An overview of Asian slavery shows it has existed in all regions of Asia throughout its history. Although slavery is now illegal in every Asian country, some forms of it still exist today.
Central Asia
Slavery has been integral to the social, economic, and political history of Central Asia. Polities of different sizes and structures such as nomadic confederations,Peter Golden, Central Asia In World History,(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64-65 agrarian city-states,Peter Golden, Central Asia In World History,(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 63-65 and empiresJeff Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2018),13 all engaged in and at various times promoted the enslavement and trade of people and the exploitation of their labor.Susan Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 250-252 While societies across Central Asia independently developed their localized practice of slavery, they also integrated their slave selling network to the development of the Silk Road, which linked dispersed markets throughout Eurasia.Valerie Hansen, 2002, "The Impact of the Silk Road Trade on a Local Community: the Turfan Oasis, 500-800. Paper presented at the New Perspectives on the Tang Conference, Princeton University. Alongside silk, spices, and other commodities of the Silk Road, merchants traded and transported people across Central Asia. As an area with diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious demographic, the people who were enslaved and traded in Central Asia came from a variety of backgrounds and spoke many different languages. In eastern Eurasia, slave selling contracts demonstrate that slave sales were conducted in Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan, Sogdian, Prakrit, Khotanese, and Tocharian.Wen Xin, "Kingly Exchange: The Silk Road and the East Eurasian World in the Age of Fragmentation (850-1000)", May 13, 2017. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/40046558. Political conquests, economic competition, and religious conversion all mattered in determining who had control over the slave trade, which demographic slave traders targeted, and whose demand slave traders catered to.
Mechanisms for enslavement
Warfare, slave raids, legal punishments, self-sales, or sales by relatives, and inheritance of slave status from birth were the common ways individuals become a slave in Central Asia. Linguistic analysis of the vocabulary used for slavery in early Central Asian societies suggests a strong connection between military actions and slavery.Peter Golden, "The Terminology of Slavery and Servitude in Medieval Turkic", p. 28. in Studies on Central Asian History in Honor of Yuri Bregel, ed. Devin DeWeese, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 27-56. Third-century Sassanian inscriptions attest to the usage of the word wardag as meaning both "slave" and "captive". Similarly, the 8th-century Turkic Orkhon inscriptions indicate prisoners of war have often designated the status of slavery. Inscriptions found in the First Turkic Khaganate also imply that terms denoting slavery or other forms of subordinate status, such as qul (male slave) and küng (female slave or handmaiden), are frequently applied to a population of defeated political entities.Golden, "Terminology", p. 29.
During the early modern era (16th–18th centuries), Khiva and Bukhara imported large numbers of Europeans slaves kidnapped by the Crimean Tatars.Mayers, K. (2016). The First English Explorer: The Life of Anthony Jenkinson (1529–1611) and His Adventures on the Route to the Orient. Storbritannien: Matador. p. 121 The Crimean slave trade was eradicated in the late 18th century. However Russian captives were still provided via the Kazakh Khanate slave trade. In 1717, 3,000 Russian slaves consisting of men, women, and children were sold in Khiva by Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribesmen.
Raids among nomadic tribes and against sedentary societies to loot people were also prevalent practices conducted by polities across Eurasia. After many Central Asian states converted to Islam, they frequently conducted slave raids into non-Muslim territories. Areas where polytheism were practiced were frequently targets of these slave raids. For example, Daylam, the northwestern regions of Iran, Gur in central Afghanistan, the Eurasian steppe, and India had long been targeted by Muslim polities for slave raids. The Samanids in Khorasan and Transoxania, and their successor, the Ghaznavids, and later the Saljuqs in Iran.
Violent encounters are not the only mechanism through which an individual was enslaved. Iranian and Chinese sources attest to the practice of self-enslavement or self-selling. In the Pahlavi Book of a Thousand Judgements, the word tan (body), designates a person who loans oneself or one's relative for a specific period of time to a debtor or creditor as security for a debt. In China, legal code historically prohibited individuals from selling children or other relatives into slavery. However, sale contracts indicate that poverty, famine, and other unfortunate circumstances often compelled individuals to sell or loan themselves, their children, and other relatives.Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas, p. 253 This is not to say that slave sales were prohibited in China, however. Tang legal codes regulated the sale of people who were already designated slave status by requiring individuals to provide certificates that demonstrate the individuals were lawfully enslaved.Valerie Hansen, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 41 In one recorded case, a man sold his daughter and son in order to raise funds to pay for his father's funeral.Whitfield, p. 254.
