'' CAPTIVES AND COMPANIONS '' : BOOK REVIEW

' Captives and Companions ' : A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the World. By Justin Marozzi.

' Bondage and its legacy in the Mideast ' : When the British journalist Justin Marozzi was covering the  2011 uprising in Libya, he encountered something that profoundly confused him. 

Meeting in Tripoli with a group of rebels, he heard one turn to a Black comrade and say, '' Hey, slave! Go and get me a coffee !''

As Marozzi writes in '' Captives and Companions,'' his knotty history of slavery in the Middle East, the other rebels were '' clearly '' amused, even if '' it was equally clear '' that their comrade was not.

The practice of slavery persists in the Middle East today in shadowy forms. In Lebanon and Qatar, for instance, the '' kafala system '' cycles African migrants into coercive contracts as maids or construction workers.

But what most galled Marozzi in 2011 wasn't a case of actual servitude ; it was the fact that the term '' slave '' was still in regular use, even outside its original context.

How did such casual utterances relate to the thousand-year legacy of bondage in the region?

As Marozzi explains that question in '' Captives and Companions,'' he showcases the many types of enslaved people - eunuchs, harem women, mercenaries, unpaid laborers - who populated a region that stretches across modern day Libya, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia.

All the while demonstrating how the realities of bondage in these places differed from the more chattel slavery in the west.

The World Students Society thanks Thomas Meaney.