An exhibition co-organised by EUI History Profesor M'hamed Oualdi is bringing the often neglected history of Mediterranean slavery to a wide public at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. 'Esclaves en Méditerranée XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle' is open from 31 March to 19 July 2026 and can be visited free of charge.
“The exhibition not only shows the suffering and labour of enslaved Muslims, but also highlights their important contribution to early modern Mediterranean and European art and culture. For instance, it explores how literate Muslim slaves contributed, and were sometimes forced to contribute, to European knowledge about Islam and North Africa,” says Oualdi, Chair of European History, 19th and early 20th centuries, at the EUI Department of History.
The exhibition draws together the depictions of the hard everyday life of enslaved rowers in the 17th-century Italian states; the written testimony of the hardships of a captive Moroccan woman in Malta in the early 19th century; and a report on the "Turkish" slaves who were forced to pose as models for a bas-relief adorning a warship of the French navy during the reign of the "Sun King" Louis XIV. Through a wide range of rarely shown works of art, the exhibit traces the often neglected history of enslaved Muslims and Christians across three centuries of Mediterranean history, with particular attention to the direct testimonies of slaves, for example through their letters.
Oualdi co-organised the exhibition in the context of his ERC project SLAVEVOICES, which provided part of the funding and allowed visitors to explore it free of charge.
He explains that the idea for the exhibition came from a collaboration with two US-based historians, Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University) and Meredith Martin (New York University). While Oualdi was working on the literacy of Muslim slaves in early modern Italy and Malta, Weiss and Martin were researching visual testimonies of enslaved Muslims in Louis XIV's France. They decided to join efforts to disseminate their connected research strands, with the ambition of giving the general public an engaging overview of Mediterranean slavery and stimulating debate on its sometimes hidden legacies.
The exhibition is the result of three years of intense work in selecting the pieces and developing the narrative. Asked about the installation of the exhibition in March 2026, Oualdi notes that it was a deeply moving experience to hang the works, and that he and the other curators "found the exhibition design to be successful, elegant, and dignified."
The exhibition is attracting significant public interest, totalling more than 30,000 visitors since it opened, and has been the subject of a dedicated issue of L'Histoire, a major French history magazine. It runs until 19 July 2026.