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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2017
The slave trade in nineteenth-century Central Asia involved hundreds of thousands of slaves, predominantly Persian Shīʿites, and stopping the trade was alleged to be a major motivating factor in the Russian conquest of the region. Nevertheless, Central Asian slavery remains little-studied and little-understood. In this article I will argue, first, that the region's slave trade was characterized by decentralized trade networks and by abundant inter-nomadic trade; and, second, that Russian efforts to end the slave trade by decree and through military force in the 1860s and 70s were not as successful as has often been assumed.
This research was assisted by an award from the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the State Department under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII). I would like to thank Allen J. Frank and the anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1 Morrison, A., ‘Twin imperial disasters: the invasions of Khiva and Afghanistan in the Russian and British official mind, 1839–1842’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2013, pp. 282–3Google Scholar. In most Russian and Western European sources, the khanate of Khwārazm is referred to as Khiva, often resulting in ambiguity as to whether an author is referring only to the capital city or to the khanate as a whole. In Central Asian sources, however, the khanate was always referred to as Khwārazm, and I will maintain that usage here.
2 Though it is ubiquitous in our sources from the nineteenth century, Central Asia's slave trade has since been the subject of very little research. Several recent studies have attempted to fill this considerable gap in scholarship. Cf., for example, Newby, L., ‘Bondage on Qing China's North-Western Frontier’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 7, 2012, pp. 1–27 Google Scholar; Farah, M. D., ‘Autocratic abolitionists: tsarist Russian anti-slavery campaigns’, in, vol 48, no. 1, 2013, A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, Mulligan, W. (ed.), Palgrave, New York, 2013, pp. 97–117 Google Scholar; Hopkins, B. D., ‘Race, sex and slavery: “forced labour” in Central Asia and Afghanistan in the early 19th century’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2008, pp. 629–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levi, S. C., ‘Hindus beyond the Hindu kush: Indians in the Central Asian slave trade’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society vol. 12, no. 3, 2002, pp. 277–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stanziani, A., Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries, vol. 42, no. 2, 2008 Berghahn, New York, 2014, pp. 63–100 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Recent examples of this approach include C. Beckwith, I., Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009 Google Scholar. For summaries and critiques of this approach, see especially the work of Levi, S. C.: The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900, Brill, Leiden, 2002 Google Scholar; ‘Early modern Central Asia in world history’, History Compass, vol. 10, no. 11, 2012, pp. 866–78; ‘India, Russia and the eighteenth-century transformation of the Central Asian Caravan Trade’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42, no. 4, 1999, pp. 519–26. Cf. also Rossabi, M., ‘The “decline” of the Central Asian Caravan Trade’, in The Rise of Merchant Empires, Tracey, J. (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1990, pp. 351–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McChesney, R. D., Central Asia: Foundations of Change, Darwin Press, Princeton, 1996, pp. 41–2Google Scholar.
4 Burton, A., The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic, and Commercial History 1550–1702, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997 Google Scholar.
5 Levi, The Indian Diaspora; Dale, S., Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1994 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alam, M., ‘Trade, state policy and regional change: aspects of Mughal-Uzbek commercial relations, c. 1550–1750’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 37, no. 3, 1994, pp. 202–27Google Scholar; Markovitz, C., The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2000 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levi, S. C. and Alam, M. (eds), India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2007 Google Scholar.
6 Sela, R., The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2013, p. 122 Google Scholar.
7 Khazanov, A., Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd edn, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1994 Google Scholar. Cf. also Khazanov, A. and Wink, A. (eds), Nomads in the Sedentary World, Routledge, New York, 2001 Google Scholar.
