the turn of the Common Era (c. first century ce), the tenth to thirteenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. The growth of the medieval slave trade coincides with the expansion of the Islamic imperium in the region, economic prosperity and political unification in Song China, and the consolidation of Chola rule in southern South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. During this period, a strong Asia-centered (including the IOW) global economy emerged. Two of this system’s primary characteristics were urbanization and trade; they feature prominently in the history of the region’s slave trade as well. Travel, commerce, and communication flowed between coastal port cities, islands, and hinterlands to create a massive trading system in the western IOW with connections to Cairo in the west and Ceylon and Melakka in the east. The slave trade was not yet pan-IOW in scope, however. Rather it operated regionally or within certain interregional subcircuits of the greater IOW. It bears emphasis here that it is misleading to privilege the IOW maritime space over the coasts, their vast hinterlands, and land-based trading networks. In contrast to the early modern Atlantic, it was not usually necessary for slave buyers to import enslaved people via the sea. These buyers had access to slave supplies via overland trade. Moreover, some trade routes encompassed both land and maritime connections. Thus, instances of medieval IOW maritime slave trading require further context and explanation, as this chapter provides below. Luxury commodities crossed the boundaries between different interregional circuits, but slaves were almost always less central than other commodities. When traders did send enslaved people over greater distances, it was usually as part of a diplomatic rather than a commercial venture, given the cost of sustenance and shipping, transit across disease pools, and the perils inherent in sea travel. For instance, while enslaved Indians are found in Cairo, Egyptian slave buyers more commonly Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 125 purchased slaves from nearby African regions. In South Asia, slavers imported enslaved soldiers and factotums from Ethiopia (particularly in later periods) as well as from the borderlands at the subcontinent’s northwest frontier. Yet Indian rulers and landowners also exploited local sources of slave supply. Yemen and its principal urban port of Aden appear as the fulcrum of western IOW slave transshipments. Aden’s geography and maritime mercantile infrastructure meant that the city served as an entrepôt for enslaved people from South Asia, East Africa, Abyssinia, and beyond. Urbanization not only shaped the logistics and geography of trade. It also influenced the nature of demand for slaves. As economic centers, cities had large concentrations of households and commercial activities that spurred demand for enslaved labor. Free men and women relied upon enslaved domestics both for household tasks and for economic activities in artisan and merchant contexts. Men exploited women for sex as well as for household duties. While most potential slave buyers probably sought slaves for the above purposes, enslaved workers are also found in agriculture and mining. States turned to enslaved soldiers to field armies. Rulers and their extensive coteries had numerous enslaved concubines, entertainers, and palace functionaries. As Chapter 13 in this volume illustrates, temple precincts in south India were also sites of enslavement. While some of these endeavors, military ones in particular, used male slaves, women made up a far greater percentage of the enslaved IOW population owing to the centrality of domestic and sexual slavery. In addition to their role as sites of demand, cities like Aden, Muscat, and Kollam (Quilon, in southern India) were entrepôts. Other middling cities such as Aswan in Upper Egypt and the port of ʿAydhab on the Red Sea coast provided access to the hinterlands in which slavers captured and purchased individuals. Over time these port cities waxed and waned as did their connections to trade routes. For instance, some historians speculate that a major tenth-century earthquake in Siraf disrupted Persian Gulf trade and Baghdad’s connection to the maritime IOW. ʿAydhab decreased in importance due to competition from other Red Sea ports, such as Suakin, until a Mamluk sultan ordered the former destroyed in the fifteenth century. Such developments led to realignments of the IOW system. Not unlike urban mainland entrepôts, islands from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia also played key roles as sources of slaves and in their transshipment. In the IOW, as in other maritime trading systems, seafarers drew on them for supplies, refuge, and commercial exchange. Some comprised autonomous political units with considerable “land-sea realms.” In the words of Roxani Margariti, the IOW was “an ocean of islands.” Islamicization of islands and littoral port cities promoted regional and long-distance trade, of which slaving was a part. In Indian Ocean Africa, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 126 craig perry land-sea realms such as Kilwa and the Comoro islands also underwent Islamicization before much of coastal and inland Africa. As Edward Alpers notes, when Ibn Battuta visited the island sultanate of Kilwa in the fourteenth century, the sultan was in the midst of waging a war against non-Muslim groups on the nearby mainland. Further, when he reached the Malay Archipelago and then Sumatra, Ibn Battuta was able to rely upon Muslim rulers for their patronage. During his journey through the IOW, he also made a habit of trading in enslaved women for his own use. Moreover, Islamic law, institutions, and the Arabic language are among the factors that were part of the larger infrastructure that traders relied upon to manage their affairs over long distances. K. N. Chaudhuri identifies four primary services that port cities provided: (1) “‘spot,’ or forward markets with clear price indicators and continuity of supply”; (2) financial intermediaries for credit and exchange; (3) courts of law to settle disputes; and (4) a market for shipping space that allowed merchants to transport their goods in multiple vessels in order to manage risk.1 The Dahlak archipelago is a particularly good example of how some islands facilitated the slave trade. Located in the Red Sea near modernday Eritrea, Dahlak was a waypoint for slave shipments between Abyssinia and Yemen. Giuseppe Puglisi estimates that traders could have shipped as many as 3,000–4,000 slaves per year through the largest island, Dahlak Kebir. Puglisi based these figures in part upon the existence of numerous cisterns that he argued far exceeded the needs of the island’s population and were probably built by the same traders (likely Arab or Persian) who traded merchandise in major ports like Jedda and Aden. Dahlak’s cisterns are also in locations that would have been relatively secure from inland brigandage. Building on Puglisi’s analysis, Timothy Insoll suggests that the presence in Dahlak of large “ephemeral ‘suburbs’ of impermanently built huts” could have been erected to contain slaves during their transit. From the seventeenth century forward, Alpers argues that the African Indian Ocean islands were essential to the rise of the export-focused slave trade in the southwest IOW. Dahlak is suggestive of the role islands played in the medieval period.2 1 Roxani Margariti, “An Ocean of Islands: Islands, Insularity, and Historiography of the Indian Ocean,” in Peter N. Miller (ed.), The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (Ann Arbor, MI, 2012), pp. 198–229; Edward A. Alpers, “Indian Ocean Africa: The Island Factor,” Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures, 10 (2000): 373–386: 378; Marina A. Tolmacheva, “Concubines on the Road: Ibn Battuta’s Slave Women,” in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (eds.), Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (Oxford, 2017), pp. 163–189; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 197. 2 Giuseppe Puglisi, “Alcuni vestigi dell’isola di Dahlac Chebir e la leggenda dei Furs,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, 1969), pp. 35–47; and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 127 As with the IOW slave trade more generally, the slave trade via Dahlak and other islands should not be presumed continuous. The size of the trade certainly varied over time with periodic “pulses” in response to increased demand. In the case of Dahlak, for example, the Najahid rulers (1022–1158) of Zabid, Yemen, imported many Abyssinian slaves via Dahlak as gifts and through trade. The Najahid dynasty was itself founded by Abyssinian slaves and used many imported slaves in their army, but the Abyssinian–Yemen connection via Dahlak probably comprised a temporary spike.3 In addition to their roles as waypoints for shipments of slaves, islands could also be exploited as sources of enslaved labor. The compilation of tales, The Book of the Wonders of India commonly attributed to the Persian ship captain Burzurg b. Shahriyar (c. mid-tenth century), contains stories of newly captured slaves in which IOW islands from Southeast Asia to East Africa feature prominently. While many elements of these tales are fantastic, their backgrounds and plotlines reflect aspects of the larger maritime setting. Moreover, the role of islands as slaving reservoirs is suggested by other historical sources. Madagascar’s links to East Africa, India, and Indonesia suggest that enslaved people were another commodity that traveled these circuits. During the Song period (960–1279), wealthy Chinese purchased slaves called “kunlun zengji” that were possibly imported from Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. In the eastern Indian Ocean, diplomatic missions brought slaves to China from places such as Borneo and the Sri Vijaya Empire in Java. In Southeast Asia, certain islands and archipelagos were known to harbor pirates who routinely captured individuals for ransom or sale.4 The focus on oceans should not obscure the importance of the land routes in Africa and Central Asia that serviced many of the same centers of demand from Egypt to South Asia. It is necessary, too, to resist over-reading evidence Timothy Insoll, “Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea: From Aksumite to Ottoman,” Adumatu, 3 (2001): 39–50: 44. On Dahlak and the IOW more generally, see Roxani Eleni Margariti, “Thieves or Sultans? Dahlak and the Rulers and Merchants of Indian Ocean Port Cities, 11th–13th Centuries,” in Lucy Blue, John Cooper, Ross Thomas, and Julian Whitewright (eds.), Connected Hinterlands: The Fourth International Conference on the Peoples of the Red Sea Region (Oxford, 2010), pp. 155–163. 3 On the slave trade to Yemen, see Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves at the Najahid and Rasulid Courts of Yemen (412–553 ah/1021–1158 ce and 626–858 ah/1229–1454 ce)” (Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Vienna, 2019). 