Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T17:04:47.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Extract

An Ethiopian man named Surūr appeared before the British Consul at Addis Ababa in December 1933 and told a remarkable story. He had just returned to Ethiopia after enduring more than five years of slavery in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf where he had been forced to work as a pearl diver. When he was eleven years old and out tending cattle in the Wallamo region of Ethiopia around 1925, he was seized by kidnappers who took him to Tajura on the Somali coast and shipped him along with fifty other captives to Jedda, where he was sold to a man who took him to Qatar and eventually sold him to a pearl merchant who engaged him as a diver. As Surūr explained to the consul, he tried twice to escape from his master. The first time, he fled to the British Residency Agent, ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, in Dubai, who promised to protect him, but then returned him to his master, who severely beat him. Shortly after, he fled to the British agency office in Sharjah, only to find that the Residency Agent was the same ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, who again returned him to his master, who this time beat him until he was unconscious. Surūr finally managed to escape by fleeing to a boat bound for Basra. There, he met some Somali men working as stokers on a British steamer who assisted him in getting to Djibouti by way of Muscat. When he arrived in Djibouti he was interrogated by port officers, and his story was passed on to the British consulat Addis Ababa who interviewed him and forwarded his story to the Political Agent at Muscat.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Primary Sources

Bombay Correspondence, 1840–1884 (AA 3), AA 3/18, Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA), Zanzibar, Tanzania.Google Scholar
British Parliamentary Papers: Slave Trade (Shannon, 1969).Google Scholar
Field, Admiral Sir Arthur Mostyn, Papers (FIE/43), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, United Kingdom (hereafter NMM).Google Scholar
Foreign Office Correspondence, 1838–1890 (AA 1), AA 1/2, AA 1/10, Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA), Zanzibar, Tanzania.Google Scholar
Gilbert-Cooper, Lt. C. M., Papers (BGY/G/5), NNM.Google Scholar
India Office Records (IOR), Political and Secret Department Records (L/PS) L/PS/12/4091, L/PS/20/C246, L/PS/20/C248B, British Library, London.Google Scholar
India Office Records (IOR), Records of the British Residency and Agencies in the Persian Gulf (R/15) R/15/1/204, R/15/1/208, R/15/1/209, R/15/1/216, R/15/1/225, R/15/1/226, R/15/1/552, R/15/6/3, British Library, London.Google Scholar
Logbook of HMS Star kept by Lynch, John G., 1866–1869 (MSS.Brit.Emp.s.536), Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (RHO), Oxford University.Google Scholar
Milne, Sir Alexander, Papers (MLN/160), NMM.Google Scholar
Muscat Dhows Arbitration in the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague, Grant of the French Flag to Muscat Dhows: The Counter-Case on Behalf of the Government of His Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1905)Google Scholar
Persian Gulf Administration Reports: 1873–1947 (Gerrards Cross, 1986).Google Scholar
Persian Gulf Trade Reports: 1905–1940 (Gerrards Cross, 1987).Google Scholar
Records of the Admiralty (ADM), ADM 1/6093, ADM 1/6190, ADM 1/6261, ADM 1/6230, ADM 1/6412, ADM 1/6622, National Archives (PRO), London.Google Scholar
Records of the Foreign Office (FO), FO 54/34, National Archives (PRO), London.Google Scholar
United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1898–1919 (Washington, DC: G.P.O., 18951920).Google Scholar
United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook, 1920–1922 (Washington: G.P.O., 19211923).Google Scholar
United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Yearbook, 1923–1925 (Washington: G.P.O., 19241926).Google Scholar

Books

Adelson, Roger, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922 (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar
Anscombe, Frederick F., The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York, 1997).Google Scholar
Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, 2006).Google Scholar
Katrin, Bromber, ed., The Jurisdiction of the Sultan of Zanzibar and the Subjects of Foreign Nations (Wurzburg, 2001).Google Scholar
Busch, Briton Cooper, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914 (Berkeley, 1967).Google Scholar
Cable, James, Gunboat Diplomacy, 1919–1979: Political Applications of Limited Naval Force (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (London, 2006).Google Scholar
Cooler, Frederick, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth, 1997).Google Scholar
Dodge, Toby, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York, 2003).Google Scholar
Eunson, Robert, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto (Tokyo, 1964).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
Kunz, George Frederick and Stevenson, Charles Hugh, The Book of the Pearl. The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York, 1908).Google Scholar
Lloyd, Christopher, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1949).Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., and Hogendorn, Jan S., Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (New York, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miers, Suzanne, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Lanham, 2003).Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, 1988).Google Scholar
Panikkar, K.M., India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History (Bombay, 1951).Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Leonard, The Pearl Hunter: An Autobiography (New York, 1952).Google Scholar
Winter, Frank H., The First Golden Age of Rocketry: Congreve and Hale Rockets of the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC, 1990).Google Scholar

Articles/Essays

Bondarevsky, Qrigori L., ‘Turning Persian Gulf into a British Lake: British Domination in the Indian Ocean in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Chandra, Satish, ed., The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (Newbury Park, 1987), 317325.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Indrani, ‘Abolition by Denial? Slavery in South Asia after 1843’, in Campbell, Gwyn, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York, 2005), 150168.Google Scholar
Gallagher, John, ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922’, Modern Asian Studies 15/3 (1981), 355368.Google Scholar
Gallagher, John, ‘Great Britain v. France’, American Journal of International Law 2/4 (10. 1908), 921928.Google Scholar
Lewis, William Roger, ‘The British Withdrawal from the Gulf, 1967–71“, The Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 31/1 (2003), 83108.Google Scholar
Mandel, Robert, ‘The Effectiveness of Gunboat Diplomacy’, International Studies Quarterly 30/1 (03 1986), 5976.Google Scholar
Onley, James, ‘Britain's Native Agents in Arabia and Persia in the Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24/1 (2004), 129135.Google Scholar
Sheriff, Abdul, ‘The Slave Trade and its Fallout in the Persian Gulf’, in , Campbell, ed., Abolition, 103119.Google Scholar
Cohan, Steven, ‘Victorian Power’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 22/3 (Spring 1989), 350353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westlake, John, ‘The Muscat Dhows’, Law Quarterly Review 23 (1907), 8387.Google Scholar
Zinkin, Maurice, ‘The Commonwealth and Britain East of Suez’, International Affairs 42/2 (04 1966), 207218.Google Scholar