Slavery in Libya formed part of wider Saharan and Mediterranean systems of captivity and coerced labor. Caravans carried enslaved people north through routes linking the central Sahara with Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Within the region, enslaved people were used in households, agriculture, military service, and sexual servitude; some were also sold onward across the Mediterranean and into other Ottoman territories.

The end of legal slavery was gradual rather than a single event. An Ottoman prohibition on the African slave trade was extended to Tripolitania and Benghazi in 1857, but enforcement varied and did not immediately emancipate everyone already held in slavery. Ottoman officials, foreign diplomatic pressure, local slaveholders, and enslaved people seeking freedom all shaped the uneven decline of the institution through the late Ottoman period and into Italian colonial rule.[1]

Because suppression of slave trading, withdrawal of legal recognition, individual emancipation, and the persistence of coercive labor occurred at different times, historians do not assign Libya one uncontested abolition date. This layered chronology also distinguishes slavery from forced colonial labor that followed under Italian rule.[2]

References

↑ Ş. Hargal, “Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911),” Middle Eastern Studies (2024).

↑ “Tripolitania under Ottoman Rule,” in The Making of Modern Libya (2011).