in the section above, i have endeavored to give an exhaustive list of all locations in the Arabian Peninsula where African servile labor is explicitly attested to in the primary and secondary sources. But does this list repre-sent the entirety of the African presence in Arabian Peninsula agriculture?
Almost certainly not. Given the somewhat sporadic nature of the evidence used above, which depends on eyewitness accounts compiled in an unsys-tematic fashion, it is inevitable that some African agricultural colonies within Arabia did not find their way into the historical record. But how many? And what fraction of all slaves and mawlas in the Arabian Peninsula were employed in agricultural labor, as opposed to domestic service, mili-tary servitude, concubinage, or other slave professions?
in most countries, questions like this one would be answered with census data. in saudi Arabia, however, the first attempt at a census was not made until 1962, when the phenomenon of agricultural slavery was already well into decline, and no complete, reliable census was conducted in the country until 1992.94 However, the officials of Britain’s informal empire in Arabia did keep their own statistics, and one study they conducted has some relevance to the question at hand. The British had a long-standing tradition of emancipating slaves who fled from Ottoman jurisdiction to their embassies, consulates, and ships, and while the Ottomans were no longer in charge of the Hijaz by the 1920s, the British consular officials in Jeddah continued to manumit and document escaped slaves up until the mid-1930s.95 These manumission documents were compiled and sum-marized in British political agent A. Ryan’s “Memorandum on slavery in saudi Arabia,” which was published for internal British use in 1934. in it,
76 | Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula
Ryan provides data pertaining to the 209 slaves who had fled to the British consulate of Jeddah from 1926 to 33. in addition to recording the gender, nationality, and circumstances of enslavement, Ryan collected evidence concerning the “trade or craft of the slaves,” which i used as the basis for figure 2.1.
As can be seen from the diagram, by far the largest number of slaves seeking manumission at the hands of the British were domestic servants, including sixty-two men and forty-four women. The second largest worked in the field of transportation, a grab-bag category that included water car-riers (twenty-three slaves), camel drivers (thirteen), seamen (seven), por-ters (five), and a single chauffeur. Agricultural laborers came in third place with thirty-three slaves. This means they accounted for only 16 percent of the total number of slaves manumitted and recorded by the British, though it should be noted that agricultural slavery was the second largest category in terms of overall numbers.96
According to Alaine s. Hutson, a historian who studied British slave manumissions at Jeddah from 1926 to 1936, the agricultural slaves freed in Jeddah were, as a group, quite distinct from other slaves in the data sample.
For one thing, agricultural slaves were overwhelmingly male: only five of the freed agricultural slaves were female, compared to forty-four males.
Figure 2.1. Professions of manumitted slaves, Jeddah 1926–33
Source: sir A. Ryan to the Foreign Office, “Memorandum on slavery in saudi Arabia,” 15 May 1934, in The Slave Trade into Arabia: 1820–1973, ed. A. L. P. Burdett (London: Archive editions, 2006), 6:683.
secondly, agricultural slaves were overwhelmingly from sub-saharan Africa. in all, 62 percent of agricultural slaves claimed to be from the sudan, while only 19 percent of agricultural slaves claimed to be from the Abyssinian region. One final factor that set agricultural slaves apart from their nonagricultural counterparts was their common complaints of shabby treatment. Hutson notes that 93 percent of the agricultural slaves in the sample cited poor treatment as the reason for running to the Jed-dah consulate, while only 54 percent of domestic and a mere 25 percent of commercial slaves complained of the same.97
Hutson’s precise statistics should be taken with more than the usual grain of salt, since there are all sorts of problems inherent to using these manumission statistics as a data set. in terms of chronological span, the manumission data cover only a small slice of time, and an atypical slice of time at that, since the British had been actively intervening in the slave trade for decades by the time Hutson’s data were collected. This study also deals exclusively with Jeddah, and thus may not be representative of slavery elsewhere in Arabia, an issue we will return to below. What is more, men outnumbered women in this data sample by almost three to one, despite the fact that female slaves probably outnumbered male slaves in the Arabian Peninsula as a whole.98 More importantly, this data set deals specifically with slaves seeking manumission rather than all slaves, meaning that certain professions that were particularly onerous might be overrepresented and more “pleasant” slave professions (if such a thing can be said to have existed) were underrepresented. Furthermore, nearly all of the slaves who sought manumission—171 out of 208—were originally enslaved outside of Arabia, and it is not clear whether the pro-fessions held by these slaves were representative of all slaves in general.
And of course this data set tells us only about slaves, not mawlas and other African servile agriculturalists. Nonetheless, as is often the case when studying Arabian Peninsula history, we must do the best we can with incomplete and imperfect evidence.
On the basis of the data presented in figure 2.1, and with the caveats listed above, it is probably fair to say that a substantial minority of Arabian Peninsula slaves were engaged in agricultural pursuits. in fact, i suspect that the number of African slaves engaged in agriculture was higher than figure 2.1 suggests. it should be remembered that these statistics were collected in Jeddah, a dry and dusty port where little if any agriculture was practiced. The closest agricultural districts were the Wadi Fatima and Wadi Jaimun, which, as we have seen above, hosted relatively small African
78 | Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula
agriculturalist populations. Khurma and the Wadi safra contained more African slaves, but were over 200 kilometers away, and the other colonies listed in this study were still more distant. While agricultural slaves were apparently not well supervised by their owners, 200 kilometers would have been an intimidating journey, especially considering that an escaped slave was under no one’s protection and thus could be robbed, killed, or re-enslaved while on the road. in contrast, an urban slave in Jeddah seek-ing the protection of the consulate had only to walk across town. Thus, we would expect urban occupations like domestic servitude and water carrying to be overrepresented in the study, while rural professions like agriculture would be underrepresented. it stands to reason therefore that the actual proportion of African slaves consigned to agricultural employ-ments was higher than 16 percent, perhaps considerably higher, though as mentioned above, the number of agricultural slaves who sought refuge in Jeddah might also be artificially high due to greater incidence of mistreat-ment by their masters. Nonetheless, on balance, i would say that 20 percent is a conservative estimate, especially given the evidence for the many Afri-can servile colonies that has been given in this chapter.
Armed with this percentage, we can venture an estimate as to the overall number of African servile agriculturalists present in the traditional Arabian Peninsula. Figures on slavery are hard to come by: in 1963, a British official in Jeddah noted that “estimates [on the number of slaves in saudi Arabia]—it would be more correct to call them guesses—range from between 2000 and 500,000.” The same official estimated, based on evidence provided by Aramco as well as other anecdotal evidence, that the true figure was closer to between fifteen thousand and thirty thou-sand, “scattered all over the country.”99 This figure is exclusive, however, of mawlas, which in the eastern provinces of saudi Arabia numbered about twelve thousand, or four times the number of slaves.100 if this proportion is valid for elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, that would indicate that there were at least three thousand to six thousand agricultural slaves, and twelve thousand to twenty-four thousand servile mawlas agriculturalists in the Hijaz, Najd, ‘Asir, and eastern Arabia as a whole, exclusive of African servile populations in Oman, Yemen, and elsewhere. This is a very rough and speculative estimate, based on data collected at the very end of the tra-ditional era of Arabian history. Nonetheless, it does agree in broad strokes with the survey of African agricultural colonies given earlier in this chap-ter. in any case, the number of agricultural slaves and mawlas present in the traditional Arabian Peninsula at any given time would have depended
largely on price and supply trends in the indian Ocean slave trade, a theme we will return to in chapter 5.