[Marxism] Muslim Vs Atlantic slave trade - comparative apocalyptics 101

[J.M.P.Cloke at lboro.ac.uk]

I suppose this is really my fault; I’d imagined that there 
was slightly more knowledge on Islamic slavery on the list 
than there plainly is, and thus allowed Papa Sarty to 
indulge in his habitually orotund persiflage at (as he 
fondly imagines it) my expense for longer than I should, 
to allow others to chip in. However, since dearth there be 
(which dearth is, if I might say so, hiatus valde 
deflendus) and it falls to my lot to undertake the 
schooling, then schooling let there be. I shall tackle the 
points about the Muslim slave trade in three parts, 
according to the three main objections raised by Papa 
Sarty, Waistline and Farmelantj:


1 “Are you really claiming that slave practices of the 
Ottomans, the Chinese, and the indigenous North Americans 
are the same, were identical in their impacts on the 
populations so enslaved as that of the Atlantic slave 
trade?” (Papa Sarty)

As Willis (1985) puts it in Slaves and slavery in Muslim 
Africa (JR Willis, 1985), by comparison with the 
transatlantic trade the  Islamic slave trade in Africa 
“compares
 in scale and scope, and out-distances the more 
popular subject in its length of duration.” When the 
Muslim community erupted out of the Arabian peninsula 
under the al-khulafa ar-rashidun (‘Rightly Guided 
Caliphs’) after the death of Abu Bakr in 634, as well as 
peoples, settlements and goods the Muslims took over 
social and economic trade networks, including the 
extensive slaving networks into the interior of Africa 
established by the Romans and Byzantines.

Because slavery was so widespread at the time of the birth 
of Islam, it is accepted implicitly (if not condoned) in 
the Quran as it was in the Bible and the Torah (for 
instance, Surah 24:58: “O ye who believe! Let your slaves, 
and those of you who have not come to puberty, ask leave 
of you at three times (before they come into your 
presence.”). As Islam spread across the Middle East and 
the North of Africa during the early medieval period, so 
did its own particular and characteristic take on slavery. 
In what we might refer to still as the early period of the 
spread of Islam, from the Seldjuk defeat of the 
Byzantines, the rise of the Mamelukes and the beginnings 
of the Ottoman empire, as Willis again puts it.

“Slaves of African origin formed a vital thread in the 
living lines of economic production in the Near and Middle 
East and formed the cord of economic activity in Islamic 
Africa itself.”

According to Toledano (Slavery and abolition in the 
Ottoman Middle East, 1998) by the 19th century there were 
principally three slave markets in Africa; the 
trans-atlantic, the muslim and the internal slave market; 
interestingly, Toledano claims that the internal market 
(African-African slavery) was the biggest, although you 
have to be careful about that since these would certainly 
not have been distinct markets – the original, 
pre-Phoenician, pre-Greek and pre-Roman internal markets 
would have been small and primitive and would no doubt 
have grown massively in response, firstly to the demands 
of the Roman market, secondly the Muslim market and then 
latterly the transatlantic market, and as these markets 
grew there would have been a considerable degree of 
overlap, to the extent that distinguishing between them 
would in some areas have been a bit meaningless.

So, not only am I claiming (as I shall expand on below) 
that the Muslim slave trade had as big an impact as the 
trans-Atlantic trade, because it lasted far longer I am 
claiming that it had a greater impact, as the statistics 
for intensity and type that I cite below give evidence of.


2  “Slavery as practiced by the Ottoman's and Moors had 
nothing in common with the commercial slavery based on new 
world production as practiced by the French, Spanish, 
Portuguese, British, and US.” (Waistline)

As we all (I hope) know, all figures for the slave trade 
are controversial and subject to revision, particularly 
those of the Muslim slave trade, which for some reason 
(much to the puzzlement of the relatively small number of 
scholars researching it) is nowhere near as popular a 
topic as the transatlantic trade - I suggest some reasons 
why this might be at the end. Having said which, Professor 
Ralph A. Austen (University of Chicago, cited in Willis, 
p. x) suggests an estimated figure of 17,000,000 for 
Islamic slave trade out of Africa from c.650-1905 (and I 
don’t know if this includes figures for people “killed 
during their storage, shipment and initial landing”).

Compare this with some of the estimates for the 
transatlantic trade which include the numbers of Africans 
who died in the process of capture, storage and on 
landing: “Approximately 8 million Africans were killed 
during their storage, shipment and initial landing in the 
New World. The amount of life lost in the actual 
procurement of slaves remains a mystery, but may equal or 
exceed the amount actually enslaved. These figures would 
indicate the total number of deaths at around 16 million” 
(David Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University 
Press, 1993).

So in terms of numbers at least, bearing in mind that the 
Muslim slave trade preceded the trans-Atlantic trade by 
hundreds of years (and indeed the first slaves brought 
into Europe in the 1440s and probably a lot longer ago 
than that were seized from Muslim communities in North 
Africa and would have included people made slaves by the 
Muslims as  well as Muslims themselves), and that the 
Muslim trade didn’t end when the trans-Atlantic trade did 
and continues (by many estimates, including let us not 
forget those 90,000 poor souls in Mauritania) to this day, 
it is most probable that the Muslim slave trade was at 
least the equal of the trans-Atlantic trade.

