Hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved in Egypt.

Evidence

Walz asks, “If it is true that as many as 800,000 Africans were forcibly settled in the country during the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries, why is there so little ‘African’ imprint on the general population?” The purpose of this book is not to identify a bio- logical imprint of black slaves in Egypt (for how could it be proven that such an imprint exists?) but instead to reveal other imprints: how deeply the relationship with the Sudan and the Sudanese affected Egyptian nationalism and cultural identity. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 112

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the demographic mystery of 800,000 enslaved Africans leaving little genetic imprint.

Related

• Up to 800,000 enslaved Africans settled in Egypt with little demographic trace (similarity 0.92)
• Nineteenth-century Egypt likely held only twenty to thirty thousand black slaves (similarity 0.87)
• Egypt’s nineteenth-century slave population numbered between twenty and thirty thousand (similarity 0.85)
• Slavery’s legacy underpinned Egyptian nationalist discourse about the Sudan (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian defenses of slavery glossed over the Sudanese slave trade’s harshness (similarity 0.83)
• Egyptian writers ranked Sudanese tribes on a racial scale of savagery. (similarity 0.83)
• Most Egyptian slaves were single household domestics embedded in intimate families. (similarity 0.82)
• Elite Egyptian households absorbed Sudanese slaves so thoroughly that their origins became bedtime folklore (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian antislavery debate conflated African and Circassian slave experience. (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian slavery discourse conflated African slaves with Circassian ones (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptians blamed the Sudanese ‘African world’ for slavery’s existence. (similarity 0.82)
• Slavery’s legacy is central to the Egyptian-Sudanese colonial relationship (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian intellectuals defended Islamic slavery as inherently milder than Western slavery. (similarity 0.82)
• African slavery was treated entirely differently from Circassian slavery in Egypt (similarity 0.81)
• Slave-descended Sudanese were deemed too lowly to speak for the nation (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Arab slave traders extracted roughly 17 million people from Africa over nine centuries #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 460
• Egyptians blamed the Sudanese ‘African world’ for slavery’s existence. #expands (0.50) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 648
• Slave origins determined which language hierarchies they occupied in Egypt #expands (0.50)
• Sudanese slaves in Egypt were caricatured as cartoons and comic characters #exemplifies (0.40) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 787