¹ Başbakanlık Ottoman Archives (hereafter BOA), A.MKT.UM 507/61, 1278.R.14 (19 Oct. 1861).

² The pençik tax (from Persian pandj yak, and equivalent to Arabic khums) originally designated one-fifth share of booty, particularly war captives, be set aside for the sovereign. For an overview of its development within Islamic jurisprudence, see Zysow, A. and Gleave, R., “Khums,” in Bearman, P. et al. , eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Brill Online, 2016)Google Scholar. In the financial and administrative parlance of the late Ottoman state, it amounted to an ad valorem import tax on slaves. Erdem, Hakan, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Despite its scale and significance, the Caucasian expulsion remains largely unstudied, particularly in terms of its effects on social and legal categories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. There are, however, several comprehensive studies of the state's policy on and the mechanisms of the settlement process. See Mark Pinson, “Demographic Warfare: An Aspect of Ottoman and Russian Policy, 1854–1866,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1970); Cuthell, David Cameron, “The Circassian Sürgün,” Ab Imperio 2 (2003): 139–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cuthell's dissertation “The Muhacirin Komisyonu: An Agent in the Transformation of Ottoman Anatolia, 1860–1866” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005); Berat Yıldız, “Emigrations from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire: An Analysis in the Light of the New Archival Materials,” (MA thesis, Bilkent University, 2006); and Özel, Oktay, “Migration and Power Politics: The Settlement of Georgian Immigrants in Turkey (1878–1908),” Middle Eastern Studies 46, 4 (July 2010): 477–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies look at the Caucasian expulsion as part of a bigger wave of displacement in the late Ottoman Empire: Karpat, Kemal H., “Ottoman Population Records and the Census of 1881/82–1893,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9, 3 (May, 1978): 237–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexandre Toumarkine, “Entre empire ottoman et état-nation turc: les immigrés musulmans du caucase et des balkans du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours,” (PhD diss., Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2000); Chatty, Dawn, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Cuthell, “Circassian Sürgün,” 155. The Başbakanlık Ottoman Archives also contains numerous files on conflicts between Caucasian settlers and the native tribes in eastern Anatolia, such as the powerful Afşar tribe.

⁵ Cuthell, “Circassian Sürgün,” 160; Petrov, Milen, “Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, 1864–1868,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46, 4 (2004): 730–59, 749CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Burnaby, Fred, On Horseback through Asia Minor (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1877), 277Google Scholar. Burnaby visited Sivas Prison, and saw that the majority of the 102 prisoners there were Circassians and Kurds imprisoned for horse or cattle theft (p. 285).

⁷ Pears, Edwin, Forty Years in Constantinople: The Recollections of Sir Edwin Pears, 1873–1915, with 16 Illustrations (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916), 66–67 Google Scholar.

⁸ The English Illustrated Magazine, 1891–1892 (London: MacMillan and Co., 1892), 903Google Scholar. Also see Chochiev, Georgi and Koç, Bekir, “Migrants from the North Caucasus in Eastern Anatolia: Some Notes on Their Settlement and Adaptation (Second Half of the 19th Century–Beginning of the 20th Century), Journal of Asian History 40, 1 (2006): 80–103, 94–95, 97Google Scholar; Gingeras, Ryan, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.”

⁹ Zohrab, Krikor, “Ceyran,” in Öyküler (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2001), 140Google Scholar. The story, which was presumably autobiographical, was originally published in Armenian in Hayrenik in 1892.

¹⁰ Ibid., 144.

¹¹ Paz, Omri, “Documenting Justice: New Recording Practices and the Establishment of an Activist Criminal Court System in the Ottoman Provinces (1840–late 1860s),” Islamic Law and Society 21, 1–2 (2014): 81–123, 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Rubin, Avi, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schull, Kent F., Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 22–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ There is a large literature on this particular paradox and how it shaped social and legal categories and, in an indirect way, citizenship in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. See especially Holt, Thomas C., The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, Holt, Thomas C., and Scott, Rebecca J., Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Scott, Rebecca J., Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Follett, Richard, Foner, Eric, and Johnson, Walter, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Yücel Terzibaşoğlu provides an excellent analysis of this particular issue from the viewpoint of land ownership and agrarian regimes, in “The Ottoman Agrarian Question and the Making of Property and Crime in the Nineteenth Century,” in Kolovos, Elias, ed., Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2015), 324–25Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Different aspects of this particular point have been raised by the historians of Ottoman and Middle Eastern slavery. See especially Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 147–51; Toledano, Ehud R., Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 96–99 Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Karamursel, Ceyda, “The Uncertainties of Freedom: The Second Constitutional Era and the End of Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Women's History 28, 3 (2016): 138–61, 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ “The Circassian Exodus,” Quiver (June 1864): 214; “National Extinction of the Circassian People,” London Journal, 23 July 1864: 61. For the connection of this coverage to the Crimean War, see Badem, Candan, The Ottoman Crimean War (1853–1856) (Leiden: Brill, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Klein, Janet, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 165–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cuthell, “Muhacirin Komisyonu,” 175–76; Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores, 26. For deployment of the incoming refugees as a “demographic weapon,” see Pinson, “Demographic Warfare”; Rogan, Eugene, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72Google Scholar.

