كمال الجزولي: هل صحيح أن الزبير باشا كان تاجر رقيق؟!

Quote: It will be remembered that at this time in England much turned upon Zobehr’s antecedents as a slave-dealer. Some people declared he was not a bona fide slave-dealer. Well, perhaps not—to the extent that the chairman of the Army and Navy stores is not a grocer or a gunmaker, or that a director of a gold-mine is not a pick and shovel miner. But there can be little doubt that Zobehr had regulated and protected and policed, and indirectly financed, the slave trade in the Equatorial Provinces; that his settlement—Dem-Zebehr—was, as it were, the metropolis and the clearing-house of the slave industry; that the considerable revenue he administered during the years of his power and rule in the Soudan was mainly levied on duties of different kinds and degree imposed upon slave-dealers and caravans—Arab and Egyptian alike; and that his influence was due to his aptitude in systematizing a common and lucrative interest. No doubt Zobehr was a large trader in other things—in ivory, gums, ostrich feathers, gold dust, precious stones, and I think, rubber and hides to a small extent; but the pulse of the machine was the slave trade.