British observers judged Ottoman slavery through a plantation model it did not fit

Evidence

British attention to slavery in the Ottoman Empire began in the middle of the nineteenth century, decades after the antislavery movement succeeded in abolishing the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833 within territories governed by the British empire. Much of the success of the abolitionist movement was due to its religion-based indignation over the enslavement of blacks, in which abolitionist leaders were able to define slavery as a violation of universal human rights. 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. Nor did they account for the violent uprooting and harrowing migrations of these slaves’ middle passage from Africa to the Ottoman provinces or to Istanbul. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 645

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the kul/harem domestic-slavery category that British and Ottoman elites each distorted.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader coloniality framing and Toledano’s scholarship on Ottoman slavery.