¹⁹ See BOA, A.MKT.MHM 168/33, 1276.Ra.23 (20 Oct. 1859), for an official correspondence that points out to the governors of Silistra and Varna that a Bzhedug tribe consisting of forty-four households and 365 individuals was not to be mixed with the Tatars when settled in Dobruca (Dobrich). For orders to combine and separate groups by their declared tribal affiliations, also see A.MKT.UM 400/96, 1276.Ş.24 (17 Mar. 1860); and A.MKT.UM 405/51, 1276.L.24 (15 May 1960). Also see David Cuthell, “The Muhacirin Komisyonu,” 172. Cuthell specifies the Russo-Caucasian war under Shamyl's leadership as the last (and possibly only) “meaningful organized resistance” among the Caucasians; “Circassian Sürgün,” 145. However, there was also anxiety about Caucasian immigrants becoming a unified group; see, for instance, BOA, A.MKT 17/14 1260.N.25 (8 Oct. 1844), for a note written by the Grand Vizier to the governor of Filibe (Plovdiv) cautioning him to keep a close eye on a Circassian prince named Safer and not let him travel outside of Edirne or communicate with other Circassians.

²⁰ Note no. 2, Consul Dickson to Russell, Earl, in Papers Respecting the Settlement of the Circassian Emigrants in Turkey: Presented to the House of Commons by Command of Her Majesty, in Pursuance of Their Address Dated June 6, 1864 (London: Harrison & Sons, 1864)Google Scholar.

²¹ Cuthell, “Circassian Sürgün,” 150. Also see B. Philpot, letter to the editor, Times of India, 17 June 1864: 7. See also a note sent to the governor of Vidin in 1861 cautioning him against armed Crimean, Nogai, and Circassian settlers: BOA, A.MKT.MHM 238/12, 1278.Ca.28 (1 Dec. 1861).

²² Kasaba, Reşat, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 117–18Google Scholar.

²³ Burak, Guy, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., “Introduction,” in Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 4–5 Google Scholar; Sharafi, Mitra, “Justice in Many Rooms since Galanter: De-Romanticizing Legal Pluralism through the Cultural Defense,” Law and Contemporary Problems 71 (2008): 139–46, 139Google Scholar. There is a large body of literature on pluralistic legal orders in the Ottoman Empire, which have been classically understood, as exemplified in a recent article by Karen Barkey, as the coexistence of and interaction between different religious legal bodies: “Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire,” in Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Ottoman and Middle Eastern legal historians have been working to include indigenous forms of governance and legal practices in their studies of the Ottoman Middle East. For two excellent examples, see Barakat, Nora, “Marginal Actors? The Role of Bedouin in the Ottoman Administration of Animals as Property in the District of Salt, 1870–1912,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, 1–2 (2015): 105–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ben-Bassat, Yuval, “Bedouin Petitions from Late Ottoman Palestine: Evaluating the Effects of Sedentarization,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, 1–2 (2015): 135–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comprehensive discussion of the need to complicate state legal systems within legal pluralism debates, see Shahar, Ido, “State, Society and the Relations between Them: Implications for the Study of Legal Pluralism,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9 (2008): 417–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Specifically for the Caucasus, see Gould, Rebecca, “ Ijtihād against Madhhab: Legal Hybridity and the Meanings of Modernity in Early Modern Daghestan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 1 (2015): 35–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Charachidze, Georges, “Types de Vendetta au Causase,” in Verdier, Raymond, ed., La Vengeance: Etudes d'ethnologie, d'histoire et de philosophie (Paris: Editions Cujas, 1980), 89Google Scholar. For a more recent and comprehensive discussion on slave-producing cultural practices such as bride-kidnapping or amanat, see Grant, Bruce, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Zelkina, Anna, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 40–41 Google Scholar.

