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As If Silent and Absent

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................ixNote on Transliteration and Terminology....................................xiIntroduction: Between Now and Then-The Pain Lingers On.....................1Chapter 1. Understanding Enslavement as a Human Bond.......................9Chapter 2. Leaving a Violated Bond.........................................60Chapter 3. Turning to the "Patron State" for Redress.......................108Chapter 4. Opting for Crime in Order to Survive............................153Chapter 5. Taming the Unknown with the Familiar............................204Concluding Remarks.........................................................255Bibliography...............................................................263Index......................................................................271

Chapter One

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was the last and greatest Islamic power of the modern era. In many ways, the history of the Middle East between 1516/1517 and 1918 is a chapter in Ottoman history, and Ottoman traces have lingered in the eastern Mediterranean many decades after the demise of the Empire. Some major features of political, social, economic, and cultural life born and developed under the sultans survived well into the twentieth century and arguably are detectable even today. While often viewed in the West as a paragon of conservatism and stagnation, the Ottoman Empire was a complex and fascinating entity through many periods of its long history; it was dynamic and adaptable, pragmatic and resilient, tolerant and accommodating, as the past two decades of intensive research have shown. There were periods in which it resembled its negative image, but an overall account of the teeming and diversified social life under its rule certainly defies that image.

The "long nineteenth century," from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth, was a period of great transformation inside the Ottoman Empire and in its international milieu. To cope with growing European expansionism and intervention, the Ottomans adopted their version of self-evolved, self-styled modernization. Some reform measures were tailored to Ottoman needs; others were resisted and rejected. Through all this, however, the increasing European presence in Ottoman societies became an undeniable reality in the Mediterranean and beyond. As I have argued elsewhere, policies to do with enslavement and the slave trade were among the most striking examples of the Ottoman attempt to resolve and contain European, mainly British, pressure: the Empire prohibited the traffic in Africans in 1856 and had gradually suppressed it by the end of the nineteenth century, whereas enslavement remained legal. In this book we shall see how British representatives in the Empire became-in the eyes of the enslaved-part and parcel of the patronage system.

THE EMPIRE AND THE ENSLAVED

Scattered data and reasonable extrapolations regarding the volume of the slave trade from Africa to the Ottoman Empire yield an estimated number of approximately 16,000 to 18,000 men and women who were being forcibly transported into the Empire each year during much of the nineteenth century. The most reliable estimates for the total volume of coerced migration from Africa into Ottoman territories during the long nineteenth century are Ralph Austen's: from Swahili coasts to the Ottoman Middle East and India-313,000; across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden-492,000; into Ottoman Egypt-362,000; and into Ottoman North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya)-350,000. If we exclude the numbers going to India, a rough estimate of this mass population movement would amount to more than 1.3 million people. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the shrinking Atlantic traffic swelled the number of enslaved Africans coerced into domestic African markets, as well as into Ottoman ones. These figures should have resulted in a fairly noticeable African diaspora into both Turkey and the successor Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa and even into the Balkans.

However, if we look for persons of African descent in these regions, we find only scattered traces. In Turkey, there are African agricultural communities in western Anatolia, in such towns and villages as Torbali, Ske, demis, Tire, and Akhisar, with a larger concentration in the province of Aydin near Izmir and in the region of Antalya. Even in the city of Izmir itself, where the largest African population in the Ottoman Empire lived at the end of the nineteenth century, an estimate that it had two thousand African residents in the first half of the twentieth century is disputed as possibly too high. Since African Ottomans and African Turks were considered Muslims and Turks, respectively, they are, in the words of one scholar, "virtually statistically nonexistent in the official demographic records" of the Empire and the later Republic. They are absent from standard reference sources such as yearbooks (salnames), directories (rehbers), and statistically compiled indexes. By comparison, persons of African extraction live in greater numbers in the post-Ottoman Levant, in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and North Africa, among the various Bedouin tribes in desert areas, and in settled villages bordering on desert areas. In Egypt, Africans seem to have a larger presence than elsewhere in the Middle East.

All in all, the impression is that only a small fraction of the descendants of enslaved Africans are still in the post-Ottoman Mediterranean region. Where have they all gone? Several explanations have been offered, including some plausible ones. The most common is that many enslaved persons perished because they were not used to the cold weather and because they suffered from contagious pulmonary diseases. The life expectancy of survivors was also quite low. In addition, Islamic law and Ottoman social norms sanctioned concubinage and subsequent absorption into the host societies. An enslaved woman impregnated by her owner could not be sold, her offspring were considered free, and she herself was freed upon the death of her master. Thus, the passage of several generations ensured not only the social absorption of such free children but also their visible disappearance.

The enslaved Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Slavs, and other non-Africans who entered Ottoman territory either voluntarily or by force were absorbed in a similar matter. The enslaved Circassians were mostly refugees riven from the Caucasus by the Russians from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s. In the Caucasus, Circassian society comprised several tribal units sharing related languages, cultural traditions, and social organization. Under Russian rule, the bonded class of agricultural workers (in Adyg Circassian, pshitl) was considered enserfed, but in Ottoman law they were accorded the status of "slave" (Turkish, kle). In reality, the pshitl were more the clients-protgs (Arabic, tabi') of each landlord-patron (Adyg Circassian, pshi; Ottoman Turkish, bey). This status was hereditary, and the offspring of free and bonded marriages inherited the status of the enslaved parent.

Other Circassians and Georgians, largely young women, were brought...