What the Quran has to say about slavery

Spectator

2 days ago

Slavery is one of the oldest and most persistent institutions of humankind. It was already well established four millennia ago when it was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Today it has been formally abolished almost everywhere, but there are still reckoned to be some 30 million people living in some form of forced labour. For most of human history slavery was regarded as an economic necessity, one of many relationships of dependence which were accepted as facts of life.
The current obsession with British and American involvement has concentrated attention on the Atlantic slave trade. This has masked the involvement of other significant actors. Foremost among them are the Islamic kingdoms of the Middle East. Islamic slavery is poorly documented. Anecdotal evidence is plentiful but may be untypical. Reliable statistics are scarce. But there is little doubt that the slave markets of North Africa and Constantinople were for centuries by far the largest in the world. Justin Marozzi's Captives and Companions is a successful attempt to fill this gap.
The Quran has a lot to say about slavery. It deprecates the ill-treatment of slaves and attaches a high moral value to their emancipation. But it acknowledges the legitimacy of slavery and of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. When challenged by European powers in the 19th century, Islamic rulers often cited the authority of their faith. In our own day, the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, have both justified their revival of slavery and forced concubinage on the founding texts of Islam.
The Arabs, like later generations of Europeans, looked down on black Africans as inferiors for whom slavery was thought to be a natural fate. But, unlike Atlantic slavery, which was exclusively sourced from sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic slavery was racially indiscriminate. North African corsairs enslaved Europeans captured at sea and in coastal raids on Europe. The Crimean Tartars trafficked slaves captured in eastern Europe to the shores of the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. There were many thousands of these white slaves, to be commemorated in 19th-century Europe in escape narratives and sub-erotic orientalist paintings.
North Africa and the Levant were not plantation economies. Most slaves sold into the markets of the Islamic world probably ended up in cities, employed in small businesses, public works, domestic households or concubinage. There is some evidence that a majority were women and girls. Theirs was usually a wretched existence. Islamic slavery, however, had some unique features which enabled a few slaves to achieve high status. One route was the harems of the great. Roxelana, the powerful and manipulative wife of the 16th-century sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, was a Ruthenian slave (from modern Poland).
But the main route to social ascent was the army. Turkic slaves fought in the armies of the Abbasid caliphate (7th to 13th centuries), some of whom overthrew their Arab masters and founded local dynasties of their own. The Mamluks, a corps of Turkic slave soldiers, took over Egypt in the 13th century and ruled it until the beginning of the 19th. Between the 15th and the 17th centuries, the Ottomans regularly enslaved Greek children in their Balkan provinces, to be converted to Islam and assigned to the corps of Janissaries or the civil service. Some of these ethnic Greeks rose to the highest positions in the state.
It is easy to understand when one reads Marozzi's book why the conservative societies of the Middle East proved to be so resistant to the abolition of slavery. Lord Ponsonby, for many years Queen Victoria's ambassador in Constantinople, reported that when he conveyed his government's objections to slavery to the sultan, he was 'heard with extreme astonishment, accompanied by a smile at the proposition for destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society'.
Slavery in the Americas was different and harsher. The slaves were not 'closely interwoven with the frame of society'. The plentiful supply of land and comparatively small number of European settlers made the Americas dependent on the forced labour of the indigenous populations and, increasingly, on imported slaves to cultivate labour-intensive crops such as cotton, tobacco and sugar. Although American slavery involved some incidental domestic service and concubinage, the destination of the great majority was the brutal, self-contained world of the plantations.
David Eltis's Atlantic Cataclysm deals with the trade which supplied this world with slaves. The subject is a minefield for scholars, for much that has been written about it is vitiated by the tendentious selection of material to serve a modern political agenda. Eltis's book avoids this vice. It is a careful study of the economics of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on all three continents involved.
The words 'economic analysis' will probably cause most general readers to run a mile, but that would be a mistake. For this is a readable and important book. It makes systematic use for the first time of the enormous databases of information about slave voyages, slavers and slaves compiled over the past 40 years. Eltis is certainly not an apologist for slavery or the slave trade. But he debunks many of the influential myths which have grown up around the trade since the publication in 1944 of Eric Williams's polemical but influential Capitalism and Slavery.
Williams argued that the profits of slavery supplied the capital for Britain's industrial revolution and made possible its subsequent prosperity, and that slavery was only abolished because it later became unprofitable. He despised Wilberforce and his allies, and denied that abolition was a moral movement. Even given the material available to him, these arguments were hard to sustain. Eltis's analysis of the plentiful data on English slave businesses convincingly demonstrates that slavery was in fact profitable right up to the end, but that the profits were a tiny proportion of Britain's trading wealth, far too small to account for her industrialisation. Abolition does seem to have been a moral, not an economic, movement, driven by the evangelical revival of the late 18th century.
There is a corresponding theory about the African end of the trade, which is in a sense the obverse of the Williams argument. It holds that just as the slave trade boosted the economic development of Britain, it exploited the African kingdoms which supplied the slaves, leading to the 'underdevelopment' of Africa. The consequences are said to have held back the continent to this day.
This is a more difficult proposition to prove or disprove, because so little can be reliably known about pre-colonial Africa. But it is implausible. The traffic was never large enough to significantly depopulate the African kingdoms. The evidence marshalled by Eltis suggests that the African middlemen who alone could supply the slaves knew their market power and dealt on equal terms with their European counterparts. There are many possible explanations for the under-development of Africa but a trade which ended a century and a half ago is unlikely to be one of them.
Eltis has done an unusual thing. He has reset the agenda in his field. It will no doubt make him enemies in all the right places.