Women and Slavery: Volume 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (review)

To avoid attracting the evil eye, it is common practice in the Islamic world, and elsewhere, not to compliment the appearance of a newborn. Thus, when seeing his daughter for the first time a colleague said to his wife, ‘She’s very dark; we won’t get much for her in the market.’ The ‘market’ is of course a reference to the slave market. Had it been a son, the association with ugliness might have been placed in a different context, but to associate a newborn daughter with the slave market is a clear reflection of the extent to which the two are still associated in some parts of the contemporary world.

The present volume, and a second still to come, stem from a conference in honour of Suzanne Miers, whose work on slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has done much to elucidate the period and the field. The organizers recognized that, despite the exponential growth of women’s studies during the past four decades, scholars had paid little attention to female slavery. Yet it is estimated that, of the tens of millions of slaves transported from Africa alone in the nineteenth century, as many as two-thirds of them were women, including young girls. Westerners, and particularly those from the Americas, view slavery largely as a male condition because of the heavy labour in which men were engaged in the plantations of the New World. But while enslaved women might also work in the fields, they were sought far more within the African continent itself, the expanding Muslim world, and the Far East for the many direct contributions they might make to the domestic household. These included washing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, mending, and the like – occupations that are not infrequently referred to by the contributors as ‘common drudgery,’ but to this reviewer seem little different from the tasks which most lower-income women of the world engage in today. There are other aspects, however, that added to the value of young female slaves, and that was their sexual attractiveness and their capacity to bear children. These were qualities they could employ to improve their condition in the master’s household for, particularly in non-monogamous societies, the offspring of a manumitted slave could divert resources away from traditional lines of inheritance. Relatively few enslaved women enjoyed the fruits of favouritism and, even as Martin Klein points out in an informative chapter on the harem, many young beauties never had the opportunity to entertain their master, and the sex life of an Ottoman slave who bore the sultan a child was over by age thirty. As Klein and others point out, however, the harem was more about family business and politics than about sex. What made life particularly difficult for any enslaved woman was the total absence of support from her own family. Because she was so entirely on her own, she was obliged to develop ways of protecting herself and her offspring that differed from those of a free woman. This she achieved by her femininity on the one hand, and her ability to develop ties of friendship and community with others like herself.

The book is composed of fifteen chapters divided into five sections: ‘Women in Domestic Slavery across Africa and Asia,’ ‘Women in Islamic Households,’ ‘Women in Households on the Fringes of Christianity and Commerce,’ ‘Women in Imperial African Worlds,’ and ‘Women in Commercial Outposts of Modern Europe.’ Their content is diverse, but a comprehensive introduction by Joseph Miller draws them together in a meaningful synthesis. There is also a reasonable index. The volume is well researched and highly informative. It will set new standards for our understanding of the subject and become a welcome addition to reading lists in the many fields it touches.