Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Wars of expansion, and trade with Europe and Africa, did produce a fairly constant flow of slaves, but in dramatic contrast to the ancient world, very few of them ended up laboring in farms or workshops. Most ended up as decoration in the houses of the rich or, increasingly over time, as soldiers. Over the course of the Abbasid dynasty (750–1258 AD), in fact, the empire came to rely, for its military forces, almost exclusively on Mamluks, highly trained military slaves captured or purchased from the Turkish steppes. The policy of employing slaves as soldiers was maintained by all of the Islamic successor states, including the Mughals, and culminated in the famous Mamluk sultanate in Egypt in the thirteenth century, but historically, it was unprecedented.65 In most times and places, slaves are, for obvious reasons, the very last people to be allowed anywhere near weapons. Here it was systematic. But, in a strange way, it also made perfect sense: if slaves are, by definition, people who have been severed from society, this was the logical consequence of the wall created between society and the medieval Islamic state.