Abstract Unwelcomed freedom: What do you do when you dismantle a royal harem? The huge royal households of the Ottomans in Istanbul, the Qajars in Tehran, and the Qings in Beijing absorbed the initial onslaught of western influence in the modern era. They survived intact into the early 20th century when each of these dynasties were destroyed by the First World War, economic collapse, and revolutions. The change in power structures moved the Turkish sultan, the Persian shah, and the Chinese emperor off the global stage. Each deposed leader had huge retinues composed largely of slaves: concubines, servants, and castrated males who were dependent on stipends and royal largesse. The question of what to do with them quickly became urgent, as these enslaved communities turned from relics of a once glorious past to flotsam of a failed state. As such, they became onerous financial burdens on the emerging nation states. The solution for all three former empires was to free the slaves, yet that freedom was essentially a form of exile and erasure. Financial straits after the destruction of revolution and war motived the actions of these states rather than the idealism of manumission. This paper compares how each of these states dismantled their royal households in the early 20th century. Freeing slaves inconvenienced most societies, and the consequences to the newly freed, as in the case of the harems and emancipation in the US, were often devastating. Gender also affected the fate of the royal slaves. In the Ottoman example, women could be returned to their Circassian clans to marry well but the fate of powerful, wealthy eunuchs was execution and subsequent confiscation of their goods by the nascent government. The shuttering of royal harems created an abrupt traumatic transition to an uneasy freedom for the slaves who made up these households.