ABSTRACT
That slavery in the Ottoman Empire involved a remarkably wide range of social groups has long been recognized by historians. Attention has been paid to the wide divergence in the legal forms of slavery, which encompassed both an involuntary recruitment system run by the state (the devşirme) through which enslaved persons could rise to become military and administrative cadres, and an older Islamic legal and social regime that condoned and regulated chattel bondage. Scholarly debate has tended to focus on finding a common definition of slavery, especially given the ambiguity of the elite recruitment system already mentioned. 2 The present study aims to be inclusive in its definition and, following Toledano, 3 places all major categories along a single continuum according to the degree of bondage: 1) military–administrative, or kul, slavery, in which enslaved male persons were trained and rose within the state apparatus as servants and property of the sultan; 2) harem slavery, in which in a course parallel to kul slaves, enslaved females served in the households of social and political elites as concubines and/or wives; 3) domestic slavery, in which enslaved males and females served in non-state elite urban households in a variety of functions and were generally subject to classical Islamic law, not the customary/imperial law of kul slavery; and 4) agricultural and galley slavery, in which enslaved individuals were usually employed on large-scale estates and naval ships as established by the government or political elites.
