The cumbersome title of this revised PhD thesis conceals the book's true focus on British attitudes to Egyptian slavery in the late nineteenth century. Its origins in a dissertation are also apparent in a tendency to repetition, long-windedness, bushy footnotes, and a painstaking ticking of post-modern theoretical boxes. Gender, identity, and race, not to mention the inevitable ‘Other,’ are all present and correct. Indeed, frequently repeated abstract statements about the fluidity of identities grate on the reader after a while.
Under its post-modern veneer, however, this is a straightforward and engaging piece of historical research. The author is treading in the footsteps of many illustrious predecessors, writing in English, but she has also checked much less familiar Arabic secondary sources on Egyptian slavery, and cites some unique or little-known material. Moreover, she has found new furrows of her own to plough in this crowded field, notably in Chapter 3 on the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and in Chapter 4 on English gender politics.
The stress on gender proves to be particularly fruitful. The prominence of women among the slaves of Egypt led to great practical problems in enforcing legislation, and yet sensible suggestions of appointing female agents, interpreters and ‘spies’ were seemingly never adopted, in part because abolition was stereotyped as a man's role. There is a long and useful section on the Cairo Home for Freed Women Slaves (1885–1908), which inculcated the values of English domesticity but was not allowed to proselytise. Lord Cromer's opposition to the veil is ironically contrasted to his virulent and active opposition to suffragettes. The author further highlights the incipient feminist movement's intelligent demand that if ‘certain rights, liberties and freedoms’ were offered to slaves, they should also be applied to British women. Balancing this are fascinating sections on Englishwomen, many of them of an artistic disposition, who identified with the harim. They saw it as a beautiful space reserved for women, similar to the English bourgeois home, in which slaves metamorphosed rather improbably into happy servants. This ran against the grain of many other discourses, notably feminist critiques of the harim as a ‘gilded cage’, the Anti-Slavery Society's portrayal of it as a ‘dark and sinister’ institution, and sensationalist descriptions by a Muslim woman who fled to the West and converted to Christianity.
The topics of race and culture yield fewer insights. The horror of British public opinion at the existence of white women slaves in the harim, notably but not exclusively Circassian in origin, is well brought out, but is hardly novel. Somewhat more revealing is the Egyptian racial classification, in which African and Ethiopian appeared as separate categories, although the author does not delve any further into this interesting topic. There is a brief reference to divergent views of justice, defined as abolition for Britons, but seen as good treatment for slaves by their Egyptian counterparts.
The author struggles visibly with tensions between the multiple identities of the coloniser. She gives little prominence to the label ‘European’, although it loomed large in a colonial setting and rather curiously included North Americans. She does note the Italian nationality of Count Edward della Salla, charged with the repression of the slave trade in Egypt before 1882, as well as the Anti-Slavery Society's many international links, but without adequately glossing these points in terms of the identity of the ‘man (and woman) on the spot’. She rather disarmingly states that there is no sign in Foreign Office records of specifically Scottish, Irish or Welsh views of Islamic slavery, but one wonders whether this is the right place to look for them. Later on, there is a thought-provoking reference to the influences of early nineteenth-century North American radicalism and cosmopolitanism in Scottish and Irish anti-slavery circles, although this is buried in a long footnote. The absence of Wales from such debates, if indeed this was the case, is not explained.
Without really addressing the contested position of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and the related use of servile metaphors to depict the social status of Catholics, Robinson-Dunn notes that Cardinal Manning rejected Islamic slavery in 1884. However, she fails to point out that this was still four years before Pope Leo XIII officially turned the face of the Catholic Church against the peculiar institution, as tensions developed between northern and southern Catholics, with Brazil only abolishing slavery in 1888. Nor does she grasp the complexities of Cardinal Lavigerie's attitudes towards Islamic slavery, as he balanced his rhetoric of a ‘crusade’ with appeals to Muslim rulers to join his campaign to end slavery in the lands of Islam. Furthermore, the opposition between secularism and Christianity, while mentioned, is not developed.
Particularly surprising is the complete omission of the role of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in British debates over Egyptian slavery. Blunt was English, but he was a more or less lapsed-Catholic, sympathetic to Irish Home Rule and generally opposed to colonialism. He and his wife, who is fleetingly mentioned in a footnote, were living contradictions of Robinson-Dunn's contention that British attitudes towards Egyptians was “not the kind of understanding that would foster sympathy”. In addition, Blunt's Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt, not listed in the select bibliography, contains Muhammad ‘Abduh's powerful, if problematic, assault on slavery in 1882. This is especially relevant to the author's references to the khedive's well-known contention that he could not obtain a fatwa against slavery, and to British rhetoric concerning Islam's unpreparedness to embrace abolition. The author also tends to underestimate the abolitionist and proto-feminist credentials of other leading Egyptian male intellectuals, notably Qasim Amin and Ahmad Shafiq, the latter the son of a Circassian concubine.
Conversely, Robinson-Dunn does not effectively denounce Cromer's double standards over slavery, although the bare bones of the narrative are there. Slavery was one factor that served to justify the ‘veiled protectorate’, but that then made it imperative to ‘hurry slowly’ in abolishing it, in order to continue to have a pretext for a British presence. The 1894 scandal, when senior Arab members of the Legislative Council were caught buying slaves illegally, is discussed, but the author fails to understand that this scandal forced Cromer's hand, leading to the abolitionist legislation of 1895–96.
The final chapter, on Islam and Islamophilia in Britain, addresses a topic that is currently attracting much attention, and deservedly so, but the author's focus on slavery unfortunately wavers at this point. The views on servitude of Abdullah Quilliam, Manx shaykh al-Islam of Britain, are given much less prominence than his ideas on temperance, and there is no suggestion as to why he might have mysteriously disappeared. As for Dr Gerhard Leitner, founder of the Woking mosque and institute, nothing is included about his general approach to servitude in Islam, even though this survives in print. Similarly, nothing is said about Sayyid Amir Ali's increasingly racist views that slavery had led Islam to reprehensible miscegenation, nor about his reputation as an ‘Uncle Tom’ among South Asian Muslims, fortified by his long residence in England.
Above all, the author does not convincingly demonstrate her central thesis, that ideas of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Islam’ were reformulated as a result of struggles over slavery. The evidence presented suggests rather that both Britons and Egyptians repeatedly clashed in a complex debate about freedom, at a time when ideas were in a process of flux and mutation. It is much harder to determine how much the issue of slavery contributed to changes in ideas of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Islam’. As the author herself shows, there were many other controversies shaping mentalities, concerning female seclusion, female circumcision, veiling, divorce, masculinity, colonialism, racism, nationalism and so forth. In particular, she repeatedly stresses that the harim survived slavery, which might indicate that this particular elite practice was more significant in shaping attitudes in the long run.
Despite these various quibbles, Diane Robinson-Dunn has made a spirited and well-documented attempt to explore interconnections between questions of servitude, religion, and racial and national identities. She has thereby contributed to the history of both Egypt and Britain, moving the debate along, even if many thorny problems remain to be resolved.