8 Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have recently offered an expansive definition of this term that touches upon the circulation not only of people and objects in trade networks but also of ‘information, knowledge, ideas, techniques, skills, cultural productions (texts, songs), religious practices, even gods’; see ‘Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule’, in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950, C. Markovitz, J. Pouchepadass, and S. Subrahmanyam (eds), Anthem, London, 2006, pp. 2–3. Here, I discuss only the circulation of people and merchandise, but where people go, their ideas, songs, and gods go with them, and one of the goals of this article is to reveal how people circulated, both with merchandise and as merchandise.
9 Cf., for example, ‘Nevol'niki v Khive’, Vestnik Evropy, vol. 80, no. 7, 1815, p. 245; Major Blankenagel’, Zamechaniia maiora Blankenagelia, vposledstvie poezdki ego iz Orenburga v Khivu v 1793–94 godakh, St Petersburg, 1858, pp. 13, 17; Murav'ev, N. N., Muraviev's Journey to Khiva through the Turcoman Country, 1819–20, trans. Strahl, P., Foreign Department Press, Calcutta, 1871, p. 144 Google Scholar; Zalesov, N., ‘Pis'mo iz Khivy’, Voennyi sbornik, vol. 1, 1859, p. 288 Google Scholar; de Meyendorf, G., A Journey from Orenburg to Bukhara in the Year 1820, Foreign Department Press, Calcutta, 1870, p. 62 Google Scholar. R. K. Mukminova's study of sixteenth-century waqf (Muslim pious endowment) documents has revealed that most of the slaves mentioned therein were used for agricultural labour or animal husbandry; see Mukminova, R. K., Sotsial'naia differentsiatsiia naseleniia gorodov Uzbekistana v XV-XVI vv, Tashkent, 1985, pp. 122–3Google Scholar; cf. also Levi, ‘Hindus beyond the Hindu kush’, p. 278n5. Other sources reveal, for example, large numbers of slaves working in agricultural on the estates of prominent Sufi leaders such as the Juybari sheikhs (ibid., p. 278).
10 Levi, ‘Hindus beyond the Hindu kush’, pp. 277–9.
11 For example, among our nineteenth-century estimates for Khwārazm, A. P. Khoroshkhin, who had been involved in a Russian census project based at Orenburg after the conquest of Khiva, estimated that 29,291 Iranian slaves had been living in the khanate, along with 6,515 manumitted slaves (Khoroshkhin, Sbornik statei: Kasaiushchikhsia do Turkestanskago kraia, St Petersburg, 1876, p. 486); Murav'ev estimated at least 33,000 slaves, 30,000 of them Iranians (Murav'ev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva, pp. 57–8); Blankenagel’ estimated 25,000 slaves (Blankenagel’, Zamechaniia maiora Blankenagelia, pp. 12–13; Herbert Wood estimated 50,000 Iranian slaves and manumitted former slaves ( Wood, H., The Shores of Lake Aral, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1876, p. 219)Google Scholar; Basiner estimated 52,000 Iranian slaves (cf. Schmidt, E., The Russian Expedition to Khiva in 1873, trans. Mosa, P., Foreign Department Press, Calcutta, 1876, p. 12 Google Scholar); Vambery estimated 40,000 Iranian slaves (ibid., p. 12); Alikhanov-Avarskii estimated 25,000–40,000 total slaves ( Alikhanov-Avarskii, M., Pokhod v Khivu (Kavkazkikh otriadov) 1873. Step’ i oazis, St Petersburg, 1899, p. 280)Google Scholar; and Ḥassan Muḥammad Amīn Oghli, author of an unpublished Chaghatay tract on slavery from the early Soviet period, estimates that there had been 58,500 slaves and manumitted former slaves in 1873, including Iranians, Kurds, Afghans, Azeri Turks, and Russians (MS IVAN Uz No. 12581, f. 51b; I am grateful to Paolo Sartori for providing me with a copy of this manuscript). For Bukhara, estimates are scarcer; Meyendorff estimated 30,000–40,000 Iranian slaves, and the Greek metropolitan Khrisanf Neopatraskii, writing near the end of the eighteenth century, estimated 60,000 Iranian slaves (in Karpiuk, S. G. (ed.), Puteshestviia po Vostoku v opokhu Ekateriny II, Vostochnaia literatura, Moscow, 1995, p. 279 Google Scholar). J. Wolff, the eccentric missionary and adventurer, estimated 200,000 slaves, though this figure seems unlikely ( Wolff, J., Narrative of a Mission to Bukhara in the Years 1843–1845, Vol. 2, J.W. Parker, London, 1845, p. 36 Google Scholar).
