Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula by Benjamin Reilly (review)

The main thesis of this book is that malarial conditions produced in the agricultural zones of the Arabian Peninsula led to a reliance on imported African slave laborers since they proved more able than locals to resist malaria. Tightly focused on proving this thesis, this short book zooms in on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it often makes forays much further back in time. The analysis is strictly material, epidemiological, and ecological. Slavery is an economic system of productive agricultural labor in this book, not a cultural or human institution made up of individual lives.

Reilly builds his argument systematically, literally from the ground up. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a wonderful account of the complexities of irrigation, agriculture, and slave and non-slave labor in the Arabian Peninsula. After a case study in chapter 3, the book’s analytical argument continues in chapter 4 where we come to see how African slaves were the keys to making malarial agricultural regions viable and productive. The final chapter argues that Arabia’s slave system was not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a fundamental component of its history and economy, one that would eventually be inscribed even in the very genes of the peninsula’s peoples.

The achievements of this book are many. Empirically, Reilly adds rich detail to our still adolescent understanding of the agricultural history of the Arabian Peninsula. Oil and religion dominate the region’s historiography. There are, however, obviously other—often older—stories to tell, and Reilly gives us some of them. The details of irrigation systems, bustan gardening, and geographic zones are all extremely useful. The book succeeds too in arguing against the dominant understanding of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa—namely, that it was overwhelmingly concentrated on domestic slavery and concubinage. Historians have long drawn a distinction between slavery in the Muslim world and slavery in the Americas. If the latter was based almost entirely on extractive labor for the cultivation of cash crops, the former aimed at serving an elite, producing offspring, and staffing a military. Reilly shows us in fact that the two systems were not as different as we might think. African slaves were used for agriculture in the Middle East, or at least in the Arabian Peninsula, and primarily for one of the same reasons they were in the Americas—their adapted resistance to malaria. With this intervention, Reilly should be commended for bringing the Middle East more squarely into studies of global slavery and the African diaspora. The book also serves as a longer history of forced labor migration and displacement in the Arabian Peninsula. The majority of the people living in many of the peninsula’s countries today are non-citizen migrant laborers from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. Long before the coercive power of our era’s global wealth disparities, the Arabian Peninsula’s servile labor regime, as Reilly shows, had been forcibly imported from outside of the region.

Throughout the book, Reilly is very clear that sources are a problem. “The study of Arabian Peninsula history,” he writes, “obliges one to be as flexible and creative as possible with the relatively small amount of available evidence” (p. 127). Ultimately the book’s wonderfully “flexible and creative” attempts to overcome the source problem, using everything from genetics to poetry, is also its greatest weakness. Can a study of slavery in colonial French North Africa really be used to illuminate the situation in the Arabian Peninsula? How well exactly can Indian Ocean slave numbers be used as a proxy for the scale of the trade in the Arabian Peninsula? Perhaps more problematic than these sorts of proxy questions is Reilly’s near total reliance on European and American travel literature and British colonial sources. To his credit, Reilly is very upfront about the shortcomings of his source base and in explaining how and why...