Slavery was both familiar to and widely accepted in all 
walks of life in Ottoman Empire from its beginnings in 
13th century; it was more institutionalized in the home 
countries of those Islamic nations conducting the trade 
than was the case for Spain, Portugal and Britain and by 
the 18th century in the Ottoman empire the number of 
slaves being imported rose to between 16,000 and 18,000 
per annum for first 70 years of the century (compare with 
estimated 25,000 per annum in 1700 for trans-Atlantic 
trade, rising to about 80,000 p.a. by 1850 and rapid 
decline thereafter) and whereas under pressure from the 
new anti-saving nations the numbers of slaves being traded 
in the Ottoman Empire began to diminish rapidly from about 
1840, it never actually ended.


3 “The latter variety of slaves could become quite wealthy 
and powerful in their own right despite their status as 
being the property of the state or of the emperors.” 
(Farmelantj)

Speaking to the quality and type of slavery, Farmelantj 
and others suggest that the trans-Atlantic trade was 
‘chattel’ slavery and therefore involved a type and 
intensity of slavery that was far worse than Muslim 
slavery. There are doubtless those on this list who know a 
little more about the trans-Atlantic trade than I, who 
will also doubtless be aware that the kind of slavery that 
took place in the New World was not monolithic in type, 
but also varied greatly, which is not to underplay the 
suffering that took place but to suggest that 
qualitatively there would have been a good deal of 
difference between the short and brutal life of a slave 
imported to cut sugar cane in the West Indies (for 
example) and (for want of a better example) one of the 
house slaves owned by the Bush family in Maryland, or a 
slave in Brazil.

The Muslim slave trade did differ in some distinctive 
characteristics from the transatlantic trade – it was for 
instance a far more feminized phenomenon than 
trans-atlantic trade, and the taking of particularly 
female slaves was driven by Islamic concept of concubinage 
– the percentage of that estimated 17,000,000 would have 
been characterised by a far greater number of women and 
children than the transatlantic trade.

So far as the Ottoman empire itself was concerned, there 
were almost certainly a far greater variety of types and 
class of slave. The main classes of Ottoman slaves were: 
domestic slaves, female harem slaves, Sultan’s Kuls 
(officeholders), court and elite eunuchs, Circassian 
agricultural slaves, slave dealers and slave owners. There 
is another controversy over the quality and intensity of 
slavery of all of these different types of slave amongst 
scholars of the Muslim trade. For instance, despite 
distinctions between types of slaves (e.g. kuls), the 
environment in which conventional slavery of all types 
took place meant that, from the beginning to the end of 
the Empire, the Sultan could confiscate all property of 
all of these classes of slaves and kill them with no legal 
process at all. Over time, though, the status and absolute 
nature of the condition of slavery changed as the Ottoman 
empire matured; after the 16th century it became quite 
rare for the Sultan to order this kind of execution and 
then it tended to occur mainly as a political example.

Some critical scholars maintain, however, that right to 
the end of the Ottoman Empire, slavery in some countries 
and regions was conducted with unequalled savagery. Jay 
Spaulding, for instance (in “Slavery, Land Tenure, and 
Social Class in the Northern Turkish Sudan," International 
Journal of African Historical Studies 15/1 (1981): 1-10) 
reckons that in Ottoman-Egyptian Sudan slaves were 
considered to be nothing more than ‘talking animals’ 
(al-hayawan al natiq); that slaves were given different 
names to prevent their integration with free people; that 
slaves in some districts were not even buried in order to 
save money, instead they were either left for animals to 
eat or dumped in rivers; that the Ottoman government 
demanded slaves as taxes, and that household slaves were 
frequently sold and very rarely manumitted.

By way of concluding, for me it is fairly plain that one 
reason that research into the Muslim slave trade is so 
badly neglected is because of political instrumentality. 
Firstly, Lefties/Marxists in the rich countries of the 
North have the trans-Atlantic trade fixed as part of their 
capitalism-orientated compass and, as for the Muslim 
trade, well, what’s that got to do with the development of 
Capitalism? Secondly, owing to the increasing centre of 
gravity constituted by the North American scholastic world 
(as well as its financial power) and its increasing 
absorption in African-American culture, obviously the 
trans-Atlantic/Triangular Trade has become increasingly 
important to African-American studies and the overall 
perception of ‘African-American-ness’. It would be 
tempting but unjustifiable to add a third motive, that the 
more feminized Muslim slave trade simply wasn’t that 
interesting to overwhelmingly andro-centric, patriarchal 
hierarchy of Marxist thought because it simply wasn’t that 
interested in anything to do with women.

Which is strange really, because you’d have thought that 
Marx above anybody would have been interested in female 
slavery and the economics of the dual reproductive/ 
productive role played by women, given the amount of time 
he spent boning the hired help.
 
And now, to lighten the tone, I am introducing a Happy May 
Day competition! The winner of the prize will be the first 
person to send me an e-mail with their name and address 
and the correct answer to the following question:

When I read Papa Sarty's e-mails, what fictional character 
immediately springs to my mind? Is it:

a) Captain Haddock from the Tintin books?
b) Colonel Hathi from Disney's Jungle Book?
c) Smaug from the Hobbit?
d) A combination of the above?

The winner of this competition will receive the 
magnificent prize of Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins 
wonderful 1984 book, The Battle for the Falklands!

Happy May Day!

Jon Cloke