Lecture Freeing the last Muslim slaves in Mediterranean Europe and North America The ambitious and forgotten policy of a Moroccan Sultan in the second half of the 18th century Add to calendar 2025-03-19 11:00 2025-03-19 12:30 Europe/Rome Freeing the last Muslim slaves in Mediterranean Europe and North America Sala del Consiglio Villa Salviati - Castle YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Mar 19 2025 11:00 - 12:30 CET Sala del Consiglio, Villa Salviati - Castle Organised by Department of History Professor M'hamed Oualdi (EUI History Department) will give a talk in the framework of the History Department Monthly Research Meetings. From the 1750s to the late 1780s, the sultan of Morocco, Muhammad Ibn Abdallah, implemented a policy to ransom a large number of enslaved Muslim men and women and a few Moroccan Jews across Mediterranean Europe (from Spain to Italy). This policy became more and more ambitious to the point that by 1777, the Moroccan sultan advocated for the whole liberation of all the women and the eldest across the Mediterranean, be they Christians or Muslims. We will explore the rationale and the history of such a pre-abolitionist policy. Why such an ambitious policy and its Islamic legal foundations have rarely been considered to write a global history of slavery and abolition?