Sociology of Slavery

Recovering Biographies of Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-Century Iran: A First Attempt

Anthony A. Lee
Lecturer, UCLA 

Abstract

African slaves were brought to Iran in large numbers in the nineteenth century as part of the Eastern slave trade. While there are no definite historical statistics on the number of slaves exported from Africa to Iran, estimates among scholars for the Indian Ocean trade during the nineteenth century vary from between one and two million.  Possibly two-thirds of these slaves were women and girls.  In Iran, these Africans were almost always destined for residence in Iranian households as servants, eunuchs, and concubines.
Little scholarship has been undertaken on the history of Africans in Iran.  There are enormous gaps in our knowledge of slavery in Iran and of the influence of African people and culture on Iranian history.  More than a decade ago, Edward Alpers called forcefully for the study of the history of Africans in the northwestern Indian Ocean.  However, his pioneering call for more research, for the most part, has not been taken up by other scholars.  This paper is a first attempt to discover the individual biographies of slaves in nineteenth-century Iran and to reconstruct at least a part of their lives. 
  Scholars of Middle Eastern slavery have warned about the limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world.  Such binary, legal concepts of slave vs. free presuppose a secular state that is able to protect the lives and property of individuals based on their claim to citizenship.  They are unhelpful when discussing societies which are not built around the power of the state, but rather on concepts or kinship, belonging, religious authority, and hierarchies of dependence. 
This paper will examine four cases of slave experience in Iran in an effort to demonstrate the widely varying conditions of enslaved persons during the nineteenth century.  First, Bahrazian Khanum and Nur Sabbah Khanum, two sisters who found their freedom in 1892, but who in the absence of protectors were quickly re-enslaved.  Second, Haji Mubarak and Fezzeh Khanum, servants of the middle-class merchant and Babi (later, Baha’i) Prophet, Mirza ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab (1819-1850).  The former an educated eunuch entrusted with his master’s business affairs; the latter a lifelong companion to the Prophet’s wife who became a holy figure in her own right.  Third, Khyzran Khanum and a young boy named Walladee, two slaves who fled to the British consulate in Lingeh in 1856 seeking freedom, but found no protection.  And, fourth, Gulchihreh Khanum, captured and enslaved as a child in the late 1800s.  She became a servant in a wealthy Iranian home and the beloved nanny of the family’s children, but continued to protest her enslavement to the end of her life.

This essay provides a critique of Orlando Patterson's analysis of property and slavery. Traditionally, the notion that the slave was the property of his or her owner was seen as the distinguishing characteristic of slavery. Patterson criticised this approach on several counts, replacing the traditional formulation of slavery as the ownership of human beings with his own sociological definition, which holds that the condition should be defined as 'the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons.' First, it is shown that the concept of property attacked by Patterson has little in common with the concept of property as understood in jurisprudence and comparative law, meaning that none of Patterson's objections carry any weight. Patterson collapses the distinction between property and contract. Two ancient case studies - classical Athens and Achaemenid Babylonia - show that the approach of modern comparative law maps accurately onto the legal contours of slave ownership in these two very different societies. Finally, the paper highlights several shortcomings of Patterson's reformulated definition of 2012.

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

Evidence from laws and histories is produced, pointing to the fact that the Langobards had a complex and vital system of making new Langoabards, either during the migration period and their occupation of Italy - a system based on the practice of violence.
English translation soon to follow.

Reflexión sobre el mundo de la identificación de los esclavos y libertos en los territorios valencianos a través de la documentación de la serie "Presentació y manifestació de catius ordinaris i fugitius" del fondo "Bailía General", conservada en el Arxiu del Regne de València. El artículo se concluye con unas hipótesis sobre los prejuicios raciales.

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a " slave king " as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Dewulf's focus on the social capital of slaves follows the mutual aid to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a much stronger impact of Manhattan's first slave community on the development of African American identity in New York and New Jersey than hitherto assumed. While the earliest works on slave culture in a North American context concentrated on an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later studies pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with Europe-an—primarily Portuguese—cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.

ISBN 978-84-941099-7-3

Desde tiempos inmemoriales Asia ha sido la cuna de numerosos imperios pero, de entre todos ellos, llegando a abarcar desde el Pacífico hasta el Mediterráneo y desde Siberia hasta el Índico, los mongoles crearon el más extenso y poderoso que ha conocido la Historia. Sería el noble Temujin, del clan Borjigin, quien encabezó dicha hazaña al ostentar por vez primera el título de Gengis Kan o Gran Kan. Unió al, hasta entonces, dividido pueblo mongol y convirtió a sus habitantes, nómadas pastores de las estepas (Lane, 2006: 17), en los guerreros más temidos de la Edad Media. Reinos e imperios cayeron a sus pies, tras vencerlos en incontables batallas, obteniendo los mongoles riquezas sin fin. Gracias a diversos cronistas árabes, chinos, rusos, etc., contamos con un conocimiento relativamente amplio y veraz de su historia, aunque la fuente principal procede de la Historia Secreta de los Mongoles, obra de autor desconocido y compilada quizá alrededor del año 1226, un año antes de la muerte del Gran Kan, que junto a numerosas leyendas recoge la tradición oral de los sucesos que narraremos.

