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Department of History

The Abolition of Slavery

Seminar Questions:

  • What was the place of slavery in the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim societies?
  • How did opponents of slavery justify abolition?

Assigned Reading:

Ismael M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (University Press of Florida, 2013), introduction and chapters 6-7, pp. 1-9, 96-130.

Will Smiley, "Let Whose People Go? Subjecthood, Sovereignty, Liberation and Legalism in Eighteenth-Century Russo-Ottoman Relations," Turkish Historical Review 3 (2012), 196-228.

For an overview of the concept of slavery in Islamic law, with definitions of Arabic terminology, see Bernard Freamon, "Definitions and Concepts of Slavery in Islamic Law," in The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (Oxford UP, 2012), e-book available via library catalogue.

Further Reading:

Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Abolition and its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Routledge, 2005).
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (C. Hurst & Co., 2006).
Mohammed Ennaji, Slavery, the State and Islam (Cambridge UP, 2013).
Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
Alison Frank, "The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 117 (2012), 410-44.
Robert Harms et al (eds.), Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (Yale UP, 2013).
Liubov Kurtynova d'Herlugnan, The Tsar's Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and its Suppression (Brill, 2010).
Shaun E. Marmon (ed.), Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Markus Wiener, 2014).
Behnaz Mirzai (ed.), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Africa World Press, 2009).
Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (University of Washington Press, 1998).
Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppression, 1840-1890 (Princeton UP, 2014).
Ehud Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (Yale UP, 2014).
Eve Trout Powell, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford UP, 2013).
Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (eds.), Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Mediterranean (American University in Cairo Press, 2010).