The Architecture of Servitude: From the Arab Slave Trade to the Kafala System in the Middle East
"I was looking for something else on Wajeeh Lion's Substack (I found it: you'll receive it soon) when I stumbled across this. It's an excellent description of the deep historical roots of the Gulf states' quasi-slave labor system. For those of you who'd like to know what this looks like, I've been meaning for a while to share this video by an adventurous American YouTuber who stumbled into a Dubai labor camp, but I wanted to write something to put it in context. The context Wajeeh offers here is far more learned than what I planned to write. I knew the abuse was terrible, and knew it had ancient roots, but I wasn't familiar with many of these details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22_kkP6O7bc"
The history of unfree labor in the Arabian Peninsula and the broader Muslim world spans well over a thousand years. Far from a forgotten relic of the past, this history forms the foundational pillar of the region’s modern socio-economic, domestic, and political structures. While the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was primarily engineered to fuel industrial …
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