Ottoman Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century

Ferguson, Michael; Toledano, Ehud R.

doi:10.1017/9781139046176.010

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Externally, the janissaries-who had eclipsed the akıncı raiders by the mid-fifteenth century-proved to be a highly effective instrument of Ottoman conquest in Europe and the Middle East, helping to build an empire that ran from Poland to Sudan and from Budapest to Baghdad (Agoston 2021). The importance of the janissaries and the slave administrators in the Ottoman elite demonstrates how slavery can function as an alternative path to "modernity" very different from that in Europe and the Americas, at least if conceived of as the move from a composite polity based on personalistic ties to a more centralized and (rational-) bureaucratic rule (Toledano 2011;Ferguson and Toledano 2017).…”

Section: Slaves As the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Slavery in the Making of States and International Orders

Sharman

Zarakol

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Despite having key implications for fundamental political science questions, slavery as a global phenomenon has received little attention in the field. We argue that slavery played an important role in state-building and international order formation. To counter a historical U.S./Atlantic bias, we draw evidence mostly from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. We identify two slave-based paths to state construction. A “slaves as the state” logic saw slave soldiers and administrators used to overcome the constraints of indirect rule in centralizing power. In a “slaves under the state” model the economy was based on slave production, itself underpinned by institutionalized state coercion. Norms often prohibited enslavement within communities, thus externalizing demand. This led to militarized slaving, and fostered increasingly long-distance trade in slaves. The combination of these normative, military, and commercial factors formed international slaving orders.

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Section: Slaves As the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Slavery in the Making of States and International Orders

Sharman

Zarakol

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…The most important events in the process of abolition were the Firman of Sultan Mahmud II freeing white slaves (1830), the disestablishment of the Istanbul slave market (1847), the suppression of the slave trade in the Persian Gulf (1847), the prohibition of the Circassian and Georgian slave trade (1854-1855), the prohibition of the black slave trade (1857), and the Anglo-Ottoman convention for the suppression of the slave trade (1880). 2 In Wallachia and Moldavia, the abolition of slavery was achieved through a complex legislative process beginning in 1831 and ending in 1856, which successively led to the emancipation of the different categories of slaves. The modernizing current in the two principalities after 1830, with the political class and Western-educated intellectuals seeking to renew the countries and dissociate them from the Ottoman world, was decisive in this context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slavery in Southeastern Europe

Achim

2023

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History

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In Southeastern Europe, slavery was present in various forms from antiquity until the nineteenth century. During the 1800s, slavery as a social reality still existed in the Ottoman Empire (including its European provinces) as well as in the Romanian principalities. Wallachia and Moldavia had slaves and slavery since their founding in the fourteenth century. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the roughly 250000 slaves living in the two countries represented seven percent of the total population. There were three categories of slaves: state slaves, slaves owned by monasteries, and privately owned slaves. The slave population was diverse in numerous ways. In terms of their ethnicity, most slaves were Roma, while some were of Romanian or other origin. As in previous centuries, they played an important role in the country’s economy—primarily by way of the enslaved craftsmen who practiced their crafts itinerantly in villages. This chapter reconstructs the history of slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation in the Romanian principalities between the 1830s and the 1850s, with reference to previous periods and similar processes taking place around the same time in other geographical areas.

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Slavery in the Middle East and North Africa

Montana

2023

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History

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In the early 1840s and following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by several European nations and the United States, European humanitarians—particularly the British—embarked on an earnest campaign to outlaw the vigorous enslaving activities thriving in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter examines the extent to which the marked increase of enslavement activities and their suppression through the pressure of European abolitionism fits into the saga of the nineteenth-century transformation processes characterized by the rise of European domination of the region. Focusing on the enslavement of Black Africans, the chapter examines the impact of state modernization schemes and the rise of European capitalism on the expansion of enslaving activities and their suppression and argues that no prior historical development has shaped the contours of African slavery in the Middle East and North Africa more than the effects of the nineteenth-century transformation process.

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Ottoman Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century

Cited by 5 publications

References 11 publications

Global Slavery in the Making of States and International Orders

Global Slavery in the Making of States and International Orders

Slavery in Southeastern Europe

Slavery in the Middle East and North Africa

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