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Slavery and Empire in Central Asia
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Eden, Jeffrey Eric. 2016. Slavery and Empire in Central Asia. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard
University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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Slavery and Empire in Central Asia

A dissertation presented

by

Jeffrey Eric Eden

to

The Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

March, 2016
© 2015 Jeffrey Eric Eden
All rights reserved.
Dissertation Advisor: Roy Mottahedeh Jeffrey Eric Eden
Slavery and Empire in Central Asia

Abstract
This dissertation is the first major study of a slave trade that captured up to one million
slaves along the Russian and Iranian frontiers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries alone. Slaves served as farm-workers, herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and
even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost
China. Most of these slaves were Shīʿites who were captured by Sunni Turkmens and sold in
Central Asian cities and towns. Despite the Central Asian slave trade’s impressive dimensions, and
the prominent role of slaves in the region’s history, the topic remains largely unstudied by historians
of the region and of the broader Islamic world. Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources
and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves’ resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the
contours of the slave labor system and played a key, unacknowledged role in their emancipation.
While previous studies of slavery in the Muslim world have emphasized the role of colonial
governments in fostering abolition, I argue that slaves in Central Asia, by fomenting the largest
slave uprising in the region’s history, triggered the abolition of slavery in the region as a whole.

iii
Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1
1. Beyond the Bazaars: Geographies of the Slave Trade in Central Asia…………………….....70
2. From Despair to Liberation: Mῑrzā Maḥmūd Taqῑ Āshtiyānῑ’s Ten Years of Slavery……....112
3. The Slaves’ World: Jobs, Roles and Families……………………………………………….149
4. From Slaves to Serfs: Manumission Along the Kazakh Frontier……………………………188
5. The Khan as Russian Agent: Native Informants and Abolition……………………………..214
6. The Conquest of Khiva and the Myth of Russian Abolitionism in Central Asia……………239
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………275
iv
Introduction: Slavery and Imperialism in Central Asia

“The indolent, enervated Orientals may still regard with bitter resentment
and rancor the efforts of Europe in the cause of humanity; but the sale and
purchase of human beings is everywhere practiced with a certain reserve
arising from a sense of shame, or, to speak more correctly, of fear of
European eyes. This trade is now to be found unfettered and
unembarrassed only in Central Asia.”
Arminius Vambery, Sketches of Central Asia, 18681

By the time of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the 1860s and 70s, the region’s social
landscape had been impacted by a millennium of slavery. Slaves served as farm-workers,
herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in
the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost China. The institution of slavery in the
region had never been seriously challenged by any internal or external forces down to the
nineteenth century. It thrived especially in the khanates of Khwarazm and Bukhara. As the
nineteenth century wore on, however, negotiations over the release of slaves began to factor
heavily in these khanates’ relationship to Iran, Russia, and Great Britain. By the end of the
century, tens of thousands of slaves would be free.

1 Arminius Vambery, Sketches of Central Asia (London: W.H. Allen, 1868), 205.
1
This dissertation examines the period from 1750-1873, which saw both the flourishing of
the Central Asia’s slave trade and its collapse, and it focuses in particular on the region
extending from Khurasan in the south to the Kazakh-Russian frontier in the north, and
encompassing Khwarazm, Bukhara and their environs.2 It is not a political history of Central
Asia, nor another diplomatic history of the so-called “Great Game.” Rather, the purpose of this
dissertation is to advance three arguments about slavery and abolition in the region. First, I
explore the ways in which slaves influenced the nature of their captivity through their own
initiatives and ingenuity, and I argue that slaves’ resistance, rather than Russian military
intervention, was the driving force of abolition in the region. Second, using evidence from
slaves’ testimonials, I argue that slavery in the region was a largely rural and agricultural
phenomenon, and that the trade in slaves was generally conducted across caravan routes. Slavery
in Muslim Central Asia thus offers an important contrast to other parts of the Islamic world,
where the urban and military dimensions of slavery were more prominent. Finally, I challenge
the historiographical consensus that Russian military force ended the slave trade, demonstrating
that the trade’s decentralized nature made it impossible to police. I also present a number of case
studies that show how Russian efforts toward fostering abolition often had ulterior motives as
well as wildly mixed results. I conclude by showing how slaves in the khanate of Khwarazm
launched an uprising, little-known even among historians of Central Asia, which served as the
catalyst for abolition in the region as a whole.

2 Slavery was also prominent in other regions of Central Asia, such as Afghanistan and East Turkistan, but I have
chosen not to cover those regions in the present work in part because, as we shall see, the region extending from
Khurasan north across the Caspian coast and along the Russian-Kazakh frontier can be considered a distinct and
bounded (albeit roughly) ecosystem in which slaves circulated. The slave trade in East Turkistan, for example,
which revolved around Tarim Basin trade networks and also involved Chinese slaves and Chinese traders, is
deserving of separate study, and Laura Newby (see above) has broken ground in that effort. A recent dissertation by
Benjamin Levey has offered groundbreaking insights into the fate of slaves along China’s Kazakh frontier: “Jungar
Refugees and the Making of Empire on Qing China’s Kazakh Frontier, 1759-1773” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard
University, 2013).
2
While evidence of slavery and the slave trade in Central Asia is plentiful, scholarship on
it is nearly non-existent.3 This is not surprising, as the scarcity of research on slavery in Islamic
Central Asia mirrors the broader scarcity of research on slavery anywhere the Muslim world. (In
Joseph C. Miller’s comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on slavery, published in
1999, we find a table showing the distribution of works on the subject according to their
geographical focus: among the thousands of works on slavery published between 1900 and 1991,
a mere 3.3% focused on the Muslim world. Between 1992 and 1996, the proportion dipped
slightly, to an even 3%.4) Fortunately, the last two decades have seen an increased interest in
Muslim slave systems, particularly in Ottoman contexts. The burgeoning study of slavery in the
Muslim world has tended to follow trends visible in the broader historiography of global slavery.
In recent years, for example, there has been a pronounced shift in emphasis from the institutional
and material study of slavery (legal conceptions, trade volume, and so on) to what might be
termed a historical ethnography of the slaves themselves.5 Whereas in earlier works the
infrastructure of slavery emerged at the expense of a clear sense for individual experiences, more
recent works have often privileged the individual at the expense of the larger framework in
which the slave was enmeshed.
The rise of the “ethnographic approach” to slavery is predicated on a luxury of pre-
existing groundwork which scholarship on Central Asia is lacking. Scholars who explore the