12 On the relative lack of first-hand slave narratives in the Ottoman context see, for example, Hakan Erdem, Y., ‘Slavery and social life in nineteenth-century Turco-Egyptian Khartoum’, in Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean, Walz, T. and Cuno, K. M. (eds), American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 2010, p. 125 Google Scholar; and Toledano, E. R., As If Silent and Absent, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, pp. 52 Google Scholar, 57.
13 Recent examples of an ethnographic approach to Ottoman slavery include Toledano, As If Silent and Absent, and Powell, E. Troutt, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2013 Google Scholar.
14 Established in 1799, the Commission was tasked with extending legal and administrative control over the Kazakhs of the steppe; the Junior Horde was subjected to particular scrutiny, as its territories of migration abutted the Russian border. The reasons why border officials would have been tasked with recording former slaves’ testimonies and autobiographical details are not entirely clear, but a few possibilities come to mind. First, the former slaves, once they had arrived at the border, would either be received as citizens of the Russian empire or returned to the steppe, and their testimonials, once written, would serve as proof that protocol had been followed in ‘processing’ these individuals. Second, the testimony of the former slaves often contained details concerning violence and tensions between nomadic groups that could be of interest in formulating the empire's steppe diplomacy and policies. Third, the written record of ‘manumissions’ on behalf of the tsar provided a sort of register of proof relating to the empire's ‘civilizing mission’ in the region.
15 The information collated is found in the following documents held by the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan (henceforth TsGAKaz): TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, ff. 45a–49b; ff. 73a–78a; TsGAKaz 4.1.198, f. 3a; ff. 19a–b; 36a–37a; 53a–54b; 104a; 137a; ff. 173a–b; TsGAKaz 4.1.195, ff. 10a–11a; TsGAKaz 4.1.3641, ff. 36a–38b; TsGAKaz 4.1.2821, ff. 2a–3a; 6a–b; TsGAKaz 383.1.89, ff. 14a–b; TsGAKaz 4.1.3573, ff. 40a–41b; 132a; 227a–b; TsGAKaz 4.1.197, f. 3a; 44a–b; 81a–b; TsGAKaz 4.1.3730, ff. 5a–b; 17a–18a; TsGAKaz 4.1.499, ff. 104a–b. Most of these documents date from between 1850–1861, with a few dating from as early as 1800. Some of these records are quite concise, comprising merely a few short sentences, while others are significantly more elaborate, but all of them provide much of the information listed above.
16 Typically, those of unknown origin had been taken captive very early their childhood.
17 Cf., for example, Toledano, As If Silent and Absent, p. 91. William Gervase Clarence-Smith provides a comparative overview of slaves’ periods of captivity throughout the Muslim world in Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, pp. 67–8. The period of seven years’ captivity before manumission appears to have had deep roots as a tradition in the Judeo-Christian world; it is mentioned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 15: 1–18). Ibid., p. 222.
18 On these policies and decrees cf., for example, TsGAKaz 383.1.184, ff. 11b–19a; TsGAKaz 383.1.89, ff. 10a–14b. The earliest of the decrees which ordered general manumission among Kazakhs under Russian dominion appears to have been issued in 1859, with similar decrees following in 1860, 1861, and 1869 (cf. G. I. Semeniuk, ‘Likvidatsiia rabstva v Kazakhstane’, reprinted in Artykbaev, Zh. O. et al. (eds), Raby i tiulenguty v kazakhskoi stepi, Altyn kitap, Astana, 2006, p. 238 Google Scholar). Slaves manumitted at the border before this period were generally escapees.
