Ottoman History Podcast - Slavery and Servitude in the Ottoman Mediterranean

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Episode 362 with M’hamed Oualdi & Hayri Gökşin Özkoray hosted by Andreas Guidi Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how slavery flourished in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the wake of growing connectivity with other world regions and territorial expansion. The discussion draws out the ambiguity between slavery and servitude in the case of the Mamluks of the Tunisian Beylik during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Which economic processes, legal interpretations, and geographic routes impacted the evolution of the slave trade from the sixteenth century until its abolition? What are the possibilities for and problems in retracing the self-narratives of those directly involved in the slave trade? « Click for More »

The South Southeast Passage, a podcast about the history and the society of the Balkans and beyond. I am Andreas Guidi and this is a joint episode with our friends at the Ottoman History Podcast. Now, if you don't know this project yet, the Ottoman History Podcast is a wonderful tool to expand your knowledge about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, including several episodes on the Ottoman Balkans. So just go and visit their website at www.ottomahistorypodcast.com to learn more about the project. And there are several ways to stay up to date with new episodes and releases,

including the Facebook page, where you can also interact with the large followers community. So the topic of today's conversation is slavery in the modern Mediterranean. Now this is a topic that has raised renewed interest among historians lately, but it is also something that is part of broader discussions in the media and in the public opinion, and it is part of today's world. One only has to think of the recent developments during the conflict in Syria and Iraq and the enslavement of the Yazidi population, and also the outrage that was sparked by a video released by the CNN that was presented as a contemporary slave market in Libya.

So there is a certain consensus in the public opinion about the fact that the very notion of slavery is something that should be, let's say, confined to the past, that should have no place in the contemporary world. But the question is, what do we know about this past? What do we know about the geography and the economy of slavery in the modern world? And I think that there is still a lot to be researched and written about this topic. This is why I am very glad to welcome two scholars today that have been working on this issue. So first of all, Mohamed Doualdi, who is assistant professor at Princeton University and currently a research fellow

at the Institut de Tous Avancés de Paris. So Mohamed, thanks for accepting our invitation and be part of the Southeast Passage and the Ottoman History podcast. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Mohamed is also the author of a monograph in French entitled Esclaves et Maîtres, les mêmes looks au service de baie de Tunis du 17e siècle aux années 1880, which was published in 2011 by Publication de la Sorbonne.

There is also an article in English that deals with the main aspects of this dissertation which was published on the International Journal of Middle East Studies and you will find a link on our website. So in this monograph, Mohamed, you try to write social history of a group but at the same time also a piece of political history concerning late Ottoman province. I also know that you are currently working on a second monograph with a tentative title, A Slave Between Empires, The Ottoman Legacy in Colonial North Africa, 1860s to 1930s. So maybe you can say a few words about this current project. So it's based on a case study about the life and the death of a former slave, Hussein bin Abdullah, and how after his death he had many conflicts over his inheritance.

And looking at this conflict, this is a way to study the Ottoman legacy in a North African context, in a colonial context. And here in Paris, during your stay at the Institut d'Etudes Avancées, you're working on a specific aspect of this project, namely narratives of former slaves in 19th century North Africa. And we will have the chance to touch upon some features of this research during the conversation.

I'm also very glad to welcome a friend and colleague of mine, Heide Goexin Oskoray, who has just defended his PhD thesis here in Paris at the École Pratique de l'Holcétude. The thesis was entitled Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 16th and 17th Centuries. So Goksin, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So maybe we can kick off our conversation by providing the listeners a general orientation about the space that we will be talking about, namely the modern Mediterranean. So how should we imagine the geography of the Mediterranean as a space of circulation and trade of slaves.

