British and Ottoman elites each misread the other’s form of slavery

Evidence

But as difficult a struggle as that had been within the British empire, exposure to Ottoman slavery presented British observers with a different and more complicated version of a trade and an institution that was multiracial, multiethnic, and generally domestic. For many in Great Britain, these differences made little sense, or even little difference, and the cruel circumstances of Caribbean and American plantation slavery that informed British commentators’ definitions of slavery framed their perspective on domestic slavery, concubinage, and military slavery in the Ottoman Empire. As Ehud Toledano has noted, this narrow definition was met with an equally oversimplified response from Ottoman statesmen and writers. These elites countered that “kul/harem,” or domestic slavery, was a considerably milder forms of the institution; in so doing, they ignored the more difficult circumstances of domestic slavery in which the majority of slaves were African. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s comparative coloniality framework; plantation-slavery definitions distorting colonial perceptions echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s pattern of cultural misreading.
• DEEPTHINKING: A nuanced two-way failure of communication about an institution, where each side’s self-serving definition reinforces the other’s — resist one-sentence summary.