Recovering Biographies of Enslaved Africans In Nineteenth-Century Iran

About: Africans were enslaved and brought to Iran in large numbers in the nineteenth century as part of the East-African slave trade. While there are no definite historical statistics on the number of slaves exported from Africa to Iran, estimates among scholars for the Indian Ocean trade during the nineteenth century vary between one and two million. Possibly two-thirds of these slaves were women and girls. In Iran, these Africans were almost always destined for residence in Iranian households as servants, eunuchs, and concubines. Historians have written little about the history of slavery in Iran. In 1997, Edward Alpers called forcefully for the study of the history of Africans in the northwestern Indian Ocean region, including in Iran. However, his pioneering call for more research, for the most part, has gone unanswered... (from africaworldpressbooks.com)