A collision of rival visions — Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 by Neil Faulkner review

Before this book deals with either empires or jihad, we are first plunged into the world of the African slave trade. None of its horrors are omitted. Columns of armed slavers fall upon sub-Saharan pastoral tribes whose way of life has not changed since the Iron Age. Their clubs, spears, and bows are no match for the slavers’ muskets, and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are rounded up every year to be dragged off to market. Countless numbers die on the way, as they march in shackles for weeks through the pitiless sun. Their routes can be followed by tracing the bones of the dead on the wayside, or the specialist centres established to turn captured boys into eunuchs.

On this occasion, neither Edward Colston nor the Royal African Company were responsible. The slaves were not destined for the cotton fields of the American south, nor the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. While a few of the slave masters may have been Portuguese, most of them were Arab-Swahilis or Arab-Sudanese. The rank and file of the armed slavers were themselves generally African tribesmen. The main beneficiaries of the trade were Arab and African merchants, as well as local east African potentates. Their captives’ ultimate destinations would be the harems, souks, and fine houses of North Africa and the Middle East.
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