And maybe related to that, what are the peculiarities of the Ottoman experience in this context? And what are, on the contrary, aspects of continuity from previous periods? So yeah, I mean, North Africa was part of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century to the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. And what is interesting, if we look at slavery from this North African viewpoint, and even including the Ottoman empire, is that North Africa is often seen as a margin of the Ottoman empire, borderland. But in fact, in this case, I mean, for the issue of slavery, North Africa was a crossroad. In this case, I mean, you have people coming from the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

And so these groups of slaves are abducted in the Mediterranean raids. So you have these first groups of Europeans coming from Italy, from Malta, from Spain. And then you have a second group of people coming from the Caucasus, from Georgia. And these people are coming from the center of the Ottoman Empire to North Africa. And they are used as mamluks and concubines. So to say that they are converted to Islam and then they are used for important positions

within households. And then you have a third group, and then they are used for important positions within households. And then you have a third group, which is made of West African and Eastern African slaves. And these people were used within households, but as well within the rural societies in North Africa. Except that in the Moroccan case, some of these West African slaves were promoted to highest social and political position and they were named Abdel Bukhari. So it's interesting to look at North Africa as a crossroad in terms of slavery

from the 16th century and even before but from the 16th century in the Ottoman Empire until the demise of slavery throughout the 19th century. So it's interesting that you, so to speak, proposed to turn the look from the idea of a periphery to the idea of a space where trajectories connect in different regions, both within the Ottoman system but beyond, converged, so to speak.

Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of the new project is to look at the slave testimonies and to kind of understand how these people could interact how a West African slave could have some social interactions with maybe

someone coming from Georgia like Mamlou coming as well from Circassia and we didn't really study this kind of interactions between different groups of slaves. I tend to focus mainly on a wider Mediterranean world that includes especially the northern coasts of the Black Sea. And it's more interesting and rather original to begin with the Northern Africa rather than evoking the central provinces of the Ottoman Empire and mainly its capital. And in Istanbul, we see many institutional and commercial continu role in the global slave trade. We can begin with

the progressive closing of the Black Sea by the Ottomans in the last quarter of the 15th century and in this space the Northern Black Sea region the main role was played before the Ottoman conquest of Crimea in 1475 by Genoese and Venetian merchants that dominated the supply of Europe and Anatolia and also the Mamluk Egypt and Syria in slaves of Slavic origin. And by the progressive closing of the Black Sea,

we see that these same merchants that specialized in in slave trade concentrated their efforts on northern and west africa while supplying southern europe and western mediterranean more and more in black slaves before being implicated in the transatlantic slave trade. Yeah, exactly. And this is, I think, a very interesting point because we have outlined a very broad region that goes at least from the Black Sea coast to West Africa.

And many of our listeners, of course, are aware of the fact that in the same period we are talking about, we see the emergent space of slave trade that connects the two coasts of the Atlantic. And there are more and more studies on the development of global capitalism that tend to see these movements and this circulation as somehow entangled. And include, for example, also South Asia and the broader, let's say, system of commerce of the time so i was wondering maybe in general terms what is the place of this mediterranean practice in this broader system is it something that is quite detached from these developments or is it an integral part of what is happening elsewhere

i tend to see rather the the connections that make the mediterranean a coherent space in a global system. For instance, we can see the connection with the Indian Ocean via the Arabian Peninsula that gets supplied from the Indian slave trade. That is not the main article of trade maybe for the early modern period, but still. We tend to forget that the transatlantic slave trade and the slave supply of northern africa tended to have the same sources originally but given that the intermediary actors remain unknown and undocumented we we tend to forget the main sources of both trades.

But still, as for the Ottoman Empire, I tend to hierarchize the slaving zones of the Ottoman Empire to cite Jeff Finn Paul, who conceptualized this notion of slaving zones based mainly on legal criteria. But I tend to establish a hierarchy between these slaving zones according to the role of main actors in the slave trade in relation and proximity to the Ottoman state and capital.

