Introduction

Current research has demonstrated that early modern slavery was much more widespread than the traditional concentration on plantation slavery in the context of European colonial expansion would suggest. ² Slavery and slave trading, which appeared so shameful even in the Northern American context that its academic breakthrough is relatively recent, remains little researched in Eurasia except for some of the southern, Muslim parts. The pioneer effort to trace the Russian campaigns to extinguish the slave trade in the Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to wait more than a decade to merit publication, ³ until well after the call for the conference to which the present volume is dedicated. Slavery and the slave trade did not fit well into Marxist models of social development in history in general and in the Russian Empire in particular, lest it might seem backward; their academic study was discouraged. ⁴ Soviet studies appeared after the Second World War prompting to justify the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and the Chechens which rather increased the stain of talking about slavery. ⁵ Moreover, early Russian enslavement of people of Finnish, Belorussian, Caucasian or nomadic backgrounds was usually passed over in silence. ⁶ Such widespread negligence is in stark contrast to the fact that slavery and the human trade were common across wide stretches of Eurasia, and a slave economy played a vital part in the political and cultural contacts between Russia and its Eurasian neighbours. The sheer scale of the phenomenon merits a close look: Eastern Europe from the Caucasus to Poland–Lithuania was second only in numbers to sub-Saharan Africa as a source of slaves; between 1475 and 1694 it provided between 1 and 2.5 million slaves (estimates) sold mainly in the Black Sea, Mediterranean, the Near and Middle East and Central Asia, not counting those who did not survive. The departure in the Russian history field from narrow approaches which postulated that states and social structures in this area had to be studied as phenomena sui generis, and which could not be compared to further contemporary world areas, has engendered in the last 20 years new comparative frameworks of imperial and borderland studies focusing on related issues. ⁷ Nevertheless, slavery in this geographical area has lingered on, and sometimes even beyond the fringes of scholarly perception. ⁸