A notorious slave market for captured Russian and Persian slaves was the Khivan slave trade, centered in the Khanate of Khiva from the 17th to the 19th century. During the first half of the 19th century alone, some one million Persians, as well as an unknown number of Russians, were enslaved and transported to Central Asian khanates.Ichan-Kala, Encyclopædia Britannica When the Russian troops took Khiva in 1898 there were 29,300 Persian slaves, captured by Turkoman raiders. According to Josef Wolff (Report of 1843–1845) the population of the Khanate of Bukhara was 1,200,000, of whom 200,000 were Persian slaves.Report of Josef Wolff 1843–1845 There were Russian and Swedish slaves, including Brigitta Scherzenfeldt, in the Dzungar Khanate in Central Asia in the 18th century.Åberg, Alf (1991). Fångars elände: karolinerna i Ryssland 1700-1723. (The misery of prisoners. The Carolinians in Russia 1700-1723) Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. Libris 7228808. ISBN 91-27-02743-0 (in Swedish)
Function of slavery in Central Asian societies
The slave trade was also an essential aspect of the economy of Central Asian societies. Due to the high demand for slaves in neighboring sedentary empires, Central Asian Turkic nomads supplied the majority of slaves to the Islamic caliphate to the west and the Chinese dynasties to the east. In the Abbasid empire, the establishment of the Mamluk institution created the preference and demand for young, Turkic male slaves due to their supposedly superior military strength. As a result of these demands, the economy of Central Asian states flourished as they dominated the slave trade. The Khazar Qaghanate,Golden, "Terminology", 37 the Samanids, and later the Ghaznavids, were some of the main suppliers of Turkic military slaves, Circassian slaves, and Russian slaves to Baghdad.
Modern slavery
Slavery gradually disappeared from the Caucasus owing to reduced demand for Circassian slaves from the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, Russian imperial policy that used the issue of slaves to infringe upon Ottoman sovereignty, and the actions of the slaves themselves.Jeff Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) In Central Asia, informal slavery continued into the Soviet period and some forms of slavery continue to exist today.
The tradition of slavery exists today in Russia.
Uzbekistan
The history of slavery in Uzbekistan is reflected in the institution of slavery in the states that previously existed within the territory of what was later to become Uzbekistan.
Before the arrival of the Russians in the 1860s, present-day Uzbekistan was divided between the Emirate of Bukhara and the khanates of Khiva and Kokand.
The city of Bukhara was the center of the ancient Bukhara slave trade. In the 16th century, Bukhara exported slaves to Central Asia, the Middle East and India. The Bukhara slave market was a destination for slave merchants from India and other countries of the "East", who came to Bukhara to buy slaves.Mayers, K. (2016). The First English Explorer: The Life of Anthony Jenkinson (1529–1611) and His Adventures on the Route to the Orient. Storbritannien: Matador. p. 121 The slaves were exported from Bukhara to other Islamic khanates in Central Asia.
Bukhara also used slaves for their domestic market. The use of slaves in Bukhara followed the normal model of slavery in the Islamic world. Female slaves were used as domestic servants or as concubines (sex slaves). Baron Meyendorff reported in the 1820s that a skilled artisan could be sold for about 100 tilla, while an attractive slave girls could be sold for as much as 150 tilla.Levi, Scott 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. 277–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188289. Accessed 15 Apr. 2024. Male slaves were used as ghilman slave soldiers. Bukhara also used slave labor in their agriculture, normally Indian slaves.Dumper, M., Stanley, B. (2007). Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia. Storbritannien: Bloomsbury Publishing., p. 97
The royal harem of the ruler of the Emirate of Bukhara (1785–1920) in Central Asia (Uzbekistan) was similar to that of the Khanate of Khiva. The last Emir of Bukhara was reported to have a harem with 100 women, but also a separate "harem" of "nectarine-complexioned dancing boys".Khan-Urf, R. (1936). The Diary of a Slave. Storbritannien: S. Low. p. 41 The harem was abolished when the Soviets conquered the area and the khan Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan was forced to flee; he reportedly left the harem women behind, but did take some of his dancing boys with him.
In the 19th century, the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara were still among the biggest slave markets in the world. The Turkmen were so known for their slave raids that it was said that Turkmen "would not hesitate to sell into slavery the Prophet himself, did he fall into their hands". The constant raids against travelers constituted a problem for traveling in the region. Between 20.000 and 40.000 slaves are estimated to have existed in Bukhara in 1821, and around 20.000 in the 1860s.
Slavery and slave trade was abolished in the khanate of Bukhara after the Russian conquest of Bukhara. The Russian-Bukharan Treaty of 1873 abolished the Bukhara slave trade. In contrast to neighboring Khiva, slavery as such was not banned in Bukhara after slave trade was banned. The Russian General Governor congratulated Emir Muzaffar bin Nasrullah for having abolished the slave trade in Bukhara, and expressed his hope that also slavery itself would be gradually phased out during a ten-year period. The Emir promised the Russians that he would abolish slavery in 1883 on condition that the former slaves remained with their slavers until then, after which they would be given the right to buy themselves free; after this promise, the Russians abstained from pressuring the emir more in the issue to avoid damaging their diplomatic contact with him.