A new global history of the slave trade, the lives of enslaved people, and the role of slavery in the formation of Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture in the medieval Middle East
In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents-which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists-provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.
Perry chronicles a protean slave trade that trafficked enslaved people from Europe, Africa, and India to the Egyptian market. His account cuts across different scales of analysis, from the macro-level of imperial rule to the micro-level of the family kitchen. Along the way, he upends the traditional story of Passover; medieval Jews, he writes, could explain slavery to their children by pointing to the enslaved people who served the holiday meal. When freed, some former slaves converted to Judaism and became the parents of Jewish children. Perry's narrative reveals a world, long hidden from historians, in which enslaved people made their way through the alleys of Cairo, toiled in the workshops of apothecaries, and found ways to evade the surveillance of their owners. With this book, Perry writes enslaved people into the social and economic life of medieval Islamic society. Craig Perry is assistant professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and the coeditor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420. "The main themes and arguments of the book speak to a range of current issues in the study of slavery, both in the medieval Middle East and in a broader, comparative perspective. It also offers a fascinating examination of slaveholding, masculinity, and their intersection with Jewish identity in a way that I have not seen elsewhere."-Hannah Barker, Arizona State University
"This book constitutes a major contribution to historians' understanding of one of the most pervasive and consequential institutions in the medieval Islamic world. Among its most important critical interventions is its refreshingly objective acknowledgement of the inescapable reality of Jewish involvement in the slave trade and its careful description of the diffuse networks through which it was carried out."-Arnold Franklin, Queens College, City University of New York
"The wealth of evidence we have for eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt, unmatched anywhere in the world before 1300, is becoming ever clearer in a range of remarkable books. Craig Perry's new book is one of the best of them. Slaves and slavery were intrinsic to the urban world in Egypt; they penetrated Egyptian society and culture in countless ways. Craig Perry shows us what it was like to be a slave and what it was like to own one, with a subtlety of analysis, a deep sympathy, and a gripping narrative verve. Every medievalist should read this book."-Chris Wickham, author of Medieval Europe
"Perry has delivered a profound and moving investigation of slaves who labored in Jewish homes and businesses in medieval Egypt. In this multiscalar history, he breaks down patterns of human trafficking while also giving an inside look at slaves' survival strategies, daily lives in markets and public spac
