**SHORTLISTED FOR 2025 THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION** A startling exploration of
slavery in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the present Slavery in the Islamic world
has a long diverse and controversial history. Captives and Companions is a brilliant synthesis
of history and contemporary reportage that 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 has 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.