4 G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville (ed. and trans.), The Book of the Wonders of India: Mainland, Sea and Islands (London, 1981), pp. 6–8, 19–21, 31–36; Philippe Beaujard, “East Africa, the Comoros Islands and Madagascar before the Sixteenth Century: On a Neglected Part of the World System,” Azania, 42 (2007): 15–35. On China–Africa connections, see Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (eds.), Chau JuKua: On the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-Fan-Chï (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 31–32 n. 2, p. 84; Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (New York, 1988), pp. 17, 18; and Helen F. Siu and Mike McGovern, “China–Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 46 (2017): 337–355. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 128 craig perry in the search for long-distance trade. While enslaved Africans are mentioned in medieval Chinese sources, they are exceptional. Enslaved people described as “dark-skinned” or “black” in Chinese sources can also signify slaves from parts of Southeast Asia (probably the Malay Peninsula). Second, free Africans traveled the IOW as merchants, artisans, fishermen, and so forth. For this reason, Thomas Vernet cautions against the tendency to presume that Africans in the IOW diaspora are enslaved.5 the late antique near east and the expansion of the islamic imperium Scholarly consensus is that the IOW slave trade expanded after the rise and expansion of the Islamic imperium in the seventh century. Still, we should consider how this periodization of the IOW slave trade is shaped by patterns of source survival. Indeed, the expansion of the slave trade from the seventh century forward coincides with the proliferation of sources that describe this trade. An overview of the slave trade in the first few centuries of Islam also suggests that overland trade, and not pan-IOW maritime commerce, long remained more consequential for buyers in the regions that ringed the seas. One history that is easily obscured by using the rise of Islam in our periodization is that there is a late antique substratum upon which later medieval slaving practices were built. In southwest Asia, the substrate is comprised of Byzantine, Arab (often “Saracens” in the surviving Greek and Latin sources), and Sasanid slaving enterprises. In the IOW maritime realm, a preexisting trade in a mix of commodities of which slaves were a part certainly existed, probably as early as the first century (ce), though evidence for the long-distance seaborne traffic between the second and sixth centuries is scant. For the later period, Mark Horton has tentatively suggested a triangular trade in the western IOW. He proposes that Indian cloth and beads were exchanged in East Africa for ivory, timber, and slaves. 5 Hirth and Rockhill, Chu-Fan-Chï, p. 31 n. 2. Africans also traveled (or were forcibly brought) to China via overland routes. See Snow, The Star Raft, pp. 16–20. Slave capture and the transport of slaves in and between Vietnam, the Malay Peninsula, Java, Borneo, and Sumatra are mentioned in Hirth and Rockhill, Chu-Fan-Chï, pp. 31–32 n. 2, pp. 47, 149, 150 n. 2. For slavery in the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia, and China, see O. P. Srivastava, “Slave-Trade in Ancient and Early Medieval India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 39 (1978): 124–136 and Rila Mukherjee, “Mobility in the Bay of Bengal World: Medieval Raiders, Traders, States and the Slaves,” Indian Historical Review, 36 (2009): 109–129. On free African mobility in the medieval period, see Thomas Vernet, “East African Travelers and Traders,” in Michael Pearson (ed.), Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 167–202 and Tamon Baba, “Notes on Migration between Yemen and Northeast Africa during the 13th–15th Centuries,” in Anne Regourd and Nancy Um (eds.), Chroniques Du Manuscrit Au Yémen, Special Issue 1 (2017–2018): 69–86. Finally, on slavery in China, see Chapter 11 in this volume. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 129 These goods were then traded in the Persian Gulf for manufactured goods that were shipped to India.6 Another slaving substratum was located in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Sasanid Empires. Noel Lenski analyzes how these rival empires encouraged raids upon each other’s subjects. While many of these captives were ransomed or exchanged, many were retained, and some were sold to third parties. At the same time, both empires sought to defend themselves against Saracen captive raiding in their territories. Lenski argues that groups in pre-Islamic Arabia were aware of this human trafficking. Moreover, the sedentary Arabs who drove the Muslim conquest of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century adopted the tactics of these seminomadic groups and their skill in taking live prisoners of war. He concludes, “It may then have been through nomadic Arabs that the new conquerors came to develop such strong attachment to slave raiding and trading. Indeed, many Muslim slave holding practices appear to reflect the habitus we have seen for pre-Islamic Saracens.”7 Slavery existed in sedentary communities within pre-Islamic Arabia and among Muhammad and his companions before the Muslim conquest of the peninsula began. Recent research by Hend Gilli-Elewy illustrates the composition of the slave population in seventh-century Arabia. Her findings, too, suggest how a late antique substratum shaped the patterns apparent in the later Muslim sources. For instance, Abyssinian rulers sent soldiers to Arabia over the course of the sixth century to fight in the battles between Persian and Byzantine forces. Gilli-Elewy argues that, after the Persians defeated the Abyssinians in 575, this group became a large potential reservoir of slave supply. This process also underscores how the ill fortunes of migrants could make them more vulnerable to enslavement.8 While Arab slaves comprised a significant proportion of the servile population in the earliest Muslim period, the numbers of enslaved Arabs decreased with the Muslim conquests and Islamization. Still, Chase Robinson cautions scholars against assuming that Arabs and Muslims were not enslaved in this early Islamic period. The conquests did generate tremendous numbers of captives from North Africa to Central Asia – even 6 Mark Horton, “Artisans, Communities, and Commodities: Medieval Exchanges between Northwestern India and East Africa,” Ars Orientalis, 34 (2004): 76. For Byzantium, see Chapter 19 in this volume. For the Sasanids, see Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London, 2009), pp. 58–59. 7 Noel Lenski, “Captivity and Slavery Among the Saracens in Late Antiquity (ca. 250–630 ce),” Antiquité Tardive, 19 (2011): 237–266: 265. In a different vein, the legal digest of Justinian mentions Indian eunuchs as one of the commodities that was subject to customs duties in Alexandria. See O. P. Srivastava, “Slave-Trade in Ancient and Early Medieval India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 39 (1978): 124–136: 124. 8 Hend Gilli-Elewy, “On the Provenance of Slaves in Mecca during the Time of the Prophet Muhammad,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017): 164–168. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 130 craig perry if scholars are rightfully skeptical about the accuracy of the reported numbers. Treaties completed in the aftermath of incomplete conquests could lead to the exchange of slaves. The most well known is the baqt, a seventh-century agreement between the Muslims and the Nubians to cease hostilities and to exchange tribute on an annual basis. The Nubians expected the Muslims to deliver wheat and textiles, and provided slaves and exotic animals in exchange. As such, the baqt was part of normal diplomacy and could be (and was) disrupted when relations soured. Thus, while the baqt intermittently delivered enslaved people to the Egyptian state, it was not necessarily a reliable or sufficient source of slaves for the larger Egyptian market over time.9 We are left then with the task of identifying the sources and modes of a larger slave trade that would have delivered slaves both to the larger Egyptian market and to Syria, Iraq, and Persia in the first centuries of Muslim rule. Particularly in Baghdad from the mid-eighth century forward, state patronage, commercial wealth, and (from the ninth century) military exigencies supported a consistent demand for enslaved people. Elizabeth Savage argues that North African Berber merchants emerged in the wake of the conquests to maintain the slave trade that supplied the Islamic heartlands in the east. Trade flowed through the Persian Gulf city of Siraf, but it is not possible to gauge the volume of its slave imports for this period. Slaving zones in Scandinavia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and (to a lesser extent) in South Asia also meant that overland trade fed Mesopotamian and Iranian markets. Thus, while adopting the IOW as a frame of reference sheds light on the medieval slave trade, the region functioned as part of an even larger global slavetrading system that supplied buyers in North Africa and the Middle East.10 9 On the thorny issue of interpreting the numbers reported in medieval Near Eastern sources, see Chase Robinson, “Slavery in the Conquest Period,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017): 158–163. In the fourteenth century, Muslim jurists still confronted questions about the illicit enslavement of Muslim women. See Yossef Rapoport, “Women and Gender in Mamluk Society: An Overview,” Mamluk Studies Review, 11 (2007): 12. For historical and scholarly literature on the baqt, see Heinz Halm, “Der Nubische Baqt,” in U. Vermeulen and D. De Smet (eds.), Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras, II. Proceedings of the 4th and 5th International Colloquium, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1995–1996 (Leuven, 1998), pp. 63–103; Craig Perry, “Historicizing Slavery in the Medieval Islamic World,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017): 133–138, esp. 134 n. 6. On evidence of disruptions in the baqt treaty, see François-Xavier FauvelleAymar, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton, 2018), pp. 28–35. See also Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), The Chronography of Gregory Abûʾl Faraj, trans. Ernest A. Budge (London, 1932), Vol. 1, p. 134. 10 C. E. Bosworth, “Barda and Barda-Dari, iii In the Islamic period up to the Mongol invasion,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/barda-iii; Elizabeth Savage, “Berbers and Blacks: Ibadi Slave Traffic in Eighth-Century North Africa,” The Journal of African History, 33 (1992): 351–368; Marek Jankowiak, What Does the Slave Trade in the Saqaliba Tell Us about Early Islamic Slavery?” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (February 2017): 169–172. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 131 In the African hinterlands of the Red Sea, there was a robust slave trade from the early Islamic period forward. This region possessed immense “fluvial wealth” that supported a large population and networks of communication and travel. These lands also rest on the Arabian-Nubian Shield, an exposed and mineral rich segment of the earth’s crust. Timothy Power suggests that the region’s wealth in people and minerals combined to entice both Egyptian state-sponsored slave raiding as well as nonstate raids by groups of organized kidnappers. During this early period, settlements and mines in the Hijaz (western Arabia) were the most likely importers of these enslaved Africans. In the ninth and tenth centuries, gold mining in the Nubian region intensified relative to the Hijaz and sparked a demand for enslaved miners. Enslaved Africans also became more valued as infantrymen in the armies of the Muslim polities that emerged in Egypt and Yemen as the Iraq-centered ʿAbbasid caliphate fragmented. Sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries suggest that professional kidnappers continued to use the hinterlands between the city of Aswan and the Red Sea port of ʿAydhab as a hunting ground for slaves that were shipped to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and beyond.11 Across the Red Sea in the Hijaz, enslaved Africans were used in agriculture in addition to mining. The general consensus has long been that agriculture in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa did not rely upon enslaved labor other than in a couple of exceptional contexts. Benjamin Reilly’s recent study argues that agricultural slavery in Arabia, while well documented for the nineteenth century, likely existed in the Middle Ages as well. Reilly weaves together scholarship on the premodern IOW, ethnographic sources, and genetic evidence to suggest that there must have been periods in the long sweep of premodern Arabian history when agricultural slavery spiked. Nasir-i Khusraw (d. c. 1072–1078) reports that “thirtythousand Zanzibari and Abyssinian slaves” were working in agriculture in the al-Ahsa oasis of eastern Arabia when he visited in the eleventh century. Yet there are no contemporary written sources that corroborate Khusraw’s account, and we should be skeptical of using thirty-thousand as anything near an accurate counting. Two scholars independently suggest dividing such numbers over a thousand by a hundred to arrive at a more accurate figure. Al-Muqaddasi’s (d. 991) tenth-century geography mentions cultivated fields near Mecca but does not say who is doing the labor. 11 Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate ad 500–1000 (Cairo, 2012) contains a great deal of material on slavery, particularly in ch. 3 and ch. 4. On eleventh- and twelfth-century kidnapping, see Craig Perry, “The Daily Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Emory University, 2014), pp. 23, 33–36. See also Richard Pankhurst, “Arabian Trade with Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: From Ancient Times to the Sixteenth Century,” in Paul Lunde and Alexandra Porter (eds.), Trade and Travel in the Red Sea Region: Proceedings of Red Sea Project I (Oxford, 2004), pp. 19–24. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 132 craig perry He does state, however, that enslaved Abyssinians are “one of the many goods traded” via Aden. Such silences present an interpretive dilemma that Reilly seeks to overcome through genetics research. Mitochondrial DNA shows an outflow of African migrants (not necessarily slaves) as far back as 500 bce. The data show that female lineages were more consequential, perhaps because African males had fewer opportunities for reproduction than did women, who bore children as free wives and as sexually-exploited slaves. Modern-day Saudi Arabia is an exception. Here, there is a higher proportion of African Y-chromosomal material. In Reilly’s view, this discrepancy may be explained by the use of enslaved African men in agriculture and perhaps fewer instances of concubinage in areas where Bedouinism predominated.12 indian ocean east africa In scholarly literature, the slaving practices in the Red Sea hinterlands of Africa and Arabia have commanded far less attention in comparison to the enslaved East Africans in eighth- and ninth-century Iraq. The ʿAbbasid caliphate imported large numbers of enslaved agricultural laborers, called Zanji (from the land of Zanj) in the sources, and used them to convert areas of southern Iraq into arable land. The Zanj register so frequently in the historiography for two reasons. First, it is less common to find enslaved agricultural laborers in the medieval Islamic world relative to other forms of slavery. Second, Zanj slaves participated in a massive revolt that roiled Iraq in the second half of the ninth century. Campbell’s recent reconsideration of Zanj slavery in Iraq underscores how the interpretation of this phenomenon has bearing on the larger historiography of medieval IOW slavery. He describes what he terms “the conventional view” of the slave trade out of East Africa that holds there was a continuous and substantial slave trade out of this region from as early as the sixth century bce according to one scholar. While the emergence of an Islamic imperium in the seventh century intensified the demand for, and thus the trade in, non-Muslim slaves, East Africans were also shipped to Gujarat and the Deccan Plateau from the fifth century (ce) forward. As Horton has posited, this trade may have been part of a larger triangular trade in the western IOW. In southern Iraq from the eighth century forward, enslaved Africans converted large tracts of marsh into arable land. The “land of the Zanj” often correlates to the east coast of Africa, though medieval authors also used the term to 12 On numbers in medieval Arabic sources, see Robinson, “Slavery in the Conquest Period,” p. 160 and n. 19. Benjamin Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (Athens, 2015), pp. 125–141. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 133 describe Africans from any number of different regions. One estimate of the number of Zanj slaves in southern Iraq suggests that there were 50,000 East Africans by 869 in the regions surrounding the city of Basra, itself an entrepôt connected to IOW maritime trade via the Persian Gulf. The conventional view holds that the slave trade from East Africa to the Gulf only declined after many Zanj slaves participated in a major rebellion against the ʿAbbasid caliphate.13 The Zanj have inspired maximal prescriptions about the medieval slave trade from East Africa. Reginald Coupland and Hubert Gerbeau, for example, locate the prehistory of the early modern and modern slave trades in the antique and medieval IOW. Gerbeau argues that the expansion of the IOW slave trade took place after the ninth-century rebellion, but still amplifies the view of Hubert Deschamps that Zanj enslavement in southern Iraq was the “first model of a great tropical construction project involving the labor of hundreds of Negro slaves.” Such opinions are based largely on the work of medieval historian al-Tabari, who provides estimates of 500, 5,000, and even 15,000 slaves in certain camps that, if accurate, would suggest a vast trade.14 In Campbell’s view, while the slave trade to the Islamic world expanded during the medieval period, East Africa was not a major source of the supply. Instead, West, central, and northeast Africa were more intensively exploited for slaves. Scholarly critique of the term Zanj provides one reason to be skeptical of the centrality of East Africans in the medieval IOW slave trade. Campbell follows other scholars including Ghada Talhami and Marina Tolmacheva to demonstrate how variable the meaning and usage of the descriptor Zanj are in medieval sources. Medieval authors were apt to conflate Zanj with the more general descriptor “black,” meaning someone from “bilad al-Sudan (the lands of the blacks),” a vast region from southern Morocco to the Red Sea coast. One also finds a similar conflation between Nubian, Beja, and Abyssinian and black. Moreover, contemporaries had varying conceptions of African geography. Ibn Battuta believed that the Nile River flowed from West Africa to Egypt. Others assumed that the East African coast curved northwards to link ultimately with South or Southeast Asia. Historians cannot reconstruct the geography of slaving 13 Gwyn Campbell, “East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered,” in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World (Cham, 2016), pp. 275–303; Mark Horton, “Artisans, Communities, and Commodities,” p. 76. For further discussion of the so-called Zanj revolt, see Chapter 10 in this volume. 14 Hubert Gerbeau, “The Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean: Problems Facing the Historian and Research to be Undertaken,” in The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Paris, 1979), p. 190; Reginald Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders: From the Earliest Times to the Death of Seyyid Said in 1856 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 17–20. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 134 craig perry solely on the basis of the ethnonyms used by medieval writers, whether in literary works or documents such as bills of sale.15 As Campbell emphasizes, logistical challenges would have also worked against intensive exploitation of medieval East Africans by slavers. Among these challenges were the costs of organized slaving, the limited carrying capacity of ships, and the length and danger of long-distance maritime travel. Mark Horton, John Middleton, and J. Alexander posit schemes through which mainland interior and coastal groups partnered to obtain slaves for trade. Campbell counters that such ventures would have required ample manpower at considerable expense. The seasonality of maritime trade provided traders with only a relatively narrow window for shipping their slaves. Delays in shipping would incur costs for lodging, guarding, and feeding slaves that far exceeded the resources required to store nonliving luxury goods such as ivory. Oceangoing vessels of any size were expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain. Shipwrecks, disease, and a potential lack of drinking water during the thirty-five to forty-two-day voyage from East Africa to the Persian Gulf ensured high risk. Assuming nineteenth-century estimates for the average number of slaves per vessel at fifty-five, Campbell suggests that the number of ships and crewmen required to transport maximal estimates of 4,000 plus slaves per year would have made trading along the African littoral much more attractive than transoceanic options. Marek Jankowiak, by contrast, assesses overland slave trading as “inherently unstable.” He suggests that the maritime slave trade was more flexible and resilient due to a broader range of traded goods and fewer logistical challenges. A tale from the tenthcentury Wonders of India reports over 200 slaves in one ship’s hold as it set sail from East Africa to Oman, and though the number 200 is probably an exaggerated one, there remains the possibility of larger, wholesale slave shipments in the medieval IOW.16 Nevertheless, the slave trade out of East Africa did expand intermittently, as probably in the period from 750–867. Another possible spike was in Rasulid Yemen (1229–1454). Manuscripts from this period list customs duties levied upon numerous commodities from across the greater IOW. For East Africa, the commodities and their provenance show strong connections at this time between Mogadishu, Zayla, and Yemen. Among 15 Campbell, “East Africa,” pp. 279–280. See also Ghada Talhami, “The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 10 (1977): 443–461; Marina Tolmacheva, “Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 21 (1986): 105–113; Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves,” pp. 67, 87, 243, 245. 