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The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade
This compelling text sheds light on the important but under studied trans-Saharan slave trade. The author uncovers and surveys this, the least-noticed of the slave trades out of Africa, which from the seventh to the twentieth centuries quielty delievered almost as many black Africans into foreign servitude as did the far busier, but much briefer Atlantic and East African trades. Illuminating for the first time a significant, but ignored subject, the book supports and widens current scholarly examination of Africans' essential role in the enslavement of fellow-Africans and their delivery to internal, Atlantic or trans-Saharan markets.
- GenresHistory
242 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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30 people want to read
About the author
John Wright
672 books41 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. ^1
John Wright is the author of the River Cottage Handbooks Mushrooms, Edible Seashore, Hedgerow and Booze and also The Naming of the Shrew, a book which explores the infuriating but fascinating topic of how and why plants, animals and fungi earn their Latin names. As well as writing for national publications, he often appears on the River Cottage series for Channel 4. He gives lectures on natural history and every year he takes around fifty 'forays', many at River Cottage HQ, showing people how to collect food - plants from the hedgerow, seaweeds and shellfish from the shore and mushrooms from pasture and wood. Over a period of nearly twenty-five years he has taken around six hundred such forays. Fungi are his greatest passion and he has thirty-five years' experience in studying them.
John Wright is a member of the British Mycological Society and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society.
John Wright is the author of the River Cottage Handbooks Mushrooms, Edible Seashore, Hedgerow and Booze and also The Naming of the Shrew, a book which explores the infuriating but fascinating topic of how and why plants, animals and fungi earn their Latin names. As well as writing for national publications, he often appears on the River Cottage series for Channel 4. He gives lectures on natural history and every year he takes around fifty 'forays', many at River Cottage HQ, showing people how to collect food - plants from the hedgerow, seaweeds and shellfish from the shore and mushrooms from pasture and wood. Over a period of nearly twenty-five years he has taken around six hundred such forays. Fungi are his greatest passion and he has thirty-five years' experience in studying them.
John Wright is a member of the British Mycological Society and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 11, 2024
Ask anyone with a Western education, and they will likely be familiar with slavery in the West, including its significant and enduring impact on contemporary psyche. Notably absent however, would be the nature of slavery within the Arab world. Is this surprising? Justifiably, much of the focus has been on the trans-Atlantic slave trade of course, whose descendants comprise a significant population in the Americas and faced historical and ongoing injustices.
Strikingly, there is no equivalent in the Middle East. This discrepancy can be attributed primarily to two factors: a) the prevalent practice in the Arab world of emancipating slave populations through their conversion to Islam, and subsequently the contrast in the West’s secularization process, which led to a profound examination of both the historiography and ethics surrounding the slave trade. In the perspective of the Arab world, the institution of slavery was rationalized on the grounds that enslavement facilitated the eventual conversion of individuals to Islam. Consequently, from this viewpoint, the ultimate outcome obviated the necessity for further critical evaluation, adhering to the principle that "the ends justify the means".
Given this - Trans-Saharan Slave Trade is a welcomed book on the subject. It is a meticulously crafted and thoroughly documented scholarship on the slave trade within the Arab-Islamic world. It is replete with interesting examinations into the intricate workings of the trade, alongside the social and economic frameworks of the peoples at both the source of the slave influx and within the Saharan transit points.
When the Arabs decided to colonize the known world, their desire for territorial expansion was accompanied by an escalating demand for black slaves in the Muslim/Arab world from the seventh to the early twentieth century. However, Islamic slave trade fundamentally differed from say, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Wright illustrates this by contrasting the economic incentives of slavery in the Islamic world with that of the West. In the US, slavery was needed for agricultural purposes, whereas Arab slavery focused more on women who could tend to house work. Nonetheless, we get poignant images of the brutality that slaves were exposed to; notably in their perilous journeys across the Sahara and their treatment by slaveowners. While Islam ostensibly preached a more "humane" treatment of slaves, it is fair to say these injunctions were often ignored. Islamic slavery was at times dehumanizing and exceedingly harsh as it was expansive and persevering.
A large part of this book depends on sources from European abolitionists, and Wright leverages interesting statistics that might be too in the woods for the average reader with a casual interest in the subject. Nonetheless, this is a clearly written and exhaustively researched book on a subject that has hitherto received little attention.
Strikingly, there is no equivalent in the Middle East. This discrepancy can be attributed primarily to two factors: a) the prevalent practice in the Arab world of emancipating slave populations through their conversion to Islam, and subsequently the contrast in the West’s secularization process, which led to a profound examination of both the historiography and ethics surrounding the slave trade. In the perspective of the Arab world, the institution of slavery was rationalized on the grounds that enslavement facilitated the eventual conversion of individuals to Islam. Consequently, from this viewpoint, the ultimate outcome obviated the necessity for further critical evaluation, adhering to the principle that "the ends justify the means".
Given this - Trans-Saharan Slave Trade is a welcomed book on the subject. It is a meticulously crafted and thoroughly documented scholarship on the slave trade within the Arab-Islamic world. It is replete with interesting examinations into the intricate workings of the trade, alongside the social and economic frameworks of the peoples at both the source of the slave influx and within the Saharan transit points.
