ABSTRACT
Abolitionists who hoped and in their various ways worked for the eventual ending of slavery in North Africa, and the trans-Saharan trade that supplied it with newcomers, seemed to do so under the common delusion that their goals would be achieved by single, instantaneous and all-embracing decrees from appropriate potentates. It seems hardly to have occurred to many would-be abolishers that no firman, whether from the Pasha of Tripoli, the Bey of Tunis, the Sultan of Morocco, or even from the Ottoman SultanCaliph himself, could or would actually halt at a stroke practices sanctioned by time, custom and Islam, and supported by the strongest social and economic arguments.1 Thus when some cautious Ottoman abolitionist measures were at last decreed in the late 1840s, the results were slight, only partly effective at best, and open to general abuse and evasion, not least by officials of the state. Such measures were often a source of evident disappointment and frustration to British consular officials and others in North Africa who had deluded themselves into believing that the supposedly absolutist Ottoman state could readily command absolute obedience even in places as remote as Tripoli, Benghazi, the Fezzan and the central Sahara. They were not to know that their ultimate abolitionist goals would not be achieved in their own nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth not as thoroughly as they might have hoped. For if the processes of ending slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire took as long as they did, it is not surprising that such practices were hardly eradicated from the remoter parts of the Sahara and its Sahelian and Sudanic fringes even with the completion of their French, Italian or partial Spanish military conquests in the 1930s.2
