Abstract
This article examines the testimonies prepared for manumission certificates issued by British authorities in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf. Based on the dataset on which the author is currently working, it examines the category of “African” recorded by the colonial record keepers to distinguish between “Africans” who were born in Africa and those born in the Gulf who were also categorized as “African” by the British officers who interviewed them. Those who were born locally from enslaved parents were called muwallad and it is widely regarded that the masters treated them better than those newly enslaved. Such discourse about muwallad is called “the myth of mild slavery.” This article analyzes the dataset both quantitatively and qualitatively to clarify the experience of “African” muwallad in order to shed light on the diverse experiences of the enslaved “African” population in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf.