16 J. Alexander, “Islam, Archaeology and Slavery in Africa,” World Archaeology, 33 (2001): 54; Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford, 2000), p. 49; Campbell, “East Africa,” pp. 286–295; Jankowiak, “Slave Trade in the Saqaliba,” p. 171; Freeman-Grenville, Wonders of India, pp. 31–36. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 135 the listed goods are six different categories of slaves, including “newly enslaved Zanj” (raqiq al-zinuj) and “Zanj slave woman” (jariya zinjiyya).17 aden, the yemen, and their iow connections Indeed, the Yemen was the fulcrum of western IOW maritime trade. Even before the thirteenth century, the bustling port city of Aden served as an IOW trade entrepôt at the confluence of routes flowing from the western Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, East Africa, and onward toward Mediterranean markets. For the period between the late eleventh and thirteenth centuries, historians can reconstruct how the slaving economy functioned in Aden (and less so in other port cities such as Shihr) from documentary sources, Arabic chronicles, administrative works, and travelogues. Letters found in the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom for disused manuscripts in an Egyptian synagogue, reveal the activities of Jewish merchants who lived in Aden and dealt in trade between India and the Mediterranean. While these merchants maintained extensive contacts with Jewish traders in Cairo and Indian cities such as Mangalore, they were also a part of the larger IOW trading system and had business relationships that cut across confessional and geographic boundaries. Thus, we can use Geniza documents to draw some conclusions about the role of Aden in the larger IOW slaving economy. Geniza merchants wrote to each other about the acquisition of enslaved people – both male (ghulams, ʿabds, and wasifs) and female (jariyas and wasifas). Jewish merchants in Aden also sought to acquire or transship slaves to their families and associates in Egypt. Exceptional among these Geniza records is a merchant letter from Yemen to Egypt written in 1140 that mentions a shipment of “new slaves” (raqiq) from “the land of the Zanj” to Aden (how large the shipment was we do not know). The author writes that he tried unsuccessfully to purchase a male servant from this group for the letter’s intended recipient. It is rare to find mention of multiple slaves being shipped in medieval documentary sources. More commonly, merchants write about the logistics of sending one slave from one location to another. Also uncommon in the documentary materials are descriptions of slaves as Zanji. The descriptors more commonly mentioned in Geniza and other Arabic documents are “Nubian” and simply “black,” or from “the land of the blacks.” This evidence does corroborate the impression conveyed by Arabic writings that the “land of the Zanj” remained a source of enslaved labor for buyers in 17 Nayef Abdullah al-Shamrookh, The Commerce and Trade of the Rasulids in the Yemen, 630–858/1231–1454 (Kuwait, 1996), pp. 22–23, 322. Al-Shamrookh suggests that the provenance of these slaves was Abyssinia. See also Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les sultans Rasulides du Yémen, 626–858/1229–1454 (Paris, 2010), pp. 415, 557–561; Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves,” pp. 67, 83–84, 87, 90, 112. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 136 craig perry Yemen and beyond. Its specificity about the source of the slaves might indicate that the buyer specifically sought a Zanj slave, a type that some authors stereotyped as hardy and strong. The author’s phrasing also suggests that arrivals of slaves in Aden in 1140 were not so commonplace that the average buyer could take such supplies for granted.18 It bears emphasizing here that Egypt, like all major centers around the IOW, imported slaves from multiple regions including via Aden. The Fatimid caliphate, for instance, exchanged diplomatic gifts of enslaved people with states from Iberia to Yemen. Yet these exchanges do not represent perennial sources of the Egyptian slave supply. Moreover, even though Egyptians imported an array of Indian Ocean commodities (including some slaves), African regions such as Lake Chad, the Horn, and the Aswan-ʿAydhab hinterlands remained the most important sources of its more regular slave supply. Still, the abundance of Egyptian documentary and narrative sources provide insight into how enslavement and the slave trade operated on the ground and at sea. These sources report on the organized and opportunistic kidnapping that fed Egyptian and Red Sea markets. Famine also compelled parents to sell their children into slavery. Letters of Muslim and Jewish merchants also illustrate how decentralized networks of merchants coordinated the shipment of slaves within their networks. These merchants were not necessarily specialized slave traders but rather dealt in slaves among their other commodities. As in Egypt, slave buyers in the maritime Indian Ocean frequently consigned small numbers of enslaved people, and even individuals, as cargo on ships carrying a wide variety of trade goods. One Jewish merchant traveling from Kollam informs his family in Cairo that he is sending them (his wife, in particular) a six-year-old enslaved girl along with muslin, pearls, and bracelets with a merchant convoy before he himself returned to India for further business ventures. Egyptians had much easier access to enslaved Africans. So why would this merchant incur the risk and expense of sending a child over such a great distance? Enslaved girls as young as five were valuable to Egyptian families both for their labor and also as statusmarkers. This young girl’s Indian origin likely increased her owner’s prestige in this regard. For the merchant already sending commodities from India to Egypt, it may have also been a matter of convenience and efficiency to consign this young girl as part of a larger shipment of mixed goods.19 Enslaved people were relatively expensive and sea travel was perilous. Hassan Khalilieh shows that Islamic jurists conceived of two separate categories for the servants on a vessel. In one category were enslaved 18 Shelomo D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Leiden, 2008), pp. 452–456. 19 Perry, “Daily Life of Slaves,” p. 49. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 137 members of the vessel’s crew and servants that belonged to passengers (or perhaps traveling on behalf of their owners). This latter group were, legally speaking, a part of the crew and were due sufficient amounts of water, food, and space. A second category of enslaved people were part of the trade cargo and were legally in the same category as merchandise. As such they were assigned a value upon embarkation so that slave owners could count them among their total losses if they were jettisoned along with other goods in moments of extreme danger. Many Muslim jurists prohibited the jettison of any human being no matter the circumstances. Others ruled that all human passengers would draw lots to determine who would be forced to jump overboard. Another consideration was the proximity of land and passengers’ relative ability to swim. It was preferable for the strongest swimmers to be jettisoned when land was near. Whether by jettison or the complete loss of an entire ship, one would imagine that, for all but the wealthiest merchants and state-sponsored ventures, the loss of multiple slaves in a shipwreck would have been ruinous. Drowned people could not be salvaged by divers.20 Whether the enslaved arrived at port in small numbers or as large groups, ruling powers generated wealth by taxing them as part of the greater transit trade that flowed through Aden and other Yemeni ports such as Shihr. Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh al-mustabsir reports the import and export duties that were placed upon commodities that passed through Aden in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Taxes upon most newly imported slaves (raqiq) were two dinars per head upon arrival and one-half dinar upon export. Certain enslaved groups could be taxed at a higher rate presumably because they were more exotic or valuable for other reasons. For instance, “Sindaburi (Goanese) slaves” (ʿawili sindaburi) were taxed at 8 dinars upon import and 1 dinar upon export; an Abyssinian slave at 4 dinars upon import. For the purpose of comparison, sheep were taxed at one-eighth dinar per head and horses at 50 and 70 dinars upon import and export respectively.21 The merchant letters discussed above make no mention of taxes levied on slaves purchased or transferred in Aden, or any other locale. Twelfthcentury slave bills of sale from Fustat and Cairo do occasionally mention taxes and brokers’ commissions that are usually included in the recorded 20 Hassan S. Khalilieh, “Human Jettison, Contribution for Lives, and Life Salvage in Byzantine and Early Islamic Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean,” Byzantion, 75 (2005): 225–235 and “An Overview of the Slaves’ Juridical Status at Sea in Romano-Byzantine, and Islamic Laws,” in Adam Sabra, Petra Sijpesteijn, and Roxani Eleni Margariti (eds.), Histories of the Middle East: Studies in Middle Eastern Society, Economy and Law in Honor of A. L. Udovitch (Leiden, 2011) pp. 73–100. 21 Roxani Eleni Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, 2007), pp. 126–140; G. Rex Smith, “Have You Anything to Declare? Maritime Trade and Commerce in Ayyubid Aden: Practices and Taxes,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 25 (1995): 127–140, esp. 132–133; al-Shamrookh, Commerce and Trade, p. 322; MoorthyKloss, “Slaves,” pp. 69, 83. