Rebalancing the history of slavery
Ottomans leading a party of enslaved Europeans, from a 1608 engraving in Salomon Schweigger’s account of his 1578 journey in the Ottoman Empire.
Salomon Schweigger / Wikimedia Commons
Slavery in the Islamic world was endemic for over a millennium, and the numbers involved must have run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Captives and Companions:
A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World
JUSTIN MAROZZI
(ALLEN LANE, 560 PP, £35)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £31.50 • TEL 020 7799 4064
This fascinating book opens with a quotation, which I paraphrase: “For every gallon of ink spilt on the transatlantic slave trade, only one very small drop has been spilt on the enslavement of Africans in the Mediterranean world of Islam.” This erudite study – recently longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize – is Marozzi’s comprehensive attempt to redress the balance.
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