Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market
The Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market, refers to the Imperial Firman or Ferman (Decree) issued by Sultan Abdülmecid I in 1847.[1] The edict closed the public slave market in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. The reform was a cosmetic one and removed the visible slave trade in the capital by removing it from the street indoors.
Background and firman
[edit]It was one of the reforms representing the process of official abolition of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, including the Firman of 1830, Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market (1847), Suppression of the slave trade in the Persian Gulf (1847), the Prohibition of the Circassian and Georgian slave trade (1854–1855), Prohibition of the Black Slave Trade (1857), and the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880.[2]: 536
The Firman was issued in a time period when the Ottoman Empire was subjected to a growing diplomatic pressure from the West to suppress slave trade and slavery in the Ottoman Empire. In the 1840s, the slave market in Istanbul was the biggest in the Ottoman Empire. Slaves where trafficked to it from the Circassian slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the Red Sea slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade. The public sale of slaves in the Ottoman capital chocked foreign visitors from the West and created bad publicity for the Ottoman Empire, which was painted as barbaric.
The edict ordered the closure of the public slave market in Istanbul. The slave market was closed from December 1846, during the 1846-1847 financial year.[1]: 97 The edict resulted in the end of the visible slave market in Istanbul.
However, the reform was mainly a cosmetic one. The slave market in Istanbul simply moved indoors, away from the visibility of foreigners, and now took place in the houses of the slave traders rather than in a public slave market.[3]: 53 Formally illegal, it was clandestinly tolerated.[4]: 94 A foreign visitor in Istanbul commented in 1869 commented, that while the public sale of slaves in the city had ended twenty years before, it was known to still be in operation.[4]
See also
[edit]- Avret Pazarları
- Firman of 1854
- Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention
- Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880
- Kanunname of 1889
References
[edit]- ^ a b Erdem, Y. (1996). Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise 1800-1909. Storbritannien: Palgrave Macmillan UK
- ^ The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History. (2023). Tyskland: Springer International Publishing
- ^ Toledano, E. R. (2014). The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840-1890. USA: Princeton University Press.
- ^ a b Junne, G. H. (2016). The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan. Storbritannien: Bloomsbury Publishing.