A first circle revolves around Ottoman armies and the zones of conquest and the Imperial expansion from the 14th 15th centuries onwards so this is the direct way of slave supplies that evolved around Rumelia the Ottoman Europe and Anatolia a eastwards from Anatolia secondly and this is maybe the most significant source in terms of quantity and remains comparable to the transatlantic slave trade before the 18th century, we have the role played by the allies of the port, namely the southern Black Sea region. And the third category is that of the peripheral zones, where non-Ottoman actors and actors that were not directly affiliated to the Ottoman polity were mainly implicated.

And this is basically the northern and eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Yeah, so to speak, there is a military-slavery complex in a way that is really connected with the territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the early modern period. But at the same time, it's not just a matter of military, but also of diplomacy and the way that the Ottoman bureaucracy kept contact with regions around its territory, as you said, Crimea, but also a space that was permeable with the flow of resources with other regions. Maybe to add about this idea of a connected history or global history of slavery,

if we look at the 19th century as a moment when the Mediterranean is transformed, in fact, it's interesting. I mean, we know from the studies by Hew Toledano that there was an increase of slaves brought to North Africa and Egypt in the 19th century because of the end of slave trade to North America and South America. So there is this kind of connection. But we can think as well in terms of constant and various abolitions within the Mediterranean. I mean, by the beginning of the 19th century, it was no longer possible to bring people

from the north of the Mediterranean to North Africa because the Corso or the Privataring was forbidden by Europe. And it's only by the 1830s that the British diplomacy started to act in order to forbid African slave trade in North Africa. And even with the British pressures, I mean, you still have African slaves smuggled by the 1920s, 1930s Morocco. So it's interesting because it gives another idea

of what was the Mediterranean within or throughout the 19th century and how it depended on the groups of slaves and how the end of slavery was a long, long process. And also it's important that you raise the point of piracy, which would deserve another episode, of course, but also the increasing presence and influence of powers that were not geographically part of the Mediterranean, but become part of it through the early developments of colonialism and imperialism in this space. So this is why

the 19th century is a key moment for the abolition and the transformation also of the economy of slavery maybe gukshin you wanted to add something on the role of western powers as we mentioned before but also maybe on some debates that were taking place within ottoman society at the time? Was it discussed at all? For the initial British abolition project, we have to go back to the reasons of the abolition in the British Empire, that it came out of the proper evolutions and internal evolutions of a capitalist economy that resulted from the industrial revolution. And even if we have this ideological and cultural dimension that refers to the Enlightenment,

for the main reasons of the abolition, we see that free labor was much more advantageous for the development of a capitalist economy. more advantages for the development of a capitalist economy, whereas in the Ottoman provinces, we do not have an economy based on the survival of labor and neither a capitalist economy. So imposing the evolution of slavery as a norm could not be well received because the practices and the reasons for slavery was completely different. And when we look at the French colonial administration in Western Africa, for instance, Martin Klein's work has well established that the colonial authorities while wishing to implement a complete abolition

were confronted to the reality of of the field and many social and economical practices and institutions made them realize that it was a much more of a progressive process that necessitated a few decades to be taken into account so they had to moderate the Abolition Project by way of realism. Yeah, absolutely. To add to what Harry just said, I mean, in the case of colonial North Africa, the work of Yassine Dadiadoune for Algeria and the work of Benjamin Brouwer as well for Algeria

and the recent book by Choukri El Hamel entitled Black Morocco show the same thing, is that colonial authorities could not intervene in terms of slave trade, in terms of slavery, because this was a system based on, I mean, slaves were used within households. So how could they kind of interfere

and try to kind of control something which was seen as a private issue? So this is part of the explanation. But as you said as well, colonial authorities were not really interested by kind of ending the slave trade maybe until the 1920s 1930s yeah yeah this is why maybe it would be interesting to move from this general picture these general coordinates to a narrower focus for our conversation that is centered on the case study of Tunisia and the

profile of the Mamluk. Because Mohamed, for example, what I found very interesting in the introduction of your monograph that I mentioned is a passage in which you state, I quote in English, in the Ottoman and Arabic speaking province of Tunis, everyone could claim to be or could be called a Mamluk, end quote. So I wonder if there was this ambiguity, what were the traits and the features that made up this group, the profile of a Mamluk? What did it mean? And how did it acquire a specific notion for bureaucracy and state power? So if I go back to the quotation, so the idea is that everyone could claim that he's the Mamluk,

