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Slavery and Empire in Central Asia Slavery and Empire in Central Asia The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Eden, Jeffrey Eric. 2016. Slavery and Empire in Central Asia. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493418 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 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 Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves’ resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the contours of the slave labor system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.
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