A decentralized slave trade

According to a long-standing consensus among historians of Eurasian economies, the rise of maritime trade linking Western Europe with India and China in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a devastating effect on the caravan trade across Central Asia, rendering it largely obsolete.Footnote ³ This overland trade had brought prosperity to Central Asia's cities by promoting the urban-centred production of everything from paper to textiles. Isolation from the new oceanic trade routes was thus (the story goes) catastrophic for the regional economy as a whole, and it resulted in decentralization and rapid deurbanization. In recent decades, however, research into overland trade in the region after the sixteenth century has revealed that it was far from stagnant. Audrey Burton's landmark work on Bukharan trade networks, for example, reveals how the khanate engaged in extensive trade with nomadic, sedentary, rural, and urban peoples throughout Eurasia, thanks to overland commercial networks extending through Khwārazm, East Turkistan, Iran, China, Muscovy, Siberia, the Ottoman empire, and India.Footnote ⁴ Trade by Indian merchants in Central Asia during this period has, meanwhile, been the subject of important studies by Scott C. Levi, Stephen Dale, Muzaffar Alam, Claude Markovitz, and others.Footnote ⁵ While the mere existence of overland trade, as Ron Sela has observed, is not sufficient to prove that Central Asia as a whole was a thriving, flourishing region during these turbulent centuries,Footnote ⁶ it is nevertheless worthwhile to consider the nature of the existing commerce and how some types of trade managed to flourish. The trade in slaves can be counted among those types of commerce that thrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was bolstered by continual conflict in Khurasan and the Kazakh steppe as well as by demand for slaves in Bukhara, Khwārazm, and among rural nomads.

As we shall see, much of the slave trade took place outside major urban centres, with slaves being transported along caravan routes across rural Central Asia and traded in rural caravanserais and settlements. They were often traded by and among nomads, and it may be for precisely this reason that studies describing this slave trade remain so rare. Nomadic commerce, after all, has most often been considered not in relation to the wide-ranging caravan trade but rather in relation to specific urban centres, and the most common approach has followed a core/periphery model: the city is the core and the nomads populate the periphery, like spokes radiating from a hub. In the decades since Anatoly Khazanov published his influential Nomads and the Outside World, the relationship between Eurasian nomads and the urban ‘core’ has frequently been described as a symbiotic one, with the nomads providing the cities with goods or services in exchange for food, handicrafts, and luxury items. The urban ‘core’, in this model, is the final destination for the nomads’ goods, as well as the source of goods and revenue that they gained in trade.Footnote ⁷

In Central Asia, slaves were undoubtedly a major source of trade revenue for many nomads, particularly Turkmens, and they were most certainly traded and sold in the cities. But the kinds of bustling slave-bazaars found in Istanbul or Timbuktu, in which hundreds or even thousands of individuals were displayed for purchase at any given time, simply did not exist in the region. While a city such as Khiva was a site of slave trading and of slave labour, it was hardly the ‘core’ of the slave trade; it was merely one possible transit-point among many. In fact, as I will argue here, slaves were sold and traded at caravanserais and in rural settlements throughout the region, and rather than searching for a ‘core’ or ‘periphery’, it would be better to think of the slave trade in terms of ‘circulation’.Footnote ⁸ Slaves and their sellers circulated in decentralized zones of commerce.

Two aspects of the Central Asian trade contributed to its decentralized character. First, a significant portion of the trade took place between nomads and other nomads. Second, the nature of slavery itself in the region was distinctly rural: eyewitness accounts as well as studies of the region's urban economies have confirmed that the predominant type of work that slaves performed was agricultural.Footnote ⁹ The primarily rural character of slavery was a consistent trait over the course of centuries, although the trajectory of the trade in slaves shifted over time. The demographic of slaves from India, once prominent in the region, was fast disappearing by the eighteenth century, as an influx of Iranian Shῑʿite slaves from Khurasan took its place.Footnote ¹⁰ The Turkmen deserts north of Khurasan became increasingly prominent zones of captivity, transport, trade, and sale. By the late nineteenth century, Iranian Shῑʿites would, by all accounts, constitute the overwhelming majority of the region's slaves. Through the northward trajectory of these trade networks, they came to form a significant demographic in Khwārazm and Bukhara. Estimates of the number of slaves in Khwārazm in the nineteenth century generally range from 30,000–60,000 individuals; similar numbers were estimated for Bukhara.Footnote ¹¹

Evidence from the lives of slaves

As the region's slave traders have left us no ledgers or diaries, the best way to reconstruct the trade itself is through eyewitness accounts, as well as through the declared experiences of the slaves themselves. For much of the Muslim world beyond Central Asia, detailed information on the lives of individual slaves, and especially accounts authored by individual slaves, appear to be very few and far between.Footnote ¹² Based on the recent ethnographic literature on Ottoman slavery, for example, it seems that there are precious few enslaved persons in Ottoman territories for whom we know the full complement of basic information: their birthplace; their age at capture, if captured, along with the location and circumstances of their capture and who captured them; their sale-price and the location(s) of their sale(s); the length of their captivity; the sort of work they did; the identity and character of their owner(s); their treatment at the hands of their owner(s); their marital status; and the manner and means of their manumission, if freed, as well as what became of them afterwards.Footnote ¹³

This was precisely the sort of data collected from Central Asian slaves and former slaves by the officials of the Orenburg Border Commission and other Russian border authorities,Footnote ¹⁴ however, and the scarcity of such information for the broader Eurasian world would render even a few such interviews precious. For the present study, I have collated data on 45 of these slaves and former slaves for whom the documentary record is particularly rich; for each of these individuals, most or all of the above information was collected at the Russian border.Footnote ¹⁵ In some documents, their lives are recounted in the first person (albeit usually translated into Russian by interpreters, who were present and named). Most of these biographies and autobiographies follow a common formula, as if in response to a questionnaire, and the formula remained consistent throughout the nineteenth century. The consistent nature of the information they provide lends itself well to a comparative assessment. With tens of thousands of slaves in the region at any given time, such a small sample cannot be taken for a comprehensive prosopography of Central Asian slaves in general. But certain striking commonalities which emerge from this small sample cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence; and at times, these commonalities defy common conceptions. The evidence provided by these biographies, when combined with evidence offered in other sources, points to a re-envisioning of the nature of nomadic trade in Central Asia, as well as to a revision of the standard narrative of how slavery was ended in the region.

