STUDY MEDIEVAL HISTORY

“And sometimes Jewish and Christian slave ownership can be construed by Muslim authorities as a sign of Jews or Christians being too haughty, or there could be a crackdown on their slave owning as a way to reassert a social order, for example. And in slave people could sometimes use that law to convert to Islam if they have an owner who's non-Muslim and compel their owner to sell them.”

“So in both Islamic and Jewish law, like, a slave owner owns the body of the enslaved person. And so, you know, the slaves do not have many rights. They can be bought and sold in perpetuity. Slaves are due a certain amount of, like, daily maintenance, like, sort of bare provisions for the necessities of life, food and drink, sort of a minimum amount of clothing, a sleeping blanket, for example.”

“The regime that Tokugawa establishes, and which is run by his descendants, endures for two and a half centuries. So right the way up until the middle of the 19th century. And throughout that entire period, Japan remains at peace. So you've had 200 years of kind of savage war, warlords tearing chunks out of each other, and then you have two and a half centuries of stability and order.”

“Throughout this period of peace, the samurai are effectively functioning as bureaucrats, as civilians, but they never give up their military status. The shogunate is always casting itself as a military regime. And the grander you are as a samurai, the better your birth, the more you are expected to kind of cosplay as a lord from the era of the warring states.”

“And so the slave trader in the period that I study, it mainly appears as a diffuse capillary network in which small numbers of enslaved people are parts of mixed cargoes, and they're sent with handlers through a series of ports until they reach their final destination. This capillary network could stretch all the way to India if you're a merchant in Cairo.”

“The thing about the samurai, and this is what makes them different, say, from other very mythologized classes of warrior, like Vikings, say, or the Knights of Medieval Christendom. These are medieval warriors who actually outlast the Middle Ages. And I think that this is why in the West, as well as I would guess in Japan, they're aesthetic, the sense of them as having kind of moral codes, their vibe, can actually seem much more attuned to contemporary culture.”

“I think the important thing I want to underscore is that both in Islam, both in Jewish culture and religion, like slave owners tell themselves stories of good and bad slave owners. And so they really, and this is important because they never arrive, I don't think, at a critique of slavery as an institution, because they are focused on like the problem is what slavery has done badly. And that unscrupulous men don't follow the laws of slavery like they should.”

“And so even though men can be exploited sexually and boys can as well, it breaks down that women and girls are the ones who were exploited sort of most of the time. And so this is the way that sort of the experience of slavery is most sort of shaped by the gender of a person.”

“So what does the Geniza provide? It provides something of you from the bottom up, I would say, so we get more glimpses of everyday life. For the period between, let's call it 1000 to 1250, which is a period of a caliphate we can talk about, it's a period of the Crusades, it's a period of intense global interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The Geniza provide really uncommon evidence for this period.”

“In the Jewish context, we mainly see a form of enumition. That's the outright freeing of a person, in which you give them a deed of enumition. The deed says, you are now free. You belong to yourself. You are free to join the Jewish community if you wish, and to adopt a new name amongst the Jews.”

“And I think that this in turn underlies a further paradox about the standing of the Samurai in the imagination, which is that on the one hand, they are indelibly Japanese. They are up there with geisha and with tea ceremonies and sumo and all that kind of thing as absolutely kind of A-list markers of Japanese culture. A samurai is Japan.”

“And the title Shogun. So Shogun is an ancient title, isn't it? Or at least in its full version, it's an ancient title. And it's basically a great general or warlord who subdues barbarians, isn't that right?”