Islamic Law, Slavery, and Feelings

This article studies a fourth/tenth-century notarial model to limit and place conditions on (istirʿāʾ) the manumission of an unruly and bad-tempered female slave. The text is part of al-Wathāʾiq wa-l-sijillāt, a notarial manual compiled by Cordoban scholar Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 399/1009), the earliest edited Andalusi work of this genre. Although it is part of a chapter on slavery and, more specifically, of a section dedicated to the manumission of slaves, it is not a generic notarial text dealing with the manumission of female slaves. The document is not a manumission form, but one that complements and limits a manumission; in fact, its aim is to impede or overturn the process. The article studies this notarial model in three different contexts: (1) Andalusi kutub al-wathāʾiq, (2) Mālikī legal literature on slavery and (3) notarial model reservation testimonies. Even if, at first glance, it appears to be an unusual legal document, when analysing other Mālikī sources we observe that the text is part of a well-documented tradition with widely accepted legal justification. This model is nevertheless exceptional from a procedural point of view because its legal arguments are based on feelings and refer specifically to the slave’s personality, temperament and behaviour as the factors that motivated the legal act.

Thralls’ Names in Scandinavia

Thanks to the Old Norse literature we have an large corpus of slave names to consider. When analysing these names, we arrive at the unfortunate conclusion that in many (most?) cases these names look like fictious, generative names, created to fit with the thrall topoi in the narrative. This is evident in the enumeration of thrall names in the poem Rígsþula, where all the names for male and female slaves are highly derogatory, obviously to make a statement of these unfree people being firmly at the bottom of society and to be looked upon with contempt. There are some names on slaves which have an origin in Celtic language, which are interesting, and some probably have a historical background. In the will of freed slaves, mentioned before, all former slaves have ordinary personal names that we find among free people. This raises the question if freed slaves took or were given a new, proper and Christian name at the manumission.

Mobile Actors, Mobile Slaves: Female Slaves from the Black Sea Region in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

This contribution aims to investigate mobility in the context of Ottoman slavery. Mainly on the basis of seventeenth-century Istanbul court records, the study deals with the question of mobility by focusing on female household slaves in Ottoman Istanbul who originated from the Black Sea region. With a look at the actors who surrounded them, female slaves are analysed at different stages in their lives. These stages were marked by changes related to mobility. The entry as well as the exit from slavery meant a spatial and social mobility for the slave women. But even in the time in between, slave women remained mobile through aspects such as conversion and resale. This paper further shows that Ottoman slavery and the slave trade were part of the Transottoman context: it can be seen that spaces of interaction were created through the connections and exchanges of actors beyond the Ottoman Empire.

Sultans and Slaves: Salih’s Rise to Power

Like all Ayyubid princes, Sultan Salih rose to power by fighting his family members, aided by his large army of Turkic slaves, called mamluks. After a period of captivity in which his Turkic concubine Shajar al-Durr bore him a son, he gained freedom and became sultan of Egypt. Just as large numbers of male slaves were imported into Egypt to serve as soldiers and servants, female slaves were acquired from the same areas, possibly in even greater numbers. These served as servants and concubines. Some, such as Shajar al-Durr, became mothers of their master’s sons and thus gained more security and social importance.

Being a Woman in the American Slavery System: A Study of the Slave Woman’s Ordeal in America, from 1776 to 1865

Women have long been negatively stereotyped in every society, usually portrayed as submissive and passive. In the case of the black women in the slavery context, the conception of them by their male compatriots as well as the white master is dual: a working animal to do every chore in the household in the one hand, and an object for the master’s sexual appetite in the other hand. Scholars in American slavery have grappled with the question of gender differences among slaves in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas some scholars hold that both male and female slaves were assigned different roles, feminist scholars hold that enslaved women labored no less than enslaved men. They observed that unlike white women, female slaves performed the same roles as men slaves. The present research work reveals and analyses the experiences and contributions of slave women in the global American slavery system. As such, the focus is on themes that especially concern female slaves; these include: motherhood, companionship, marriage, work on plantations, and punishment. Central in this study is how those female Blacks experienced slavery in America and how they help build the American economy in that period.

Women in West African History

Across West Africa up to the 19th century, titled positions for women ensured that women’s interests could be voiced and their disputes regulated. Women often had major roles as brokers and intermediaries in trade centers along the Saharan and Atlantic littorals, contributing to the emergence of powerful Euro-African families. Nevertheless, women were particularly vulnerable to the depredations of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades. Because female labor was so highly valued, female slaves were more expensive than male slaves. The history of women in West Africa has been characterized by marked differences by ecological zone. Those differences have been deepened by Islamic influences in the North and by different experiences under French, British, and Portuguese rule. With the decline in the Atlantic trade and the growing emphasis upon commodity production, the demand for female labor in agriculture and in processing rose. Under colonial rule, the loss of slave labor was partially offset by increasing demands upon the labor of wives. Women mediated demands upon their labor through colonial courts, with some success in the early decades of the 20th century. Later courts and administrators supported patriarchal controls upon women in the interests of order and a smoothly running economy. Women’s control over their traditional means of accumulating wealth through farming, cloth production, and specialized crafts was typically undermined as economies shifted to emphasize cash crop production and tree crops in particular. Women nevertheless could flourish in market trade and could sometimes gain control over new niches in the economy. The growth of colonial infrastructure had contradictory implications. Women’s traditionally important roles as queens, priestesses, and ritual specialists declined in importance. At the same time, schooling gave some women access to new means of gaining income and prestige as teachers and medical practitioners.