3 The only monograph on the topic remains a slim but important Soviet-era volume in Uzbek, by Tursun Faiziev:
Buxoro feodal jamiyatida qullardan foidalanishga doir hujjatlar (XIX asr) (Tashkent: Fan Nashriyoti, 1990). Some
related articles of note include Laura Newby, “Bondage on Qing China’s North-Western Frontier,” Modern Asian
Studies 46:7 (2012), 1-27; Scott Levi, “Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush: Indians in the Central Asian Slave Trade,"
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 12/3 [2002]: 277-288); and Benjamin Hopkins, “Race, Sex, and Slavery:
‘Forced Labor’ in Central Asia and Afghanistan in the Early 19th Century,” Modern Asian Studies 42:2 (2008), 629-
71.
4 Joseph C. Miller, Slavery and slaving in world history: a bibliography, 2 vols. (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe,
1999), xi-xii.
5 Recent examples of this approach include Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the
Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Eve Troutt Powell, Tell This in My Memory:
Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
3
experiences of an individual slave in Istanbul or Baltimore can do so with the ease of knowing
that the basic features of Ottoman and American slavery have been clarified elsewhere; they can
even take for granted that a sizable audience for their work will already be familiar with this
background. A historian who attempts a history of Central Asian slavery has no such luxury.
Fortunately, the task of building foundations is made less discouraging by the sheer abundance
of primary sources on the subject, which span every type from census records to firsthand
narratives by former-slaves (a genre which has generally been absent from researches into the
Ottoman world).6 Thanks to this wealth of material, I will provide a general overview of the
institution of slavery and its economy in the region, while also offering case-studies of individual
slaves based both on their own testimony and on eyewitness accounts.
Another feature widely shared among works on slavery in Muslim societies is a tendency
to divide slave labor systems into discrete spheres, each corresponding to particular jobs and
spaces: military slavery, domestic slavery, harem slavery, and so on. (Specialists have emerged
in the study of particular spheres: we have, for example, David Ayalon’s remarkable body of
work on the Mamlūk military slave system.7) Here, I will likewise examine the specific jobs
undertaken by slaves and the places they inhabited, but, whenever possible, I will take a more
holistic view, considering how slaves’ occupations fit into the broader narrative of their lives and
experiences. This approach is particularly appropriate for the Central Asian context, in which an
individual slave could occupy many different spaces and perform many different kinds of labor
over the course of his or her life.

6 On the relative lack of firsthand slave narratives in the Ottoman context see, for example, Y. Hakan Erdem,
“Slavery and social life in nineteenth-century Turco-Egyptian Khartoum,” in Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno,
eds., Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in 19th-Century Egypt, Sudan, and
the Ottoman Mediterranean (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 125.
7 See David Ayalon, The Mamluk Military Society: Collected Studies (London: Varorium, 1979)
4
While I will focus here on slavery in the Muslim societies of Central Asia, it is important
to observe that slavery was not introduced to the region by Muslims, and neither were captive-
taking and slave-owning exclusive to Muslims. Furthermore, as I will show, Muslim Central
Asia was home to a great diversity of slave systems, some of which invite comparisons beyond
the Muslim world.8 In Khwarazm, for example, where we find slaves laboring on large
agricultural estates, the prevailing system of slavery shares more common features with
plantation slavery in the American South than it does with urban slavery in Istanbul. Slavery
among the nomadic Kazakhs, meanwhile, shares more in common with slavery among nomadic
non-Muslim groups such as the Mongols than with either Khwarazm’s plantation slavery or
Istanbul’s urban slavery. Aside from its diversity of forms, the extensiveness of slave-owning
also varied by region: even as the trade thrived in Khwarazm and Bukhara, it remained strikingly
small in scale in the neighboring Muslim khanate of Kokand.9
Given the above, it is best to think of Central Asian slavery as a regional phenomenon
rather than as a religious one.10 While Hanafi law, in theory, governed the slave system, and
religious differences usually distinguished slaves from their owners, slavery among Muslims was
merely the continuation—amended with certain religiously-informed cultural adaptations—of a

8 The terminology of slavery in Central Asia is vast—ghulām, qul, chūrī, and mamlūk are just a few of the many
terms for slaves that we shall encounter over the course of this dissertation—and the word “slave” is hardly adequate
in reflecting that diversity. What unites the roles defined by all of these terms is best captured in Seymour
Drescher’s definition of slavery: “The most crucial and frequently utilized aspect of the condition [of slavery] is a
communally recognized right by some individuals to possess, buy, sell, discipline, transport, liberate, or otherwise
dispose of the bodies and behavior of other individuals” (Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-Slavery
[Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 4-5).
9 The main reason for this is likely Kokand’s relative distance from Khurasan, the region that supplied most of the
slaves kept in Khwārazm and Bukhara.
10 This approach contrasts with that taken by a number of recent works on “Muslim” slavery, most notably William
Gervase Clarence-Smith’s ambitious comparative synthesis, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
5