Beyond the Bazaars: Geographies of the slave trade in Central Asia

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 919-955
Author(s):  
JEFF EDEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Decentralized Trade ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Motivating Factor

AbstractThe slave trade in nineteenth-century Central Asia involved hundreds of thousands of slaves, predominantly Persian Shīʿites, and stopping the trade was alleged to be a major motivating factor in the Russian conquest of the region. Nevertheless, Central Asian slavery remains little-studied and little-understood. In this article I will argue, first, that the region's slave trade was characterized by decentralized trade networks and by abundant inter-nomadic trade; and, second, that Russian efforts to end the slave trade by decree and through military force in the 1860s and 70s were not as successful as has often been assumed.

Central Asia: West and East

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN BOARDMAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
British India ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the interest of the west in the history of Central Asia. It explains that central Asia has been studied by many western scholars and explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and traveller Sir John de Maundeville. Central Asia figured prominently in the days of political concerns about the safety of British India in the nineteenth century and this generated the interest of scholars. Today, the boom in Central Asian studies is further encouraged by the presence in Britain of those who have worked in this field and the source of many new publications on both prehistoric and historic periods.

Slavery in Islamic Central Asia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Eden
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
The Caspian Sea ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Northern Iran ◽  
Central Asian

By the late 19th century, when much of Islamic Central Asia was conquered by the Russian Empire, the region was home to tens of thousands of slaves. Most of these slaves were Shiʿa Muslims from northern Iran, though the slave trade also ensnared many Russians, Armenians, Kalmyks, and others. Slave labor was especially commonplace in the Sunni Muslim domains of Khwarazm and Bukhara, where enslaved people constituted a substantial proportion of all agricultural workers, domestic servants, and soldiers. Slaves also labored in many other roles, and an individual slave could be tasked with a variety of jobs. Slaves served, for example, as concubines, craftsmen, miners, herdsmen, entertainers, blacksmiths, calligraphers, and even, in rare instances, as government officials. Before the 16th century, the majority of the slaves in Central Asia—defined here as the region extending from the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea through Xinjiang, China, and from southern Siberia to northern Iran—seem to have been trafficked to the region from India. This changed in the 16th and 17th centuries, as a significant number of Iranian war-captives were brought north and enslaved during the course of numerous armed conflicts between the Central Asian Uzbeks and Iranian Safavids. Many of these slaves evidently labored on the region’s rapidly expanding agricultural estates. In the 18th and 19th centuries, frequent Turkmen raids into northern Iran resulted in tens of thousands of Iranian Shiʿas being captured and funneled into a booming slave trade in Khwarazm and Bukhara. Further north, a much smaller number of Russians were seized and sold into slavery by Kazakh nomads along the steppe frontier. The region’s slave trade declined in the late 19th century and seems to have remained dormant throughout the Soviet period. The post-Soviet period has witnessed a resurgence of human trafficking throughout Central Asia. In recent decades, local governments and international organizations have labored with mixed success to combat a new kind of slave trade, as Central Asian victims are trafficked by criminal cartels to neighboring countries, or to other regions of the world, for the purposes of forced labor or sexual exploitation.

The Kushan Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinru Liu
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Silk Road

The Kushan Empire was a political power that started as a nomadic tribe from the Central Asian steppe and became established as sedentary state across South Asia and Central Asia. Migrating from the border of agricultural China in late 2nd century bce to north Afghanistan, by the 1st century ce, the Yuezhi nomads transformed themselves into a ruling elite in a large area from Afghanistan to the Indus Valley and North Indian Plain, embracing many linguistic and ethnic groups. Adapting the Persian satrapy administrative system into Indian kshatrapa administration, the Kushan regime gave much autonomy to local institutions such as castes, guilds, and Buddhist monasteries and meanwhile won support from those local communities. Legacies from Achaemenid Persia and Hellenistic cities, the cultures of various nomadic groups from Central Asia, and Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions merged to create a cosmopolitan Kushan material culture and art. Mahāyāna Buddhist theology and institutions matured in the Kushan economic and cultural environment and were propagated to Central Asia and China from there. Having under their control several important commodities, such as silk, lapis lazuli, and horses, demanded by elites from the Roman Empire, the Han Empire, and the Parthian Empire, the Kushan court sat on a key location of the Eurasian trade networks, or the Silk Road. The Kushan Empire benefited from the Silk Road trade economically and meanwhile received knowledge of faraway countries and facilitated transferring the information to the visions of the Romans, Parthians, and Chinese.

Mistranslation of Three Cultural Signs: Rajm, Food, and Tayammum in Vambery’s Travels in Central Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 420
Author(s):  
Ahmad Gholi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Foreign Culture ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Cultural Baggage

Translation as a process of domesticating something alien is not restricted solely to linguistic domain; on the contrary, it can be extended to other arenas as well. For example, travel writing as an attempt to tame foreign culture and render it accessible for the audience in home culture, can be considered as a kind of cultural translation. When a travel writer enters into a new context (source culture), he encounters with signs which are radically different from those in his home culture. Hence, the travel writer is burdened to deforeignize hitherto unknown signs to render them familiar and consumable for his audience. Since the travel writer carries his cultural baggage which functions as a cultural filter, his cultural translation cannot be objective and free from cultural mistranslations, and as a result, the current article is going to focus on the cultural mistranslations in Arminius Vambery’s Travel to Central Asia. Thus, it argues that the travel writer in question in his journey to Central Asia which is a semi terra incognita in nineteenth century endeavors to translate the exotic aspects (foreign signs) of Central Asian culture; however, his cultural biases give rise to the cultural mistranslations in areas such as diet and religious punishment like stoning.

