Slavery in Turkey is illegal, though like many other countries, it suffers from issues relating to human trafficking. Historically, slavery in Turkey was significant during the Ottoman Empire period.
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Slavery in Turkey is illegal, though like many other countries, it suffers from issues relating to human trafficking. Historically, slavery in Turkey was significant during the Ottoman Empire period.
Slavery was a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy.
Turkey is one of the top destinations for victims of human trafficking, according to a report produced by the UNDOC. [1]
A 2016 report based on the Global Slavery Index estimated that there may be about "48,000 people in Turkey [who] live like modern slaves". [2]
Many members of the Afro-Turk minority are descendants of the former slaves. [3]
Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is an attachment of any ownership right over one or more people with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in sexual activities. This includes forced labor that results in sexual activity, forced marriage and sex trafficking, such as the sexual trafficking of children.
Devshirme was the Ottoman practice of forcibly recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of their Balkan Christian subjects and raising them in the religion of Islam. Those coming from the Balkans came primarily from noble Balkan families and rayah (poor) classes. It is first mentioned in written records in 1438, but probably started earlier. It created a faction of soldiers and officials loyal to the Sultan. It counterbalanced the Turkish nobility, who sometimes opposed the Sultan. The system produced a considerable number of grand viziers from the 1400s to the 1600s. This was the second most powerful position in the Ottoman Empire, after the sultan. Initially, the grand viziers were exclusively of Turk origin, but after there were troubles between Sultan Mehmed II and the Turkish grand vizier Çandarlı Halil Pasha the Younger, who was the first grand vizier to be executed, there was a rise of slave administrators (devshirme). They were much easier for the sultans to control, compared to free administrators of Turkish aristocratic extraction. The devshirme also produced many of the Ottoman Empire's provincial governors, military commanders, and divans during the 1400s–1600s period. Sometimes, the devshirme recruits were castrated and became eunuchs. Although often destined for the harem, many eunuchs of devshirme origin went on to hold important positions in the military and the government, such as grand viziers Hadım Ali Pasha, Sinan Borovinić, and Hadım Hasan Pasha.
White slavery refers to the slavery of Europeans, whether by non-Europeans, or by other Europeans. Slaves of European origin were present in ancient Rome and in the Islamic world, such as the Arab slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Black Sea slave trade and the Ottoman Empire.
Afro-Turks are Turkish people of African Zanj descent, who trace their origin to the Ottoman slave trade like the Afro-Abkhazians. Afro-Turk population is estimated to be between 5,000 and 20,000 people. Afro-Turks are distinct from African immigrants in Turkey, which number around 1.5 million individuals as of 2017 according to state-owned Anadolu Agency.
Forced prostitution, also known as involuntary prostitution or compulsory prostitution, is prostitution or sexual slavery that takes place as a result of coercion by a third party. The terms "forced prostitution" or "enforced prostitution" appear in international and humanitarian conventions, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but have been inconsistently applied. "Forced prostitution" refers to conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage in sexual activity.
The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society. The main sources of slaves were wars and politically organized enslavement expeditions in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southeast Europe, and Africa. It has been reported that the selling price of slaves decreased after large military operations. In Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves. Statistics of these centuries suggest that Istanbul's additional slave imports from the Black Sea slave trade have totaled around 2.5 million from 1453 to 1700.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
Slavery in Niger involves different practices which have been practiced in the Sahel region for many centuries and which persist to this day. The Bornu Empire in the eastern part of Niger was an active part of the trans-Saharan slave trade for hundreds of years. Other ethnic groups in the country similarly had a history of slavery, although this varied and in some places slavery was largely limited to the political and economic elite.
Slavery in Haiti began after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the island in 1492 with the European colonists that followed from Portugal, Spain and France. The practice was devastating to the native population. Following the indigenous Tainos' near decimation from forced labor, disease and war, the Spanish, under initial advisement of the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas and with the blessing of the Catholic church, began engaging in earnest during the 17th century in the forced labor of enslaved Africans. During the French colonial period, beginning in 1625, the economy of Saint-Domingue, was based on slavery; conditions on Saint-Domingue became notoriously bad even compared to chattel slavery conditions elsewhere.
Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe were the slave raids, for over three centuries, conducted by the military of the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde primarily in lands controlled by Russia and Poland-Lithuania as well as other territories, often under the sponsorship of the Ottoman Empire.
Slavery is a system which requires workers to work against their will for little to no compensation. In modern-day terms, this practice is more widely referred to as human trafficking. Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation”. The practices of slavery and human trafficking are still prevalent in modern America with estimated 17,500 foreign nationals and 400,000 Americans being trafficked into and within the United States every year with 80% of those being women and children. Human trafficking in the United States can be divided into the two major categories of labor and sex trafficking, with sex trafficking accounting for a majority of cases.
The history of slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia. The practices of keeping slaves in the Muslim world nevertheless developed in radically different ways in different Muslim states based on a range of social-political factors, as well as the more immediate economic and logistical considerations of the Arab slave trade. As a general principle, Islam encouraged the manumission of Muslim slaves as a way of expiating sins, and many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal, were former slaves. However, Islam never banned the practice, and it persisted as an important institution in the Muslim world through to the modern era.
Legal chattel Slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until the 1960s.
Avret Pazarları, or female slave bazaar, was a market of female slaves located in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, operating from the mid-15th century to the early 20th century. Many households owned female slaves, employing them as domestic servants. The Ottoman state regulated the slave market and imposed taxes on every slave transaction.
Turkish textbooks have faced criticism for their negative depiction of Greeks and Armenians, lack of depiction or explicit denial of Ottoman-era massacres and genocides, denial of the existence of the Kurdish people, as well as understating and condoning Ottoman-era slavery. According to a study by Abdulkerim Sen, human rights education in Turkey subscribes to the 'escapist model'; Sen explains that Turkish textbooks either deliberately avoid human rights issues, struggles, campaigns, and activists altogether, or window-dress human rights issues by presenting de-contextualised narratives. Sen further states that the curriculum fails in respect of critically examining on discrepancies about claims made in Turkish textbooks vis-à-vis realities of human rights; and has scope to improve the curriculum encouraging learners to explore transformative powers of Human Rights Education.
George of Hungary was an Ottoman slave that escaped and reverted from Islam to Christianity, writing afterwards about his experiences. As per his own description, when George was 15 or 16, he was taken prisoner and sold into slavery when the Ottoman Turks invaded the town of Mühlbach in 1438. George had arrived to the city a year earlier, probably to go to a school in the local Dominican monastery.
Slavery existed in the territory of the modern state of Iraq until the 1920s.
Slavery existed in the territory of the modern state of Syria until the 1920s.
Slavery in Jordan is illegal, however, like many other countries, it suffers from issues relating to human trafficking. Historically, slavery in the territory later to become the modern state of Jordan, was significant during the Ottoman Empire period.
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