Presenter: Ceyda Karamursel, Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London
Abstract: Shaped by successive military and diplomatic conflicts, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed large-scale forced displacement across the Ottoman Middle East. With it came a protracted crisis that unsettled established legal and ethical frameworks, producing a volatile environment in which the slave trade persisted and adapted, even as formal efforts to suppress it were put in place. This paper focuses on a key moment in this prolonged crisis—the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 and its aftermath—to examine the practices of Ottoman slaveholders and traders, many of them women, operating at various scales, from elite mistresses to small intermediaries. In doing so, it sheds light on how local structures and practices—social, economic, and legal—collided with the emerging global moral order that reframed legal distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion, and state-belonging, with long-term implications for the decades that followed.