The origins of these 45 slaves and former slaves are recorded as follows: 13 were described as Persian, seven as Kalmyks, four as Afghans, three as Arabs, two as Hazaras, two as Turkmen, two as ‘Bukharans’, two as Kirghiz, two as Karakalpaks, two as ‘Central Asians’, one as a Tatar, one as an Uzbek, and four as of unknown origin.Footnote ¹⁶ These 45 individuals—41 men and boys, and four women and girls—had lived a combined 683 years in captivity. It is claimed in some sources that slaves in the Muslim world could very often expect their freedom after a period of roughly seven years, since it was at this point that slaves became eligible to purchase their own freedom.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, this alleged peculiarity of slavery in the region has been used to argue that Central Asian slaves—and slaves in the Muslim world more generally—had an easier time of it than slaves elsewhere, as they were rarely held in perpetuity. Of the 35 slaves in the present cohort whose total period of captivity is recorded, however, only three individuals had spent fewer than 15 years in bondage. Only two had been enslaved for a period of less than seven years before gaining their freedom. (Both of these two had been presented at the Russian border by their owners after the circulation of imperial decrees threatening punishment for all Kazakhs under Russian dominion who did not bring forward their slaves.Footnote ¹⁸ ) Sixteen others, having been presented to the Russian authorities, requested to be sent back with their owners in order to continue in their present circumstances—their captivity was open-ended at the time of their interview, in other words. In all, the mean period of captivity among this cohort of slaves was 19.51 years, with a median of 15 years. This tells us, among other things, that these slaves had substantial experience of captivity by the time they were interviewed.

Though nearly all of these 45 slaves had come to the Russian authorities from among the Kazakhs, their generally long duration of captivity cannot be considered a trait unique to the Kazakh context; and these statistics alone do not reflect the fact that a great many of these slaves had several owners over the years. Indeed, the experience of being sold repeatedly from owner to owner is another striking commonality that emerges in their biographies. This ‘horizontal’ transit is especially pronounced among those slaves who were initially taken captive by the Turkmens: for this cohort of 16 individuals, ten were sold more than once, and on the whole they were sold an average (mean) of 2.43 times per individual. This mobility from one owner to another is worth bearing in mind as we come to consider slaves’ transit across the region. We will now turn to the autobiography of one of these slaves, whose story unfolds across a remarkably broad geographical and cultural range.

Received by Russian border authorities in November of 1852, a man named ʿAbdullāh, son of one Mullā Walī Yār, described himself as 40 years old, a Shῑʿite, originally from Herat. Fourteen years prior, he had been living with his parents, his elder brother, his wife, his two sons (Begrashīd and Sayfullāh), and six servants (prislugi) on a farm the family owned near Herat. One day, they were attacked by a host of some 2,000 Teke Turkmens, who were in some sort of relationship of dependency to Merv, and had been—according to ʿAbdullāh—at the command of Tabsad Khan [sic]. The attacking party robbed the family of their property, making off with 200 sheep, 60 horses, and 50 head of cattle. The Turkmens took the family captive, along with their servants, numbering 13 people in all. (ʿAbdullāh's third son, Iskandar, and his daughter, A___,Footnote ¹⁹ had been living with his father-in-law, who was an official in Herat, so they were spared from the attack.) The captive family was taken to the Turkmens’ camp, southwest of Merv, where they remained for four days. During that time, the khan freed ʿAbdullāh's parents and sent them home, returning to them from among their stolen goods a carpet, some cattle, a cooking-pot, a blanket, and all of his father's books (his father had a reputation in the region, being a well-known religious scholar, or ‘mullā’). ʿAbdullāh's brother was sold to some Turkmens for the very low sum of 7 tillas, and ʿAbdullāh was sold for 8 tillas to a Turkmen named Berdi-Kilich, who in turn sold him at a profit to a Khivan two months later, earning 12 tillas. The sale evidently took place in the Turkmens’ camp near Merv. The Khivan, named D___, immediately took ʿAbdullāh to the town of Urgench and sold him to another Khivan, this one named Palvān Niyāz, for 18 tillas. After five days, Palvān Niyāz sold him to another Khivan, identified as ‘yuzbāshi Yakub’,Footnote ²⁰ for 25 tillas. In less than three months, ʿAbdullāh had already been sold four times.

Soon after arriving at the yuzbāshi’s house, ʿAbdullāh received the news that his father-in-law, Arbab Zulfikar [sic], the Herati official, had written to Tabsad Khan regarding the manumission of ʿAbdullāh's wife and two sons, who had also been sold off. He learned also that their servants had been sold to Khiva, but he did not find out where they and his elder brother were currently residing.

