Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire

319 Pages·2015·3.02 MB·English

by  Matthew S. Hopper

SLAVES OF ONE MASTER
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slaves of
one master
Globalization and
Slavery in Arabia in the
Age of Empire
Matthew S. Hopper
New Haven & London
Copyright © 2015 by Yale University.
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
(cid:24) The East African Slave Trade and the Making of
the African Diaspora in Arabia 18
(cid:25) Slavery, Dates, and Globalization 51
(cid:26) Pearls, Slaves, and Fashion 80
(cid:27) Slavery and African Life in Arabia 105
(cid:28) Antislavery and Empire: Paradoxes of Liberation
in the Western Indian Ocean 142
(cid:29) Globalization and the End of the East African
Slave Trade 181
Conclusion: Silencing and Forgetting 212
Notes 223
Bibliography 261
Index 293
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PREFACE
Salama was nineteen years old when war came to her town in
Ngindo- speaking southeastern Tanzania in 1869. Her father was killed,
and her home was destroyed. She and her sister were sold to slave traders
who forced the women to walk a month’s distance to the coastal city of
Kilwa. From there, Salama and her sister were sent by boat to Zanzibar,
where they were separated and sold to different slave traders. Off the coast
of Oman, the ship that carried Salama was stopped by a British naval patrol,
which suspected the ship of transporting slaves to the Arabian (Persian)
Gulf (“the Gulf”) in violation of a treaty with the sultan of Muscat. British
officers boarded the ship, seized the Africans aboard, and recorded some
of their testimonies. Salama’s story is preserved in the records of that
seizure, but there is no account of what happened to her sister. If she
survived the journey, Salama’s sister likely became one of the hundreds of
thousands of Africans taken from East Africa to the Arabian Gulf in the
nineteenth century.1
Salama and her sister highlight the central problem of this book.
Historians know much about the Africans who were captured by British
antislavery patrols in the Indian Ocean and something about those who
were enslaved on the coast of East Africa. But we know remarkably little
about the African captives who were transported to many destinations
around the Indian Ocean. A growing scholarly literature has begun to
explore the history of this branch of the African diaspora, but Arabia—
which received a considerable number of captives from East Africa—has
vii
viii PREFACE
remained largely unexplored by historians. The aim of this book is
to fill this gap in the literature by recounting the story of the Africans who
were enslaved in the Gulf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
I first read Salama’s story as a doctoral student, and it profoundly moved
me. Inspired in part by stories like hers and in part by my exposure to
Pan- Africanism as a student at Temple University and my readings in
diaspora studies with Edward Alpers at UCLA, I drafted research proposals,
received financial support, and departed in the summer of 2001 to begin
work on this project in Yemen and Oman. With a theoretical and meth-
odological background and years of training in both Swahili and Arabic,
I anticipated uncovering the kinds of documentary sources that would
allow me to fill a significant gap in the historical literature and bring stories
like Salama’s into clearer view. I hoped that Arabic manuscripts would
reveal the inner workings of the slave trade and allow me to draw the kinds
of concrete conclusions made by historians of the trans atlantic slave trade
and provide a non- Eurocentric framework for understanding this rich
history. I imagined that hitherto elusive documents would provide me a
portal into the lives of slaves themselves and that interviews with the
descendants of enslaved Africans in Arabia would provide additional depth
of understanding of African cultural retentions, survivals, coping mecha-
nisms, and diasporic consciousness.
No research project turns out exactly as planned, and I was unprepared
for the shifts that would be required in both my framing and conducting
of this research. My first adjustment was geographic. Four months into
my stay in Yemen, the September 11 attacks and their aftermath presented
challenges for my research agenda in that country. Moving eastward to the
Gulf was expedient in the short term but also proved logical in the long
term, as the origins of African communities on the Gulf side of Arabia
differ from those of the Red Sea side (chapter 1). With some adjustments
to my research plans, including a temporary shift in location to Zanzibar,
I was ultimately able to spend more than a year, cumulatively, in Oman,
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Qatar, where I attempted
to visit every town and village in those countries that was accessible by
paved road at the time. The “Arabia” of this book’s title is thus limited to
eastern Arabia and the Gulf.
PREFACE ix
That experience led me to a further revelation and another adjustment.
I found that those whose ancestors had been forcibly taken to eastern
Arabia as slaves did not by and large identify themselves as African, speak
African languages, talk openly to strangers about their ancestry, or celebrate
aspects of their African heritage. Moreover, the sensitivity of the topic of
slavery discouraged my inclusion of interviews in subsequent applications
for research clearance in those countries. The sensitivity of the subject also
contributed to the limited accessibility of documentary sources. The Arabic
sources related to the slave trade that I cite in this book come primarily
from archives in Zanzibar and London. And unlike documentary sources
from the transatlantic slave trade, where banking, insurance, and govern-
mental demands created inducements for both the specificity and preserva-
tion of records, Arabic documents related to the slave trade in the Indian
Ocean proved more uneven. Some of the most promising Arabic docu-
ments, those captured aboard slaving vessels in the Indian Ocean in the
nineteenth century, yielded little useful information about slaves themselves
other than gender and price, and provided only limited insights into the
workings of the slave trade.2
Specialists in this field may be disappointed by the preponderance of
European (mainly British) sources in this book, particularly as the voices
of the Africans whose lives this book seeks to uncover will necessarily be
contained behind several mediating layers. This limitation demands expla-
nation. The question of whether the enslaved or subaltern may actually
speak for themselves was raised provocatively by Gayatri Spivak and has
been revisited variously since. Spivak’s interrogation of the representation
(and “re- presentation”) of the subaltern subject in theoretical and historical
texts has presented a challenge to cultural historians of imperialism and
slavery that endures today. Her determination that the “subaltern as female
cannot be heard or read” is exemplified poignantly by descriptions of
colonial and post- colonial forces claiming to represent the silent dead.
Whether it is Victorian imperialists justifying a civilizing mission in India
through the mistranscribed names of widows of sati, male independence
movement leaders interpreting a female activist’s suicide, or the contem-
porary historian/critic attempting to represent the motives/actions of
masses/workers/subalterns, she concludes that “one cannot put together
a ‘voice.’”3