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 138 craig perry purchase price and incumbent upon the buyer. It may be that merchants took these fees for granted when they wrote to each other about the logistics of transportation. We might also consider that merchants tried to evade these fees, which would have amounted to roughly 10 percent of the final slave’s price, by acquiring slaves through personal networks as opposed to public markets. Aden had the infrastructure and bureaucracy necessary to facilitate commerce and collect taxes. During the Zurayid dynasty (1080–1174), the state invested in Aden’s harbor, customs house, and market. Forts and a seafront wall protected the city from attack and gave customs officials the ability to monitor shipping. After 1174 the Ayyubid sultanate (its capital in Cairo) systematized the tax system further and instituted maritime patrols. Merchants importing slaves to Aden encountered officials who chose the most desirable slaves for themselves. Only after state administrators had had their pick did the remaining slaves make their way to the larger slave market where they experienced invasive bodily inspections. In Aden, merchants fumigated enslaved women with aromatic smoke and adorned them to enhance their marketable value. Ibn Mujawir reports that prospective merchant buyers scrutinized and measured the naked bodies of men and women from head to toe. Arabic slave-buying manuals from this time instruct buyers how to examine slaves’ body parts for signs of illness and “defects.” Sellers, for instance, could attempt to conceal scars on the skin that could indicate leprosy or other diseases. Recent scholarship suggests that the slave trade was probably a key factor in the spread of leprosy. Spread of the disease required prolonged, intimate contact as between an owner and his enslaved concubine. Along with traders that specialized in slaves (nakhkhasin) were the brokers (dallal/dallalin) who could, depending upon the particular time and place, either be free agents or government appointees. Their job was to help value commodities (for the purposes of taxation and for traders) and to match potential buyers and sellers. Buyers incurred the associated brokerage fees, a portion of which went to the broker while the remainder went to the state.22 22 Yusuf Ragib, “Les marchés aux esclaves en terre d’Islam,” in Mercati e mercanti nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1993), pp. 721–766; R. B. Serjeant, “Yemeni Merchants and Trade in Yemen, 13th–16th Centuries,” in Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin (eds.), Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Océan Indien et la Mer de Chine, 13e–20e siecles (Paris, 1988), pp. 61–82, esp. 76–77; Smith, “Have You Anything to Declare?,” pp. 127–140, esp. 134; Smith, “More on the Port Practices and Taxes of Medieval Aden,” in J. R. Smart, B. R. Pridham and G. Rex Smith (eds.), New Arabian Studies, Vol. 3 (Exeter, 1996), pp. 208–218, esp. 212–215; Margariti, Aden, pp. 109–140; Vallet, L’Arabie marchande, p. 213; Hannah Barker, “Purchasing a Slave in Fourteenth-Century Cairo: Ibn al-Akfānī’s Book of Observation and Inspection in the Examination of Slaves,” Mamlūk Studies Review, 19 (2016): 1–23, esp. 13. Highly recommended on this topic is ch. 3 of Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves,” esp. 75–101. On slavery and the spread of leprosy, see Monica Green and Lori Jones, “The Evolution and Spread of Major Human Diseases in the Indian Ocean World,” in Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Eva-Maria Knoll (Cham, 2020), pp. 25–57. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 139 The nakhkhas and the dallal were probably one and the same person in certain contexts, whose portfolio included economic activities beyond slaving. And since both positions necessitated the creation of written records, the same person could have also worked as a scribe. Only a small percentage of these officials would have specialized solely in the slave trade. Éric Vallet, for instance, notes that in Rasulid-era Yemen there were highly specialized government bureaus, one of the smaller of which was dedicated to regulation and taxation of the slave trade. The existence of this slavetrade bureau illustrates how specialized the slaving economy could become when scaled up to serve the interests of states. Government officials in areas of slave supply, such as the nazil in Ethiopia, supervised slave exports to Aden among other duties. The task of identifying the different agents of the slave trade and understanding their actual (in addition to prescribed) roles requires more research.23 In Egypt during the Mamluk sultanate, the Egyptian state did employ merchants responsible for delivering slaves, but only for the overland trade from regions that supplied enslaved soldiers. One would imagine that other kinds of slaves would have been transported along with these soldiers, but this still needs to be demonstrated. The greatest of these merchants received the honorary title “khwaja.” In the maritime realm, the Karimi merchants were intensively involved in Indian Ocean trade between Cairo and the rest of the IOW in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (though they exited earlier as a more loosely organized maritime convoy). Karimi merchants and convoys in the IOW did transport slaves between India, the Yemen, and Egypt but dealt with small numbers shipped as part of mixed cargo. Spices and textiles were much more important for them and their state patrons. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, a major Karimi merchant returned to Aden from China via India. He arrived in Yemen carrying a cargo comprised of slaves, silk, and porcelain. While enslaved people were among his cargo, he was not remembered primarily as a slave trader.24 This and the evidence above suggest that a wholesale long-distance trade involving large numbers of slaves was probably less common in the medieval IOW for most of the era under review. At least as late as the sixteenth century, traders sent slaves as part of a larger, mixed cargo even when the ship technology permitted a carrying capacity of 180 slaves or more. In 1518, for example, a Gujarati vessel bore some slaves from Malindi to Cambay, though most of the cargo was ivory and metals. For shorter 23 Vallet, L’Arabie marchand, pp. 258, 416; Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves,” pp. 82–83, 86–88, 100. Sato Tsugitaka, “Slave Traders and Karimi Merchants during the Mamluk Period: A Comparative Study,” Mamluk Studies Review, 10 (2006): 141–155. On the Karimi merchant returning from China, see Eliyahu Ashtor, “The Karimi Merchants,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1/2 (1956): 45–56. 24 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 140 craig perry voyages, such as from Abyssinia to Yemen, slave merchants may have been more likely to send larger shipments of enslaved people on a single vessel. But the most common enslaved groups in the IOW, mainly domestics, entertainers, sex slaves, and factotums, were not the strategic asset to states that the military slaves were who came from regions in Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Because the state sought these troops, there may have been more profit to be had for merchants and more state support for their shipment in large numbers over land. Further research on the composition of seaborne cargo is important because it has bearing upon how we interpret the scattered mentions to the slave trade in medieval sources. Slaves being part of a mixed cargo is not necessarily indicative of a large number. Just as the misinterpretation of diplomatic exchanges like the baqt might distort estimates of the trade’s volume over time, so might the assumption that passing mentions of slaves necessarily indicates a sizable number of them. maritime western south asia For present purposes, writing western South Asia, from Sind to Kerala, into the history of the IOW slave trade requires putting aside the Bay of Bengal and regional links with mainland and insular Southeast Asia as well as China. Over the course of the medieval era, a periodization that scholars of South Asia have rightly criticized, South Asia was likely a net importer of slaves from Central Asia and Africa (Abyssinia in particular). A large proportion of this traffic traveled over land or by using a combination of land and sea routes. Yet as the traffic through Yemen reveals, slavers also exported enslaved South Asians westwards across the Arabian Sea. Entertainers, concubines, young boys and girls designated as domestics, and male factotums were probably the most common kinds of Indian slaves that buyers in Yemen, Egypt, and beyond acquired.25 In terms of sources, scholars including Leslie C. Orr and Daud Ali have used epigraphy to write histories of palace and temple slavery in Tamil Nadu. Inscriptional sources abound for other regions of India as well, though Sebastian Prange concludes that these tell us little about the slave trade or the merchants, sailors, and enslaved people who would have been at the center of it along the Malabar coast. Another major source for the 25 Slavery in Tamil Nadu is discussed by Leslie C. Orr in Chapter 13 of this volume. On the African diaspora in South Asia, which included enslaved individuals, see Richard Pankhurst, “The Ethiopian Diaspora to India: The Role of Habshis and Sidis from Medieval Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Richard Pankhurst and Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya (eds.), The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, (Trenton, NJ, 2003), pp. 189–221. Pankhurst states that documentation for African slaves is unavailable until the thirteenth century. See also Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 6–8, 176–178. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 141 study of slavery in South Asia before 1500 is Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu legal texts and narrative works. According to O. P. Srivastava these sources have yet to be explored fully on the topic of slavery. Himanshu Prabha Ray demonstrates, however, that such normative works can be read alongside material remains including inscriptions, archaeology, and documentary sources to write histories of premodern maritime India.26 Noninscriptional documentary sources are less numerous but relatively rich in the data they provide about slavery and the slave trade. One of the earliest such records is a ninth-century copper plate engraved with a royal edict that gave trading privileges to a community of Persian Christian merchants. This document, frequently called the Kollam or Tharispallasi plate, is discussed below. Another form of local writing in Malabar is the granthavari, a palm leaf upon which scribes etched records with an iron stylus. A collection of these documents, sometimes called the “mudaliar (or mudaliyar) manuscripts,” has recently been published in Tamil. They contain references to slavery and await further scrutiny by scholars. In medieval Gujarat, scribes copied model documents for particular kinds of transactions, some of which contain formularies that describe the conditions of slavery and mechanisms of enslavement.27 Scholarship on the slave trade to South Asia focuses more on the overland trade from the northwestern frontier than its maritime counterpart. André Wink argues that there were two phases when enslavement and the slave trade expanded from Sind to the Middle East and to other parts of South Asia. The first wave of enslavement and trade to the central Islamic lands began during the conquests of Ali’s caliphate from “the frontier of alHind.” During the caliphate of the Umayyad leader Muʿawiya (r. 661–680), Muslim-state conquests and raids penetrated deeper into areas including the Makran coast. The conquering armies captured “many slaves,” “much booty,” and “big and beautiful horses.”28 26 See Chapter 13 in this volume and the sources cited there. Daud Ali, “War, Servitude, and the Imperial Household: A Study of Palace Women in the Chola Empire,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Maxwell Eaton (eds.), Slavery & South Asian History (Bloomington, 2006), pp. 44–62; Prange, Monsoon Islam, p. 18. Himanshu Prabha Ray has published broadly on this topic. Recently, see “The West Coast of India and the Maritime World of the Western Indian Ocean,” African Archaeological Review, 31 (2014): 583–598. O. P. Srivastava, “Slave-Trade in Ancient and Early Medieval India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (PIHC), 39 (1978): 124–136; Shadab Bano, “India’s Overland Slave-Trade in the Medieval Period,” PIHC, 58 (1997): 315–321; Bano, “Slave Markets in Medieval India,” PIHC, 61 (2000): 365–373. 