ʿAbdullāh lived with the yuzbāshi for the next four years, evidently in Urgench, doing agricultural labour for him, and after four years his master sold him to a Khivan named Yusuf Khop-Khar [sic] for 25 tillas, earning back the sum he had initially paid for ʿAbdullāh four years prior. After five days, this Khivan turned around and sold ʿAbdullāh to a Karakalpak named Mullā Bishbay [sic] for 37 tillas, and he lived with the Mullā for the next 7 years, performing domestic labour (domashnaia rabota) for him. At the end of seven years, the Mullā sold ʿAbdullāh for 30 tillas to a Kazakh of the Tabïn clan who was a nomad in Khivan territory. He lived with this nomad for a month before being sold once again, this time for 3 horses and 20 sheep, to a Kazakh named Chin-Timur [sic], who was from the Shekti clan and lived as a nomad along the river Emba. He lived with Chin-Timur for a little over a year before this owner presented him to Sultan Arslan Jan-Turin [sic], who gave him over to the Russian authorities. ʿAbdullāh reported that seven of his owners subjected him to no manner of abuse or mistreatment—implying, however, that one of his eight total owners did mistreat him. He requested that the Orenburg Border Commission convey him back home to Herat, at long last.Footnote ²¹

Over the course of 14 years, ʿAbdullāh was enslaved by a remarkably diverse cross-section of Central Asian society. He was held and sold by Turkmen raiders, by Khivan traders, by a Karakalpak mullā, by an Urgench yuzbāshi, and by two different Kazakh nomads. We know that he worked both as a domestic servant and as an agriculturalist, and one can only imagine the range of households to which he became accustomed—from Turkmen camps to Kazakh tents to the yuzbāshi’s estate. His price ranged from 7 tillas, near the site of his capture, to 37 tillas as an ‘import’ at an urban centre. ‘Horizontal’ mobility and demographic diversity characterize his ordeal, and in both of these traits ʿAbdullāh's narrative is no great exception in our cohort of 45. His story also follows a general pattern among our biographies in that a significant portion of his experience took place beyond the ‘urban’ sphere.

The first half of ʿAbdullāh's story is quite in keeping with common perceptions of how the slave trade functioned: archetypically, Turkmens raided Khurasan and brought Persian captives to the bazaars in Khiva or Bukhara, where they would enter the service of urban notables. Here we find the standard model of nomadic economic networks, with nomads supplying cities whose markets were the nexus of the slave trade. The nomadic and sedentary economies thus become inseparable, as in the widely repeated observations of Murav'ev:

Soon after, however, ʿAbdullāh passes from the cities back into the hinterlands, where he is traded among nomads. Rare indeed is the study which emphasizes trade among and within nomadic groups, and historians attuned to the many reminders that nomadic and sedentary economies were inextricable may begin to wonder whether there was any such thing as an intra-nomadic economy, and whether there is any alternative model for nomads’ trade relations other than symbiosis (or, according to older models, parasitism) with respect to settled regions. For our purposes, two questions emerge in light of ʿAbdullāh's story: first, did a significant slave trade exist beyond the urban bazaars? And, second, could the slave trade persist without the bazaars?

At first glance, the travellers and diplomats who provide much of our data on the nineteenth-century slave trade do not give us much cause to depart from the standard ‘urban core/nomadic periphery’ models sketched above, or even to elaborate on them. In source after source, we are told of a linear progression: captives were dragged from the peripheries to the urban bazaars of Khiva and Bukhara, with Turkmens—and, less commonly, Kazakhs—as their vector. The centre of the trade was the urban bazaar, and the nomads themselves were ever the captivators, armed chaperons, sellers, and nothing more. Thus we have it since the very earliest Russian appraisals of the slave-dealing economy, such as the following, dating from 1815:

The idea that Kazakhs and Turkmens kept few slaves among themselves plays into the notion that they were exclusively raiders, transporters, and dealers, and it is likewise a long-standing conceit. One can trace the idea from early Russian travel reportage through Soviet scholarship. A. I. Levshin, who travelled among the Kazakhs in the first half of the nineteenth century, was perhaps the earliest to propose that they kept no slaves among them—other than their women, who, Levshin characteristically claims, generally took the place of slaves, given the alleged laziness of Kazakh men.Footnote ²⁴ In the many years since, some scholars have flatly denied that slavery could develop in nomadic societies in general, and particularly among the Kazakhs. Their reasoning usually concerns: the relative lack of labour-intensity involved in herding; the weak development of agriculture and crafts among the Kazakhs; the availability of alternative sources of inexpensive or free labour; and the prohibitive expense of slaves when compared with the average Kazakh's worldly holdings.Footnote ²⁵

The first three points presume that owning slaves was merely a matter of perceived labour necessity—a simplistically ‘rationalist’ vision of slavery which overlooks the many tasks performed by slaves, throughout human history, which have been neither rational nor necessary nor always readily identifiable as ‘labour’. This leaves us with the notion of prohibitive expense. Semeniuk, for one, argues that a slave typically cost, among the Kazakhs, an average of 75 sheep, while, according to my collation of his data, only 21.1 per cent of Kazakh households in his sample (from mid-nineteenth-century Omsk) had more than 50 sheep, and only 9.6 per cent had more than 100.Footnote ²⁶ By considering ʿAbdullāh's biography, however, among others, we can see that prices fluctuated wildly. Abdullāh's price rose by nearly 500 per cent—from 8 tillas to 37 tillas—in different contexts and at different times. At a mere 8 tillas, ʿAbdullāh would have been an obtainable commodity for many. And some slaves cost nothing: they could be captured, and they could reproduce.

If one is still inclined to question whether the Kazakhs kept significant numbers of slaves, the Border Commission's tally of freedmen—those who either fled captivity in the steppe or were freed by their masters and arrived safely at the border—can be illuminating. The earliest numbers I have seen are already impressive; between 1749 and 1753, no fewer than 1,024 former slaves from among the Kazakhs turned up at Russian defensive posts.Footnote ²⁷ Of these individuals, 862 claimed to have fled their owners.

The most compelling evidence concerning slavery among the Kazakhs, however, is the testimony of the slaves themselves. It is with this in mind that we return to ʿAbdullāh, whose journey eventually took him in precisely the opposite direction from the standard model of nomadic trade—he went from the city of Khiva to the domains of nomadic Kazakhs and Karakalpaks, rather than vice-versa. Here, his story is similar to the others in his cohort: all spent some portion of their captivity among the Kazakhs, as one might expect, given that they emerged from the steppe; more surprisingly, most spent nearly the entirety of their captivity among Kazakhs. The sedentary centres of Khiva and Bukhara emerge in these biographies as merely two transit points in a series of sales. Generally, major towns are rarely mentioned in these documents. Another example will further illustrate the common feature of broad mobility beyond the bazaars and urban centres.

