From dates to oil, the Arab project of slavery

In April 1931, brothers Abdulaziz and Abdulrahman bin Abdul Latif Al-Muna' wrote to Nasir bin Mohammed Al-Mani', informing him that they had sold five Sudanese women in Doha. The women had been brought from Dammam in Saudi Arabia, and were sold to a man named Jum'a Al-Somali for 1,000 rupees and $135.

Nasir, who resided in Bahrain, had entrusted the brothers with part of his capital to pursue a trade venture. In their letter, the brothers explained that they had closed the deal quickly and for less than anticipated because the enslaved women feigned illness whenever they were displayed for sale. However, Jum'a, who owned a car, said he would buy the women and take them away. Eager to finalize the sale and rid themselves of the burden, the brothers quickly transferred ownership to Jum'a.

The detail of the “car” stood out to me while reading this story in “Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” by Matthew S. Hopper. The scene juxtaposes tradition and modernity, destitution alongside ostentation, backwardness alongside consumption of technology, and the cunning of the master against the struggle of the slave. The automobile—an invention of the great white master—carried everyone along.

This is just one of many accounts Hopper uses to document the prevalence and expansion of the slave trade, particularly in the Arab coastal emirates stretching from Muscat to Basra. The trade grew more brutal from the mid-19th century until the 1940s, before rebranding in the post–World War II era as labor sponsorship.

The Kafala System, a sponsor-based migration system that has historically given employers in Gulf countries near-total control over their migrant employees' lives and legal status, is a modernized form of enslavement.

In 1943, a woman named Fatima bint Mohammed arrived at the British political agency in Bahrain to report abuse by her enslaver. Originally from the Zanzibar Islands—now part of Tanzania with semi-autonomous governance—Fatima had been abducted by Arab traders, among thousands of children taken from East Africa.

She was first sold to a family in Dammam, then resold to another woman in Bahrain. Fatima told British authorities that her new mistress beat her daily with a shoe and a whip. The report noted signs of torture and abuse on her body. British authorities issued a manumission certificate, formally granting her freedom.

The Slavery of Dates and Pearls

Fatima’s story—and those of countless other men and women enslaved in the Arab coastal emirates—dates back centuries. Since the 16th century, two main routes for the slave trade emerged, both originating in Africa.

The first and older route began in East Africa, where the Sultanate of Oman occupied Zanzibar and other islands, as well as coastal regions and territory inland.

Arab traders from the peninsula would lure African children with dates stuffed with a sedative. Once asleep, the children were carried onto boats that transported them to Muscat or Dubai, the historical capital of both the slave trade and piracy. From there, the slaves were sold to merchants in Basra or the coastal emirates. This trade route even extended as far as India.

The second route was the transatlantic slave trade, where African captives were transported across the Atlantic to labor in European colonies in North and South America.

The two systems differed in culture and structure. Under Islamic law, slaves on the eastern route were primarily used as consumerist symbols by wealthy elites, with a higher demand for female slaves. A slave’s value increased if they could read, write, play music, or sing—skills that reflected the social status and wealth of their owner.

This sharply contrasted with the Atlantic system, where millions of slaves were forcibly transported to the New World to work in agriculture and build new colonies under European law and Christian doctrine.

After the United States declared independence, American trader Alexander Hamilton arrived in Muscat in the late 18th century, marking the first commercial voyage between the Arab coast and Boston. He returned with a variety of goods—including dates, which sparked a culinary and economic revolution in the US throughout the 19th century. The date trade coincided with America’s growing appetite for pearls from the region.

By the early 19th century, trade between the US and Arab coastal cities like Muscat and Basra was flourishing. Dates were marketed as the “fruit of Christ” from the groves of the “Eden of the East,” and pearls became a status symbol among bourgeois American women.

In response to US demand, the coastal emirates expanded palm cultivation and pearl diving to increase exports, in exchange for, irony of ironies, American kerosene and petroleum byproducts.

This shift altered the dynamics of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Coastal Arabs began abducting and purchasing more Africans—mostly Muslims—to force them into date farming and pearl diving. Despite the shared religion, Arab Muslims captured and enslaved African Muslims, shattering any notion of Muslim unity or solidarity.

Wealthy families who profited from this trade used enslaved labor to amass fortunes and presented themselves to British officers, American traders, and Christian missionaries as the region’s rightful authorities. By the end of the 19th century, Britain formally recognized some of these families’ power—transforming slavers into future rulers.

Britain officially banned the slave trade in 1833 and tasked its Gulf military bases with intercepting Arab ships carrying enslaved Africans. But these campaigns were largely unsuccessful. The trade flourished, continuing into the 1940s.

