Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

NY: Oxford University Press, 1992. reprint. Softcover. Very Good/None. Softcover in pictorial wraps, 184 pages, coloe illustrations. From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millennia. Bright, clean copy. Record # 383466