The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia

Foreword

Foreword Ismael M. Montana’s The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia is situated at the heart of three major scholarly discourses, to each of which it contributes in significant ways. First and foremost among these is enslavement studies, with special emphasis on slavery and the slave trade in Islamic societies. Then comes the related debate over abolition and antislavery, or the lack thereof, in those societies. Last but not least, the book adds a great deal to the historical study of the Arab provinces in the Ottoman Empire. In the following, I briefly discuss the main trends in these fields and highlight the importance of this book within each. Enslavement studies span close to a century of writing and are characterized by cycles of rising and ebbing interest. Earlier turns were mostly concerned with slavery in antiquity, Europe in the Middle Ages, and the modern North Atlantic world. Later cycles were preoccupied with the Atlantic world, adding slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean islands to the already strong interest in antebellum U.S. enslavement and offering a comparative approach. Only in the past decade or so, with the added impetus driven by the bicentennial of the 1807 Abolition Act concerning the Atlantic slave trade, the neglect of non-Atlantic systems of enslavement began to be addressed in earnest. International conferences were held across the globe including in Tokyo, Accra, Cape Town, Abuja, Chicago, and Rio de Janeiro, and on various European campuses. Their highly interesting and diversified proceedings have been coming out in recent years. The leading enslavement research centers–-the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples at York, the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at Hull, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at Yale—have also become more inclusive and diversified in treating historical modes of unfreedom around the world.1 xvi · Foreword Embodying the shift in the current global and comparative cycle is the publication in 2009 of The Cambridge World History of Slavery.2 The volume, which covers the period from 1402 to 1804, devotes considerable space to non-Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, although the analytical sections are still heavily tilted toward the Americas. The attempt to introduce types of enslavement in other parts of the world and examine differences in concept and practice has centered around the debate over the “Indian Ocean model.” Despite the fact that the depiction of two essentially different “models” of human bondage is flawed and too rigid a concept, the debate generated around this has contributed immensely to diversifying the conversation around non-American practices of unfreedom.3 In many ways, the Indian Ocean model is about how different was enslavement in Islamic societies from enslavement in Western-led systems . It is here that The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia offers the reader a well-documented, well-conceived account of the experience of enslaved Africans in an Ottoman-Arab society. Not less significant, however, it shows how the trans-Saharan slave trade was an integral part of the larger and interdependent trade systems of North Africa, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Levant, where a variety of commodities were being moved and exchanged. We thus gain an essential understanding of how well integrated and deeply entrenched the traffic in enslaved persons and enslavement itself were in Ottoman North Africa, and hence, too, of how difficult it would be to abandon slavery abruptly and altogether. Herein lies also the work’s unique contribution, that is, its concentration on the question of abolition, where in the Regency of Tunis, Ahmad Bey was a path-breaker who launched a bold move within the domains of the sultans. The discourse about antislavery initiatives in Islamic societies is gradually attracting more attention among scholars working on the sociocultural history of the Middle East and North Africa. The first generation of writers on slavery in the region was well aware of the absence of a genuine critique of and opposition to enslavement. These scholars tended to explain that absence by the “mild” nature of slavery in Muslim societies, the encouragement to manumit enslaved persons after about a decade of servitude, and the legal mechanisms deployed to bar breeding and enable the integration of liberated slaves into society within a generation or two. Foreword · xvii The fact that, like all other religions, Islam...