but the Mamluk of someone else. If I take a specific example, so you will have an Islamic scholar, a alim, who would say I'm the Mamluk of God, which is obvious because he's serving God. So the idea is that it was used in the daily life as a vocabulary to express the fact that you're obedient, the fact that you belong to a specific community. In my case, I was just focusing on a specific community of Mamluks. The Mamluks who were obeying to the Ottoman governor of Tunis,

who were called the Beys at that time, from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century. So the main question is how we do define these Mamluks, obeying to these governors. And my idea was to kind of nuance a definition of the Mamluk, which is important in the Mamluk studies, which was in fact framed by David Ayallon, the idea that most of the Mamluks are slaves converted to Islam

and trained for high positions within the administration and within armies. And so if you look at the case of the Mamluks in Tunisia, which is not the most important case, the most important case is in Egypt, but if you look at Tunisia, and if you look at the registers and the letters, then you would see that among these Mamluks, who were less than 200 people by the 1820s,

among these Mamluks, you had slaves indeed. Clearly, I mean, they had the legal status, the Islamic legal status of a slave, but you have as well free people who were belonging to Muslim families in Tunis. So how do we explain that the social group can bring together slaves and free men and my idea is that slavery is a feature of the social group but not the only one and that in fact what was what was important when you had to create a group of mamluks is to be obeyed by these people and i mean the people that you can control the most are the slaves. But you can as well try to control free men if you have some tools,

legal tools, or even economic tools to control them. So I think it's important to expand our notion of what is a Mamluk. A Mamluk is not only a slave. A Mamluk is a servant. And this brings us back to the debate about the cool in the Ottoman Empire the debate about the cool in the

Ottoman Empire, because what was the cool in the Ottoman Empire? Was he a slave of the Sultan, or was he a servant of the Sultan? And this was a debate, I mean, a lasting debate among Ottoman historians.

So, if I understood it correctly, it's also a way to rethink this notion of Mamluk, this label, as something that evokes the idea of social relations, social dependency, and also loyalty, of course, at different levels. Exactly. If you do define the Mamluks only as slaves, as foreigners, then you are arguing that, in fact, the state using these slaves the Mamluks only as slaves, as foreigners, then you are arguing that in fact the state using the slaves and Mamluks was separated from the whole society.

And this brings you to say that in fact the state within the Muslim lands was not legitimate enough. If you look at the Mamluks as free men and slaves, you can see that in fact the Mamluks show that there were strong interactions between the state and the society and the state was not that separated from the society. So you kind of go against an Orientalistic vision of Muslim societies. Yeah, sure.

And I'm also glad that you mentioned this other notion of cool. And maybe, Gokshin, you can add something on this legal universe and debates and the boundaries between a slave and a free man. So maybe you can introduce some notions according to the sources

you've dealt with in your phd research to go back to the mamluks instead we can see that even or especially when manumitted they they had a certain number of obligations and dependencies vis-a-vis their masters, their former masters and now patrons. Whereas having the same legal status as a freeman, they did not have the same social position as compared to those who have never been enslaved in their life. That legal status came with a certain number of advantages also when their former master was in a powerful position in society and the state apparatus. And when it comes to the coups,

and you mentioned something that I like very much as an expression, the military-slavery complex. So this is another dimension of this institution. When it comes to the cults of the Sultan, there's no doubt that they were his property, that's for sure. But the private and public aspect remains debatable, of course, especially distinguished from what we can qualify as the public slaves of the sultan. So the miri esirler, who were mainly the war captives that had a servile status and remained ransomable, but they were submitted to forced labor,

