Race-making, Religion, and the Gendered "Business" of Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire
The second half of the nineteenth century, marked by recurrent military and diplomatic conflict, witnessed large-scale forced displacement into the Ottoman Middle East. With it came a prolonged crisis that unsettled established legal and ethical frameworks, creating a volatile environment in which the slave trade not only persisted but adapted and, in some cases, expanded-even as formal efforts to suppress it were underway. This paper turns to a pivotal moment within this broader turbulence: the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War and its aftermath. It examines the practices of Ottoman slaveholders and traders-many of them women-operating across different scales, from elite mistresses to local intermediaries. In doing so, it explores how these practices collided with a shifting global moral order that recast legal categories of race, ethnicity, religion, and state belonging, leaving a lasting imprint on the region's social and legal landscape.