Like ʿAbdullāh, Kalbay Hamzin [sic] was interviewed by Russian border officials in November of 1852. He was then 24 years old, a Shῑʿite from the town of Kalyan, one-and-a-half days’ caravan journey from Mashhad, where his parents and brother were evidently living at the time of his interview. Six years prior, at the end of a winter night, Kalbay and 12 companions were grazing sheep about 12 versts (8 miles) from town, when they were attacked by 40 Teke Turkmens who had been based at Ashgabat. These Turkmens took them captive and brought them to the town of Alkabad, where they were divided up, and Kalbay was sold to a Turkmen with whom he lived for one month. This Turkmen then sold Kalbay to another Turkmen, named Khwāja Bulak [sic], for 37 tillas. Khwāja Bulak was from one of the tribes which had accompanied the raiding party. He immediately took Kalbay to the Khivan village of Purs [sic],Footnote ²⁸ two days’ caravan journey from the town of Urgench, where he sold him to a Khivan named Kut-Muhammad [sic] for 30 tillas. He lived with Kut-Muhammad in Purs for the next five years, serving him by planting grain and working the land. Finally, he was sold by Kut-Muhammad to a Khivan trader of Persian slaves for 30 tillas. This trader turned around and sold him for the same amount to a Kazakh of the Tabïn clan, living within the domain of Khiva. Kalbay lived with this Kazakh for two months before he was traded to another Kazakh, this one named Murat-Bek [sic], of the Karakesek, in exchange for 10 large sheep, a camel, a horse, and three large felt carpets. Kalbay stayed with Murat-Bek for 7 months, and he was then sold to a Kazakh named Butunbay [sic] of the Nazar clan,Footnote ²⁹ with whom he lived for another four months. This last master finally presented Kalbay to the sultan of the Middle Horde. At the conclusion of this narrative, Kalbay adds the details that all of his masters treated him well, that they did not beat or abuse him, and that he possessed no livestock or holdings of his own, or of his former masters’.Footnote ³⁰

As with ʿAbdullāh, Kalbay spent much of his captivity in the steppe. It is not clear that he ever passed through the urban bazaars of Khiva, Urgench, and Bukhara, and his time in the Khwārazmian khanate was evidently spent in remote, rural quarters. This rural orientation is, as mentioned, something his narrative shares with nearly all others in the cohort, and in order to appreciate the magnitude of this commonality, we will now step back briefly from particular narratives and have a look at trends related to acts of sale.

Of these 45 slaves, seven were kept by their original captors, and the other 38 were sold—so far as their biographies reveal—a total of 67 times altogether. For 63 of these recorded sales, something of the origins of the buyer and seller is recorded—whether they were ‘Kirghiz’ (Kazakh), ‘Khivan’ (a category which seems to exclude Turkmens and Kazakhs within Khivan domains), Karakalpak, Turkmen, and so on. Given the urban-centered model offered by our eyewitness accounts and by later secondary literature, one would naturally expect that most of the sales took place between Turkmens and Khivans, between Khivans and other Khivans, and—because these slaves issued from the Kazakh steppe—between Khivans and Kazakhs. After all, the best-known sources are unanimous in emphasizing that the bazaars of Khiva and Bukhara served as the crux of the traffic in slaves. But in fact only 5 of the 63 detailed sales took place between Turkmens and sedentary Khivans. Another four took place between Khivans and other Khivans. In other words, only 14 per cent of the recorded sales involved a sedentary Khivan buyer, and only 11 sales (17 per cent) involved a sedentary Khivan seller. Bukharans were involved in six of the sales, and in four of these cases they were recorded selling slaves to the Kazakhs. On both the buying end and the selling end, Turkmens and Kazakhs predominate. Sixteen of the sales involved Kazakhs selling slaves to other Kazakhs, with another eight being sales in which the buyers were Kazakhs and the sellers were, based on context clues, very likely other Kazakhs. Another 11 sales involved Turkmens selling slaves to Kazakhs. There were two sales by Turkmens to other Turkmens, two by Kazakhs to Karakalpaks, and two by Karakalpaks to Kazakhs. In all, among the 63 detailed sales, these sources document 50 buyers from nomadic or semi-nomadic groups (Turkmens, Kazakhs, Karakalpaks), at least 36 sellers from these groups, and no less than 33 cases in which both seller and buyer were from a one of these (generally non-sedentary) groups. The predominance of urban centres—Khiva, Bukhara, or others—is nowhere in evidence, nor is the predominance of urban, sedentary traders.

Four brief examples, all of which will be drawn, like the biographies of ʿAbdullāh and Kalbay, from the autumn of 1852, will give some further idea of how these slaves changed hands beyond the urban, sedentary sphere:

1. 1) A Turkmen whose name is recorded as Kul-Murat Sagdiev was 25 years old when he was interviewed by border officials. After the death of his parents, he passed into the care of his brother, who quickly sold him to a Kazakh for a camel and two horses. This owner surrendered him to the Russian authorities, and Sagdiev requested of them that he be sent back to his original homeland.Footnote ³¹

2. 2) An Afghan, whose name was illegibly recorded, was 45 years old when he was interviewed by border officials. He did not know the details of his original captivity, only that Turkmens sold him to a man named Khuday-Berdi for 60 tillas and that, when he was 4 years old, this man resold him to a Kazakh for the same amount. He lived with this owner for the next 37 years. He was married to a Kazakh of the Bayulï clan, and he had three sons, two daughters, and his own kibitka (yurt) among the Kazakhs. His owner presented him to the Russian authorities, who formally freed him, but he requested to be sent back to live with his present family among the Kazakhs.Footnote ³²

