Returning Persia to the Persian Gulf: Iran's South and the Persian Gulf Slave Trade in the 19th and 20th Centuries

This paper will focus on slave trading patterns and practices in Iran’s southern and southeastern border regions, which differed significantly both in terms of slave demography and the process of abolition from Iran’s north, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper is intended as a corrective of recent scholarship that has either privileged the study of slavery in Iran’s north or in the Arab regions of the Persian Gulf and the “Arab slave trade.” This paper will examine how the slave trade in southern Iran was an integral part of a broader Indian Ocean network of slave trading that persisted in places well into the twentieth century. While the slave trade at Iran’s southern ports was abolished in 1848, followed by the abolition of slavery as an institution in 1929, the slave trade nevertheless continued to affect Iran’s south and the slave trade continued in greatly reduced numbers in areas where central government control was weakest, particularly along the Makran Coast. While slaves were increasingly difficult to sell openly during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the slave trade nevertheless overlapped with other forms of illicit trade, such as arms smuggling, which provided tribes with a bartering currency in bullets and rifles as well as the means to capture new slaves through raiding. The intersection of the slave trade and arms smuggling thereby fueled tribal warfare and strengthened the ability of tribes along Iran’s southern periphery to challenge the authority of the central government. This paper will also explore Great Britain’s assumed right to unilaterally manumit slaves in Iran’s south within the context of Great Britain’s capitulatory agreements with Iran and Iran’s indigenous sanctuary traditions (bast). In doing so, this paper will consider the question of whether Britain’s assumed right to unilaterally manumit slavery throughout the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East developed in isolation of British experiences in Iran, or if the established practice of offering sanctuary to a wide range of Iranians in British consulates and embassies provided an example that Great Britain applied to slaves elsewhere.