²⁷ For a contemporary account, see Golovin, Ivan, The Caucasus (London: Trübner & Co., 1854), 165Google Scholar. Inozemtseva, Elena, “On the History of Slave-Trade in Dagestan,” in Iran & the Caucasus 10, 2 (2006): 181–89, 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kanly, which literally means “bloody” or “bloodstained” in Turkish, is a term used to describe those who killed a person and thus owed either his life or a corresponding blood money to the victim's relatives; Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, Liubov, The Tsar's Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and Its Suppression (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Inozemtseva, “On the History of Slave-Trade,” 185; İbrahim Köremezli, “The Place of the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Circassian War (1830–1864)” (MA thesis, Bilkent University, 2004), 41–42.

²⁹ Manning, Paul, “Just Like England: On the Liberal Institutions of the Circassians,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 3 (2009): 590–618, 591CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Köremezli, “Place of the Ottoman Empire,” 7.

³¹ BOA, ŞD 2872/30, 1289.Ra.7 (15 May 1872).

³² See, for instance, BOA, MVL 620/84, 1278.B.20 (21 Jan. 1862), for a case of a man murdering his brother, both of them recent immigrant-refugees from the Caucasus, whose interrogation was conducted by the help of an interpreter. Also see Ömer Karakaş, “19. Yüzyılda Anadolu'da Çerkes Göçmenlerinin İskânları Sırasında Karşılaştıkları Sorunlar: Uzunyayla Örneği,” Karadeniz Araştırmaları 36 (Kış 2013), 88–89.

³³ BOA, A.MKT.MHM 176/37, 1276.B.09 (1 Feb. 1860).

³⁴ Cuthell, “Circassian Sürgün,” 146.

³⁵ BOA, A.MKT.DV 181/59, 1277.B.19 (31 Jan. 1861).

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ BOA, ŞD 2872/30, 1289.Ra.7 (15 May 1872). Private ownership and property rights particularly of land, as opposed to usufruct rights, were a nineteenth-century development that culminated in the Ottoman Land Reform of 1858. Mikhail, Alan, “Unleashing the Beast: Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt,” American Historical Review 118, 2 (2013): 317–48, 341CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comprehensive treatment of property ownership in Egypt, see Cuno, Kenneth M., The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. On the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 specifically, see Islamoglu, Huri, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in Owen, Roger and Bunton, Martin P., eds., New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. The enslaved refugees’ efforts to push for a new definition of ownership must be understood within this larger framework of changing notions of property ownership.

³⁸ Ehud R. Toledano insightfully explored how running away or absconding were strategized and employed by enslaved men and women: As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 60–107 Google Scholar. Here I am building on Toledano's observations, but I am more concerned with how slave flights were translated into legal categories vis-à-vis citizenship rights. As Toledano also argues, most Caucasian enslaved refugees were considered serfs in their native lands and became slaves only after they entered the Ottoman Empire, because that was the only legal category available for them (ibid., 95). However, this was not an automatic process but took shape as the enslaved and slaveholding refugees and the Ottoman state interacted in different capacities in the aftermath of the Caucasian expulsion.

³⁹ BOA, A.MKT.MHM 176/75, 1276.B.11 (3 Feb. 1860).

⁴⁰ BOA, MVL 991/62, 1281.M.13 (18 June 1864). Toledano has argued that the established Caucasian customs strongly favored maintaining the unity of slave families and it was the “hardships of emigration [which] eroded the old and established customs”; The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 160Google Scholar; and As if Silent, 98. While the difficulties encountered during the expulsion and settlement process shifted the ethical boundaries between the slave owners and traders, petitions the enslaved wrote indicate that it was already the slaveholding elite's prerogative to sell their slaves at will. For a comprehensive discussion on this particular point, see Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, Tsar's Abolitionists, 1–36.

⁴¹ The sale of the family was reportedly annulled, as is clarified in an official notice sent by the Supreme Council to the Grand Vizier; BOA, MVL 996/26, 1281.S.21 (26 Jul. 1864).

⁴² For a brief note on the extension of the age limit to all Caucasian tribes, see BOA, MVL 991/39, 1280.Z.29 (5 Jun. 1864). Written by the Supreme Council, to the governor of Varna, it states that the legality of the sale of tribe members was conditional on following the age limitations it had previously determined.

