The slave trade and its fallout in the Persian Gulf

Although the northern slave trade from East Africa to the Persian Gulf region never attained the dimensions ascribed to it by slave-trade abolitionists or colonial historians, the constant trickle of slaves for centuries into the sparsely populated desert area could not but leave an indelible imprint on the population of the region. Edward Alpers places this region within what he categorises as ‘Islamic slavery’.1 It may be questionable whether Islam as an ideology can explain the existence and essential features of slavery throughout history from the time of the Prophet, when the ethics of domestic slavery were enunciated, through the oppressive large-scale plantation slavery in Mesopotamia under the Umayyads, which led to the Zanj Rebellion in the ninth century, down to the plantation economy of the East African coast during the capitalist era, or to pearl diving in the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth century. However, as Alpers admits, there is not a single type but a large variety of patterns of slavery. These include domestic slavery, practised by small peasants who acquired one or two slaves to work beside them; slave labour hired out by the day, as was common in Zanzibar town and elsewhere during the nineteenth century; slave artisans who were hired out and who shared their income with their owners; and the curious case of slaves owning other slaves to work for them.