Justin Marozzi, Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Medieval World (Penguin, 2025, £35.00) – Review by Jeff Fynn-Paul
Justin Marozzi is a British journalist, travel writer, and man of affairs who is fluent in Arabic and has spent a great deal of time in the Arabic-speaking world. He is best known as the author of 2021’s Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped Civilization: From Mecca to Dubai, and 2014’s Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood – A History in Thirteen Centuries. The latter volume, which appeared in print just as American and allied forces were recalled to Iraq to combat the growing threat of ISIS, was what launched Marozzi into the popular consciousness.
His current book, Captives and Companions, shows top-notch familiarity with the scholarly historiography on many aspects of the slave trade in the Islamic world. He has consulted with major experts including Matthew Gordon for the earlier period and Ehud Toledano for the early-modern period. The book therefore aims to be taken seriously by historians, even as it declares itself in its Introduction to be a popular history.
Far and away the most important aspect of this book is its mere existence. As Marozzi notes at the outset, academic historians have refused to touch the topic of Islamic slavery with a barge pole. Meanwhile, they fetishize the European-led elements of the transatlantic slave trade. The result is that for every article addressing some aspect of slavery in the Islamic world or sub-Saharan Africa, there are dozens of books written on slavery in the antebellum South. The reasons for this basic failure of historical science are all too familiar: multiculturalism, as Thomas Sowell has observed, boils down to the maxim that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture, and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture. Under the influence of multiculturalism and its ideological cousins, the Western historical establishment has become tragicomically incapable of dealing with topics that make non-Western cultures “look bad”.
This is why it’s so refreshing that Marozzi has taken up his pen, and assembled scores, if not hundreds, of anecdotes relating to the history of slavery in Islam. This is precisely the fly in the Western academic’s socialist champagne, though I can confidently predict that historians of slavery will do their best to ignore it. Academics’ favourite tactics in such cases include the slur that “it’s not written by a real historian, after all”. Yet Marozzi’s bibliographies and reading lists are impeccable and very useful for historians, and one can hope that these will serve as bait to draw at least some young scholars into the world that Marozzi’s anecdotes open up.
The book is subtitled ‘A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World’. The topic is enormous, encompassing more than 1,400 years and millions of square miles of territory. Marozzi has attempted to get a grip on this subject by dividing his book into thirteen chapters, most of which address a “type” of slave in the Islamic world. Marozzi’s own extensive experience in Libya and environs has tended to focus his narrative more on North Africa than other parts of the Islamic world, a narrowing of scope few readers will fault him for. The chapters run in a vaguely chronological order, with early chapters addressing topics such as the treatment of slavery in the founding texts of Islam, and the famous revolt of the black Zanj slaves in the ninth century. Later chapters address “Barbary slavery” in the early modern Mediterranean (a term which Marozzi is at pains to nuance), Ottoman slavery, nineteenth-century Saharan slavery, and then various anti-slavery movements such as the American attack on Tripoli, British abolitionism, and the continuation of abolitionist movements against modern slavery in states such as Mauritania.
Marozzi’s chief concern, oft repeated over the course of the volume, is to “recover the lives and voices” of the exploited and the book mostly consists of a series of anecdotes about the experience of various slaves. For example, the chapter on concubines examines the lives of three different concubines who lived in the early medieval period. These biographies are interwoven with what, to this historian, seemed to be too little connecting tissue regarding the more general history of this or that aspect of Islamic slavery, and—more jarringly—with frequent scene shifts recounting the author’s personal adventures in North Africa. It is largely left to the reader to make what they will of these recovered voices: the journalist’s appeal to a human sense of sympathy and outrage leaves interpretation largely up to the individual.
Those who like travelogues and are fascinated with contemporary Northern Africa and the greater Sahara region will find here much that is illuminating, much to ruminate over, and much to add depth to their understanding of the lands and cultures that interest them. Even for seasoned historians of slavery, the book’s abundant anecdotal evidence provides a good dose of raw humanity, which helps bring life to the often bloodless academic discussions of slavery across the centuries. But for those looking for historical argument about this or that development of various slave flows and institutions within the Islamic world, this book has less to say.
