Paper short abstract:

This paper is focused on the intellectual debates in Muslim West Africa on enslavement and remedies for illegal enslavement from the 1500s to the mid-1800s.

Paper long abstract:

The academic discourse on the abolition of slavery is dominated by a focus on European abolitionist arguments and actions, and more recently on the role of freed slaves in the Americas and Europe in the abolitionist movement. Often ignored is that the legality and ethics of slavery were not only debated in European and European-derived societies starting in the 1700s but were also debated in other societies and among various faith groups across Africa and Asia. During the slave trade era, both Muslim and non-Muslim Africans also had clear ideas about who was enslaveable and who was not. Depending on the society, insider-outsider status in Africa could be based on ethnicity, citizenship or religion broadly defined. All Africans had an interest in protecting from enslavement those whom they considered to be "insiders." African states, including those involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and West Central Africa, sought to regulate the slave trade and facilitate what they considered to be legal enslavement and slave-trading while preventing what they determined to be illegal enslavement. For West African Muslims, the intellectual discourse on slavery was focused on religious status as the basis for enslavement, the onus to prove freeborn Muslim status, and remedies for illegal enslavement. This paper is focused on the intellectual debates in Muslim West Africa on enslavement and remedies for illegal enslavement from the 1500s to the mid-1800s.