19 The Russian transliterations of non-Russian names which appear in these documents often appear strange or ambiguous to me, and, rather than continuing to garble these individuals’ names for posterity, I have opted to use first initials wherever I have had especially strong reservations about the proper identification and rendering of a name.
20 In Khwārazm, the title of yuzbāshi—literally meaning ‘head of one hundred’—did not, according to Murav'ev, indicate a formal position, but was rather an honorary title ‘bestowed by the Khan in war time on the officers commanding divisions of his forces’. Murav'ev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva, p. 50. Those upon whom this title was bestowed tended to retain it indefinitely, and not only at times of war.
21 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, ff 75b–76b.
22 Murav'ev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva, p. 148. He elsewhere observes, ‘The Turcomans buy their grain at the markets, and dispose of slaves, so useful in the cultivation of the land, as they are generally the ploughmen; were the trade with the Turcomans to cease, Khiva would lose the chief source of its prosperity, and probably sink back into insignificance’ (ibid., p. 144).
23 ‘Nevolniki v khive’, Vestnik Evropy, vol. 80, no. 7, 1815, p. 244.
24 de Levchine, A., Description des hordes et des steppes des Kirghiz-Kazaks ou Kirghiz-Kaissaks (Paris: Impr. royale, 1840), p. 354 Google Scholar.
25 On these points, cf. Semeniuk, ‘Istochniki rabstva v Kazakhstane v XV-XIX vekakh’ in Raby i tiulenguty v kazakhskoi stepi, pp. 140–1, 151, 176; K. Kraft, ‘Unichtozhenie rabstva v kirgizskoi stepi’, in Iz kirgizskoi stariny, Orenburg, 1900, p. 95. David Sneath has connected the claim that Central Asian nomads had few slaves to a more general preoccupation among scholars, especially in the Soviet Union, with the idea—one Sneath combats at length—that nomadic societies were fundamentally egalitarian. See Sneath, D., The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, pp. 152–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 186.
26 Ibid., pp. 150–1.
27 ‘Iz istorii Kazakhstana XVIII v.’, Krasnyi arkhiv, vol. 2, no. 87, 1938, pp. 167–8.
28 ‘Pars’ is likely intended here.
29 The Nazar were a large subdivision of the Shekti, living along the Emba River. As of 1848 they reportedly numbered some 1,200 yurts. I am grateful to Allen J. Frank for providing this information.
30 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, ff 74a–75a.
31 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, f. 47b.
32 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, ff. 47b–48a.
33 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, f. 47a.
34 TsGAKaz 4.1.3646, ff. 48a–48b.
35 While there is less evidence available concerning the experiences of those slaves who gained their freedom along the southern expanses of Central Asia, the most detailed record authored by any Central Asian former slave—the ʿIbratnāma of Mīrzā Maḥmūd Taqī Āshtīyānī—reveals a similar pattern to what we find among the cases considered here. Cf. Āshtīyānī, ʿIbratnāma: Khatirati az dawran-i pas az jangha-yi herat va merv, ed. Husayn ʿImadi Ashtiyani, Nashr-i markaz, Tehran, 1382/2003. A scribe and calligrapher, Mīrzā Maḥmūd, was taken captive by Turkmens while travelling as a keeper of accounts (kārguzār) with the Qajar military in 1860–61. Rather than being transported northwards for sale, he is held by his cruel master, Muḥammad Khān, in the village of Panjdih, where he is made, among other things, to tend to his master's camels and work a hand-mill (dasās) (ibid., p. 59). His master hopes to ransom him, but appears inclined to keep him in slavery indefinitely until a suitable ransom offer arrives. Some two years pass, during which Mīrzā Maḥmūd suffers terribly in his captivity. Hearing that literate and educated slaves enjoy better treatment in the city of Bukhara, he forges a letter from a well-known Iranian merchant who dealt in slaves, tricking his master into believing that a large profit could be made by putting Mīrzā Maḥmūd on a caravan to the city, where he would be sold (ibid., pp. 74–80). It is only through this ruse that Mīrzā Maḥmūd manages to leave the hinterlands and arrive in Bukhara. On the way there, he witnesses many Iranian slaves working in agriculture (dehqānī) in villages such as Lubab and Ghanju (ibid., p. 83). For an overview of the first two years of Mīrzā Maḥmūd's nine-year captivity, Amanat, cf. A. and Khazeni, A., ‘The steppe roads of Central Asia and the Persian captivity narrative of Mahmud Mirza Taqi Ashtiyani’, in Writing Travel in Central Asian History, Green, N. (ed.), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2014, pp. 113–33Google Scholar.