3. 3) A Karakalpak whose name is recorded as Mamandat Imaraliev was 30 years old when he was interviewed by border officials. After the death of his parents, he likewise passed into the care of his brother, who sold him for 100 sheep to a Kazakh, with whom he ‘travelled’ for 10 years. At the time of interview, he had a wife and a son among the Kazakhs. His owner surrendered him to the Russian authorities, who granted him his freedom, but he requested that he be returned to his home among the Kazakhs.Footnote ³³

4. 4) An Afghan whose name is recorded as Midman was 34 years old when he was interviewed by border officials. He relates that he was originally from Herat. Nineteen years prior, he had been tending to some cattle when he was taken captive by Turkmens. These Turkmens carried him along with them for the next two years before finally selling him to a Kazakh for 40 [?] sheep. He lived with this owner for the next 14 years before being presented by that same owner to the Russian authorities. Midman did not wish to be returned to his original homeland and requested that he be sent back among the Kazakhs.Footnote ³⁴

Despite the scarce mention of Khiva and Bukhara in these sources, it may be wise to assume that those sales involving sedentary Khivans and Bukharans took place in or near a town, for the simple fact that townsmen did not often venture out into the hinterlands unless joining a caravan. But in those cases when Kazakhs sold slaves to other Kazakhs (for example), it is equally likely that these sales took place in the steppe. Transport to a town prior to sale is never mentioned in such cases, nor would it be necessary—not only did neighbours trade with one another beyond the bazaars, but it turns out that the bazaars themselves—and urban spaces more generally—were not as essential to the slave trade as they were elsewhere in the Muslim world. As we shall see, this is borne out by the available descriptions of urban slave trading in Central Asia.Footnote ³⁵

The slave trade observed

Most of the eyewitness reportage on urban slave trading in the cities of Khiva and Bukhara concern the latter, given the relative inaccessibility of Khiva (and Khwārazm as a whole) for European travellers. Notorious as it was as a hub of the slave trade, the city of Khiva remained fundamentally obscure to most Western explorers and diplomats well into the mid-nineteenth century. A powerful indication of this obscurity comes in the form of an annotated map of the town which was published in the Russian journal Syn otechestva in 1842. Here, this map, which in its sparseness resembles a Piet Mondrian painting sans colour, is presented on the pretext that it should help provide some military knowledge in support of Russian expeditions, since the Russians knew so little of the layout of the town. The problem—such as it is—is that the map itself was drafted more than a hundred years prior, not long before Nadir Shah's troops caused significant damage to the city. The idea that this map from 1740 should offer valuable military intelligence to the armies of 1842 may lead us to suspect that few Russians had, in the intervening years, become intimate with the city (except under circumstances of captivity), and that fewer still would have personally observed slave dealing there.Footnote ³⁶

The earliest eyewitness account which I have yet seen of an actual Khivan slave bazaar is that of Murav'ev, published in 1822. His description is very concise indeed, and it is not clear if he is describing a scene he saw for himself. Of Persian captives coming to Khiva, he writes,

Though Murav'ev had much to say about the trade in slaves and their experience of captivity, he had nothing more to say about the spaces where they were sold. As far as I have seen, there would not be anything like another eyewitness report on a Khivan slave bazaar for nearly four decades thereafter.

The next account I have found—and perhaps the first which truly resembles eyewitness reportage—is by N. Zalesov, from his 1859 ‘Letter from Khiva’. The passage is striking for its luridness; for our purposes, it is still more striking for the modest scale of the bazaar itself, and its scant offerings:

Another decade would evidently pass before any traveller offered further observations about the specifics of a Khivan slave bazaar, and we have reason to doubt that the traveller in question—Arminius Vambery—actually saw the market with his own eyes. While listing the various bazaars of Khiva in his Travels in Central Asia, Vambery writes:

This is all Vambery has to say about the bazaar, though he elsewhere dedicated ample space to discussing the plight of Persian captives in the region. Indeed, he is one of our most impassioned commentators on the subject. Had he seen the bazaar for himself, we can be sure he would have provided more detail than this. His comment is helpful nevertheless, as it identifies the site of sales not as a typical bazaar, but rather as a caravanserai—a hint, perhaps, that slave trading was the sort of thing which tended to take place in venues with interior rooms and out-of-the-way dwelling spaces.

Amazingly, this appears to be the full extent of our eyewitness reportage on Khiva's slave bazaars. In all, it must be concluded that first-hand evidence regarding the nature of those market spaces is inconclusive—despite a general sense of certainty among sources (especially those who never saw the bazaar) that, as V. A. Tugan-Mirza-Baranovskii put it, ‘Until 1873, the main locale for the sale of slaves was in Khiva, in whose markets one could always meet with Tekes trafficking in this commodity’.Footnote ⁴⁰

We are more fortunate when it comes to eyewitness reportage on the slave bazaar of Bukhara. One of the earliest accounts of the bazaar, offered by the Scottish explorer Alexander Burnes, gives a wealth of detail:

In this account, it sounds as if the bazaar in question was capable of accommodating a fair amount of merchandise, with 30 or 40 stalls available. But again, as with the extant descriptions of the Khivan markets, our eyewitness saw just a few captives for sale. We see not the faintest glimmer of the kinds of teeming slave bazaars for which Istanbul (for example) was known. As with Zalesov's visit to Khiva, it appears that Burnes visited Bukhara during a low point in the trade, a season when slaves for sale were generally scarce.