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom w...

"What Race Defaced does phenomenally well is delineate the inability of capitalism (especially its ‘kinder, gentler’ neoliberal incarnation) to deliver upon any meaningful form of human equality – especially since racial thinking was introduced to bolster the system – as well as the inability of current thinkers to engage with humanity in the name of the future, to imagine a better world
which we might achieve, to advance a vision independent of the anti-emancipatory paradigms of pessimism that are the standard currency. Ever a ‘hopeful subject’, one can anticipate this volume
producing a new critical turn, a critical return to the classical role of philosophers, which is not simply to outline the problems of the present order, but also to provide a feasible means by which we – all of us, together – might achieve the good life."

Depuis les travaux de Maurice Halbwachs, nous savons que la mémoire collective doit être considérée comme le produit d’une sélection et d’un oubli. Aujourd’hui, au Bénin, la mémoire de l’esclavage passe par les discours de commémoration officielle, par les narrations orales et les pratiques rituelles populaires. Si, d’un côté, le ton semble consensuel, de l’autre, on assiste à un travail sur la mémoire fluctuant et sélectif. Les cultes et cultures populaires contribuent ainsi à la construction sociale d’un passé politiquement « sensible » et à l’émergence de nouvelles formes de relation à l’Histoire. Ce dossier aborde les aspects ambivalents de l’héritage de l’esclavage au Bénin, de ses traces matérielles, symboliques et religieuses.

The study of slavery in the Medieval World has been largely marginalized in the past.  Despite large amounts of evidence, medievalists have traditionally opted to focus their attentions elsewhere or to have seen slavery as being of only marginal importance in the societies and economies of the world from late antiquity until the opening of the Atlantic trade.  While some important studies have been done in the past, a new interest in the subject has been growing with research looking more and more at the subject and its ramifications.

While it seems that the International Medieval Congress at Leeds this summer has barely ended, it is already time to begin thinking about next year.  This summer, of course, there were more papers and sessions devoted to the subject of slavery (and related topics) in the medieval world than ever before.  As a result, some were even scheduled to run against each other.  In order to avoid this next summer and to better promote understanding of the topic, it is hoped to organize a strand of sessions to be held next year at the IMC Leeds 2016 (4 to 7 July 2016, at the University of Leeds).

The overall topic will be ‘Slavery in the Medieval World’ with separate sessions focusing on various eras and topics under the overall theme.

The individual sessions will be numbered and will have sub-titles relevant to what their particular focus is (as well as individual session organizers).    Possible topics might include such areas as "Slavery in Medieval Arabia", "Manumission", "Children in Slavery", "Slavery and the End of the Western Empire" and so on and so forth.

The total number of sessions will, of course, be determined by the number of participants; ideally, we will have a mix of early career and more senior scholars as well as of people working on a range of geographic and temporal areas.

By bringing together scholars working on different areas and periods of the history of medieval Europe, Asia, and Africa, we hope to address the question of whether there is a single subject of slavery in the medieval world, whether some practices and activities can be seen as being of global importance, and how the earlier modes of slavery found in antiquity shaped later practice.  Whether the teachings of the monotheistic religions served to ameliorate slave-systems inherited from the past or whether they served to make them stronger could be discussed while the role of slavery itself in the systems of exchange and of personal relationship might also be usefully addressed.

All proposals addressing the topic, whether of single papers or of organized sessions, are welcome and will be examined.

Practical issues
If you are interested in giving a paper or organizing a session, please send an email by 23 August 2015 to  medievalslavery@gmail.com

While we look forward to proposals for individual papers, we also encourage potential collaboration, respondents, and moderators.  Of course, please feel free to forward this call for papers to any student or colleague who might be interested in participating in our strand!

When you write, include the following information:
1) paper title
2) a short abstract/brief description indicating what the paper will be about (max. 200 words)
3) your contact details and affiliation
4) Equipment needed? (Laptop, Beamer, etc.)

We will determine how papers of 20 minutes each best fit and we’ll let you know the results as soon as possible (no later than mid-September). We are unable to cover travel, registration and accommodation expenses for speakers. Please consider the bursary application offered by the IMC (deadline 17 October): https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*context=IMC&*id=0&*formId=83&conference=2016&*servletURI=https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet 
For general information on the IMC, see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125137/international_medieval_congress
We’re looking forward to lots of interesting papers and proposals!

Taking T.H. Marshall's seminal paper on Citizenship and Social Class as a point of departure, this paper critically engage with contemporary debates on citizenship and belonging. I draw on the works of Bauman and utilise legal case studies of forced labour and human trafficking to discuss the equivocal nature of the rights presented in the Council of Europe's 'Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings' to problematise the possibility of world citizenship at the local level.