At least since the modern period, Morocco and the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were among the regions directly implicated in the enslavement and displacement of sub-Saharan African peoples, and were used either as platforms for their transit towards Europe or as territories seeking domestic and agricultural labour. In the case of Tunisia, slaves were brought overland as part of trans-Saharan business and trade, but they could also be transported by sea, the trans-Mediterranean trade completing the trans-Saharan trade. Domestic slavery concerned large urban areas, as well as the rural world, but there remained some specificities relating to certain regions. From a global perspective, the Tunisian Regency was less of a ‘slave society’ than a ‘society with slaves’, with current research suggesting that the Tunisian economy was not directly dependent on the slave trade or on the presence of slaves. If the role of slaves in society was indisputable, it was nonetheless only indirectly useful to stakeholders in the evolution of this society.

When an intellectual and moral abolitionist movement spread throughout the world in the early nineteenth century and began exercising considerable pressure on slave societies, the Regency of Tunis was also inevitably affected, with the first abolitionist measures appearing in the early 1840s. In 1841, the Bey decided to end the export and the public sale of slaves with the closure of the slave market. The following year, the decision was taken that all children born of enslaved parents would be declared free. Finally, in January 1846, the Bey ordered the promulgation of a text abolishing slavery. There was also a second abolition of slavery in 1890, hastily drafted by the protectorate authorities in the hope that this ban would restore their tarnished image after charges had been brought against, and a scandal had erupted concerning, the French resident minister, Justin Massicault (1886–92), who was suspected of having made use of slave labour (French Diplomatic Archives: docs 61, 101, 105). Generally speaking, however, the French protectorate authority (1881–1956) pursued a conciliatory policy towards the abusive detention of slaves, which led to the drafting of the text in 1890.

Today, the Tunisian black minority consists not only of descendants of slaves, but also of sub-Saharan immigrants, who were encouraged by the French colonial administration in the early 1890s to come and work in the Regency of Tunis.