Slave Testimonies in the Abolition Era. European Captives, African Slaves and Ottoman servants in 19th century North Africa

Project Information

SlaveVoices

Grant agreement ID: 819353

DOI

10.3030/819353

EC signature date 28 June 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 975,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 975,00

Coordinated by

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 5 - SlaveVoices (Slave Testimonies in the Abolition Era. European Captives, African Slaves and Ottoman servants in 19th century North Africa)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ERC project SlaveVoices has two main scientific goals. First, it aims at fully renewing our approach to the end of slavery, a crucial social transformation in North Africa seen as part of the Muslim world. So far historians have explained the abolition and gradual disappearance of slavery in this region either as the outcome of European imperialistic interventions or to a lesser extent as resulting from debates among Muslim scholars and leaders who owned slaves. SlaveVoices will instead interpret the end of slavery in North Africa through the testimonies of those who experienced and acted to bring about the end of slavery: namely the testimonies of the slaves and their descendants written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and European languages.

Second, by studying together –and not apart, as is often the case– the various groups of slaves in North Africa hailing from Africa, Europe and Asia, SlaveVoices will propose a new way of conceiving and writing the history of North Africa. Instead of studying each historical phenomenon in terms of specific national divisions of the wider region (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt), SlaveVoices will be a concrete attempt at writing a globalized and connected history of modern North Africa. It will explore the reshaping of the connections that groups of slaves built up within North African societies and between this part of the Muslim world and other adjoining societies in Africa, Asia and Europe in the abolition era. SlaveVoices will innovate in resituating slave testimonies within a broader history of literacy in North Africa throughout a long nineteenth-century, a period in which literacy and written sources underwent major changes in Ottoman and colonial North Africa.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first year and a half of my ERC research project implemented at Sciences Po, I have mainly focused on a major dimension of the project: namely the various ego-documents written or conceived by the last European slaves in North Africa and by the last North African slaves in Europe from the mid-18th century to the 1820s.
Regarding this first aspect of the project, from October 2019 to January 2020, while teaching two courses at Sciences Po, I have collected and read most of the secondary sources published about Mediterranean slavery in 18th and 19th century Italy, Spain, France and Malta in various European languages and in Arabic. I have also been able to find copy and read some very rare Italian secondary sources at the Italian National Library in Rome (January 12-19). After having read and summarized these secondary sources, I started to explore a vast range of primary sources in Madrid, Palermo, Naples, Venice, Malta, and Paris. So far, I have published in French and in English, a peer-review paper about the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Tunisia that is available in open access (https://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/3989). I have also started to collect with the two postdoctoral researchers that we have hired by spring 2020, some major slave testimonies that we intend to publish on a website (see next section).

Despite the COVID constraints, a second member of the team, Gabriele Montalbano explored in Roma in September and October 2020 (when these state and private archives were still open), the archives of the Italian Foreign ministry (ASMAI) and the archives of the Giuseppini catholic order that founded an Institution for manumitted slaves in the Libyan city of Benghazi. Out of these fantastic and fascinating primary sources, Gabriele is currently writing an excellent draft for two essays in English.

The second postdoctoral researcher and third member of the team, Ali Al Tuma is working on two topics: the group of black elite slaves (‘abīd al-Bukhārī) surrounding Moroccan sultan in the 19th century; the issue of slavery in the Spanish protectorate over Northern Morocco. Because of the COVID related travel restrictions, Ali has not been able to travel to Morocco. Instead, during the first semester, Ali has been working on primary sources in Arabic (chronicles and biographies) to locate the ‘abīd al-Bukhārī’ within the 19th century Moroccan society. During the second semester, Ali went to Spain, to the National Archives at Alcala de Henares (February 3-14) to collect and copy documents related to the issues of slavery in Northern Morocco under Spanish protectorate (1912-1956).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Historians have explained the demise of slavery in this part of the Muslim world merely as an effect of European imperialism within the Mediterranean. They have thus mainly understood the demise of slavery in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) and across the wider Muslim world from a Western or, indeed, a European standpoint as a legal abolition implemented in the wake of British abolitionist campaigns and European colonial expansion. Consequently, they have tended to analyze this legal abolition as an indicator of the extent to which Muslim societies were able to adapt to crucial changes such as the end of slavery.
Conversely, other historians have shown that the abolition of slavery in North Africa and in other parts of the Muslim world was not merely due to British diplomatic pressure and European colonial interventions.

Though the team of researchers that I will involve in SlaveVoices will bear in mind these foundational debates and will conceive of slavery as “the individual or communal ownership of another person or group” (Rossi 2009), the research project aims to explore the ending of slavery in North Africa from a very different angle: SlaveVoices will reinterpret the end of slavery in North Africa by seeking to understand how slaves, former slaves, the servants and sons of slaves were involved in abolition and the broader demise of slavery in the Maghreb. The project follows and expands recent attempts by historians of the Ottoman Empire to recover the voices of slaves in modern Egypt and at the centre of the Ottoman Empire (Toledano 2007, Troutt Powell 2012). However, SlaveVoices will not –as has been the case so far– only focus on African slaves. It will be the first research project scrutinizing the testimonies produced in North Africa by slaves hailing from various regions during the abolition era –be they from West Africa, from the northern shores of the Mediterranean or from the Caucasus.

As a PI I will write one short book in French for a broad audience about slavery in modern North Africa. I will write and revise two chapters from the Global History of Slavery edited by Paulin Ismard in French and in English: a chapter about “slave narratives”, another about “manumissions”. I will work on another book, summarizing the overview and main scientific outcome of the project, that will combine chapters from the drafts of the short book, and the materials collected from fieldworks in Mediterranean archives.
Each postdoctoral student involved in the project will aim to publish at least a peer review paper in a journal.
Finally, we will select testimonies from male and female slaves from various cultural and social backgrounds that we will present in a website, hopefully in a book and for an exhibition conceived for a broad audience concerned with the resurgence of slavery in the present day.

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