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 (kanīzīn) and household male slaves (ghulāmīn), their roles within Iranian families and Iranian communities, the legal status and social relationships with their masters, and the complicated procedures for their eventual freedom, whether in death, by escape, through manumission, or due to the 1929 Emancipation Act. She then explains that there were three successive phases of slave trading activities on Iran's frontiers following the 1722 collapse of Safavid family rule in Isfahan along Iran's southern, northern, northeastern, and eastern frontiers.

In the first phase, the boom period of southern “Eastern African and Indian Ocean trade” began in the late 1780s and continued into the mid-19th century, she argues, when the overall effects of the 19th century British Indian Ocean antislaving naval patrols, and a series of Iranian proclamations by the Tehran Qajar shahs in 1807, 1833, and 1848 finally began to diminish the importation of East African slaves by way of the sea via issuing two firman sent to the governor of Fars, and the governor of Isfahan and Khuzistan as guardians of the southern ports. The British interpreted the slaving prohibitions to effect the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea only but not landed slave activities.

Mirzai principally relies on British foreign office records, reports, and correspondence; summary research of the British East India Company letter books; John Gordon Lorimer's confidential multi-volume Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia; and the invaluable Persian foreign office records and archives in Tehran. Through careful reading of these materials, she succeeds in linking naval patrols and Qajar attempts to some semblance of Tehran control over the provincial governors and local elites involved in the southern slave trade to a modest decline in slave imports. She admits that both British and Persian accounts and records continued to document the import of enslaved men and women through Iran's southern regions into the 20th century.

A large part of that documentation is based on J.G. Lorimer's information-packed gazetteer published between 1908 and 1915. Though universally recognized as an indispensable historical record of the time, some historians now caution its use as a primary source rather than as a secondary one due to the collaborative and summary work of other researchers in the compilation. It was meant originally as a confidential encyclopedic handbook for the Persian Gulf British resident agents rather than as the actual British East India Company letter books and memoranda. In addition, there does not exist, as far as this reviewer knows, a careful reading and publishing of the principal British naval and diplomatic reports on the Indian Ocean antislavery patrols’ successes or failures. Until we have such a publication, we will not know how successful such naval actions were in stemming some or all of the Indian Ocean slave traffic of that time.

Mirzai then examines the northwestern frontier of the Caucasus that had become a hotly contested battleground between Russia and the Iranian shahs into the 19th century. Russia finally conquered large portions of that region capturing both the Baku oil fields and the vast labor pool. She then concludes that the Russian Caucasus ceased the enslavement of workers and women captured and then exported to the Ottoman or Qajar empires. Following a series of imposed treaties on Qajar Iran, Iran reluctantly recognized the Aras River as its Northwest frontier with Russia in the 1828 Treaty of Turkmanchai. For Mirzai, the treaty effectively closed the slave trading regions of Georgian and Circassian peoples to Iranian importations.

She then focuses on the third phase, examining slave raiding by armed Turcoman tribesmen and villagers in Iran's northeastern and eastern frontiers. The closure of the 1828 Russian–Iranian frontier accelerated the raiding, leading to the enslavement of village Iranian men, women, and children in Iran's northeastern and eastern Khorasan province. Like the Russian Caucasus, the Turcoman and Afghan slave raiders were exporting Iranian (Persian and Kurdish) slaves to Central Asian and south Asian markets of the Indian continent. It was only in the early 20th century that the Khorasan province slave exportations ceased under the Pahlavi government's antislaving efforts.

Mirzai then concludes her work with a fascinating account of the late 19th- and early 20th-century efforts by crediting the Qajar shahs and the leading Iranian Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ in their efforts to end the importation of overseas and overland slaves and the deportation of Iranian peoples into slavery. Mirzai shows the combined efforts of European powers, not only British and Russian, to enact antislavery legislation, culminating in part with the 1889–1990 Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference. The conference adopted the 1890 Anti-Slave, Arms and Ammunition Act that declared all such were illicit and antihumanitarian. Both the Qajar Ministerial elites and some of the leading ʿulamaʾ, joined the rural and urban grassroots movements of peasants, workers, and literati of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11 in their final assault on Iranian slavery and the regional slave trade. With the aftermath of World War I, the Iranian parliament and new Pahlavi shah set in motion Iran's 1929 Act of Emancipation, chiefly through greater centralization of national authority and armed repression of provincial independence movements and of workers and peasant collective actions. She adds that continued 20th century struggles in improving Tehran's centralization incrementally rendered both domestic and foreign slavery and trade a thing of the past.

Overall, Mirzai's seminal study will be of great interest to scholars and specialist in national, regional, and world history. She has effectively put to rest the puzzling widespread notion among many Iranians that there were neither slaves nor slave trading in Iran historically. Her use of the archival sources found in Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean basin, Britain, and continental Europe opens up new research possibilities and a host of questions about accepted knowledge on the degree of Iranian intervention in the cessation of the slave trade and slaver traditions in the Middle East. Her work begins to challenge accepted beliefs of the dominance of European powers in enacting modernizing legislation, and the difficulties of engaging in progressive development in the age of empire and “new imperialism.” Lastly, Mirzai's discoveries of slave narratives and case studies of slave resistance in the Iranian foreign office and general manuscript collections in Tehran were well worth her decades of research. It can only be hoped that she will publish her earlier field interviews and continue her outstanding film documentary work on the hidden lives, oral traditions, culture, and rituals of the Afro-Iranian communities in the Gulf and southern Iran regions.