Slavery in a Global Context: the Atlantic, the Middle East, and the Black Sea

46. Shared Histories of Bondage.

Slavery, the practice of owning human beings, is a nearly universal historical phenomenon that reached its global peak during the eighteenth century and remains present to this day. However, slavery has taken many different forms in different regions: plantation slavery, domestic slavery, concubinage, military slavery and the like, often predicated on difference of religion or race. In this episode, we discuss slavery as practiced in different regions of the world from the Atlantic to the Middle East to the Black Sea in a comparative perspective.



Elena Abbott is a PhD student at Georgetown University focusing on the history of the Atlantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Soha El Achi is a PhD student studying slavery and French colonialism in North Africa at Georgetown University
Michael Połczyński is a PhD student studying Ottoman and Polish history at Georgetown University (see academia.edu)
Chris Gratien is a PhD student studying the history of the modern Middle East at Georgetown University (see academia.edu)



Note for the listener: This podcast is not primarily a work of primary source research. It is a synthesis of publicly available information and draws extensively from the following works below, which are also mentioned during the course of the episode. For the purposes of academic citation, we encourage you to consult these works. 

Select Bibliography

Johnson, Walter. "On Agency." Journal of Social History , Vol. 37, No. 1, Special Issue (Autumn, 2003), pp. 113-124

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Clarence Smith, W. G. Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Cordell, Dennis. “No Liberty, Not Much Equality, and Very Little Fraternity: The Mirage of Manumission in the Algerian Sahara in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, ed. Suzane Miers and Martin Klein.

Erdem, Y Hakan. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909. London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1996.

Troutt Powell, Eve M. A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan. University of California Press, 2003.

David, Geza and Pá Fodor. Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders : Early Fifteenth-Early Eighteenth Centuries. Ottoman Empire and its Heritage ; v. 37. Vol. . 37. Leiden ;Boston: Brill, 2007.

Fisher, Alan. A Precarious Balance : Conflict, Trade, and Diplomacy on the Russian-Ottoman Frontier. Istanbul: Isis Press, 1999.

Gertwagen, R. "Halil Inalcik; Victor Ostapchuk (Volume Ed.), Sources and Studies on the Ottoman Black Sea. Volume I: The Customs Register of Caffa, 1487-1490." NORTHERN MARINER 8, no. 3 (1998): 105.

Hellie, Richard. Slavery in Russia : 1450 - 1725. Chicago [u.a.]: Univ.Pr., 1982.

Kolodziejczyk, Dariusz. "Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: The Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries." Oriente Moderno. 86, no. 1 (2006): 149.