Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

by Justin Marozzi

**SHORTLISTED FOR 2025 THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION**
A startling exploration of slavery in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the present

Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, diverse and controversial history. Captives and Companions is a brilliant synthesis of history and contemporary reportage that brings to life the voices of the enslaved in stories of eighth-century concubines and ninth-century revolts, thirteenth-century slave soldiers who established dynastic rule over Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, eighteenth-century corsairs and twentieth-century pearl divers in the Gulf. It also has first-hand accounts of this legacy in the twenty-first century, including the depredations of Daesh and continuing hereditary slavery in Mali and Mauritania.

Justin Marozzi traces the extraordinary variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, which ranged from agricultural labour and domestic toil to elite concubinage, guardianship of sacred spaces, political leadership and even military command. He shows how Africa bore the brunt of the demand for slave labour, fuelled throughout the nineteenth century by expanding global markets and commodity chains. Slavers plied African coasts, traders raided inland for human cargo, and millions were marched across the Sahara into captivity. Meanwhile, North African corsairs turned the Mediterranean into a slave-raiding ‘free-for-all’ between Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Taking the reader on an extraordinary historical journey from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea, this is the riveting human drama of those caught up in one of history’s most remarkable overlooked stories.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Islam, Middle East

550 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 10, 2025

About the author

[Excerpt from http://www.justinmarozzi.com/about/]

Justin is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. He graduated from Cambridge with a Starred Double First in History in 1993, before studying Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University and winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania to read a Masters in International Relations. After working in the BBC World Service on ‘News Hour’ and BBC Westminster on ‘Today in Parliament’, he joined the Financial Times as a foreign correspondent in Manila, where he also wrote for The Economist. During his time in the Far East, he shared a Winnebago with Imelda Marcos, a helicopter with the Philippine president and his mistress, and a curry with Aung San Suu Kyi whilst under house arrest in Rangoon.

His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara, described by the desert explorer and SAS veteran Michael Asher as “the first significant journey across the Libyan interior for a generation”. His second, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, launched in Baghdad in 2004, was the best-selling biography of the world’s greatest Islamic conqueror and a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year: “Outstanding… Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians.”

In 2006, he wrote Faces of Exploration, a collection of profiles of the world’s leading explorers. He has contributed to Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (an interview with the Afghan mujahid hero Ahmed Shah Massoud), The Seventy Greatest Journeys, and most recently The Art of War (essays on Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane).

His latest book, published in October 2008, is The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, based on extensive research in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece. Apart from a year working for a British security company in Iraq, an encounter with the Grand Mufti of Egypt and an investigation into outwardly religious girls performing oral sex in car-parks in Cairo, one of the many highlights of the Herodotean trail was a retsina-fuelled lunch with the nonagenarian war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.

Justin is a former member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where he has also lectured, and an Honorary Travel Member of the Travellers Club.

Reviews

[Yalman Onaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shocking history of slavery in the Muslim world. But perhaps a little too wide a net cast for describing today’s work conditions as slavery.

[Pierre Rembert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captives and Companions, History of Slavery in the Islamic world by Justin Marozzi
Marozzi’s book on slavery in the Islamic world takes a comprehensive look at how slavery has
been a traditional, constant part of Muslim societies since the religion’s inception. Of course,
the institution pre-existed Islam and has been widespread on all continents and many, if not
most, societies since civilizations began.
As the author points, most attention today goes to the Atlantic slave trade as if it were
somehow unique or the beginning of something rather than, in fact, the ending. Nevertheless
Marozzi is careful to hedge his account with the fact that many Muslim historians claim that
their slavery was different, less terrible — often with similar arguments to what I heard in the
American south in the 1950s.
And in fact, there were differences, principally for slaves who were placed in royal or sultanic
courts, and from there often graduated through complex political intrigues to positions of
power. Particularly notable were enslaved concubines and the eunuchs who guarded the
harem as well as the slave armies that wielded power as sorts of Praetorian guards.
While there was no parallel route to power in the Atlantic plantation structure, there is little
indication that the vast majority of slaves in the Arab empires were any better off than those
sent to America.
As for those who claim the Atlantic slave trade was unique for its racial basis, the book totally
destroys that idea. Subsaharan Africa provided the largest source of slaves for a very long
time, with Arab raiders and local potentates regularly grabbing thousands of black people and
shipping them off to the Middle East or North Africa. To be sure the Arabs and Turks also
enslaved many white Europeans, either raiding the northern Mediterranean coastline or slave
trading with the Caucausus and Asian steppes, particularly for their preferred Circassian
women.
Abolition of slavery was pretty much totally a result of European morality movements. The main
actor was Britain. As the hegemonic world power due to its naval superiority, Britain was the
agent of freedom. One feels that Marozzi is nervous in stating this incontrovertible truth, no
doubt as he worries about his place in the modern academy for whom anything positive about
European colonialism is anathema. So he repeatedly brings up the idea that Britain’s motives
for enforcing abolition were mostly just an excuse to expand its empire. Muslim historians
particularly push this theory. However, it’s clearly mere obfuscation of the fact that Britain’s
zealous anti-slavery stance was a result of overwhelming public opinion at home that
politicians simply couldn’t ignore. It was a grass roots movement originating with evangelical
Christian groups and spreading from there.
Needless to say, Arabs, Ottomans, and other Muslim polities were mystified by the abolitionist
movement and chalked it up to a European superiority complex that created false narratives
about them. This attitude continues today among many Muslim historians and their allies in
Western academia. Even in the face of the evidence that slavery still persist in African, in
places like Mauretania and Mali, there is little recognition of how Islam has historically had a
deep tolerance for slavery.
Marozzi reveals all this and more. I was particularly fascinated by the roots of the current,
brutal, wars in Sudan, and the total racial divide there that harkens back (not very far) to that
country’s centrality in the slave trade.
He mentions, but does not attempt to include other slaving societies such as those in China
(past and present) or the Americas. But as a history of what was probably the biggest and
longest-lived slave culture, his book is well worth a read.

[Rita]

Good summary/review in NRC 13 nov 2025
'Een onthullend boek over hoe religie en racisme slavernij vormgaven in de islamitische wereld'
by Bart Funnekotter

Author born 1970, educated Cambridge. Did lots of journalism.
Several history books.
'Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (2014)' seems the most mentioned.

[Umar Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good historical overview free of romance