Unfree Lives

Book excerpt: Unfree Lives illuminates Yemen’s forgotten history of slavery, as well as the transregional dimensions of slave trading in the Red Sea and wider Indian Ocean world. By analyzing Arabic narrative and administrative sources, Magdalena Moorthy Kloss reconstructs the lives of women and men who were trafficked to Yemen as children and then placed in various subaltern positions — from domestic servant to royal concubine, from quarryman to army commander. In this first in-depth study of unfree lives in Yemen, Moorthy Kloss argues that slaves and former slaves made significant contributions to social, economic and political processes in the medieval period. She highlights the gendered nature of slavery through a nuanced examination of the social identities of eunuchs and concubines. Unfree Lives also includes detailed information on slave trading between the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the 13th century, as well as an account of the little-known Najahid dynasty that was founded by Ethiopian slaves.