27 Nair also makes note of two deeds of sale for slaves, one from 1431 and the second from 1591. See Adoor K. K. Ramachandran Nair, Slavery in Kerala (Delhi, 1986), pp. 19–20. On the publication of the mudaliar manuscripts by the Tamil publisher Kalachuvadu, see Bhagawati Kollapan, “When Dalits Were Also Landowners, and Vellalas Slaves,” The Hindu, May 8, 2017, www.thehindu.com/news/national/ tamil-nadu/once-dalits-were-landowners-vellalas-slaves/article18405606.ece (accessed June 30, 2018). 28 André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1990), Vol. 1, pp. 171–172. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 142 craig perry The slave trade also flowed outward from South Asia, though likely in smaller numbers of the enslaved. A group labeled with the ambiguous descriptor “Zott” (referring to seminomadic peoples from the regions of modern Afghanistan and India) are found in Iraq from the time of the Umayyad and ʿAbbasid caliphates where they were coerced into gang labor to convert large areas of the south into arable land alongside Zanji laborers. Subsequently, the caliphate struck tribute agreements with states in the region that stipulated that they supply it with a set number of slaves. Given the divergent interpretations of the baqt between Nubia and Egypt, it would be prudent to investigate whether the tribute agreements in the Islamic East were also reciprocal exchanges and not reflections of conqueror–subject relationships. A second massive wave of capture and enslavement followed the rise of the Samanids (819–999) and, particularly, the Ghaznavids (977–1186). Mahmud of Ghazni (d. 1030) launched a series of attacks across his empire’s Indian frontier. His armies are said to have enslaved such great numbers of Indian captives that the prices of slaves plummeted. Enslaved Turkish soldiers were also crucial to the Ghaznavid state, as they were to their successors, the Ghurids (c. 879–1215) and the Delhi sultanate (1206–1526, see chapter 15 in this volume). Away from the northwestern frontier, multiple modes of enslavement across diverse regions of the subcontinent are apparent. At the risk of flattening salient differences, some general observations are warranted. Wars between Indian polities on the subcontinent led to enslavement. While some of these captives may have been traded away, rulers also used them for their own purposes or resold them locally. Seminomadic groups, commonly referred to in the scholarly literature as forest people (or tribes), also made raids on sedentary settlements and captured slaves for the express purpose of selling them for profit abroad.29 For thirteenth-century Gujarat, a collection of model documents that date from the mid-eighth to the later fifteenth century indicates a variety of routes to enslavement. Published editions of this work contain two versions of a deed of sale for a sixteen-year-old girl. These formularies reveal that her owner, a royal military official, obtained her as part of the spoils of a campaign in the region of Maharashtra. Here a merchant (or a money lender in a second manuscript version) purchases the enslaved woman, whose many domestic duties are enumerated. A separate deed of selfenslavement specifies that an enslaved girl may be sold to another country for profit and that she may be passed down to her purchaser’s sons and grandsons. These deeds contain chilling clauses protecting the purchaser in the event that his slave commits suicide by throwing herself down a well. Formulas are also included that give the master rights to beat his slave 29 Srivastava, “Slave-Trade,” p. 126. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 143 cruelly if her father, brother, or husband should seek to buy her back or otherwise “interrupt” her duties. The absence of deeds of sale for male slaves is conspicuous, an imbalance that may be partially explained by contemporary legal prescriptions that required written deeds only for the transfer of enslaved women. These documents should be read alongside surviving literary and inscriptional sources in order to uncover further details about the lives of the enslaved.30 The sale of children and self-sale due to economic duress are also documented in South Asian sources. One model document for self-sale describes a ten-year-old orphan girl (a widow in a second version) voluntarily committing herself to be the slave of a merchant during a time of famine. To call this girl’s act voluntary is of course misleading and can be understood only in the context of extreme distress and vulnerability. The document relates how the child became a beggar for a time before she found a merchant who accepted her offer to “engage me for the work of a female slave and save me from this terrible famine.” The connection between famine and enslavement was long-standing. When Duarte Barbosa (d. 1521) was in Malabar during an early sixteenth-century famine, he observed that Muslim traders took rice and coconuts to the Coromandel coast and returned with “ship-loads of slaves.”31 Agricultural slavery seems to have been common from Kerala to Gujarat. Future scholarship should consider where on a spectrum between chattel slavery and serfdom these particular practices fell. Sixteenthcentury land deeds written on palm-leaf manuscripts show that enslaved laborers were included in the sale of property. Domestic slavery, in the view of Nair, was unthinkable in Kerala due to laws of caste purity. In contrast, Prasad suggests how documentary sources from further north in Gujarat question whether legal prescriptions on caste were always followed. For instance, Hindu law texts (dharmaśāstras) differentiate between categories of servants and slaves and indicate that only the latter were permitted to do “impure” work such as handling human excrement. In contrast, the Lekhapaddhati documents describe the duties of domestic slave girls to 30 English translations of these deeds are in Pushpa Prasad, Lekhapaddhati: Documents of State and Everyday Life from Ancient and Early Medieval Gujarat, 9th to 15th Centuries (New Delhi, 2007), see esp. pp. 158–164. See also the Sanskrit–German edition Ingo Strauch, Die Lekhapaddhati-Lekhapañcāśikā: Briefe und Urkunden im Mittelalterlichen Gujarat (Berlin, 2002), pp. 188–193, 402–410. In addition to these model documents, Prasad indicates that the Likhanavali of Vidyapati (fourteenth century) contains model documents for “the sale and mortgage of male Sudra slaves.” See Prasad Lekhapaddhati, pp. 33–34, 45 n. 188, and Prasad, “The Economy of Gujarat in the Thirteenth Century,” in Irfan Habib and Debi P. Chattopadhyaya (eds.), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500, Vol. 8, pt. 1 of History of Science, Philosophy, and Culture in Indian Civilization (Delhi, 2011), pp. 17–19. 31 Prasad, Lekhapaddhati, pp. 161–164; Strauch, Die Lekhapaddhati-Lekhapañcāśikā, pp. 402–410; and Prange, Monsoon Islam, p. 180. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 144 craig perry include both “pure” tasks like cooking and “impure” tasks like smearing the floors with dung. We should not assume a priori that practices of slavery followed legal prescriptions.32 Some states in maritime South Asia used trade to strengthen their geopolitical position. In the second half of the ninth century, the Cera kingdom granted privileges and concessions to a group of Persian Christian merchants who had settled in the city of Kollam (Quilon), built a church, and cultivated local and long-distance commercial business. The concessions included an exemption from taxes upon “those whom these people take as their slaves.” While the Persian merchants clearly traded in taxable goods such as toddy, there is no explicit evidence that these merchants exported slaves to anywhere in the greater IOW. If their trade activities followed the pattern we find elsewhere in the medieval IOW, then it’s possible that enslaved people were one unspecified (and minor) commodity among the others taxed in Kollam. Further north in Goa, the ruler Jayakesi I (c. 1053) of Gopakapattanam (modern-day Goa) later sought to attract Arab traders. Using state revenues from taxes on commercial items including slaves, he subsidized the local mosque of Sadhan. In both Kollam and Gopakapattanam, local rulers cultivated and rewarded the activities of foreign merchants through a mix of inducements. Among these inducements was the sanction of slave trading and exemption from poll taxes upon their locally owned slaves. Specifically, it was in these states’ interests to cultivate maritime trade in order to acquire the kinds of prestigious luxury commodities that could be used as what Fouad Makki calls “means of persuasion” in expanding and consolidating regional control.33 Maritime western South Asia avoided the large-scale military confrontations that characterized the northwest frontier. While the maritime realm was not free of violence, it was shaped far more by “mutual commerce” and institutions that developed to serve diverse and geographically widespread trading diasporas. Prange describes how Muslim trading communities in Malabar from the twelfth century forward thrived among competing states, which drew not primarily on agricultural surplus but on revenue 32 Nair, Slavery in Kerala, pp. 12–13, 15–16; M. T. Narayanan, Agrarian Relations in Late Medieval Malabar (New Delhi, 2003), pp. xv, 4–7, 10–11, 126–127. 33 M. G. S. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala (Trivandrum, 1972), p. 93. The copper plates that record these grants are commonly referred to as the Tharispalli (after the name of the church) or Kollam (after the city name that followed Quilon) plates. For a translation and analysis of these charters, see T. A. Gopinatha Rao, “Three Inscriptions of the Sthānu Ravi,” Travancore Archaeological Series, 2 (1920): 60–86. Thanks to Elizabeth Lambourn for bringing˙ Rao’s edition and related topics to my attention. For Gopakapattanam, see Panduranga S. Pissurlencar, “Inscriçōes Pre-Portuguesas de Goa,” O Orient Portugues, 22 (1938): 386–398. Thanks to Glen Goodman for his help with the Portuguese. On the “means of persuasion,” see below and Fouad Makki, “The Spatial Ecology of Power: Long-Distance Trade and State Formation in Northeast Africa,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 24 (2011): 155–185. See also Pius Malekandathil, Maritime India: Trade, Religion and Polity in the Indian Ocean (Delhi, 2010), pp. 40–44. