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Dissertation Information for Matthew Scott Hopper

NAME:
- Matthew Scott Hopper

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2006)

ADVISORS:
- Edward A. Alpers

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- James Gelvin
- Christopher Ehret
- Thomas Hinnebusch

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The African presence in Arabia: Slavery, the world economy, and the African diaspora in eastern Arabia, 1840--1940

Abstract: This dissertation examines the slave trade from East Africa to the Arabian Gulf and the role of the African diaspora in the Gulf economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this study attempts to present an analytical framework for understanding the growth of the slave trade to the Gulf in the nineteenth century and its continuation into the early twentieth century. The framework presented in the following pages is largely economic, concentrating on the role of African labor in the primary Gulf export industries in the century before oil---dates and pearls---as the region was increasingly incorporated into the global economy. This study does not attempt to resolve the ongoing debate about the extent of the Indian Ocean slave trade in terms of specific numeric estimates. However, it does present a context through which existing estimates may be judged. Neither does this study attempt to draw any sweeping conclusions about the nature of "Islamic slavery." However, it does present evidence which challenges many conventional notions about slavery in the Middle East.

This dissertation attempts to place the East African slave trade to the Gulf in the context of the expansion of the world economy. In the following chapters, I argue that the slave trade to eastern Arabia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like the Atlantic slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was influenced by wider economic processes. Most studies of slavery in the Middle East view the institution as fundamentally different from Atlantic slavery. Most importantly, enslaved populations in the Middle East are understood to have been excluded from the productive sector of regional economies---serving as soldiers, concubines, and domestics---while in the Atlantic slaves were vital to production through the plantation complex. Evidence from Eastern Arabia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicates that enslaved Africans were, in fact, vital to production of the leading export commodities in the Gulf and that export of these commodities expanded from their regional markets in this period to meet rising global demand.

MPACT Scores for Matthew Scott Hopper

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-09 08:45:14

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Students under Matthew Scott Hopper

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None