"Montana’s book will be crucial to all who wish to understand the decision to ban slavery in Tunisia in 1846. Its broad scope ranges from the machinations of France, Britain, and the Ottomans in North Africa to the trans-Saharan and Mediterranean trades and the internal struggles over slavery in Tunisia, citing travelers’ accounts, statistics, consular records, Muslim court decisions, and the situations of individual slaves to provide a nuanced account of a key step in the global abolition process."--George Michael La Rue, Clarion University

"A fascinating topic that has the potential to draw in readers interested not only in Tunisia, but also in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and international law."--Allan Christelow, author of Algerians without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society


Tunisia is known for being the first Muslim country to abolish slavery during the modern period.

Although Ahmed Bey, the country’s ruler in the mid-nineteenth century, was morally opposed to slavery, he did not have the broad support of the citizenry to enact reforms. Even religious leaders were against change, pointing to Islamic law’s precedent for slave ownership. Yet Bey realized that increased European intervention throughout North Africa threatened Tunisian independence and thus embraced abolition as a progressive reform measure to safeguard its integrity and sovereignty.

In this groundbreaking work, Ismael Montana fully explicates the complexity of Tunisian society and culture and reveals how abolition was able to occur in an environment hostile to such change. He reveals how European capitalism, political pressure, and evolving social dynamics throughout the western Mediterranean region helped shape this seismic abolition process. The result is a study that reassesses the impact of the broader transformations of the late eighteenth century on black slavery throughout North Africa and the Mediterranean lands of Islam.



Ismael M. Montana, assistant professor of history at Northern Illinois University, is the coeditor of Slavery, Islam and Diaspora.

No Sample Chapter Available

“A fine history of the end of the slave trade and, ultimately, slavery itself in Ottoman Tunisia.”
--CHOICE; Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

“Montana’s argument that Islamic legal norms deeply shaped Ahmad Bey’s abolitionist thinking is both entirely convincing and fascinating… a pioneering study of the religious legitimization of abolitionism, this book has shed new light on the central importance of debates on slavery in the rise of Islamic reformism, a theme that deserves further study.”
--The Journal of North African Studies

“Nicely illustrates the transit of people and ideas that affected the corner of the North African coast while providing a deep analysis of slavery, abolition, and its aftermath.”
--Journal of African History

“The IM Montana study is to no doubt one of the ring members of a reconstruction of a social history of the Ottoman Maghreb.”
--Journal of Muslim world and the Mediterranean

This is a succinct account of the abolition of slavery in Tunisia and as such is a very welcome addition to the library of slavery studies of the Islamic world in general, and the Ottoman Empire in particular.
--American Historical Review

Contributes to our understanding of the networks that transported slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean coast, with a focus on early to mid-nineteenth-century Tunisia.
--The Historian