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 145 from their port cities. The Muslim presence in Calicut followed a pattern evident in the earlier predominance of Christian merchants in Kollam and Jews in Cochin. Recalling the ninth-century Kollam grants, this pattern shows the effort of local rulers “to attract and retain foreign trading communities in order to tax their trade.” In this context, pepper was “the king of spices” in a trade that also included cardamom, cloves, ginger, and other goods. Slaves were by no means the most important component of the larger trade. As Prange demonstrates, Malabar Muslim trading communities needed “religious and political institutions that could address the particular needs of these far-flung diaspora settlements.” Law was one necessary component and the Muslim jurist Zayn al-Din al-Malabari (d. c. 1583) produced a legal compendium meant to serve the trading diasporas on the Malabar coast. Zayn al-Din dealt with the laws for the purchase, keeping, and manumission of enslaved people. In another work, he reports that Hindus who violated caste restrictions could be sold as slaves. Barbosa, earlier in the sixteenth century, had also reported that “vagrant youth” in Calicut could still be legally purchased by Muslim merchants.34 Local traders were clearly purchasing enslaved Indians for their own use as well as for resale in markets like Aden. The twelfth-century Jewish trader and manufacturer, Abraham b. Yiju, is known from Geniza documents to have acquired two Indian slaves, a Tuluva woman called Ashu, who likely bore his children, and a man named Bomma, who served him as a business agent. Upon Ashu’s manumission and following Jewish law, Ashu became a free Jew and adopted the Hebrew name Berakha. Prange suggests that Muslim Malabar traders likely brought enslaved Africans with them as well and that the conversion of slaves to Islam was one vector for the broader dissemination of Islam in medieval India. Muslim freed men are indeed found in Malabar sources. One individual is mentioned in an inscription that reports how he purchased land with his own money and built a mosque.35 the slave trade and the dynamics of state formation When it comes to the question of what groups were eligible for enslavement in the greater IOW, we have to enlarge the conversation to include 34 Prange, Monsoon Islam, pp. 3, 6, 12, 14, 16, 18, 133. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London, 1992); Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of MS. H.6.,” in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds.), Subaltern Studies VII (Delhi, 1992), pp. 159–220; Goitein and Friedman, India Traders. Cf. Ophira Gamliel, “Aśu the Convert: A Slave Girl or a Nāyar Land Owner?” Entangled Religions, 6 (2018): 201–246. See also Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social History of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, 2018). Prange, Monsoon Islam, pp. 6–8, 176–178. 35 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 146 craig perry factors beyond religious identity and regimes of law. In theory all groups in the western IOW were eligible for enslavement in some other part of the region. Still, the eligibility question leads us to think broadly about why some regions and states predominately supply slaves to the market while other areas and polities do not generally do so. Jeffrey Fynn-Paul’s 2009 publication, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean,” tackles the eligibility question head-on for the premodern period. Fynn-Paul’s “slaving zones” thesis posits that such zones, along with “no-slaving zones,” existed in the Greater Mediterranean region from antiquity to the early modern era. A central thrust of Fynn-Paul’s 2009 article was that medieval Islamic and Christian empires created more perfect nonslaving zones, whose inhabitants were ineligible for, and generally protected from, enslavement. Over the course of the last decade, Fynn-Paul has refined his slaving zones thesis and enumerated criteria that led to the creation of these zones along with nonslaving zones.36 One criterion that the history of the IOW slave trade can further illuminate is the role of political organization and disorganization in determining where slaving and nonslaving zones emerged. It is essential to note that smaller polities and seminomadic groups participated in the slave trade on their own terms. From the Aswan-ʿAydhab hinterlands to the land-sea realms of the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean and to the forest tribes of South Asia, ostensibly less politically centralized groups were crucial to creating supplies of slaves and in transporting the enslaved over distance.37 The Beja (Buja, Bejawi) of northeast Africa exemplify these patterns. While sources most often refer to the Beja in a monolithic manner, they were a people comprised of different tribes, some of whom were heavily involved in mining, slaving, and trade – particularly in the Eastern Desert, a part of the Aswan-ʿAydhab hinterlands that long served as a source of the slave supply for the Egyptian market and beyond. While some medieval sources portray the Beja as hapless victims of kidnappers, other sources describe them as slave raiders to be feared. Petra Weschenfelder illustrates how different Beja subgroups were integrated into the social and economic networks of the Eastern Desert through conversion to Islam and alliances with sedentary groups. One Beja subgroup, the Hadariba, asserted claims to some of the same gold 36 Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Past & Present, 205 (2009): 3–40; Jeff Fynn-Paul, “Introduction. Slaving Zones in Global History: The Evolution of a Concept,” in Damian Pargas and Jeff Fynn-Paul (eds.), Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Leiden, 2018), pp. 1–22. See also Chapter 2 in this volume. 37 Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery”; Fynn-Paul, “Introduction,” p. 3. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 147 mines that attracted Arab entrepreneurs to the region. Beja groups attacked miners, raided caravans, and enslaved captives for resale. These groups also controlled access to Red Sea harbors and desert waypoints such as Wadi alʿAlaqi that were essential for provisioning trade and pilgrim caravans. Major harbors depended on the Beja for supplies, particularly animal products including meat, milk, and ghee, which were generated by these pastoralists. In certain contexts, Beja leaders shared in the tolls and taxes that traders and pilgrims paid as they traveled across the Eastern Desert to and from the Red Sea coast.38 There are parallels between the roles of seminomadic groups like the Beja and the land-sea realms of the maritime IOW. As Margariti argues with regards to the self-styled sultans of Dahlak between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, their “assertive titulature and the concomitant claims to authority and legitimacy accompany a moment of expansion of the island polity and an assertion of control, if not sovereignty, over a land-sea realm, extending throughout the Dahlak archipelago and including the sea routes that traversed it.” The Beja did not call themselves sultans, but they sometimes acted like the rulers of the Eastern Desert in defiance of the larger sedentary empires to their north. Some scholars suggest that one reason the Islamic empire did not expand further into northeast and East Africa is because they wanted to preserve these areas as slave reservoirs. An alternate, perhaps complementary, interpretation is that this expansion was delayed because the empire did not have the power or resources to bring these regions to heel. Seminomadic pastoralists and regional sedentary elites would not allow it.39 In light of these histories, state formation is a more flexible category than the dichotomous criterion of political organization versus disorganization. Dynamics of state formation are key to understanding patterns of slave trading in the medieval western IOW. With regards to northeast Africa as an example, state formation was cyclical and tied to political strategies including territorial expansion and the cultivation of long-distance trade relations as opposed to primarily upon an intensification of agricultural or other production. Slaves were not the only or even most important commodity to such long-distance trade. Rather they were part of a bundle of goods in which informal and sometimes ephemeral coalitions of traders and state actors transacted. Enslaved people were doubly valuable to political rulers as were other luxury items. First, taxes upon them generated revenue. 38 Petra Weschenfelder, “The Integration of the Eastern Desert into the Islamic World: Beja Groups in Medieval Islamic Geography and Archaeological Records,” in Navigated Spaces, Connected Places: Proceedings of Red Sea Project V Held at the University of Exeter, 16–19 September 2010, ed. Dionysus A. Agius et al. (Oxford, 2012), pp. 221–228. On the Beja in Islamic historiography and modern scholarship, see Karen Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (Chicago, 2016), pp. 187–218. 39 Margariti, “An Ocean of Islands,” p. 212. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 148 craig perry Second, they formed “the means of persuasion” which, along with “means of coercion” (mainly military forces), ruling elites relied upon to build, extend, and consolidate their power.40 Around the IOW, states relied upon maritime trade for resources, tax revenues, and even political legitimacy. These states varied in their nature. Some were independent city-states; others were semi-independent kingdoms, of which some were vassals of larger powers, while others were seminomadic groups that interacted with sedentary powers. The importance of trade in the IOW’s interstitial spaces, its seas and deserts, helps explain why these different polities engaged willingly in the slave trade and allowed foreign groups to exploit their subjects and hinterlands as slave reservoirs. This chapter suggests that scholars of the medieval IOW slave trade need to pay further attention to the dynamics of state formation at and beyond the borders of large land-based empires. From the Saracens of late antique Syria to the rulers and rice cultivators of Madagascar and to the rulers of Cera South Asia, sedentary, seminomadic, and pastoral groups established various modi vivendi that defy core–periphery hierarchies and dichotomies of organized and disorganized. Margariti’s analysis of the state and nonstate actors in the IOW’s land-sea realms illustrates how these dynamics have a history.41 The dichotomy of powerful, organized state versus weak, disorganized state promotes the impression that the slave trade is a result of the stronger states coercing the weaker states to provide slaves. Indeed, during conquests, the power with the stronger military generated a large stream of captives that would feed its slave supply. Yet during the long periods when imperial frontiers were relatively stable or when states rose, declined, and were succeeded in a given geographical area, this explanation does not adequately explain why some states supplied slaves. topics for future research Future research may unearth and compile more data that will permit the reconstruction of enslaved lives and the activities of emancipated slaves in the IOW. Amitav Ghosh’s use of archival and ethnographic sources in writing the life of Bomma, Abraham b. Yiju’s enslaved factotum, remains one of the best examples of what interdisciplinary research might achieve in 40 Fouad Makki, “Spatial Ecology,” pp. 156, 157, 164. Roxani Eleni Margariti, “Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and ‘Pirate’ States: Conflict and Competition in the Indian Ocean World of Trade before the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008): 543–577. 