The Red Sea was the setting of one of the world’s oldest, most enduring, and complex arenas of the slave trade, involving some of the earliest routes that carried enslaved Africans outside the continent. This volume adopts a broadly conceived Red Sea spatial framework that brings into sharper focus the distinctive features, workings, and dynamics of enslavement, unfreedom, and slavery’s long endings in this region and its adjacent areas. Drawing on a range of methods and approaches, the chapters make use of a rich array of both familiar and previously untapped sources in more than half a dozen languages to illuminate slaving patterns and practices, the lived experiences of the enslaved, and diverse paths to emancipation, among other subjects. In particular, the chapters explore the relationship between slavery and the states and empires that dominated the Red Sea region, the routes pursued by the slave trade, urban slavery, resistance and manumission, while also drawing attention to new sources and literary representations.

Contributors are: Alessandro De Cola, Sinan Çakar, Ulrike Freitag, Elad Giladi, Dominique Harre, Thomas Kuehn, George Michael La Rue, Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Jonathan Miran, Magdalena Moorthy Kloss, Lukian Prijac, Hideaki Suzuki, and Jerzy Zdanowski.