Content area
Full Text
Behnaz A. Mirzai , A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 (Austin, Tex. : University of Texas Press , 2017). Pp. 324. $34.95 Paper. ISBN: 9781477311868
Book Review
History
Behnaz Mirzai has written a monumental monograph in her study of slavery and emancipation in early modern and modern Iran. Focusing primarily on the 19th-century boom in the importation of "black" eastern African slaves from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, the "white" slaves from the northeast Caucasus villages across the Aras River, and Persian, Kurdish, and Baluchi slaves from the northeastern and eastern Turcoman and Afghani rural regions beyond Khorasan and Baluchistan, Mirzai presents what is to date the most comprehensive study of slaving and its emancipation in Iran's past. To document her findings, Mirzai has dug deep into the rich archival materials in Tehran, such as the National Archive and Library of the Islamic Republic, the Gulistan Palace Photo Collection, the Central Library of the University of Tehran's rare books collection, and the Foreign Affairs Center of Documents. She also used the Center of Iranian Studies in Bushire and the National Archive in Tabriz. Finally, she drew on the holding of the Juma Al-Masjid Centre of Culture and Heritage in Dubai, the Zanzibar National Library in Tanzania, the Quai d'Orsay Foreign Office Archives in Paris, and the British foreign office materials and manuscripts in the Kew Gardens' National Archives and in the London British Library. In the process, Mirzai had already published a score of articles, and produced two DVD documentaries on the Afro-Iranian communities in Southern Iran's Fars, Kerman, and Baluchistan provinces. She implies that in her copious endnotes--so important to read along with her text--she carried out field interviews but, unaccountably, did not incorporate them into this monograph.
Mirzai sets out to "provide an account of the development and ultimate decline of the institution of slavery in modern Iran" through her research into the lives of 19th- and early 20th-century urban domestic female slaves (kanizin) and household male slaves (ghulamin), their roles within Iranian families and Iranian communities, the...