Carolina Weatherall

This past Wednesday, Professor Kristina Richardson, a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar and faculty member at the University of Virginia, delivered a talk examining the Indian-Ocean slave trade that began in the seventh century.

Richardson’s research has been met with praise—she received the Dan David Prize for her monograph “Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration.” In her lecture, Richardson shared her research on the writings of non-elite groups in the Middle East during the premodern and medieval periods.

“In our historiography of the Middle East, we’ve really cut off everything below [South of Ethiopia] as irrelevant to our own history, even to human history,” Richardson said.

Her lecture in Kresge Auditorium shed light on the understudied history of racial capitalism and slavery that existed outside and before the trans-Atlantic slave trade. She focused on the Makua people from the Zanj region, which is on the southeast coast of Africa.

“We know the word for Ethiopian, we know the word for Somali, we know the word for people of particular cities.… We have been able to particularize these broad categories; with the Zanj we haven’t done that in Arabic studies at all,” Richardson said.

One of the central historical points of Richardson’s lecture was a dive into the Zanj Rebellion—a slave revolt that occurred in the Abbasid Caliphate in 869. Her research included declassified spy satellite imaging of the fields on the eastern bank of the Tigris River that the enslaved and freedman Zanj people worked on; these large areas of land have been left untouched for centuries.

“It’s a large area inside of Iraq and Iran that these men and women worked on.… 25,000 men could move 50,000 pounds of soil a day,” Richardson said. “The work represented nearly a decade of work.”

Richardson explained the scale of the work done by enslaved people at that time as a way to break away from the commonly held belief that slavery on a massive scale started during the colonial period.

Richardson explained that her research aims to address the lack of scholarship and sources readily available about certain, usually underprivileged, groups of people. In finding sources, she challenges the notion that non-elite groups have no history or culture worth remembering.

“And while we did not have a premodern history of [Makua people of the Zanj region], I think we can start thinking about them as being a people with somewhat of a recorded history,” Richardson said.

According to Richardson, historical scholarship around non-elites is vital because history considered canonical is often a product of or related to these understudied groups. Despite the immense amount of research around the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Richardson said there is not enough analysis on the pre-existing enslaved people that would continue to be exported after the discovery of the Americas.

“The idea is that probably when the Portuguese had arrived in the African continent in the 1500s, they were tapping into very old systems of trade,” Richardson said, “It is surprising that [the Portuguese] were extracting [from] the same populations that had been extracted for so very long,”

Richardson emphasized how the erasure of other’s history is ultimately a loss to our own history and understanding of the world. Her interest in non-elite groups from the premodern Islamic world contributes to the explanations of how the world became what it is now and reshapes our understanding of early modern slavery.

Faculty members from more than just the history department came to learn about Richardson’s work.

“The major takeaway is that these systems of the world that we have set up don’t always correspond to the way things actually work,” Caitlin DiMartino, visiting assistant professor of art history, said when asked about her takeaway from the lecture.

Reflecting on the lecture, attendee Andrew Tran ’26 spoke about the need to remember the history of the underprivileged.

“It is interesting to see this other side of scholarly work where you are pioneering your own branch of knowledge. It also contributes to today’s aim to create a decolonial history that looks at everyone, especially those who are underprivileged,” Tran said.