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Terence Walz/Kenneth Cuno (eds.): Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan and the Otto- man Mediterranean, Cairo 2010: American University in Cairo Press. 264 pp. ISBN 978-977-416-398-2
This is an interesting yet frustrating book. Interesting, because it provides data from multiple sources and archives on questions of bonded labor. Emad Helal's contribution on Muhammad Ali's army ably contests the established narrative. Ter- ence Walz and Kenneth Cuno make effective use of census data on the social, econ- omic, and cultural world of nineteenth century Egypt, as does George La Rue on the basis of European accounts. Hakan Erdem transforms police reports into a multi-layered representation of late Ottoman Izmit. Ahmad Sikainga portrays the dynamic crossroads that was nineteenth-century Khartoum, while Michael Ferglt- SON resurrects the forgotten story of Crete's Arab-African inhabitants. Finally, Liât Kozma and Eve Powell address labor and family relations in the wake of state en- forced manumission, through police records and two newspaper articles by Abdul- lah al-Nadim.
The frustration, for its part, begins with the title, which echoes word for word the book by Bernard Lewis, even as its mystifying subtitle attempts to render matters more complex: the term trans-saharan is used to refer to persons; history as a discipline is pluralized, and the geographical area under study consists of two countries alongside a more amorphous imperialo-geographic unit, the Ottoman Mediterranean. What remains uncontested is the Sahara as a great dividing line between distinct civilizations, peoples, races, separating North from South, Black/ African from White/Arab, flying in the face of recent scholarship highlighting the largely colonial...