Recurring themes which do stand out include ample evidence of longstanding Arabic disdain for black Africans—the book begins with a story of how the modern-day Libyan slang for black Africans is still “slave”—and the practise of slave raiding itself. For more than a millennium, metropolitan demand encouraged Islamic North Africans to range far to the south, in order to prey on politically disorganized villages of unbelievers for use as human chattel. Several of the book’s more harrowing anecdotes begin with a horde of horsemen sweeping into a sleeping village, whence they proceed to systematically slaughter, capture, and (in the case of young boys) castrate captives, with victims’ fates being determined by a ruthless calculus based on their age and gender. Those who survived the initial cull would then be marched a thousand miles or more (changing masters perhaps a dozen times as they were driven from region to region) until the survivors were sorted into one of the Islamic world’s main slave categories.
One opportunity which Marozzi missed here, I think, is to emphasize more strongly how slavery under Islam is not unusual in human history. Whether called by the name of “slave” or not, dependents have often been treated with what to modern Western eyes seems like extreme callousness and cruelty. If we went to nineteenth century China, fifteenth century India, ancient Rome, ninth century Europe, or seventeenth-century Iroquois territory we would find the exact same thing: powerful people treating other humans as chattels—no different from the animals which they kept and casually slaughtered as a matter of course.
Another link which should probably have been made more strongly, was to drive home that slavery in the Arabic (and later Islamic) worlds was part and parcel of late antique society into which Islam was born; but that a major novelty of Islam as a religion was the notion that co-religionists, as equals in the faith, were not to be enslaved. This, from the seventh century until the modern era, was a major driver of Islamic demand for non-Muslim slaves on the peripheries of the Dar al-Islam—especially Africa and Russia. It was also a major reason why most Muslim men avoided slave status within their own societies, even as polygyny denied wives to the poorest strata.
In the end, the main impression left by Captives and Companions is one of sadness. Sadness about how cruelly humans have tended to treat one another across the centuries, and about just how commonplace casual cruelty has been in almost every historical society. This, for me, always highlights the value of the European Enlightenment as a pivotal moment in human history. It was in the Enlightenment that humans first began to politicize human rights and human dignity. And yet, for the ideological reasons outlined above, the Western academy has stubbornly downplayed the miracle of the Enlightenment and subsequent developments that we all take for granted as the basis of the modern international order. The academy would hide the Enlightenment under a bushel in this way, just because it originated in Europe – and this despite the fact that enlightened ideas remain at the core of the modern western Left’s weltanschauung.
Marozzi has done a perfectly sane and progressive thing by being one of the first writers to catalogue in such detail the many varieties of slavery prevalent in the Islamic world from its foundation to the present day. In doing so, Marozzi is treating modern North Africans and other Muslim peoples as fully rational beings, who will, if prodded, realize that their culture must eventually “come to terms” with their own history of slavery and with the centuries of prejudice against black Africans and non-Muslims that accompanied it.
The anti-Western bias in the modern academy is not only unscientific; it systematically hurts and disrespects the people it purports to help. Travel through Africa today and you will find country after country where elites blame their nation’s failures on “colonialism” rather than corruption in their own ranks. You will find non-elites who have been convinced that their country’s evils are due to Western “racism,” rather than the failings of their own governments. We can only hope that with time and the publication of more books like Marozzi’s, global society will come to realize that Europeans did not have a monopoly on hatred, exploitation, or cruelty. Only then can modern Africans be expected to focus whole-heartedly on their problems at hand with genuine optimism for the future, rather than fatalistically expecting failure as a consequence of mostly imagined, century-old wrongs.
The first step along that path is for Western academics to stop burying their heads in the sand when faced with facts they dislike. Historians must regain the maturity to confront historical truth. The slave voices of Northern Africa—as assembled by Marozzi in this volume—stand as a challenge to Western academics’ comfortable self-fashioning. Do they have the courage to accept their own challenge? Do they really wish to “recover the repressed voices of the past” as they so often aver—even if those voices have been repressed by people of non-European origin? As the Left’s failure to acknowledge the ongoing repression of young women in Iran and the Western academy’s failure to acknowledge Islamic slavery both indicate in their own ways, so far, the answer has been a frankly embarrassing, and morally reprehensible, “no.”
About the author: Jeff Fynn-Paul is a Professor of Economic History at Leiden University, The Netherlands