Another traveller of the early 1830s—P. I. Demaisons, who was sent to Bukhara to secure the release of Russian captives—offers some further information about the structure of a Bukharan slave bazaar, though there is no indication that he saw one for himself. He writes:

Demaisons later identifies the caravanserai by name—the Sarāy-i pā-yi astāna.Footnote ⁴³

Concise as it is, the information Demaisons offers here is significant; slaves, he tells us, were not actually sold at the bazaar, which served merely as a showroom. The fact that much of the trade took place in peripheral spaces, beyond the public eye, is likewise confirmed by Vambery, who writes:

The cumulative impression here is of a trade which was perhaps deliberate in its remove from the public eye. The general absence of slave traders from the main bazaars is nowhere more palpable than in the account of Mohan Lal, the brilliant Kashmiri author and adventurer who served as an aid to Alexander Burnes during his voyage to Bukhara. Lal, like Burnes and Vambery, was repulsed by the trade in Persian slaves, and dedicated extensive commentary to the subject in his travelogue. He, too, interviewed a number of Persian slaves, and he extensively describes the circumstances of their captivity, both in specific and general terms. He was also a connoisseur of Central Asian bazaars: in the course of his travels, Lal visited bazaars in nearly every major town he passed through; he comments on the bazaars of Charju, Mashhad, Bala Khayaban, Turbat, Herat, Shikarpur, Ghazni, Jalalabad, Balahisar, Kabul, Kulum, Balkh, Karasan, and, of course, Bukhara. But for all his time in the bazaars, he reports only a single eyewitness experience of slave dealing, which he observed in Qarshi, a town identified by Vambery (above) as one of the major slave ‘depots’ of the region. Lal writes:

In this account too, we find the trade based not at the bazaars, but in the chambers of a caravanserai, seemingly well out of the public eye. Again, the scale of the trade is strikingly small—here, just three women were for sale.

One might expect to gain further details on Khivan and Bukharan slave markets from freed Russian slaves, many of whose biographies were preserved either in the Russian press or in Russian travelogues. But here too, eyewitness reportage is scarce, and by the early 1840s the trade in captive Russians had subsided so much that the Russian officer I. F. Blaramberg wrote of it in his journals as a distant memory:

In the 1860s and 70s, the Russian conquests would further reduce the visibility of slave trading. Captain L. F. Kostenko, reporting on the Russian mission to Bukhara in 1870, evidently learned that the slave market there was no longer in existence:

Emil Schmidt reported a similar state of affairs in Khiva, where slavery was formally abolished in 1873: ‘Latterly . . . the slave trade had considerably diminished, and a thousand individuals per annum were no longer brought to the Khivan markets.’Footnote ⁴⁸ The open trade in slaves, then, which had evidently never been especially visible to foreign travellers in the region, was by the late nineteenth century assured to remain mostly out of sight.

Russians as emancipators?

According to some Russian officials as well as foreign observers, the conquest of Khiva in 1873, which resulted in a proclamation of abolition jointly prepared by General Kaufman and the Khivan Khan, signalled not only the emancipation of Khwārazm's slaves but the effective end of the region's slave trade. This heroic narrative, painting the conquerors as emancipators, would prove to be long-lived. On the 25^th anniversary of the conquest, the popular Russian journal Niva offered a rhapsody typical among later appraisals of it:

The dramatic events in Khiva likewise inspired sanguine reflections among many Western observers, such as the British traveller Herbert Wood, who, writing soon after the conquest, praised the Russian ‘civilizing mission’ in the most generous terms: ‘The first steps have already been taken for the diffusion of light in these dark places of the earth,’ Wood writes, ‘for Humanity owes to Russia the cessation of brigandage and slavery, which from the earliest historical times have been the scourges of the Oxus countries.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Regarding the slave markets, he goes on:

It is no surprise that European observers would have expected abolition to constitute a major feature of the Russian ‘civilizing mission’ in the East, given that Western European powers tended to cast many of their own conquests and interventions in this era as emancipating enterprises. Indeed, the nineteenth century was an age of abolitionist intercessions, even if not all interventions were successful, and even if many were mere foils for more pressing motivations. Denmark led the way, officially abolishing the slave trade in its possessions by 1802, and other colonial powers soon followed suit: the British empire took steps toward abolishing the trade in 1807; Portugal signed a treaty stifling the importation of slaves into its colonial possessions in 1810; Sweden banned the trade in 1813; the Netherlands did the same the next year; and Spain and France followed soon after, the former promising to abolish the trade by 1820 and the latter by 1819. In the decades to come, the freeing of Christian captives was presented as a major incentive for the French conquest of Algiers (though, as W. G. Clarence-Smith observes, ‘they failed to extend their liberality’ to non-Christian slaves),Footnote ⁵² while the British empire attempted to foster abolition throughout the Ottoman world, sometimes with the assistance of Ottoman rulers and elites and sometimes in spite of their opposition.Footnote ⁵³ The British likewise led the way in efforts to undermine the Atlantic slave trade, though the last slave ship to arrive in the American South did so as late as 1858.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Clarence-Smith has shown in his wide-ranging survey of abolition in the Muslim world, colonial emancipation projects often achieved their ends, if at all, only very gradually, sometimes over the course of decades.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, in this climate of widespread abolitionism, the Russian efforts in Central Asia, which came not long after the abolition of serfdom within the empire itself, would naturally have been regarded by Western observers as yet another mission to end the misery of bondage, whatever its other motivations may have been.

A vision of Russian conquests in the East as an abolitionist enterprise has been offered in recent historical studies as well, particularly those by Liubov Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan and M. D. Farah,Footnote ⁵⁶ and it is certainly true, as Alexander Morrison writes, that the slave trade played a key role in justifying and motivating the Russian advance into Central Asia.Footnote ⁵⁷ But the overall mechanism of total abolition, and the means by which the region's new Russian rulers would patrol the slave trade and ensure that it had in fact ended, were evidently never articulated even among the tsar's top generals and officials. If indeed there had been a grand, overarching plan for general emancipation in Central Asia, it was certainly implemented in a scattershot—perhaps even improvised—manner. First, we must observe that, although the Russian conquest of Bukhara in the late 1860s had resulted in a number of Bukharan concessions rendered in ambitious treaties, an order of general emancipation was not among them. It was only in the autumn of 1873—some five years after Bukhara's conquest—that, by Russian demand, the universal emancipation of slavery became a law in the territory. The enforcement of the law involved a striking concession on the part of the Russian empire, however: General Kaufman, the architect of the treaty, allowed the Bukharan emir an entire decade to provide complete emancipation, during which time all slaves would stay with their present masters. Attempts to escape to freedom were punishable by death.Footnote ⁵⁸ In all, we find here a remarkably hesitant approach to emancipation for an ‘abolitionist’ empire.

