Captives and Companions
  • Published: 3 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141997667
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560

Captives and Companions

A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

Formats & editions
Hardback
7 Oct 2025
EBook
3 Jul 2025
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A startling exploration of slavery in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the present

Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, complex and controversial history. Captives and Companions is a brilliant synthesis of history and contemporary reportage, which brings to life the voices of the enslaved in stories of eighth-century concubines and ninth-century revolts, thirteenth-century slave soldiers who established dynastic rule over Egypt, Syria and Iraq, eighteenth-century corsairs and twentieth century
pearl divers in the Gulf. It also includes first-hand accounts of this legacy in the twenty-first century, including the depredations of Daesh and continuing hereditary slavery in Mali and Mauritania.

Justin Marozzi traces the extraordinary variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, which ranged from agricultural labour and domestic toil to elite concubinage, guardianship of sacred spaces, political leadership and even military command. He shows how Africa bore the brunt of the demand for slave labour, fuelled throughout the nineteenth century by expanding global markets and commodity chains. Slavers plied African coasts, traders raided inland for human cargo, and millions were marched across the Sahara into captivity. Meanwhile, North African corsairs turned the Mediterranean into a slave-raiding ‘free-for-all’ between Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Taking the reader on an extraordinary historical journey from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea, this is the riveting human drama of those caught up in one of history’s most remarkable overlooked stories.
  • Published: 3 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141997667
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
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Praise for Captives and Companions

A bold, brilliant and timely history that confronts one of the most neglected and uncomfortable subjects in global history. Justin Marozzi brings to life the complexity and humanity of the Islamic world’s entanglement with slavery using an extraordinary range of sources, across more than a millennium and across sweeping geographies. Not just a mesmerising book, but a profoundly important one too

Peter Frankopan, author of <i>The Silk Roads: A New History of the World</i>

A remarkably humane work, written in urbane and polished prose. A rare combination of the erudite and the adventurous, the author... provides first-person glimpses into contemporary slavery in Mali, Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania. Marozzi has once again made a meaningful and enjoyable contribution to historical debate

Bartle Bull, Literary Review

An unsentimental unveiling of a subject that has long been shrouded in scholarly purdah...An elegant and ambitious synthesis, serving up a scintillating compendium of lives.. .Gliding through the ages, Marozzi's prose recalls an older tradition of history writing - the effortless fluidity of a John Julius Norwich of Jan Morris. Reading him one thinks of Tintoretto: vast canvases, mannered style, high drama, narrative drive

Pratinav Anil, The Times

Well written ... important and well-researched ... Marozzi is able both to redress the balance and to draw very effectively on recent scholarship. A richly impressive book

Jeremy Black, Nuova Antologia Militare (NAM)
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