especially in the imperial arsenal of Istanbul, for instance. Whereas, Khuls of the Sultan were not ransomable people. Instead, they were foreigners or Ottoman subjects recruited as potential future members of the imperial elite. recruited as potential future members of the imperial elite and one of the main differences and shocking aspects of the so-called cool system as it has been qualified by metin kunt or halil in aljik was that the sultan had the exclusive right of life and death over his personal cools. We have to precise that no ordinary slave proprietor had

such a right over his or her human human possessions. Besides that, one of the distinguishing aspects of the cool system is that the Sultan's cools one of the distinguishing aspects of the cool system is that the sultan's schools could possess their slaves in their own right whereas such a thing was unimaginable for any any other slaves and i think this is also related to the specificities of the notion of property right in the ottoman context that is not just related to human resources, let's say, but also has implications, for example, for land and for other domains. And in order to understand this, we should also reflect on the boundaries between what is public and what is private in the Ottoman context, right?

Yeah, that's why I think it's interesting to have this discussion between historians, mostly focusing on provinces like Tunis, and historians who have this knowledge about what's happening on the ground with the sultan and his administration. Because if I look at Tunis, I don't see a clear distinction between public and private slaves. I think it's interesting because most of them are related to households. And even the Bey and the Mamluks were belonging to the Bey. How can we define them as public or private slaves? Because some Mamluks were sold or even offered by traders coming from the center of the Ottoman Empire.

So I think it's much more interesting to see how it can be fluid between public and private in this provincial context. And I'm glad that Khayri is mentioning this notion of because it shows that you had this notion of public slavery in the Ottoman Empire as well. And it's important because there is an important debate about the use of public slavery in the Ottoman Empire as well. And it's important because there is an important debate about the use of public slaves. I mean, the idea defended by Paul Einemar

for the ancient Greek societies, that in fact public slaves were the ones allowing the Greek democracy to work because they were doing the work of the civil servants at that time. So there are two questions here. What is public? What is private? Is it really useful to use public slaves in a specific society like the Tunisian one? Sveta Petrovic, Svetlana Petrovic, Svetlana Petrovic, So welcome back to the Southeast Passage and the Ottoman History Podcast. Andreas Guidi here talking to Mohamed Waldi and Ayri Gökçin Özkaray about slavery in the modern Mediterranean. So, so far we have given you an overview about the space and the time we're talking about and also some features of slaves and more specifically of

mamluk as social groups but maybe now it is the time to talk about some individual trajectories so muhammad i'm sure that you collected also sources about individual experiences and maybe you can give us an example that allows us to connect all the different aspects that we've touched upon so far yeah i mean the second project after the mamluks was to study the last one of the last mamluks from tunisia and this trajectory was this trajectory of hussein ben abdallah Abdullah. So bin Abdullah is often used and can show that someone has a slave status because it's not a real name, in fact. So Hossein bin Abdullah was from Circassia and he arrived in Tunis by the 1820s and was part of a military school. And he was trained there, so he had Arabic,

and he could understand clearly French and English at some point. And he became then a minister. But what is interesting about the life of Hussein is much more his death, because he died not in Tunisia, not in Istanbul, but in Italy, in Florence, or in Tuscany. And it's interesting because he died six years after the colonization of Tunisia by France in 1887. I mean, the colonization of Tunisia by France in 1881, and he died in 1887.

So what I'm doing here by studying the deaths and the conflicts over the inheritance of Hussein is to kind of follow partly what we have learned from the Microstoria is that following the trajectory of an individual and even of a former slave like Hussein can reveal some parts of the social life that we historians cannot imagine. One example that I can take is related to the properties or the real estate of Hussein. So he did not really invest in Italy or in Europe. Most of his real estate was in Tunisia, around Tunis. And it's interesting because he did think that what was important

for his life and for his afterlife was to kind of pass on lands which were close to his i mean i mean to the state of tunis or to the the country or the tunisian country and this gives us an important an important vision of the social life at that moment it was the beginning of the colonization in tunisia. So what could be the resources of people who became colonized like Hussein? Even if he was living in Italy, he felt like he was a Tunisian. So the resources for him were clearly the lands and the real estate. And through these lands, he could act. And even the people who did inherit from Hussein did act through these lands close to Tunis. And this is important because for this history of Tunisia,

