Content area
Full text
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909 by Y. Hakan Erdem. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan in association with St Antony's College, Oxford, 1996. Pp. xxii + 229, bibliography, index. L40.00 (hardback).
The study of Ottoman slavery suffers from a `near-total collective amnesia' (p.xviii), due not, as some scholars have suggested, to a lack of sources, but, Erdem argues, to the way in which the Ottoman institution of slavery disappeared. 'There was no organised movement for abolition in the Empire, no abolitionist tracts popularising the subject and bringing home the sufferings of slaves - real or imagined. Today, the abolition of slavery, as one of the past human achievements, is not part of the curriculum in schools in modern Turkey. Nor is there a specific date of abolition (as in the West Indies or the USA) which could be used as a dramatic starting-point for such a study'. The disappearance thus followed 'an historical path different from its counterparts in the West' (pp.xviii-xix). Erdem's book is an attempt to overcome this lack of attention paid to slavery in the Ottoman empire and to explain how, without any formal decree of abolition, slavery met its demise (p.xvii).
In the first chapter, which includes an interesting discussion of the term zimmi, highlighting contemporary confusion over its precise meaning, a meaning which was confused even in the sixteenth century (pp.5-6), Erdem challenges the argument that the devsirme was incompatible with the Seriat and therefore illegal and suggests that in fact, at least initially, this was not the case (p.2).
After considering traditional pre-Tanzimat policies, Erdem turns to the nineteenth century and the means of enslavement and slave acquisition. He argues against the view that the increase in black slaves in this period was due to any decline in...