Suchergebnisse

This contribution aims to investigate mobility in the context of Ottoman slavery. Mainly on the basis of seventeenth-century Istanbul court records, the study deals with the question of mobility by focusing on female household slaves in Ottoman Istanbul who originated from the Black Sea region. With a look at the actors who surrounded them, female slaves are analysed at different stages in their lives. These stages were marked by changes related to mobility. The entry as well as the exit from slavery meant a spatial and social mobility for the slave women. But even in the time in between, slave women remained mobile through aspects such as conversion and resale. This paper further shows that Ottoman slavery and the slave trade were part of the Transottoman context: it can be seen that spaces of interaction were created through the connections and exchanges of actors beyond the Ottoman Empire.

Abstract
This contribution aims to look through a common lens at two important components of early modern Ottoman society, namely the endowment system and the institution of slavery. The relationship and intersections of these two fields will be examined on the basis of Istanbul's court records from the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, in order to pursue the question of where and how (manumitted) slaves could benefit from endowments. The examination of individual cases found in the court records provides information about possible ways in which (former) slaves took on different roles and benefited from the charitable intentions of the founders of endowments.

Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of 'slavery' and 'freedom' derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies.