A Spectrum of Unfreedom: Captives and Slaves in the Ottoman Empire
- ISBN-10
- 9633864003
- ISBN-13
- 9789633864005
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 134
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-05-30
- Publisher
- Central European University Press
- Author
- Leslie Peirce
Description
Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts. Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave. Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor. From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law
By Cathryn Costello, Mark FreedlandThis collection has its origins in the recognition that there is a highly significant and under-considered intersection and interaction between migration law and labour law.
-
Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics
By Sofya KhagiSofya Khagi’s Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era.
-
Contemporary Inequalities and Social Justice in Canada
By Janine Brodieto the scholarship of the last several decades that has sought to highlight the centrality of unfree labour to contemporary capitalism and conceptualize freedom/unfreedom as a spectrum rather than a binary (Shrivankova 2010; ...
-
The Quality of Freedom
By Matthew H. KramerMuch of The Quality of Freedom is devoted to elaborating the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of particular freedoms and unfreedoms; however, the book's cardinal objective is to establish the measurability of each ...
-
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
By Daron Acemoglu, James A. RobinsonIn reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe's early and recent history, the Zapotec ...
-
Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery
By Prabha Kotiswaran... Surveillance and the Politics of Fear Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order Nick Cheesman The Ironies of Colonial Governance: Law, Custom and Justice in Colonial India James ...
-
Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom
By Scott SeliskerThere, Donald experiences a day-in-the-life of Nazi Germany, working on a munitions conveyor belt in a clear homage to Chaplin's factory. He experiences the frenzy of the accelerating assembly-line belt, but the Disney animators adapt ...
-
Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam
Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900–1900 is a collection of studies that investigate various types of unfreedom in the wider Black Sea area in the medieval and early modern periods.
-
The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500-AD 1420
By Paul Cartledge, David Richardson, David EltisIn this volume, leading scholars provide essay-length coverage of slavery in a wide variety of medieval contexts around the globe.
-
The Charisma of Distant Places: Travel and Religion in the Early Middle Ages
By Courtney LuckhardtAlexander O'Hara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 19–53; Ian Wood, “Reform and the Merovingian Church.” In Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong, ed. Rob Meens et al.