Legacies of Race and Slavery in Turkey

Throughout the nineteenth century, slavery in the Ottoman Empire relied heavily on Black female domestic labor. After the dissolution of the Empire (1922), the descendants of these enslaved Africans remained in the region and eventually became citizens of the Turkish Republic, identifying as Afro-Turks. Despite the significant historical presence, Ottoman slavery is often overlooked in global slavery studies and mainstream Turkish historiography, and today, the Afro-Turk community faces various forms of microaggressions on a daily basis. However, the exclusion of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from studies on the legacies of slavery is not just a matter of geography, nor is the neglect of the history of slavery in Turkey and other countries in the region accidental. Instead, it reflects a larger global trend: the long-standing systemic marginalization of gendered domestic work from analyses of the development of capitalism and labor studies. Accordingly, this research has three main objectives: (1) to investigate the erasure of domestic slavery in Ottoman history and its impact on Turkish identity and Afro-Turks’ experiences; (2) to expand the sociological analysis through late Ottoman archival materials, tracing racial ideologies from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic; and (3) to disseminate this scholarship through a complementary visual digital project investigating the urban and rural sites that bear the mark of this history in the region. By examining the history of Ottoman slavery and its effects on contemporary Turkey, this project aims to create a framework that highlights how global patterns of gender oppression and racialized enslavement are interconnected. In doing so, LERSiT will highlight historical contexts often overlooked in studies of colonialism and slavery, thus broadening our understanding of historical and racial formation theories.