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Eve M. Troutt Powell , Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press , 2012). Pp. 264. $40.00 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book.
Regional Crossings and Peripheries
Eve Troutt Powell's Tell This in My Memory is a wonderful addition to the growing literature on enslavement in Middle Eastern societies during the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods. The current cycle in the study of slavery in general boasts a comparative focus that brings into the discourse a serious attempt to examine and integrate into the debate enslavement in Islamic societies. Earlier cycles were mostly concerned with the Ancient world, then the U.S. Antebellum South, and more recently the broader Atlantic world, which includes the study of enslavement in Brazil and the Caribbean Islands. The present, comparative phase also devotes more attention to microhistorical studies that endeavor to recover voices of enslaved individuals; special interest in antislavery discourse and abolition in non-Western societies is also noticeable. (For a survey of recent contributions to the literature on enslavement in Ottoman and other Islamic societies, see Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 239-69; and Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East [New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2007], 38-47. For the current debate over antislavery and abolition in Islamic societies, see Ehud R. Toledano, "Abolition and Anti-Slavery in the Ottoman Empire: A Case to Answer?" in A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Mulligan and Maurice Bric [Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], 117-36.) In many ways, Troutt Powell's book fits well within the current trend.
Tell This in My Memory