British and Egyptian views of slavery rested on opposed domestic assumptions.

Evidence

The Anti-Slavery Convention may have provided a clear date from which the trade in slaves was no longer permissible, but it left open wideranging and important questions about the nature of the trade in Egypt. It also created a very thick wall: on one side stood the British officials of the occupation, who were quickly coming to believe that a proslavery solidarity existed among the Muslims of Egypt, and that any Egyptian who supported the officials of the slave trade bureaus would be considered a traitor by other Egyptians. On the other side of the wall stood the majority of Egyptians, who saw slaves as closely connected to their households and often treated them as part of their families, and who believed that the more gentle domestic bondage of Egypt actually benefited the slaves themselves. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 659

Categorization

• XREF: The Egypt household-slavery gap versus British abolitionist moral framework parallels the reader’s broader Egyptian-versus-Sudanese coloniality comparison; also connects to domestic/privacy themes in A Midwife’s Tale.