IOR/R/15/1/206

The volume contains correspondence related to manumission applications made by slaves at the Political Agency at Bahrain. A total of seventy-six individual cases for manumission are dealt with in the file. Cases generally follow a set pattern, beginning with the slave’s manumission statement, followed by correspondence between Residency and Agency staff relating to the case until its conclusion.

The majority are straightforward cases of manumission, where the grounds for granting freedom were clear according the guidelines for manumission. Correspondence from the Bahrain Political Agency noted instances where the slave’s master had not turned up at the Agency to claim their slave back, which was taken as an assumption by Agency staff that the slave could be manumitted. A small number of cases in the file are more protracted in their nature, and reveal some of the complexities of slavery in the region, during a period when the pearling industry was in steep decline:

• Subject 19, beginning folio 131: A manumission request from an individual who was not a slave, but was a pearl diver who found himself transferred from one merchant to another in lieu of a debt that one could not pay to the other. The diver, unhappy with his working conditions, had absconded to Dubai after the transfer and, according to rumours in Dubai, had committed two acts of theft there;
• Subject 22, beginning folio 197: An Abyssinian who claimed that two of his female relations were kidnapped while in Ethiopia [Abyssinia] and sold on at Sharjah. The complexities of the case revolve around the individual’s protracted search for his relations, and whether the two women were slaves, or whether they were legitimately married to their masters, and hence free;
• Subject 28, beginning folio 270: A case relating to an eight-year-old girl who was sold as a slave in 1937 in Dubai, and whose father alerted the British Agency at Bahrain. British staff identified four potential culprits (buyer, seller, broker, dhow captain); much of the case correspondence relates to British officials’ discussions on the most appropriate form of punishment (imprisonment, fines, deportation) for each of the guilty parties.