By the end of the nineteenth century tens of thousands Shiʿa Iranians were taken captive by Sunni Turkmen and Kazakh slave raiders and enslaved in the cities and steppes of Central Asia. Slave-raiding was an act of resistance on the part of Turkmen and Kazakh nomads against the surrounding Persian and Russian empires as well as a nomadic proxy strategy used by the Central Asian khanates on the Khurasan frontier. This “forgotten slave trade” is the subject of Jeff Eden’s book Slavery and Empire in Central Asia. Eden offers exhaustive research on the Central Asian slave trade covering the period between the mid-eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. This is a surprisingly understudied topic given the prevalence of the phenomenon and the abundance of suitable primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, captivity narratives, and transcripts of interviews with slaves. As Eden acknowledges, the scholarship on the topic remains scant and limited to works on Russian imperial abolitionism, such as Liubov Kurtynova-D’Herlugnan’s monograph The Tsar’s Abolitionist: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire and M. D. Farah’s article “Autocratic Abolitionists: Tsarist Russian Anti-Slavery Campaigns.”Footnote ¹ These works view Russia as an abolitionist power, which Eden sets out to challenge by arguing that abolitionism was neither the motive nor the result of the Russian imperial conquest of Central Asia. By contrast, he proposes to credit slaves for their own emancipation, suggesting that the widespread slave uprising in Khwarazm in 1873 served as the impetus for abolition in the region.

While the book preserves an overarching chronological progression, Eden organizes his work into thematic chapters, each tackling a particular aspect of the slave trade. The introductory chapter presents the reader with the social, historical and political context of the Central Asian slave trade. Relying on the Khivan Chagatai chronicle Firdaws al-iqbal, with its numerous references to captive-taking, Eden explains that instead of being an exclusively nomadic practice, slavery was a “normative part of warfare across the region” (p. 6). The strength of this chapter lies in its questioning whether Russia—itself a participant in the slave-taking—can a priori be considered abolitionist. The following chapter, “Beyond the Bazaars: Geographies of the Slave Trade in Central Asia,” explains the decentralized nature of the slave trade due to its close connection with caravan routes. Here, Eden highlights that “the urban centers of Khwarazm and Bukhara were, for many slaves, merely transit points” (p. 55), whereas transactions occurred in caravanserais. The author draws his evidence from eyewitness accounts of travelers to Central Asia as well as unpublished interviews with slaves who had escaped or were surrendered by their owner to the Russian border authorities. Concluding on the decentralized and rural characteristics of slavery, Eden convincingly argues against the notions of “Russian and local authorities effectively abolishing the slave trade in 1870s” (pp. 55–6). His reference to Turgun Faiziev’s published collection of documents related to slavery confirms the continuation of slave trade in Bukhara beyond 1870.

In the third chapter, “From Despair to Liberation: Mirza Mahmud Taqi Ashtiyani’s Ten Years of Slavery,” Eden summarizes and analyzes Ashtiyani’s captivity narrative. Detailing his ingenious and arduous path to freedom, Ashtiyani’s memoir reflects subversive agency held by slaves. Eden compellingly links this agency to the 1873 uprising, discussed in the final chapter, and provides both a continuous and pointed analysis. In the subsequent chapter “The Slaves’ World: Jobs, Roles, and Families,” the author offers a window into the “possible range of slaves’ experiences” (p. 140), drawing evidence from the Russian border authorities’ interviews of escaped slaves. The way in which Eden references these interviews is one example of his meticulously pointed use of primary sources: it is impressive that with institutional imperial records, Eden manages to depict a “history from below” that maintains slaves at the forefront of their story. Here, by showcasing slaves’ agency and social mobility, albeit limited and subject to chance, Eden demonstrates that slaves were essential to the Central Asian social fabric and that they achieved their own emancipation.

Chapter 5, “From Slaves to Serfs: Manumission along the Kazakh Frontier,” challenges Russia’s abolitionist status by demonstrating that, once at the Russian border, escaped slaves were primarily drawn into serfdom to settle the borderlands of the empire or sent back under the guardianship of their masters. The latter was often the case for the slaves who were bought in early childhood and their masters were the only “family” known to them. Eden successfully persuades the reader by using the same interviews, but this time discussing individual cases to support his point. The following chapter, “The Khan as Russian Agent: Native Informants and Abolition,” studies the mixed results of the Russian Empire’s efforts in terminating slavery among nomads with the help of Kazakh and Turkmen community members as informants. Eden demonstrates that while Russia used its informants as proxies against Iran, these informants “came to use their newfound status not only for personal interests, but also as a form of resistance against their own colonial patrons” (p. 163). The final chapter, “The Conquest of Khiva and the Myth of Russian Abolitionism in Central Asia,” details how slaves sparked an uprising in Khwarazm. In discussing the slave uprising of 1873, Eden drives his argument home by showing that, upon conquering Khiva, Russia had no intention of emancipating the slaves: the first wave of the uprising resulted in the public execution of two slaves. Slaves’ persistence with another wave of rebellion left Russia with no choice but abolition. As Eden persuasively illustrates, only five years after the conquest “Russians would write abolition into a treaty with the Bukharan Amir, and even then the ruler was allowed a deferment of ten years before full emancipation would have to take effect” (p. 184).

Eden’s monograph successfully fills the gap in the Central Asian and global histories of slavery and the broader Eurasian history, and lays ground for further research in comparison of Central Asian slavery with slave trade in other parts of the Islamic world. He persuasively discredits Russia’s abolitionist narrative but does not supplant it with any alternative, though this falls beyond the scope and the aim of the book. The reader is left to wonder: why did Russia conquer the region? In response to this question, Russia’s “civilizing mission”—which Eden acknowledges to be overlooked by the Soviet and western scholarship—and its connection to the Russian conquest of Central Asia and eradication of slavery is an important avenue for further research and debate.