As mentioned before, statistics on the MeNA region’s slave trade are extremely speculative, since the slavers themselves kept few if any records.
Nonetheless, it is abundantly clear from British archival records that the slave trade into Arabia was booming in the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury. Major Wilson, the Political Resident of the Gulf, wrote in 1831 that Muscat alone received 1,400–1,700 male and female slaves a year, includ-ing 10–15 eunuchs. Female slaves from sub-saharan Africa, he wrote, “are usually sold at 25 to 45 German Crowns—males from 20 to 35,” while Abyssinian slaves cost 35–150 Crowns.52 Wilson’s estimate may be a low one: another British official wrote to the Government of Bombay in 1842 that the annual importation of slaves to the Omani coast was 20,000 or
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even 30,000 souls.53 Many more slaves were imported into Mocha, hode-ida, and Jeddah on the Red sea coast. Captain Davies, the Political Agent at Aden, wrote that he had “seen as many as 200 and 300 a month arrive at Mocha, and in landing they are immediately placed within a compound unclothed, and from whence they are drawn to a well for water twice a day like a flock of sheep, their food consisted of jowaise [millet] cake, and some sugar cane.”54 These slave flows were no doubt just the tip of the iceberg, since at this point the British were not yet actively involved in eliminating the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Britain’s hands-off attitude toward the Indian Ocean slave trade changed in the late nineteenth century, in large part as a reaction to British missionary David Livingstone’s reports concerning the brutality of the trade in the east African interior. In 1873, the British forced the sultan of Zanzibar to sign a treaty forbidding the trade of slaves into and within his possession, and British vessels began to actively interdict cargoes of slaves passing between Zanzibar and the mainland.55 What is more, British cruisers were stationed in the Red sea to intercept the passage of slaves between the Arabian Pen-insula and the African mainland. At about the same time, British officials in Jeddah began to pressure the Ottoman empire, which had seized control over much of the hijaz in 1841, to enforce its own prohibitions against the slave trade. While the Ottomans in theory had abolished the slave trade in the 1850s, in practice these laws were little enforced, especially in the hijaz, where taxes on slaves filled Ottoman coffers and where officials feared that an outright abolition of the trade would outrage local Arabs and weaken their already tenuous hold over this remote province.56 As a result, despite being formally outlawed, the slave trade was “carried on with very little secrecy” as late as the 1860s, and turkish troops seeking bribes actively protected and encouraged the trade on both sides of the Red sea.57
A series of incidents occurring in Jeddah in 1879 illustrate the con-tinued flow of slaves into the hijaz, despite the technical illegality of these practices, as well as Britain’s continued inability to stamp out the trade.
In May of that year, Consul Zohrab, the ranking British official in Jed-dah, complained to his superiors in London about “the remissness of the authorities here in regard to the slave trade, which is so active that at any time from 100 to 200 slaves can be bought without the least difficulty; not old, but newly imported ones.”58 Zohrab’s complaints led to the arrest of 7 slavedealers and the manumission of 38 slaves, but he notes that only a few days later there were “between 200 and 300 newly-arrived slaves in the town, which could all be recaptured if we had honest officials and troops
sufficient to prevent opposition.”59 As a result of these large-scale slave imports, Zohrab wrote, “the town is crowded with slaves for sale, nearly all being Abyssinians. The number was so great in Mecca . . . that prices have gone down from 100 dollars, the average price of last year, to 40 and 50 dollars.”60 A recent study of the Indian Ocean Red sea trade estimates that, at the time Zohrab was writing, as many as 3,000 slaves per year were being smuggled into Arabia across the Gulf of Aden alone, plus another 1,500 or so from the Massawa area, 1,200 from suakin, and 2,000 from the Danakil coast to the north of modern Djibouti.61
By the late nineteenth century, however, these large-scale slave imports were slowly becoming a thing of the past. slave exports from east Africa to the Arabian Peninsula were already in decline by mid-century, in large part due to the absorption of many slaves into the Zanzibar clove and coconut plantation. By the 1870s, reinforced British naval interception efforts in east Africa further reduced the volume of this old slave trade. Crucial in this regard was the stationing of an old two-decker British warship, the London, in Zanzibari waters, along with its attendant “mosquito fleet” of small, highly mobile pinnaces and other vessels.62 however, east African antislavery measures did not destroy the trade so much as shift it to over-land routes, and large numbers of slaves were still transported into Arabia across the Red sea and the Gulf of Aden, where the narrowness of the seas combined with a large number of reefs and islands made the task of British naval interception nearly impossible.63 Indeed, Martin Klein has argued that British naval suppression in east Africa actually stimulated the overland slave trade into Arabia, as British efforts ensured that the price of slaves in Africa remained cheap and thus created a dramatic price dif-ferential between African and Arabian slave markets.64
In the end, the death knell of the trade was sounded, not by British naval pressure, but by european colonization of Africa. As suzanne Miers points out, european occupation of Africa did not immediately end slav-ery in Africa, but it did inhibit large-scale slave exports and as a result
“the pathetic caravans of slaves, roped together . . . soon vanished from British Africa.”65 As a result of the closure of Africa, slave prices in Ara-bia, which had remained remarkably steady throughout the nineteenth century, spiked dramatically by the 1920s, reaching 200–250 percent of nineteenth-century high prices even after accounting for inflation of the pound.66 Those slaves who were still smuggled in tended to be young children, who were no doubt far easier to smuggle across the Red sea in small batches, and who could be passed off as children of the owner if the
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boat was stopped by British authorities.67 In addition, Abyssinian slaves claimed an increasingly larger share of all slave exports to Arabia in the twentieth century, since ethiopia remained independent of european con-trol until 1936. According to timothy Fernyhough, in fact, both slavery and the slave trade flourished in early twentieth-century ethiopia despite occasional antislavery decrees by the ethiopian government.68 slave trad-ers also relied increasingly on the tactic of importing individual slaves via the hajj pilgrimage, since it was fairly easy for African pilgrims to bring slaves along on the pilgrimage, in the guise of “sons” or “daughters,” and then sell them into slavery upon reaching Mecca. Despite such tactics, British officials believed that, by 1929, “the import of slaves into [Arabia had] diminished considerably,” and that the sale of an Abyssinian girl in Mecca that year was notable not only for its rarity, but for its high price:
the girl sold for 136 pounds, the equivalent of 1,700 Maria Theresa thalers (Mtt), well over ten times the price she would have fetched in the early nineteenth century.69 slave prices declined once again in the 1930s, which reflected not decreased demand, but the greatly diminished purchasing power of the Arabian Peninsula Arabs as a result of the Great Depression.70 By the 1940s, slave prices had spiked once again, though now the demand for slaves was increasingly being met with slaves from the Makran region in what is now Persia and Baluchistan, not from traditional slave markets in Africa.71
As a result of reduced supply and consequently higher prices, Afri-can slaves in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries increasingly became a luxury commodity, with female slaves favored over male, child slaves favored over mature adults, and Abyssinian slaves increasingly dom-inating the market, a trend which probably reflects the increasing difficulty of smuggling sudan slaves through British-controlled egypt and (after 1899) Anglo-egyptian sudan. since African agricultural slavery depended on a steady flow of inexpensive adult male slaves of sub-saharan African origins, these changes would have disproportionally affected the Arabian agricultural sector. Well before the formal abolition of slavery in saudi Arabia in 1962, therefore, agricultural slavery in the Arabian Peninsula was already undergoing a sharp decline.