"So novel in its character from any thing known": Ottoman Antislavery Policy Under Mahmud II?

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In 1830, Sultan Mahmud II issued a sweeping order freeing enslaved people. Scholars have often been puzzled by this apparently unprecedented 1830 decree, and they have sometimes seen it as the beginning of Ottoman abolition. Yet the academic consensus is that Ottoman state efforts against slavery began only later, in 1847 at the earliest. This article attempts to resolve the discrepancy. By studying the original order and placing it in context, I argue that it emerged from a longer Ottoman tradition of freeing foreign captives after wars. Mahmud extended this tradition to Greece once that state won its independence in 1830. Thus Mahmud's order was not the unprecedented beginning of Ottoman abolition, but the last act in an older interimperial system of regulating enslavement. That system offered precedents for Ottoman antislavery action but was not itself opposed to slavery. Furthermore, I argue that the reason Mahmud's order has perplexed scholars is because of how it was transmitted to us. A single British observer is responsible for all subsequent work on the order, and his presentation of it was deeply colored by his position in contemporary British debates about abolition and the Eastern Question.