Even when British forces liberated captives, some were re-enslaved and sold again.

The lucky few were sent to Mumbai or American missionary schools in Bahrain, where they were converted to Christianity and taught English. Those who couldn’t escape endured conditions worse even than those permitted under Islamic slave laws.

In one case from 1921, Aisha bint Khalifa Al Nahyan—sister of Abu Dhabi’s seventh ruler, Zayed bin Khalifa (d. 1909)—freed her slaves before her death and asked her son, Saif bin Mohammed, to formally document the manumissions. But when Sultan bin Zayed Al Nahyan came to power in 1922, he ignored the certificates and re-enslaved the freed individuals, declaring them property of the Al Nahyan family.

One of them, a child, escaped to the British political office, complaining that he was forced to dive for pearls despite his age. But Sheikh Sultan’s men recaptured him and returned him by force to continue diving during the season.

Slavery in the Gulf did not end due to British intervention or the kindness of Gulf rulers. It ended because the US, starting in the 1920s, began developing date cultivation in Southern California. Cultured pearl production also made its way to California from Japan. Meanwhile, drought and disease ravaged Arab date palms in the 1920s, opening the global market to American dates.

Now there was no longer a need to enslave African children to farm dates or dive for pearls.

The Oil Years

A few years after World War II, oil exploration and extraction began in the Arab coastal emirates—now granted independence by Britain after decades of protection from Ottoman and Saudi influence. Britain handed them over, neatly packaged, to Roosevelt and the United States.

With oil came a need for a new type of labor—not from East Africa this time, but from middle-class professionals: engineers, doctors, teachers—those recruited under the kafala system as hirelings, not partners.

In the oil age, just as in the age of dates and pearls, Gulf feudal elites capitalized on their relationship with the major Western empires, first Britain, then the United States, to consolidate power and preserve their economic dominance. They also invested in crafting a modern image that suggested a fusion of tradition and modernity; a feudal economic system talking about genetic modification and artificial intelligence.

This carefully managed image often belied a persistent reality, a contradiction perfectly captured in the stark tableau of the Al-Muna' brothers a century ago, who sold enslaved women for $135 next to a modern car designed for driving through the desert.

Today, American and Western conservatives admire this Gulf model.

During his recent visits, Donald Trump repeatedly said, “It's really incredible what you’ve done. You achieved a modern miracle.”

He wasn’t referring to the kind of Italian marble in the Qatari ruler’s palace. He meant the Arab realization of the dream that millions of white Americans salivate over: a labor structure resembling slavery, enabled by AI.

For the American right, the Civil War—which ended with the end of slavery—left a deep wound. All their political projects and maneuvers are efforts to restore that world, one where a white man sits on a cotton plantation sipping lemonade as he watches his slaves in the field.

That era is gone, but today, they look enviously at the Arab coastal states. Those Arabs have achieved the dream many white Americans still long for. The America 2025 plan proposed by the right aims to fundamentally reshape immigration and naturalization laws, creating a system modeled on today’s Gulf countries.

This includes tying visas to employment and “sponsorship,” and the granting of US citizenship based on “merit” rather than years of residency and tax contributions. This mirrors the “golden visa” and selective naturalization offered by some Gulf states to artists, businessmen, or academics, while millions of migrant workers remain without rights.

Some argue that the Gulf’s stance against the Arab Spring was driven by fear of political Islam. But the reality is more complex. The Arab Spring represented a resurgence of ideas around self-rule and independence. Arab people, especially the middle-class elite, asserted their humanity, their freedom, and their capacity for coexistence outside feudal structures and Hashemite claims to rule.

To the Emirates of the Arab coast, these liberationist ideas posed an existential threat. Feudalism is the essence of their political DNA.

To ensure their own stability, they have a vested interest in limiting political outcomes to two untenable models. The first is an authoritarian system that merges Islamic rule with feudal authority, permitting a managed rotation of power among elites but never a genuine democratic transition—a pattern observable in the case of Al-Shara and Jolani. The second, and more devastating, model is state fragmentation, achieved by systematically dismantling the foundations of civil society, erasing collective memory, and eliminating any potential for a unifying civil peace or shared imagination, a process already realized in the cases of Libya and Sudan.

In this effort, the coastal emirates have methodically supported civil wars, institutional collapse, and the return to primitive tribal and feudal governance—reminding everyone that they are, ultimately, slaves to one master.

And for those who dare rebel, economic punishment and starvation remain ever-ready tools of discipline.