The New Coordinates of the Slave Trade in Late Antiquity: Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Near East

The outlines of the slave trade in the Roman Empire are well-known.  The process of military conquest, in tandem with the precocious economic development of the imperial heartland, made Roman Italy a voracious consumer of human chattel.  The trade flowed inward and westward, a vast movement of people whose traces are still visible in a range of documents.  Likewise, the slave trade in the central middle ages has been effectively mapped by modern historians.  The trade headed east, towards the rich markets of the Islamic Caliphate.  The work of McCormick demonstrates that the Carolingians exported slaves from northern and eastern Europe in exchange for the commodities of the Islamic world, and it has long been known that Arab merchants, in the wake of the Arabic conquests, quickly and effectively began to exploit interior Africa as a southern source of the slave supply.  The coordinates of the slave trade in the period between the high Roman Empire and the early Islamic caliphate are uncharted.  This paper reconstructs the lineaments of the slave trade in these pivotal centuries, ca. 300-600 CE.  Drawing on a range of little-known literary and papyrological evidence, the paper argues that both the eastern flow of the trade and the exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa preceded the rise of the Islamic empire.  The evidence suggests that the Romans had already established a vigorous trans-Saharan land route for the slave trade and more importantly built a commercial network flowing down the Nile, connecting Ethiopia, the Red Sea, and Alexandria, the gateway to the Mediterranean.  This reorientation of the slave trade is made highly plausible by the new consensus that the eastern Mediterranean in the late Roman period was home to a vibrant commercial economy.  The slave trade out of Africa must be backdated into the late Roman era.