when we consider people like Hussein or another former slave like Khayreddin, who was as well a Circassian Mamluk, we tend to think their lives in terms of intellectual lives. What did they write write what were their ideas but in fact we have to be really cautious and kind kind of take into account as well the material life and the economic life and what did they try to pass on what did they try to in what kind of field did they try to invest yeah and this fits well the approach of the micro-historia, in fact, because on the

one hand, we have those who have focused more on, let's say, visions of the world and also cosmology in the case of, let's say, ordinary people from lower classes. But there is also the other side that deals more with social networks and social relations around these people. So maybe to add on this on what you just said, I would be curious in knowing how this rupture with the arrival of the French in 1881 directly influenced the socialization of people like Hussein. Yeah, maybe I can take two examples. He was living in Tuscany,

and most of his intermediaries were Jews from Tunisia, Algeria. But by the colonization of Tunisia by France, he started to kind of interrupt all his relations with the Jews and the people who were serving him among the Jews. And that's interesting in terms of reshaping your own social world. Then another change is that he was an official within the Tunisian state. But by the colonization of Tunisia by France, he was no longer considered as a member of the Tunisian state. So he could not access to official tools like letters, finance.

like letters, finance, and he tried to reshape all the tools of communication with Istanbul using private intermediaries, using as well people traveling from Italy to Egypt or Istanbul. So he had to kind of maybe rely more on Istanbul than he used to be and rely less on Tunis and the Tunisian state. But I would argue that the main argument behind the study of the life of Hussein is much more an argument related to the state of the field in terms of North African history. of the field in terms of North African history. It's really important here for me because most of the studies dealing with North Africa are focusing on the colonial period and the colonial domination, which makes sense, absolutely,

and the colonial violence. But by doing so, we tend to forget that the Ottoman culture, the Ottoman political culture, which is made of the Ottoman political culture from the center, but as well some customs in North Africa. So this Ottoman political culture was still influential during the colonial period until the 1920s.

And this has been completely forgotten, if we think in terms of the history of North Africa. So we need to think the colonial history of North Africa has an overlap between the colonial domination, the colonial violence, and still the use of an Ottoman political culture until the 1920s, when you have then a new generation of statesmen,

leaders, political thinkers. And Gokshin, maybe this goes a bit beyond the time frame that you're working on, but it would be interesting maybe to reflect if we talk about individual trajectories and different moments in the life of a slave. Maybe if we refer back to, let's say, the classical age of this phenomenon, how do legal texts and debate reflect these different moments in life? Yes, and since I do not dispose of such detailed sources on, let say ordinary slaves I have merely fragments at precise moments of their life and then they disappear completely from documented sources so that's why while studying slavery as a legal institution I advocated for a biographical approach by biographical approach, I mean focusing on the main events and stages that occur in a slave's life.

So mainly it's enslavement, entering into slavery, life during slavery and the eventual exit by way of manumission. manumission. And there's no centralized codification of legal aspects of slavery, but in compilations of fatwas or legal opinions and also legal treatises, we have different chapters that deal with slaves and the case of the Ümmüveled or Ümmüvalad, so the mother bearing the child of her masters. Besides that, we do not have an exhaustive legal treatise that deals with the question of slavery, but we have, for instance, based on the Mültakal Abhurd of Ibrahim Halebi, a legal scholar of the 16th century, whose texts served as the main reference for the official Hanefi school of the Ottoman Empire. In its French translation from the 18th century by Muradja Dawsonon. We have the first effort of codification in a way

because he made thematical chapters and one of them was on the Ottoman institutions, was that on slavery. So we can say that quantitatively most of the evidence is about the Manumission stage, but the legal foundations of the survival institution concern every stage of a slave's life, but not the duties except for the sexual part for women. But we can find an exhaustive account of every stage of a slave's life.