Madagascar and the Slave Trade, 1810–1895

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
The One

The distinguishing feature of the Malagasy slave trade in the nineteenth century was the co-existence of two competitive slave networks, the one feeding Malagasy slaves to meet the demand of long-distance and regional markets in the western Indian Ocean, and the other channelling Malagasy war captives and East African slaves on to the markets of Imerina. The export of slaves from Madagascar had long existed, but the import of slaves was a new and distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon, the result of the rise of the Merina empire, whose economy was based on a huge, unremunerated and servile labour force. As the empire expanded, so its labour requirements grew, to conflict sharply with the increasing demand for labour on the neighbouring plantation islands as they shifted over to the production of sugar. Creole merchants found themselves obliged to find alternative labour supplies, and from the 1830s they were moving rapidly down the west coast of Madagascar, where they purchased slaves from chiefs independent of Merina control. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Merina war of 1882–5, the slave-trade networks remained remarkably stable, despite local rivalries. This was due largely to the presence of the Arab Antalaotra, an experienced body of middlemen, and the Indian Karany who supplied the capital for the trade. The war effectively broke the power of the Merina regime, and as the imperial economy crumbled, so security of trade collapsed across the island. Though the disruption of legitimate commerce initially spurred the slave trade, it also strengthened creole calls for French intervention. This occurred in 1895, and the following year the French authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar. This, and the effective military occupation of the island by the French, reduced the Malagasy slave trade to a trickle by the first years of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Myths and Lessons of Liberal Intervention: the British Campaign for the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade to Brazil

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
John MacMillan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Target State ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
Cultural Constraints

This article takes issue with recent references to the British nineteenth century campaign for the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil that serve to bolster interventionist or imperialist agendas. In particular, such accounts reproduce two and a half myths about the campaign: that it can serve as a model for the present age; that the success of the campaign can be explained through the actions of the intervening party alone (with a corresponding neglect of those of the ‘target’ state); and the half-myth that the campaign’s success was due to military action (at the expense of institutional (legal) and normative factors and the capacity of the target state). I argue instead that this case – and interventions more generally – would benefit from an analysis that considers the role of force in relation to a series of residual institutional and cultural constraints within the liberal state and to political conditions in the target state. In light of the complexities and contingencies that these factors present the underlying lesson is that military force should be used sparingly, if at all.

Speaking about Freedom and Dependency

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 44-71
Author(s):  
Elena Smolarz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Public Debates

Slavery and freedom as political subjects shaped the public debates of the nineteenth century. Employing an historical-semantic approach, this article scrutinizes established academic debates as well as nineteenth-century Russian discourses on Central Asian slavery and slave trade, and on enslaved Russian captives in Bukhara and Khiva in particular. In so doing, it uncovers multiple perspectives on freedom, slavery and dependency, and enriches the representational repertoire of official actors with insights into the perspective of the enslaved themselves.

scholarly journals Twin Imperial Disasters. The invasions of Khiva and Afghanistan in the Russian and British official mind, 1839–1842

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER MORRISON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Self ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Sense Of Entitlement

AbstractThis paper examines two linked cases of abortive Imperial expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian winter expedition to Khiva both took place in 1839, and both ended in disaster. These events were linked, not merely by coincidence, but by mutual reactions to intelligence received in Orenburg, St Petersburg, Calcutta, London, and Tehran. British and Russian officials shared similar fears about each other's ambitions in Central Asia, similar patterns of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, and a similar sense of entitlement as the self-conscious agents of two ‘Great Powers’. By examining the decision-making process which preceded these twin cases of expansion, and the British and Russian attitudes to Central Asian rulers and informants, the paper provides not only a deeper understanding of what provoked these particular disasters, but also of the wider process of European imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Slaves Who Owned Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Reis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Urban Slavery ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Provincial Capital ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Special Case

It was not uncommon in Brazil for slaves to own slaves. Slaves as masters of slaves existed in many slave societies and societies with slaves, but considering modern, chattel slavery in the Americas, Brazil seems to have been a special case where this phenomenon thrived, especially in nineteenth-century urban Bahia. The investigation is based on more than five hundred cases of enslaved slaveowners registered in ecclesiastical and manumission records in the provincial capital city of Salvador. The paper discusses the positive legal basis and common law rights that made possible this peculiar form of slave ownership. The paper relates slave ownership by slaves with the direction and volume of the slave trade, the specific contours of urban slavery, access by slaves to slave trade networks, and slave/master relations. It also discusses the web of convivial relations that involved the slaves of slaves, focusing on the ethnic and gender profiles of the enslaved master and their slaves.

Problems of military-political interaction between the countries of the West and Central Asia at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-33
Author(s):  
Boris G. Koybaev
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The West ◽  
Regional Environment ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Political Interaction ◽  
The Military

Central Asia in recent history is a vast region with five Muslim States-new actors in modern international relations. The countries of Central Asia, having become sovereign States, at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries are trying to peaceful interaction not only with their underdeveloped neighbors, but also with the far-off prosperous West. At the same time, the United States and Western European countries, in their centrosilic ambitions, seek to increase their military and political presence in Central Asia and use the military bases of the region’s States as a springboard for supplying their troops during anti-terrorist and other operations. With the active support of the West, the Central Asian States were accepted as members of the United Nations. For monitoring and exerting diplomatic influence on the regional environment, the administration of the President of the Russian Federation H. W. Bush established U.S. embassies in all Central Asian States. Turkey, a NATO member and secular Islamic state, was used as a lever of indirect Western influence over Central Asian governments, and its model of successful development was presented as an example to follow.

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