36 ‘Khiva za sto let nazad’, Syn otechestva, vol. 1, 1842, pp. 33–39. Many Tatars and Bashkirs from Russian dominions had been there, either as residents or traders, but I am not aware of any substantial written records of Khiva by nineteenth-century Tatar or Bashkir observers.
37 Murav'ev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva, p. 58.
38 Zalesov, ‘Pis'mo iz Khivy’, p. 285.
39 Vambery, A., Travels in Central Asia, Harper and Bros, New York, 1865, p. 380 Google Scholar.
40 Tugan-Mirza-Baranovskii, V. A., Russkie v Akhal-Teke, St Petersburg, 1881, p. 71 Google Scholar.
41 Burnes, A., Travels into Bokhara, Vol. 2, John Murray, London, 1839, pp. 241–2Google Scholar.
42 Demezon, P. I. and Vitkevich, I. V., Zapiski o Bukharskom khanstve, ed. Khalfin, N. A., Moscow, 1983, p. 57 Google Scholar. (The French-born Demaisons and the Polish-born Witkiewicz published their travel accounts in Russian, and their reportage can thus be found under their ‘Russified’ names, Demezon and Vitkevich.)
43 Ibid., p. 59. This information was confirmed in the account by Demaisons’ contemporary, Witkiewicz. Ibid., p. 101.
44 Vambery, A., Sketches of Central Asia, W.H. Allen and Co., London, 1868, p. 217 Google Scholar.
45 Lal, M., Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, and Turkistan, to Balk, Bokhara, and Herat; and a Visit to Great Britain and Germany, W. H. Allen, London, 1846, p. 12 Google Scholar.
46 I. F. Blaramberg, Vospominaniia, Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury; TSentral'naia Aziia istochnikakh i materialakh XIX-nachala XX veka, Moscow, p. 252.
47 Kostenko, L. F., Puteshestvie v Bukharu russkoi missii v 1870 godu, St Petersburg, 1871, p. 94 Google Scholar.
48 Schmidt, The Russian Expedition, p. 122.
49 ‘Dvadtsatipiatiletie pokoreniia Khivy’, Niva, vol. 24, 1898, pp. 477–8.
50 Wood, The Shores of Lake Aral, p. xii.
51 Ibid., pp. 182–3.
52 Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, p. 100.
53 Toledano, Cf. E. R., Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1998 Google Scholar; and The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840–1890, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1982; Montana, I. M., The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 DuBois, W. E. B., The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, Longmans, Green, and Co., New York, 1904, pp. 181–5Google Scholar.
55 Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, pp. 99–218.
56 Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, L., The Tsar's Abolitionists: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, Brill, Leiden, 2010 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farah, ‘Autocratic abolitionists’, pp. 97–117.
57 Morrison, ‘Twin imperial disasters’, pp. 282–3.
58 Becker, S., Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1924, Routledge, New York, 2004 [1968], pp. 67–8Google Scholar.