Moreover, while it was the liberation of specifically Russian slaves that, as Morrison observes, was frequently evoked to justify military expansion, multiple eyewitness accounts confirm that Russian slaves were already quite scarce in the khanates by the mid-nineteenth century. Jan Prosper Witkiewicz, a Polish explorer who ventured to Bukhara in service to the tsar in the 1830s, wrote that ‘There are not many Russians in the Khanate; perhaps one could count up to 50 of them, and these ones are elderly, imported some time ago’. Some 20 of them, he estimated, belonged to the khan.Footnote ⁵⁹ Alexander Burnes, who likewise visited the khanate in the 1830s, put the number of Russian slaves at not more than 130.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Russian officer L. F. Kostenko, reporting on Bukhara circa 1870, wrote:

As for Khwārazm, as Kaufman and his forces approached the city, the khan made a desperate attempt to placate him and stave off invasion by rounding up and sending to the general what he claimed to be all of the Russian slaves that remained in the khanate. They totalled 21 people in all.Footnote ⁶²

Notwithstanding the scarcity of Russian slaves to liberate, popular opinion that conquest was necessary to end Russian enslavement in the khanates was rooted in a widespread feeling in Russia of perennial victimhood on the frontiers. This feeling manifested itself, as Bruce Grant has shown, in a vast popular literature, consisting of everything from short stories and novels to popular songs and ballads, all concerning Russian captivity in the East, generally among Muslims.Footnote ⁶³ To the extent that these captivity narratives had historical roots, these roots might be found in the long, traumatic period during which Russians were regularly captured and carried off by the soldiers and raiders of the Crimean khanate. Up to 200,000 Muscovites were estimated to have been taken into slavery by Crimean Tatar and Nogai captors between 1600 and 1650.Footnote ⁶⁴ The total number of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles captured by Tatars between 1468 and 1694 has been estimated at 1,750,000.Footnote ⁶⁵ As recently as the eighteenth century, Russians were frequently captured along the steppe frontier and the eastern Caspian shores; many were ransomed, but some were sold into slavery.

The slave trade continues

By the mid-nineteenth century, the age of Russian enslavement had mostly passed. Meanwhile, as we shall see, the trade in Persian slaves, who constituted the vast majority of slaves held in the khanates, seems to have continued even after the fall of Khiva. Nevertheless, Russian military presence in the sedentary heartland of Central Asia does appear to have occasioned some changes in the volume of the slave trade. One significant change evidently concerned the demographics of the highest registers of power in Bukhara, as many functions of state were carried out by slaves. P. Shubinskii described the alleged inconveniences the Bukharan emir ‘Abd al-Aḥad (r. 1885–1910) occasioned for himself in proposing general abolition:

It is unlikely that ‘all’ of the slaves who had been serving as court officials—however minor—would have departed upon receiving their freedom, and we have no further evidence, so far as I have seen, to support the claim. Nevertheless, it is plausible to suspect that manumission, if it had really been effective, would have had a cumulatively dramatic effect on the military, on the government, and on the domestic sphere among the nobility. But a trade that occurred largely in out-of-the-way spaces—rural nomadic settlements, backrooms in caravanserais—must have been difficult to abolish while demand for slaves still existed. Indeed, according to N. P. Stremoukhov, who travelled to Bukhara in 1873, demand still existed, and it was still satisfied:

Given the occult nature of the practices Stremoukhov describes, it is unfortunate that he provides no hint as to how he gathered the foregoing information. He testifies, in any event, that the trade continued not only among merchants, but at the highest levels of state:

Along with these bold claims, Stremoukhov provides one anecdote concerning the continuance of the trade which was drawn from his own personal experience:

Elsewhere in Central Asia, travellers, military personnel, and other eyewitnesses were turning in similar reports. In Badakhshan, where Shῑʿites had long been taken into captivity, and where groups of them had long been sent off into slavery as tribute to local Afghan rulers, the announcement of abolition from Kabul evidently had mixed effects. According to Thomas Edward Gordon, the more visible forms of trafficking had ceased, but the trade went one:

It would not be long before a traveller attempted to conduct a more intensive and personal investigation into the persistence of the slave trade. The traveller in question was the American diplomat Eugene Schuyler, who visited Bukhara in his Central Asian travels, having departed St Petersburg for the region in March of 1873. He made his first attempt to observe the trade when he arrived at Qarshi, the town whose slave dealing had been noted by Vambery and Mohan Lal. Here, he saw nothing: ‘I asked to see the slave market and was shown the sarai, but saw no slaves, though I was told that the next day (Tuesday), being bazaar day, some would probably be brought in for sale.’Footnote ⁷¹ He apparently never had a chance to return the next day, but in the town of Bukhara he would resume his search. His curiosity was piqued by a disparity between the claims of some Russian officials and those of local merchants and others he had met in the region. He writes:

Schuyler knew that he could not reveal his intentions to the Bukharan officials around him, since they would be likely to deny the existence of the trade. Seizing an opportune moment, he asked someone less beholden to the Bukharan government whether he might be shown a slave market, and he was promptly taken to ‘a large sarai’, where he proceed up the stairs into a gallery and found ‘several rooms, some of which were locked, and a number of slaves—two little girls of about four years old, two or three boys of different ages, and a number of old men—all Persians’. Schuyler reports that there were no women in sight, as both young women and old—excepting, apparently, the very young girls—were purchased immediately upon their arrival in Bukhara. The slaves were shown off by ‘an old Turcoman, who acted as a broker’, and who explained to Schuyler that ‘the market was rather dull just then, but that a large caravan would probably arrive in the course of a few days’. At this point, curious to learn about how such sales were conducted, Schuyler began bargaining for a ‘lively looking lad of fifteen’ who, he was told, had been taken captive near Astarabad five months previously.Footnote ⁷³