For instance, in the biblical and Quranic account of Joseph's life. So in Genesis 37 or Quran 12, the 12th surah. And it was a myth, of course, but perceived as a historical reality by the Ottomans. And it came to summarize slavery in the Ottoman Empire in a way. So the initial abduction of a youngster until his manumission. So going through the slave market and by the act of sale the slave status came into act officially and then the entry into a household and the personal relation that the slave developed with the family that bought him and possessed him

and eventually that way led to his manumission and this person remained a dependent as a manumitted free man but yeah for part of this configuration with his former uh master yeah and so maybe for the last part of our interview we can refer back to muhammad's current project on narratives of former slaves in 19th century North Africa. This, of course, raises the question of subjectivity and of the voice of the people we are talking about. So I wonder what methodology you use to, let's say, recover former slaves' voices, and the way this maybe fluctuates in between a sense of collectivity and a sense of individual subjectivity. Yeah, I mean, this new project is influenced by recent works

by Ottomanists such as Euto Edano and Yves Traut Powell. The idea is that, quoting Yves Traut Powell's paper, is that can the slaves as subalterns, can they speak, can they be heard within the Ottoman primary sources? And it's as well influenced by the scholarship about slave narratives in America and a third source of influence and inspiration

are recent works about the autobiography and the self in Arabic literature so building on that I think that you can find clearly material to deal with the issue of slave testimonies you have a long tradition of european captives telling their story and i'm trying to focus on the end of this tradition the by the way of the 19th century

can we find this kind of european sources i think it's really possible until the 1820s. And then studying the Mamluks in Tunisia, I could find letters where the Mamluks will tell about their lives. The only thing is that we have to pay attention and try to find testimonies by African slaves in this moment that I'm trying to study the abolition era.

So the demise of slavery throughout the 19th century. And I think we didn't really pay attention to that. And I'm sure that we can find at least some testimonies of African slaves as reported to

maybe British diplomats. But then, even if we have the material, is it even possible to kind of recover the self of a slave? What does it mean? Does he express individualistic feelings? Is it about the individual in other terms? And this is interesting.

I think the study of the self in the muslim world and even broadly in social science is not mainly about the individual is how people could express feelings and how behind the self there is maybe a sense of belonging to a community so your question is absolutely right it's maybe not to kind of find the slave as an individual maybe try to kind of understand the many ways you could use to express what was called the self which is not individual it's not only like recovering the voices it's maybe trying to understand the end of slavery from the viewpoint of the people who were the most impacted in this case because when studying the abolition of slavery in North Africa, one question was can Muslim societies adapt to

this change? But how the slaves did feel or experience the end of slavery, this question was never raised in for the history of North Africa. Another question which is behind the end of slavery, this question was never raised for the history of North Africa. Another question which is behind the issue of slave testimonies is to what extent the end of slavery meant the reconnection or disconnection between the former slaves and their societies, I mean West African societies, the Caucasus. Is the end of slavery a moment of, is it a shift in terms of connection

and disconnection between North Africa and the neighboring societies? So I think this is a good moment to stop our conversation. Maybe to sum up, I am very glad that we reflected quite a lot on the interconnections, for example, between discourse, law and society,

considered as both public and private domain. We explored different levels concerning the scale because we went from the individual to very large and global phenomena related to economy and society. phenomena related to economy and society. And again, also, we looked at the interplay of different spheres, such as the military, the economic, but also the bureaucratic functioning of a state and of, let's say, more private society. So I would like to thank once again, Mohamed and Goksin for being part of our conversation today. Thank you. And for those among you who would like to know more about this subject, we will prepare a short bibliography and we will also upload some images and some material that can bring you closer to the discussion we had today. I remind you that you can find this episode both on the Southeast Passage

and the Ottoman History Podcast platforms. This was all for today and until next time, take care. Thank you.