⁴³ BOA, A.DVN 156/50, 1277.Ra.03 (19 Sep. 1860). Armed clashes between the slave owning classes and slaves did occur, especially in the aftermath of the 1908 revolution, when Caucasian slaves claimed full citizenship in the new constitutional order, and the government gave both the slaves and slave owners a confusing message by drafting enslaved men into the army. Gûâze 1, 9 (19 Mayıs 1327, 1 June 1911): 5.

⁴⁴ Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 162–63.

⁴⁵ BOA, MVL 698/20, 1281.L.13, (11 Mar. 1865).

⁴⁶ For examples of these settlement registers, see BOA, A.DVN 147/43, 1276.R.4 (31 Oct. 1859); A.DVN 147/27 1276.R.4 (31 Oct. 1859); DH.MHC 1/60, 1277 (1860–1861); Taksim Atatürk Kütüphanesi, Belediye Yazmaları, BEL_Yz_B.000059, 1294 (1877–1878). Entries in the register are broken down by family size, and each begins with a brief visual description of the family head (particularly his height and the shape and color of his beard), and his name and age, followed by information on the other family members, starting with the wives and ending with the slaves the family owned.

⁴⁷ BOA, A.DVN 146/11, 1276.S.14 (12 Sep. 1859).

⁴⁸ BOA, A.MKT.MHM 332/32, 1281.Z.21 (17 May 1865). Also see MVL 529/110, 1283.Z.29 (4 May 1867), in which twenty-six individuals were enslaved, reportedly in return for the simple promise of protection.

⁴⁹ Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 150–51.

⁵⁰ See, for example, DH.MKT 2891/97, 1327.B.17 (4 Aug. 1909). See also Karamursel, “Uncertainties of Freedom,” 146.

⁵¹ Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 168; Slavery and Abolition, 33.

⁵² Burbank, Jane, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, 3 (2006): 397–431, 401CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Grattan Geary, Letters to the Editor, Times of India, 25 July 1878: 4.

⁵⁴ We know that the Ottoman government already favored Circassian elites in some contexts. See, for instance, a petition by Şahin Giray Bey of the Zodoh tribe, in which he asked to be granted a military rank equivalent to that he had held with the Russian state before he came to the Ottoman Empire. The Ministry of War approved his request. BOA, A.MKT.MHM 177/29, 1276.B.21 (13 Feb. 1860). Similarly, Kasbolat Bey, the chieftain of the Altıkesek tribe, petitioned to the office of the Grand Vizier for an “appropriate” salary, and asked that if that was impossible then he be given an administrative position at a government institution. This request, too, was deemed appropriate by the Muhacirin Komisyonu. BOA, MVL 434/79, 1280.Ş.03 (13 Jan. 1864). For an elaborate discussion of the Ottoman policies of coopting Caucasian and Crimean elites, see Cuthell, “The Muhacirin Komisyonu,” 130–39. Cuthell argues that both the Muhacirin Komisyonu and the government it represented “recognized and promoted continuity in the social structure common to both Crimean and Ottoman societies,” 133.

⁵⁵ For a discussion of this particular point, see Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar, Introduction.

⁵⁶ Taussig, Michael, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 16Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Faroqhi, Suraiya, “Quis Custodiet Custodes? Controlling Slave Identities and Slave Traders in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2002), 252Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ibid. This point constitutes the core argument of Madeline Zilfi's Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 87.

⁶⁰ BOA, MVL 964/64, 1280.M.18 (5 Jul. 1863).

⁶¹ Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 164–65.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ The initial land distribution among Circassian immigrant-refugees was reportedly not based on exceptions or princely prerogatives, and was carried out in accordance with household divisions. But since the slave families were attached to their owners’ households, and the land titles were registered with the owners’ names, the slaves could not legally claim ownership of the land. See BOA, ŞD 2396/18, 1289.Ra.8 (16 May 1872), 8.

⁶⁴ Toledano, Ottoman Slave Trade, 165–66.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 166.

⁶⁶ That the courts favored slaveholders over slaves has been noted by Toledano in As if Silent and Absent, 95–96. Burak has argued that the “locality” of such legal practices or posts were indicative of local power relations; Second Formation, 54. Boğaç Ergene further demonstrated that several legal and administrative ranks of these courts were made up of local notables, many of whom carried “military and religious titles”; Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 29Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ For an excellent analysis of how Ottoman slavery was put into use to enforce imperial hierarchies in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, see Frank, Alison, “The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 117, 2 (2012): 414–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The British pressures to abolish Ottoman slavery, which Eve Troutt Powell called “invasive abolitionism,” has been extensively discussed by historians of Ottoman and Middle Eastern slavery. See Powell's A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 136–41Google Scholar; Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 67–93; Toledano, Slavery and Abolition, 112–34.