59 Vitkevich, Ia. P., Zapiski o Bukharskom khanstve, Nauka, Moscow, 1983, p. 115 Google Scholar.
60 Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, p. 115.
61 Kostenko, Puteshestvie v Bukharu russkoi missiiv 1870 godu, p. 107.
62 MS IVAN Uz No. 12581, f. 42a; cf. also J. A. MacGahan, who wrote, ‘The released Russians numbered but twenty-one, eleven of whom are Cossacks. They were all captured in 1869 and 1870 by the Kirghiz and delivered to the Khivans. It was said that these were all the Russians held as slaves in Khiva that could be found, with the exception of one old man taken in Perovsky's disastrous expedition, who, having become a Mussulman, married there, and preferred to remain.’ MacGahan, J. A, Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva, Sampson Low, London, 1874, p. 20 Google Scholar.
63 Grant, B., The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2009 Google Scholar; cf. also Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, The Tsar's Abolitionists, pp. 37–72.
64 Davies, B. L., Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700, Routledge, New York, 2007, p. 25 Google Scholar.
65 Fisher, A. W., ‘Muscovy and the Black Sea slave trade’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1972, pp. 575–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. also Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, p. 13.
66 Shubinskii, P., ‘Ocherki bukhary’, Istoricheskii vestnik, vol. 7, 1892, p. 125 Google Scholar.
67 Stremoukhov, N. P., ‘Poezdka v Bukharu’, Russkii vestnik, vol. 6, 1876, p. 690 Google Scholar.
68 Ibid., p. 690.
69 Ibid., p. 655.
70 Gordon, E., The Roof of the World: Being a Narrative of a Journey Over the High Plateau of Tibet to the Russian Frontier and the Oxus Sources on the Pamir, Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh, 1876, p. 147 Google Scholar.
71 Schuyler, E., Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, Scribner, Armstrong, New York, 1876, p. 79 Google Scholar.
72 Ibid., pp. 100–1.
73 Ibid., pp. 100–1.
74 The comparatively astronomical price of the slave will be noticed. Unless we can assume severe currency depreciation in 1870s Bukhara—the likes of which I have not heard—the price of 1000 tenga for a slave is roughly 33 times greater than the historical market norm. Perhaps the dealer was relying on Schuyler's unfamiliarity with the usual price range. Schuyler shows at least some awareness of the odd pricing, however: ‘I thought that 850 tengas was too much to pay for the lad, especially as I had no desire to buy him; at the same time, the wistful looks of the boy, who seemed very anxious to be bought, smote my conscience a little, and I asked for the refusal of him at that price, which was given’ (ibid., p. 102).
75 Ibid., pp. 105–6.
76 Ibid., pp. 104–5.
77 Ibid., pp. 108–9. Later, he brought ‘Hussein’ back to Russia, where he saw to his education.
78 Ibid., p. 310.
79 Ibid., pp. 310–11.
80 Faiziev, T., Buxoro feodal jamiyatida qullardan foydalanishga doir hujjatlar (XIX asr), Fan, Tashkent, 1990; cf. pp. 115–27Google Scholar, document nos 26–42.
81 Ibid., pp. 117–18, document no. 30.
82 Ibid., p. 127, document no. 43.
83 Similarly, concerning the French-sponsored abolition of slavery in the Comoro Islands in 1904, Gill Shepherd writes that ‘slaves were not freed, in Comorian eyes, by European emancipation decrees, but only by the individual action of their masters’. Shepherd, G., ‘The Comorians and the East African Slave Trade’, in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, Watson, J. L. (ed.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p. 96 Google Scholar; cf. also Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, p. 147.
84 Inventory of Caravanserais in Central Asia (UNESCO / Ecole d'Architecture Paris Val de Seine EVCAU Research Team, 2004).
85 http://www.unesco.org/culture/dialogue/eastwest/caravan/countries.htm, [accessed 20 August 2016].
86 Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, p. 342.
