http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html

The economic exploitation of slaves, apart from some construction work, took place mainly in the countryside, away from the cities, and like almost everything else about rural life is sparsely documented. The medieval Islamic world was a civilization of cities. Both its law and its literature deal almost entirely with townspeople, their lives and problems, and remarkably little information has come down to us concerning life in the villages and the countryside. Sometimes a dramatic event like the revolt of the Zanj in southern Iraq or an occasional passing reference in travel literature sheds a sudden light on life in the countryside. Otherwise, we remain ignorant of what was happening outside the cities until the sixteenth century, when for the first time the surviving Ottoman archives make it possible to follow in some detail the life and activities of rural populations — and the exploration of this material has still barely begun. The common view of Islamic slavery as primarily domestic and military may therefore reflect the bias of our documentation rather than the reality. There are occasional references, however, to large gangs of slaves, mostly black, employed in agriculture, in the mines, and in such special tasks as the drainage of marshes. Some, less fortunate, were hired out by their owners for piecework. These working slaves had a much harder life. The most unfortunate of all were those engaged in agricultural and other manual work and large-scale enterprises, such as for example the Zanj slaves used to drain the salt flats of southern Iraq, and the blacks employed in the salt mines of the Sahara and the gold mines of Nubia. These were herded in large settlements and worked in gangs. Large landowners, or crown lands, often employed thousands of such slaves. While domestic and commercial slaves were relatively well-off, these lived and died in wretchedness. Of the Saharan salt mines it is said that no slave lived there for more than five years. The cultivation of cotton and sugar, which the Arabs brought from the East across North Africa and into Spain, most probably entailed some kind of plantation system. Certainly, the earliest relevant Ottoman records show the extensive use of slave labor in the state-maintained rice plantations. Some such system, for cultivation of cotton and sugar, was taken across North Africa into Spain and perhaps beyond. While economic slave labor was mainly male, slave women were sometimes also exploited economically. The pre-lslamic practice of hiring out female slaves as prostitutes is expressly forbidden by Islamic law but appears to have survived nonetheless.

Where can you get this movie?

This makes more sense. I am uncomfortable with the “little bit pregnant” explanations of slavery in other times and other parts of the world as somehow being a little more benign than American slavery. The difference wasn’t one of degree but the fact that the crimes against humanity of American slavery “happened after the enlightenment.”

Did anyone see “Guiana 1838,” a movie made a couple of years ago about the history of Indo-Caribbean indentured labor? In 1833 slavery was officially abolished in the British empire and the plantation owners had to look for cheap labor to replace the free labor. However, unable to break their old slavemaster habits, they started treating indentured Indians like slaves. Raping, beating and torture were rampant. It was years later, and not without some intervention from the British government, that the indentured laborers were treated like farm hands rather than slaves. Watching this movie was like watching “Roots” except it was a lot closer to home. A poorly acted and directed film, but historically very significant to Indians and not completely unrelated to the thread above.

You are attributing a claim to me that I did not make. In fact no one made it. I searched this whole thread for the word Darfur and you are the first person to have brought it up.

Statements like “Did they lynch black people ? Maybe. But we don’t have the photographs.” sound like apologia to me.

That’s for you and Van to figure out. But I see you have chosen a different sentence to excerpt from Van’s comment than the one you originally labeled quasi-apologia.

I said that Van’s post was well argued and useful. If you would like to extract individual sentences from Van’s post and suject them to context-free evaluation, I suppose we could do that if we had nothing better to do with our time. However, Van’s post consisted of several sentences, paragraphs even, making an overall point. Perhaps it wouldn’t be asking too much of you to respond at a similar level?

What evidence do you have that Darfur-like conditions weren’t prevalent when arabs took black slaves??? Statements like “Did they lynch black people ? Maybe. But we don’t have the photographs.” sound like apologia to me.

Siddhartha, I think I love you.

I thought Van’s point was really right-on and is an important contextualization of the differences in the different kinds of slave trades in Africa. I think most people would agree that slavery is vile, but I do think it’s important to understand the very different way that the Atlantic trade operated. Especially since the ideas behinds “rights in person,” property, and social structures were so different.

And chachaji, I’m with Shodan (and GQ apparently?) in that prison culture is where super baggy clothing comes from. I say this having grown up in an “urban” area I actually don’t think obesity has as much to do with it in terms of the origin of the style — it wouldn’t explain why guys (of all sizes) still walk around with their pants around their mid-thighs/knees

No, it doesn’t. It was a perfectly well argued and useful point.

I completely agree that slavery is inhuman in any form and I am not condoning the trans-saharan/Arabian slave trade at all. I am not saying Arabic slave trade was much less intense as a matter of policy and intent.Arabs traded much fewer slaves for the simple fact that slave traders of the middle ages did not have at their disposal the war making apparatus and the humongous economic structure( eg. plantations, construction in the Americas) which accompanied slavery in the new world. Between 650 CE and 1905 CE it is estimated that approximately 18,000,000 slaves were taken across the Islamic/trans-saharan and Indian ocean slave trades. Between the second half of the 15th century and 1867 Europeans have shipped 8 to 10 million slaves to the New World. If you think that even today( including the populous North African Arab countries) Africa has less people than India, it is not hard to imagine how acutely devastating to African society the transatlantic slavery must have been. So much happened in so little time……( The figures I am quoting are from Britannica- in the section of “Slavery;Slave owning societies”- not even Wikipedia. So long……

This was the crucial difference. A slave in ancient Greece and Rome, in 18th c. Europe, in Arabia, and especially in Africa itself, was a very low-status member of the family, a hereditary and unpaid servant. It was a quasi-caste system. There was no sustained argument that slaves were anything but human. The possibility of working a way to freedom was present in these societies in various ways. In African institutions of slavery the question of race never came into it. Slaves were slaves because they or their ancestors were taken in raids. They became slaves in societies similar to the ones they had been taken from. Their circumstances were extremely grim, unquestionably, but with time some of them married their masters’ daughters and became the heads of the households in which they were slaves.

In the United States, with the large numbers of Africans brought over to work the land, the institution of slavery became part of a society that had not itself developed an internal mechanism for it.

It was only at this point in the misadventure that the racial element became essential. Race was emphasized in order to maintain the difference between who could be considered fully human and who could not be permitted to cross that boundary. And it was a difference insisted on, to the death.