Looking at the presence of slaves within their own homes or in the households of friends and relatives,"they could pretend that this was where slavery actually began and that what had happened before belonged to another world—uncivilized, unruly, beyond their control." Toledano is describing in this sentence the feelings of Ottomans, but the question of whether that other African "world," from which many slaves came, was beyond control was problematic in the wake of Egyptian claims to the Sudan and its painful loss to the Mahdïya. And this African "world" could easily be blamed for the existence of slavery, for creating a cultureless vulnerability and lack of family structure, and even, it seemed, for going to war in order to defend the right to slavery.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 648