Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century (1976/1998)

The reason I read this is that it is, apparently, the best account of the Zanj Rebellion, the massive, 14-year long uprising of African slaves in ninth century Iraq. These slaves may have worked on plantations, even on sugar-growing plantations. So, ultimately, my interest was to learn more about the development of the "plantation complex," which of course would play such a big role in the colonization of the Americas. This book is considered important - it was published by an imprint of Princeton University Press; Henry Louis Gates wrote an introduction to the English translation; on the back cover, David Brion Davis, the eminent historian of slavery, blurbs it as "an extremely important book." Yet the book is also quite underwhelming. This is no reflection on the author. An immigrant to France from Tito's Jugoslavia, Popovic began work on the project in 1957, and after eight years completed his research. The French edition came out in 1976. My hunch is that simply collecting the relatively sparse evidence on the Rebellion was a painstaking task in and of itself. The work is underwhelming because it amounts largely to a literal blow-by-blow account of the long rebellion. There is very little analysis here, which the author acknowledges. The whole text amounts to fewer than 160 pages, including footnotes. The closest Popovic comes to addressing the question that most interests me - about the nature of the slavery - is when he discusses the conditions in southern Iraq, especially around Basra. There was lots of unclaimed "dead land" - which farmers had abandoned to move to the cities, and which has become covered in a layer of salt. The government offered incentives to whomever was willing to reclaim the dead land and put it to use. Basra was the center of capital looking for opportunities and a major slave market. So, while Popovic uses the term "plantations" only once, all of the ingredients seemed to be in place for plantation-style slavery. Sugarcane, I believe, had already made its way from India, where it was domesticated, to the Fertile Crescent. Popovic suggests, albeit only in passing, that the Zanj Rebellion may have put an end to the development of plantations in the Abbasid world. Only when European crusaders appeared on the scene would the plantation complex be revived and begin its fateful movement across the Mediterranean, onto the Atlantic islands (Canaries, Sao Thome), and then into the New World.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (1987)

This book, by one of the preeminent historians of Iberian exploration and colonization, significantly deepened my understanding of the centuries-long background to Columbus and da Gama. The process was multi-sided and dynamic - first the Catalans took the lead in conquering Majorca in 1229; later Castile, in concert with Genoese financiers and navigators, came to the fore, especially with the slow conquest of the Canaries from the mid-fourteenth to late fifteenth centuries, which became the key launching pad for Columbus. As with the English domination and conquest of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland at about the same time (see the previous review), this process also involved many different actors - nobles, royal houses, Popes, Catholic orders - and motives. The book describes the "spectacular" emergence of sugar plantations on Madeira and some of the Canaries in the 1450s, and the further innovation, from the 1460s on the Cape Verde islands, of plantations worked by slave labor. One of the most fascinating aspects was the European struggle to understand and categorize the indigenous "primitive" Canarians - whether they were noble innocents or barbaric savages. In many ways, then, the European encounter with the peoples of the Americas were prefigured on this East Atlantic archipelago more than a century before Columbus. Reading this book made me want to read much more about Europe's dynamism of the high middle ages and reread books such as Thomas Ertman's The Rise of Leviathan (1997) and Robert Bartlett's seminal The Making of Europe (1994). I'd be curious to learn more, for example, about the state-building of Aragon-Catalan and of Castile. This book mentions the Reconquista but doesn't leave the impression that it played a predominant role in these states' dynamism.