Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire
The Design of Difference

This book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Madeline Zilfi (Author)

9780521515832, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 March 2010

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.55 kg

'Zilfi's masterful new work creates space for debate on the topic of women, slavery and the gender hierarchy in the late Ottoman Empire … This contribution will undoubtedly shape the nature of research into slavery in the Ottoman Empire, and represents a major work in the burgeoning field of Ottoman slavery studies. Furthermore, to its great credit, this book contains an excellent bibliography which gathers the secondary studies on slavery in the Middle East and its immediate geographical proximity as well as the relevant methodological literature. It will be a boon for future scholars of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.' Nur Sobers-Khan, New Middle Eastern Studies

Madeline C. Zilfi's book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire. In a challenge to prevailing notions, her research shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries female slavery was not only central to Ottoman practice, but a critical component of imperial governance and elite social reproduction. As Zilfi illustrates through her graphic accounts of the humiliations and sufferings endured by these women at the hands of their owners, Ottoman slavery was often as cruel as its Western counterpart. The book focuses on the experience of slavery in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, also using comparative data from Egypt and North Africa to illustrate the regional diversity and local dynamics that were the hallmarks of slavery in the Middle East during the early modern era. This is an articulate and informed account that sets more general debates on women and slavery in the Ottoman context.

List of illustrations
1. Empire and imperium
2. Currents of change
3. Women and the regulated society
4. Telling the Ottoman slave story
5. Meaning and practice
6. Feminizing slavery
7. Men are kanun, women are shari'ah.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]