Spencer Collection, the New York Public Library. “Three black cannibals swimming in a silver sea; f. 77v” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 20, 2025.
In 869 CE, thousands of East African agricultural slaves rebelled in the southern Iraqi city of Basra and formed an independent state that fell to the Abbasids fourteen years later. A generation or two after, a small collective of Muslim philosophers based in Basra composed a revolutionary, anti-slavery treatise. In this lecture, Kristina Richardson will trace the development of abolitionist philosophies from the ninth-century slave revolt to the tenth-century treatise and beyond, offering an original excavation of medieval abolitionist thought. Kristina Richardson is professor of history and Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2022). She also co-edited the Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She is currently writing a book called Black Basra on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq.
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