The stories of Enslaved Africans in the Ottoman Empire have not been passed down to future generations. Moreover, research into the living conditions and experiences of enslaved Africans in the new land are still at a germinal phase. To deduce untold stories of these people who suffered during the imprisonment, deportation, punishment and forced labor, torture is really difficult. Some scholars suggest that the Ottoman slavery system was different than Atlantic slavery, because Islam advises that enslaved people should be treated well and then freed after seven years’ service. However, there are many documents at the Prime Minister Ottoman Archives in Istanbul that indicate the experience of those enslaved was different. The paper is an attempt to shed light on the experiences of enslaved African men and women by studying their involvement in crime in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. A review of records shows that slaves involved in crimes for many reasons. Some because of harsh treatment from their master, some were forced, by their master to commit crimes and some while trying to escape bondage. A close investigation of archival documents on criminal cases and the punishments respectively will inform us of the living experiences of enslaved Africans and their bondages. This paper intends to look at these crimes; arson, theft, homicide and the case of fugitive slaves. Moreover it will also focus on why slaves committed particular crimes. I argue that the legal, institutional, and practices of slavery were quite different when one looks at the treatment of slave masters in practice.

My aim in this paper is to cast a new light on enslaved Africans in the mid 19th century Ottoman Empire, “ silent and absent” as they have been characterized, by focusing on a specific set of issues: their every day life, their relationships to the social environment in which they lived, their desires and emotions, and their experiences of exploitation. I seek traces for these in the records of the Nizamiye court for the few criminal cases concerning enslaved Africans, which had been referred to them. I will take one example, the case of a young runaway enslaved woman, which includes her interrogation reports. This woman called Zeyneb tried to escape from bondage, by running away from her masters, but she fell victim to an unscrupulous couple, neighbors who deceived her by raising in her false hopes, but then instead of helping her shut her in a hidden cell in their house for about five months, and when she was not docile they admonished her reminding the grim legal sentence she would receive if she was caught, and if that did not work threatened to kill her. Nevertheless, Zeyneb did not give up and one day when the trap door was forgotten unlocked, she broke free and took refuge in her neighbor’s house. The records do not make clear whether Zeyneb sought justice or was one of the defendants in the case and therefore the case found her. What we find clearly revealed, however, is the desperate and hopeless search for freedom of one young enslaved woman, and the vulnerability and loneliness which made her easy prey for predators who stoke her craving for freedom but pounced on her at the moment she thought she was getting away, in order to re-enslave her.

The Ottoman slavery passed to a new phase by the second half of the nineteenth century with the general prohibition of the slave trade in Africans. Following the end of Tanzimat period, the abolition process gained momentum with the reissue of the ban by the law of 1877. Due to the diplomatic pressure coming from Great Britain that forced the Ottoman state to handle the subject of African enslavement on humanitarian ground, the control over slave trade was increased, and thus manumission of slaves became a prevalent practice for legal authorities. On the other hand, the British abolitionist pressure led Ottoman elites who were already encountered with the Tanzimat ideals such as freedom and equality for all, to a discussion on the morality of the enslavement practices. Within this context of socio-political change, enslavement practices took a new turn and “free” forms of labor became a more preferable way to meet the labor need in domestic servitude in Ottoman elite households. The main tendency of the scholarly analyses regarding this transformation assert that the slavery was substituted by the practice of evlatlıks – adopted children and beslemes - fostering girls- who were recruited to households at young ages to serve in domestic services. This paper aims to lay out a discussion on the notion of “free labor” by delineating the meaning and role of evlatlıks and beslemes, from the perspectives of both laborers and households in the late nineteenth century. Additionally, relying upon the archival records and literary examples of the period including memoirs and novels, this paper challenges the idea that the practice of beslemes and evlatlıks took the place of domestic slaves in the transitory period after the ban on slave trade. It argues that the two categories were associated with white female laborers and thus implied an ambiguous line between concubinage and domestics; whereas African domestic laborers were rendered invisible figures of domestic realm. In fact, African female labor continued to occupy the “servant” position in menial jobs within domestic servitude in post- manumission period. Finally the paper attempts to problematize the imprint of slavery in blackness suggesting the lens of race for a reading on the transformation of labor structure in domestic servitude. Thus, it contributes to the discussion on the prevalent role of domestic sphere in reproducing gendered as well as racialized social hierarchies in the late Ottoman period.

While in the last 20 years historians working in state archives have significantly enhanced our understanding of the history of African slavery in the Ottoman Empire, little is known about its lasting effects on their descendants in Turkey, known as Afro-Turks. This is owed in many ways to Turkish nationalism in the twentieth century: the new state promoted a monolithic view of Turkish culture and identity, and any public discussion or research into its historical diversity was looked upon as an existential threat. Only in the last 10 years have Afro-Turks begun attempting to wrest control of their own history away from state archives and other institutions – a process that has been fraught, to say the least. Focusing on the case of Afro-Turks, this paper I will explore aspects of the epistemological violence involved in the creation of the field of Ottoman slavery studies. As both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault remind us, the very creation of ‘the archive’ in which historians work was itself an act of violence. With this in mind, I examine the development of two recently established archival repositories of the history of African slaves and their descendants – one held by the Turkish Historical Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) in Istanbul, the other, operated by the Afro-Turks themselves at the headquarters of the African Culture, Solidarity, and Cooperation Association (Afrikalılar Kültür, Dayanışma ve Yardımlaşma Derneği) in Izmir. Drawing upon interviews I conducted in the fall of 2015 with individuals involved in decision-making at both organizations, I will show how the legacies of slavery and archival violence have intersected in these spaces to work against the long-term goals of the Afro-Turkish community. For example, despite helping the Turkish Historical Foundation to collect the oral histories of descendants of slaves in a major state-backed project in 2012, the Afro-Turk association has since been denied access to these recordings, with no explanation given. Thus, the documents and sources that constitute authoritative knowledge have been removed and concealed from the very objects and producers of that knowledge. This paper thus seeks to open a broader discussion about the nature of archives and the impact of the inherent violence of their creation upon the history of marginalized peoples in late Ottoman and modern Turkish history.