The ensuing negotiations drew a small crowd: ‘I was immediately asked to take a seat on a mat,’ Schuyler writes, ‘and the room soon filled with people, all of whom seemed to take much more interest in the sale than did the boy himself, who did not understand what was being said, the conversation being in Turki. The first price asked was more than 1,000 tengas, which I gradually reduced to 850 tengas; the seller constantly dilating on the good points of the boy, what an excellent jigit he would make, and so on, the bystanders joining in on one side or the other.’Footnote ⁷⁴ At first, Schuyler vacillates on the price, and searches the building's other rooms for other slaves. When he and his guide find none, he finally agrees to buy the boy, evidently for 850 tenga, planning to take him to Russia and, eventually, to secure his safe return to Iran. At this point he is confronted with ‘a broker, a swarthy, thick-set fellow from Kara-kul, a well-known slave dealer’, who tells him that a rival bidder had agreed to pay 900 tenga for the boy, along with two ‘gowns’ on top of that. An additional complication, according to this ‘broker’, was that the boy's real owner was not present, so that he himself had no right to part with the boy on his owner's behalf—the result being that Schuyler agreed to pay a portion of the price to the man as an advance in order to secure the later delivery of the boy, who he failed to take with him.

In short, Schuyler was swindled. He never received the boy, nor, apparently, did he ever get back the money he had already paid for him. He sent an acquaintance back to the place of sale two days later in order to seek out the boy, but this man found only two very young girls and one other boy for sale.Footnote ⁷⁵ Later, Schuyler mentions his adventure to a Bukharan official, who insists that the slave trade had indeed been ended, and that these few items of sale were nothing more than remnants. ‘I told him,’ Schuyler writes, ‘that I did not doubt his words, although, at the same time, it appeared very strange to me in this case, that when a caravan of sixty slaves had arrived at Bukhara the night before, at nine o'clock, he himself had given order that it should remain outside the Kara-kul gate, in order that I should not see it.’ Schuyler did not see it, nor would he ever see it, but by his own account the official did not deny the accusation.Footnote ⁷⁶

Undeterred, Schuyler resolves to buy another slave. He sends his wagon driver, Pulat, to search the town for one to buy. Pulat spends the day searching, and returns the same evening with the news that he had found a boy for sale, about seven or eight years old, offered for 700 tenga ‘and a good gown’. Schuyler buys him, and he turns out to be ‘very small and feeble, although intelligent’, a Persian from Maymana who had been taken captive by Salor Turkmens some three years earlier. According to Schuyler, the boy had little recollection of his parents and seemed not to know his own name, in light of which he ‘took the liberty, which in these countries is always allowed on the purchase of a slave, and named him Hussein’. He managed to retain this boy, despite the efforts of the boy's former owner to steal him back (fearing, after the sale, the he would be punished by officials for selling a slave to a foreigner who could expose the ostensibly illegal trade).Footnote ⁷⁷ Schuyler later tells us that his purchase caused a stir in Samarkand and Bukhara, with some notables further denying the existence of the trade and others glad to have it exposed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ultimately, Russian authorities seem to have taken the reports of slave trading in Bukhara seriously; after the fall of Khiva, the Russian Court Councillor K. V. Struve negotiated a treaty with the emir which resulted in a new injunction, signed in the autumn of 1873, that the slave trade be ended in Bukharan domains. This action, according to Schuyler, was still insufficient:

Schuyler was perhaps the most deeply invested among foreign observers investigating the persistence of the slave trade. There is likewise, however, significant evidence from native Central Asian sources which confirms the continuation of the trade after the Russian-fostered ‘official abolitions’ of the 1870s. When it comes to Bukhara, for example, we can observe the persistence of slavery through the lens of Islamic law, thanks to a document collection published by Turgun Faiziev. This collection is comprised of some 52 documents, most of a legal nature, including everything from bills of sale to manumission contracts and correspondences among Bukharan notables concerning slaves. The compilation contains no fewer than 17 such documents dating from the year 1886 alone.Footnote ⁸⁰ One document contains a brief register of the names and jobs of slave boys—15 in all— owned by the emir himself, some serving in the royal household and some in the government chambers.Footnote ⁸¹ In another document, two Muslim notables write to the emir notifying him that one Sardar Ishāqjān, residing along with ‘several households’ of people in Qubādiyān province, remains in possession of three male and seven female slaves, despite the fact that these slaves had been freed by official decree. Evidently, the slaves had come before a Bukharan general and a Russian official and explained that their masters had agreed to set them free, but that these masters were declining to issue them manumission documents in order to make their freedom legitimate within the context of Islamic law. The masters were duly ordered to issue the necessary paperwork.Footnote ⁸² The implications are remarkable: the official decree was not enough; for these slaves, and perhaps also for their owners, in order for manumission to be valid, it needed to issue—in the traditional fashion—from legitimate Islamic juridical authorities.Footnote ⁸³

Other documents preserve petitions requesting that the emir validate and ensure the release of slaves, in keeping with his general manumission decree. There are two ways of understanding such petitions: on the one hand, the fact that denizens of Bukhara felt that they could effect change by appealing to the highest authority might hint at a degree of action on the part of the emir and other high officials when it came to enforcing manumission; on the other hand, the fact that these same residents felt they needed to address their petitions to the royal court indicates the failure of more ‘local’ organs of change, and for each petition naming a particular slave, we must wonder how many other slaves went unmentioned by any appeal.