41 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 149 this regard. The lives of other IOW slave agents and freed men are described in Arabic biographical literature. Matthew Gordon’s work reconstructing the life courses of elite courtesans in ʿAbbasid Baghdad suggests what scholars still might do with the rich material in sources like ʿUmara al-Hakami’s “History of Yemen.” Moorthy-Kloss has used this work to illuminate the life histories of enslaved women such as ʿAlam and Warda. ʿAlam, an accomplished singer, is remembered for protecting her hajj companions from extortion, owning her own retinue of enslaved women, and even murdering a hostile man with a poison-soaked cloth when he visited her expecting songs and sex. In order to know more about the trade in slaves, it is also necessary to gather data on the sometime shadowy array of traders, brokers, and slave inspectors who profited from this commerce.42 At the macro-level of population movements, genetics research has been used to date the migration of peoples and to suggest certain sex patterns among specific groups. As one piece of the puzzle, such data can be used to test hypotheses and to generate research questions. But genetics alone cannot tell us with any certainty whether large population movements were the result of the slave trade or the migration of free peoples. Richards et al. found that a sub-Saharan African genetic presence can be detected among Near Eastern Arab populations as early as 500 bce and especially in the Hadramawt region of Yemen. By analyzing the proportion of Y-chromosomal DNA compared to mitochondrial DNA, geneticists also demonstrate that African DNA came into Arab populations via African females. A small sample from a group of Saudi Arabian men suggests that Arabia was an exception to this general trend – and that African men were more predominate in bringing African DNA into the gene pool. Reilly suggests that this pattern may be explained by the occasional intensive use of male African slaves in Arabian agriculture, where the nature of the work, slaves’ resistance to malaria, and periodic pulses in the supply of cheaper slaves made the exploitation of this group more feasible in certain areas. In his analysis of the literature, Campbell suggests that “the greatest African genetic input into Arabia is of Ethio-Somali and Nilo-Saharan origin.”43 42 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land; Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of MS. H.6.”; Goitein and Friedman, India Traders. Cf. Ophira Gamliel, “Aśu the Convert.” See also Omar H. Ali, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford, 2016); Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves,” pp. 75–101. On the lives of the enslaved and Gordon’s work, see Chapter 10 in this volume and the literature cited there. 43 On genetics and the slave trade out of Africa, see the discussion in Campbell, “East Africa,” pp. 283–286; Martin Richards et al., “Extensive Female-Mediated Gene Flow from Sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab Populations,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 72 (2003): 1058–1064; Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria, pp. 138–143. See also Romuald Laso-Jadart et al., “The Genetic Legacy of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade: Recent Admixture and Post-Admixture Selection in the Makranis of Pakistan,” The American Journal of Human Genetics, 101 (2017): 977–984, which argues that an admixture between Africans from the Swahili coast and local Baluchi populations in the Makran region of Pakistan resulted from the Omani-dominated slave trade of the eighteenth century. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 150 craig perry Recent genetics scholarship underscores the need for closer collaboration between genetics researchers, historians, archaeologists, and others. Gourdine et al. critique the methods and rebut particular claims made by Schuenemann et al., who argue that the premodern trans-Saharan slave trade accounts for genetic differences between ancient and modern Egyptian DNA samples. Gourdine et al. argue that the sub-Saharan genetic affinities found by Schuenemann et al. may be explained by “ancient early settlers” and that the relevant sub-Saharan genetic markers do not align with the geography of known trade routes. The claims of both of these studies require further scrutiny and discussion.44 Still, evidence of genetic admixture raises intriguing questions for scholars because it has bearing on how we understand social relations between the enslaved, freed persons, their descendants, and other local neighboring groups over the longue durée. Reilly proposes a theory that enslaved Africans would have been absorbed and assimilated into the greater Arabian population. He works from the premise that the volume of the slave trade spiked in particular times and places and led to an influx of (in this case) enslaved Africans. Over time these groups and their descendants would have become more autonomous. Eventually they would have become “subordinate but autonomous farming communities, sustained by local population growth as well as exogamous marriages with neighboring Arab groups, and distinguishable from other Arabian Peninsula farming towns only by the social stigma of African or servile ancestry.” Reilly adds that this hypothesis is testable. If it is accurate, then at any given time there would be different groups that reflect different historical pulses in the slave trade.45 a guide to further reading A transhistorical overview of this topic can be found in Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans-Indian Ocean World Slave Trade,” in Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers (eds.), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Oxford, 2007), pp. 286–305. Campbell’s more recent article “East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered,” in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World (Cham, 2016), pp. 275–303 is a study, as the title suggests, of East Africa and the history and historiography of the Indian Ocean 44 Verena J. Schuenemann et al., “Ancient Egyptian Mummy Genomes Suggest an Increase of Sub-Saharan African Ancestry in Post-Roman Periods,” Nature Communications, 8 (2017): 1–11; JeanPhilippe Gourdine et al., “Ancient Egyptian Genomes from Northern Egypt: Further Discussion,” OSF Preprints, August 16, 2018, https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ecwf3. Thanks to Monica Green for bringing these studies to my attention. 45 Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria, pp. 132–134. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 the slave trade in the western indian ocean world 151 Slave trade to Iraq and the greater Middle East. For Yemen and its IOW connections, we now have Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss, “Slaves at the Najahid and Rasulid Courts of Yemen (412–553 ah/1021–1158 ce and 626–858 ah/1229–1454 ce)” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Vienna, 2019). Moorthy-Kloss brings a wealth of data and previously untranslated material to light. She builds on earlier scholarship that includes slavery within its frame, but focuses more broadly on society, economy, and culture. See also works by Roxani Margariti, R. B. Serjeant, Rex G. Smith, and Éric Vallet that are cited in Moorthy-Kloss’s bibliography and in this chapter’s notes. The fact that scholarship on IOW slavery is embedded within more general studies of trade and communication reflects the nature of historical sources and the structure of this slave system itself. With some notable exceptions, historical sources generally treat slavery incidentally. Moreover, enslaved people were trafficked in the IOW as one commodity among many luxury goods. Thus, more research and further synthesis of the literature is needed to write general histories of the greater IOW slave trade. A recent work that integrates the slave trade into medieval global history is Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (New York, 2020). Though it is mainly concerned with later periods, Benjamin Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (Athens, 2015) analyzes the slave trade between Africa and Arabia over the longue durée. Another work that sheds light on the topic of slavery and the slave trade is Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate ad 500–1000 (Cairo, 2012). Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa,” The African Archaeological Review, 21 (2004): 59–88 studies evidence from later centuries, but his methods and conclusions should be considered among other perspectives that differ over to what extent archaeology can illuminate the history of slavery. For instance, see the works of J. Alexander, Mark Horton, and John Middleton as cited in Campbell “East Africa.” Documentary sources also contribute greatly to our knowledge of IOW slavery, see the materials related to the topic in Pushpa Prasad, Lekhapaddhati: Documents of State and Everyday Life from Ancient and Early Medieval Gujarat, 9th to 15th Centuries (New Delhi, 2007) and the sources cited in Craig Perry, “Historicizing Slavery in the Medieval Islamic World,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017): 133–138, esp. n. 9. For slavery in South Asia, Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Maxwell Eaton (eds.), Slavery & South Asian History (Bloomington, IN, 2006) contains several chapters on slavery before 1500. For links between slavery here and the greater Indian Ocean region, one must consult the many different works of cultural and material history that are cited in this chapter’s notes and that are too numerous to reiterate here. In addition, see Himanshu Prabha Ray, “Trading Partners across the Indian Ocean: The Making of Maritime Communities,” in Merry E. WiesnerHanks (ed.), The Cambridge World History, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 2014–2015), Vol. 5, pp. 287–308. For the transition from the medieval to the early modern period, see Markus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006 152 craig perry the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History, 14 (2003): 131–177; Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2019); Thomas Vernet “Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500–1750,” in Behnaz A. Mirzai, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Ismael Musah Montana (eds.), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ, 2009), pp. 37–76; Richard B. Allen, “Ending the History of Silence: Reconstructing European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean,” Tempo 23 (May 2017): 294–313; Ayda Bouanga, “Gold, Slaves, and Trading Routes in Southern Blue Nile (Abbay) Societies, Ethiopia, 13th–16th Centuries,” Northeast African Studies, 17 (2017): 31–60; and Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians: Ethiopia, 1548,” in Elizabeth Lambourn (ed.), Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe (Kalamazoo, 2017), pp. 73–114. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Emory University, on 17 Feb 2022 at 14:40:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.006