⁶⁸ Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 113–14; Toledano, Slavery and Abolition, 113.

⁶⁹ Holt, Thomas C., “The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838–1866,” in Cooper, Frederick, Holt, Thomas C., and Scott, Rebecca J., Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 37–38 Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2–3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Pitts’ article “Liberalism and Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Algerian Mirror,” Modern Intellectual History 6, 2 (2009): 287–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 4Google Scholar.

⁷² Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 1–2 Google Scholar. A large literature examines the ways in which liberalism encountered the world. In addition to the studies by Holt, Pitt, and Sartori cited above, see, Metcalf, Thomas R., Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mehta, Uday S., Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Although such Tanzimat-era intellectuals as Şinasi and Namık Kemal—two prominent figures in the Young Ottoman movement that culminated in the promulgation of the Constitution proper in 1876—are known to be have been immersed in liberal thought, I know of no systematic study of liberalism as a mode of rule in the Ottoman Empire. The existing literature, moreover, continues to divide the global nineteenth century into binary liberal and illiberal polities—that of the Muslim East and the Christian West—and criticizes “missionaries of liberalism” who tried to “convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted”; Massad, Joseph A., Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3Google ScholarPubMed. These neat divisions obscure the “internal inconsistencies” of liberalism and disregard other, more complex challenges to it.

⁷³ BOA, A.MKT.MVL 140/4, B.23.1278 (24 Jan. 1862).

⁷⁴ See İkdam, 17 Teşrinisani 1324, for an example of the announcement note.

⁷⁵ BOA, ŞD 2786/29, 1327.N.14, 29 (29 Sep. 1909), 66; Karamursel, “Uncertainties of Freedom,” 146.

⁷⁶ BOA, ŞD 2786/29, 1327.N.14, 29 (29 Sep. 1909), 66.

⁷⁷ Toledano, Ehud R., “Abolition and Anti-Slavery in the Ottoman Empire: A Case to Answer?” in Mulligan, William and Bric, Maurice, eds., A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 120Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 118.

⁷⁹ Karamursel, “Uncertainties of Freedom,” 150–51.

⁸⁰ BOA, ŞD 2872/30, 1289.Ra.7 (15 May 1872). The Council of State branched off from the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances in 1868, and was a consultative assembly to which were brought complex legal matters that could not be resolved or referred to through law.

⁸¹ BOA, ŞD 2396/18, 1289.Ra. 8 (16 May 1872), 21.

⁸² This expression was used by the National Magazine in the context of two Caucasian beys, Hadji Hayden Hassan and Kustan Ogli Islam, when they petitioned Foreign Secretary Earl Russel during a visit to England in 1863. Here I borrow it to highlight the rhetorical character of such broad claims. “Our Dominions in India,” National Magazine (Jan. 1863): 13, 75, 97–99 Google Scholar.

⁸³ BOA, ŞD 2396/18, 1289.Ra.8 (16 May 1872), 19/1.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 19/2.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 21.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 9.

⁸⁷ Both Ehud Toledano (Slavery and Abolition, 96–97) and Hakan Erdem (Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 118) mention a similar, 1867 decision by the Council of Ministers.

⁸⁸ Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 16.

⁸⁹ Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁰ Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 120.

⁹¹ It is important to note that even though women were central to the claims to freedom in many slave petitions, women's experience of slavery and freedom remained different from that of male slaves. Women and children, whose flow, especially toward Istanbul, continued for at least another four decades, developed other sorts of relationships both with their owners and with slavery as a practice. For a gender-focused discussion of emancipation, see Ceyda Karamursel, “‘In the Age of Freedom, In the Name of Justice’: Slaves, Slaveholders, and the State in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic, 1857–1933,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015), ch. 3, “Slaver-Mistresses, Matchmakers, and Destitute Women”; and Karamursel, “Uncertainties of Freedom.” For a note on the vulnerabilities of Caucasian women who managed to obtain their freedom in the aftermath of the Caucasian expulsion, see BOA, ŞD 2395/3, 1288.B.15 (30 Sep. 1871).

⁹² BOA, A.MKT.MHM 461/26, 1290.C.16 (11 Aug. 1873).

⁹³ Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 119.