Egyptian elites externalized slavery onto Africa to reconcile abolitionism with their own households

Evidence

But increasing foreign pressure and changed sensibilities about cultural and political reform created a deep internal conflict over the question of slavery for many in the Ottoman Empire. Toledano writes that, by the 1870s, “patriotic, Westernized Ottomans were torn between a growing rejection of slavery and a deep attachment to their sociocultural heritage, of which they remained proud. They tried hard to reconcile the conflict between a system in which they were born and raised—often by mothers, wet nurses, nannies, and female relatives of slave origins—and the demands and principles of a foreign culture they grew to respect, wanted to acquire, and wished to be recognized by as equals.” Many Egyptians felt this conflict, which was exacerbated by the British occupation and the deepening of Egyptian nationalism. The particular geographical and cultural position of Egypt was threatened by being categorically collapsed into one of the worst examples of African slavery in the West. Looking at the presence of slaves within their own homes or in the households of friends and relatives,“they could pretend that this was where slavery actually began and that what had happened before belonged to another world—uncivilized, unruly, beyond their control.” Toledano is describing in this sentence the feelings of Ottomans, but the question of whether that other African “world,” from which many slaves came, was beyond control was problematic in the wake of Egyptian claims to the Sudan and its painful loss to the Mahdïya. And this African “world” could easily be blamed for the existence of slavery, for creating a cultureless vulnerability and lack of family structure, and even, it seemed, for going to war in order to defend the right to slavery. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 648

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on coloniality in Africa: Egyptian self-distancing from ‘African’ slavery as a defining feature of Egyptian vs Sudanese colonial positioning.
• DEEPTHINKING: The psychological mechanism of locating the origin of slavery ‘beyond control’ while benefiting from it in one’s own household is dense enough to sit with.