Slave Trades: Why the Term “Arab-Muslim Slave Trade” Is Not Enough to Tell the History

The term “Arab-Muslim slave trade” regularly arises in public debates about slavery. It most often refers to deportations carried out across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean to North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, India or, at times, China. Yet this wording can create the impression of a uniform phenomenon driven by a single group, whereas the historical realities were multiple.

Discussing the slave trades requires distinguishing between regions, periods, actors and forms of servitude. This means neither downplaying the violence committed in Muslim societies or in Africa, nor erasing the central role of European powers in the construction of racial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

What Is Slavery?

Slavery is a system of domination in which human beings are regarded as the property of other people. They may be bought, sold, passed on or exchanged. Their freedom is severely restricted, and their status exposes them to obligations, punishments and separation from their original environment.

This condition is also described as a “social death”: the captive person is torn away from their family, group of belonging and points of reference. The paths into slavery varied across societies: capture in war, sentencing, debt or birth into servile status.

Historians generally distinguish between societies in which slavery exists without being the main driver of the economy, and slave societies, in which the labour of enslaved people structures social and productive organization. This distinction does not prevent relatively small numbers of enslaved people from holding decisive roles in certain states.

A Practice That Predated Islam and Christianity

Slavery existed in the Mediterranean world before the emergence of Christianity and Islam. In Greek city-states, the Roman Empire and then the Byzantine Empire, people of diverse origins were enslaved. They could serve as domestic workers, labourers, concubines, soldiers, gladiators or administrators.

As states and economies developed, their need for enslaved labour encouraged the search for captives beyond their borders. Trade networks thus emerged between Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Near East and Asia.

The word “slave” itself is linked to the history of Slavic populations, who were frequently captured and sold through several medieval and modern trade networks. Europeans, too, were enslaved and resold in different parts of the Mediterranean and eastern world.

What Does the Concept of the Arab-Muslim Slave Trade Cover?

The term generally brings together two major systems: the trans-Saharan slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade. The first linked sub-Saharan Africa to the Maghreb across the desert. The second notably departed from the coasts of East Africa for the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf, India and other Asian territories.

These networks involved Arab, Amazigh, African and other merchants, as well as local rulers and intermediaries. Reducing them to a single religious or ethnic identity therefore conceals the diversity of those involved. Likewise, not all participants in these exchanges were Muslim, and not all Muslims took part in them.

Islam did not create slavery, but Muslim societies incorporated and regulated an institution that was already ancient. The prohibition on enslaving other Muslims could shift the supply of captives towards populations living on the edges of Islamized territories. In practice, this rule was also circumvented: Black converts were sometimes kept in servitude on the questionable grounds that they were not considered sufficiently Muslim.

Religion, Skin Colour and Hierarchies

In several Muslim societies, religious status was a major criterion of domination. This does not mean that skin colour did not matter. Sources and historical scholarship cited on this subject describe hierarchies in which Black people often occupied the most devalued positions and were sold for lower prices in certain markets.

Religious justifications were also used to legitimize the enslavement of Black populations, notably interpretations of the curse of Ham. These readings were not unanimous. Ibn Khaldun, for example, proposed an explanation based on climates, which nevertheless remained marked by prejudices that ranked Black and Slavic populations hierarchically.

It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that Muslim societies were untouched by discrimination based on skin colour. It would be equally misleading to impose one modern conception of racism on every period and every region.

Why Is There No Comparable Black Diaspora Around the Mediterranean?

This question fuels oversimplified narratives. The idea that the supposed absence of a large Black Mediterranean diaspora can mainly be explained by the mass castration of deported men is not supported, based on the evidence presented here, by reliable proof establishing a generalized phenomenon.

Another factor must be considered: a significant share of the people deported along trans-Saharan routes were women. Their descendants may gradually have been integrated into the receiving societies, making any interpretation based on a visible continuity of identities or skin colours difficult. Single-cause explanations do not account for such long and diverse processes.

Slavery in Precolonial Africa: Diverse Realities

Forms of captivity and dependency existed in many African societies before European colonization. They were often linked to warfare and the loss of family or community protection. In some contexts, captives could gradually be integrated into the family or clan of their master, while retaining an inferior status.

This integration should not be confused with an absence of violence or exploitation. It does, however, distinguish certain African forms of captivity from the plantation slavery developed in the Americas, which was based on dehumanization, the hereditary nature of servile status and the structural impossibility of escaping the imposed condition.

African kingdoms took part in supplying captives to commercial networks. Wars, access to firearms and external demand profoundly reshaped power relations. Some states made the capture of prisoners a central activity, while other populations resisted these systems. Reducing this history to the phrase “Black people sold Black people” erases political rivalries, military constraints and the resistance of those most directly affected.

The Distinctive Nature of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic slave trade gave colonial slavery an industrial and racialized dimension. Beginning with Portuguese expansion and the sugar economy, the forced labour of deported African people was placed at the heart of plantations in São Tomé, Brazil, the Caribbean and the Americas.

In this system, enslavement was associated with lasting racial classification: being Black gradually became equated with being enslaved. Religious conversion or social integration could no longer offer the same prospects as in some other systems of servitude. European powers, religious authorities and legal frameworks helped legalize this order, notably through the Code Noir in France.

This history is inseparable from the formation of the modern economy, colonial expansion and the racialization of social relations. To explore this connection further, read how capitalism emerged through expropriation, colonial expansion and racialization.

Colonization: Abolition Invoked as a Justification

After the abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery in several European empires, some African states continued to exploit captives on plantations serving external markets. Colonial powers then widely used the denunciation of intra-African or eastern slavery to portray their conquest as a civilizing mission.

This rhetoric should not obscure the fact that colonization did not immediately eliminate all forms of servitude and that it established, in many territories, systems of forced labour intended to exploit populations and resources. Denouncing certain forms of violence could thus serve to legitimize another form of domination.

Examining the Slave Trades Without Setting Them Against Each Other

The trans-Saharan, eastern, intra-African and Atlantic slave trades should neither be conflated nor placed in a competition of horrors. They involved African, European, Muslim and other actors in shifting configurations. They also produced profoundly unequal profits and devastation.

In France, the history of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial slavery and their legacies is directly part of national history. The journey of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former enslaved person who became a deputy to the National Convention is a reminder that enslaved people were never merely passive victims: they resisted, fought and contributed to abolitionist struggles.

Recognizing the plurality of the slave trades makes it possible to avoid two pitfalls: denying the violence perpetrated in certain African or Muslim societies, and using that violence to divert attention from European responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, colonial slavery and their lasting consequences.

FAQ

Is the Arab-Muslim slave trade a precise historical term?

It is a common but reductive expression. It most often refers to the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades, even though these networks involved actors from diverse backgrounds and faiths.

Did Africans participate in the slave trades?

Yes, some African powers and intermediaries captured, held or sold captives. However, this participation must be placed within contexts of war, external commercial pressure and political upheaval, without erasing African resistance to slavery.

Why is the Atlantic slave trade considered distinctive?

It developed, on a very large scale, a plantation system based on the deportation of African populations, the hereditary nature of slavery and a racial hierarchy that durably shaped colonial and postcolonial societies.