Thank you to those who have booked for this event, which has now sold out.
You are invited to join us at Elsing Hall, NR20 3DX on Friday 14th November when Justin Marozzi will be talking about his new book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
The book, long-listed for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction 2025, is an ambitious and revealing new history of slavery in the Islamic world – the culture, characters, trade and geography of a story far wider than the shorter-lived Atlantic slave trade, spanning 1,400 years and several empires, from Baghdad to the Black Sea.
Marozzi has travelled extensively in the regions of the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, Caucasus and the Sahel, and specifically for this book to Libya, Turkey, Oman, Qatar, Mali and Mauritania, where he spoke to people today who had been enslaved and either escaped or had been rescued and freed.
Captives and Companions presents the riveting human drama of those caught up in one of history’s most overlooked stories.
The talk commences at 6pm, followed by drinks.
Justin Marozzi has spent most of his professional life living and working in the Muslim world. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society, he is a Senior Research Fellow in Journalism and the Popular Understanding of History at Buckingham University and an advisor to the Middle East Association. His previous books include South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara (2001), the bestselling Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization (2019), Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (2004) and The Arab Conquests: The Spread of Islam and the First Caliphates (2021). Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (2014) won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and was praised by the judges as ‘a truly monumental achievement’.