When the Arabs decided to colonize the known world, their desire for territorial expansion was accompanied by an escalating demand for black slaves in the Muslim/Arab world from the seventh to the early twentieth century. However, Islamic slave trade fundamentally differed from say, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Wright illustrates this by contrasting the economic incentives of slavery in the Islamic world with that of the West. In the US, slavery was needed for agricultural purposes, whereas Arab slavery focused more on women who could tend to house work. Nonetheless, we get poignant images of the brutality that slaves were exposed to; notably in their perilous journeys across the Sahara and their treatment by slaveowners. While Islam ostensibly preached a more "humane" treatment of slaves, it is fair to say these injunctions were often ignored. Islamic slavery was at times dehumanizing and exceedingly harsh as it was expansive and persevering.
A large part of this book depends on sources from European abolitionists, and Wright leverages interesting statistics that might be too in the woods for the average reader with a casual interest in the subject. Nonetheless, this is a clearly written and exhaustively researched book on a subject that has hitherto received little attention.
August 26, 2019
The first few chapters were interesting, afterwards it became a disaster 🤦
July 3, 2021
The Atlantic slave trade through the lethal Middle Passage is well-known, especially thanks to recent scholarship and the popular exploration of US slavery by the New York Times's 1916 Project. No doubt less familiar to most readers is the centuries-long trade in sub-Saharan African slaves across the Sahara Desert to feed the appetite for them in the Islamic world. Work done by David Mattingly and his team in the Fazzan, home to a civilization contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, has now shown that this trade did not begin with the Islamic conquest of North Africa and penetration of the Sahara, but was being practiced centuries earlier. The Islamic trade merely adopted the practices and routes already long pioneered, although they seem to have increased the volume of the traffic.
John Wright, whose career has focused on Islamic slave trading, did not know this work, which started being published only a few years before The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade appeared in 2007. He can be excused, then, for stating that the trade really began with the Arabs. But this is minor and not really important, for Wright's focus on the trade from the eighth century CE down practically to the present day presents a magisterial sweep of this cruel business.
Wright tracks changes in routes and demand for slaves, arguing that the main determinants of the former were conditions of safety and of the latter the pull in demand from centers where slaves ended up. This pattern remained much the same until the mid-nineteenth century, when European powers began to press the Ottoman Empire and Morocco for abolition. In general, this pressure resulted at first in even greater demand in fear that the supply would dry up and a diversion f much of the trade eastward, as the Libyan ports responded to European pressure. Morocco, by contrast, largely ignored European protests and continued to import and exploit slaves well into the twentieth century.
As Wright notes, events in the western Sahara in the early 2000s increased disruption, and slavery re-emerged in parts of the region. It remains a problem today.
Wright uses accounts of Arab geographers, early travelers' books, and colonial sources both published and in archives as the basis for reconstructing the trade. He did not have access to actual traders' documentary material or oral accounts, such as Lydon so painstakingly collected for her brilliant On Trans-Saharan Trails. Wright's book and hers make a nice pairing, his with a long historical sweep, hers focused on nineteenth-century western Sahara trade (and not only in slaves). What becomes abundantly clear is that the desert "middle passage" was in many regards as horrific and deadly as the Atlantic crossing. The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade makes a central contribution to our knowledge of slavery, a social phenomenon that has been virtually coterminous with human history, globally and locally. It is a history we need.
John Wright, whose career has focused on Islamic slave trading, did not know this work, which started being published only a few years before The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade appeared in 2007. He can be excused, then, for stating that the trade really began with the Arabs. But this is minor and not really important, for Wright's focus on the trade from the eighth century CE down practically to the present day presents a magisterial sweep of this cruel business.
Wright tracks changes in routes and demand for slaves, arguing that the main determinants of the former were conditions of safety and of the latter the pull in demand from centers where slaves ended up. This pattern remained much the same until the mid-nineteenth century, when European powers began to press the Ottoman Empire and Morocco for abolition. In general, this pressure resulted at first in even greater demand in fear that the supply would dry up and a diversion f much of the trade eastward, as the Libyan ports responded to European pressure. Morocco, by contrast, largely ignored European protests and continued to import and exploit slaves well into the twentieth century.
As Wright notes, events in the western Sahara in the early 2000s increased disruption, and slavery re-emerged in parts of the region. It remains a problem today.
Wright uses accounts of Arab geographers, early travelers' books, and colonial sources both published and in archives as the basis for reconstructing the trade. He did not have access to actual traders' documentary material or oral accounts, such as Lydon so painstakingly collected for her brilliant On Trans-Saharan Trails. Wright's book and hers make a nice pairing, his with a long historical sweep, hers focused on nineteenth-century western Sahara trade (and not only in slaves). What becomes abundantly clear is that the desert "middle passage" was in many regards as horrific and deadly as the Atlantic crossing. The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade makes a central contribution to our knowledge of slavery, a social phenomenon that has been virtually coterminous with human history, globally and locally. It is a history we need.
August 25, 2019
A brief enlightenment into the slave trade that occurred among the Arab world along the Saharan route. An interesting detail for me here was the interest in buying NonMuslism slaves.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews