The 1839 Nile expedition’s leaders restrained enslavement because Muhammad Ali had forbidden it.

Evidence

But the exchange deteriorated when the tribe shortly thereafter mobilized to fight the soldiers, who quickly killed a number of them: … We saw their leaders signal for them to escape from us, and we chased them off right up to their huts; where we took eight of their women and girls and a large measure of their embroidered fabrics. But we hastily freed the young girls because we realized that enslavement went against the intentions of His Highness our leader, and we gave to these women some gifts and explained to them that we wanted them to treat us as we treated them. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 202

Categorization

• XREF: This restraint-on-enslavement detail helps chart exactly how Egyptian colonial practice on the Sudan frontier differed from European slaving norms.