Original air date: 11 December 2014 | The legal and social environments surrounding slavery and manumission during the early modern period varied from place to place and profession to profession. In this episode, Nur Sobers-Khan presents her exciting research on the lives of a particular population of slaves in Ottoman Galata during the late sixteenth century, how they were classified and documented under Ottoman law, and the terms by which they were able to achieve their freedom. Nur Sobers-Khan completed a PhD in Ottoman History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Cambridge. Dr. Sobers-Khan was formerly a curator for Persian manuscripts at the British Library. She is currently a curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Chris Gratien is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University researching the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA focusing on the history of knowledge and science in the early modern Middle East. He also runs the website HAZİNE, which profiles different archives, libraries, and museums that house sources on the Islamic world. Music: İnci Çayırlı - Kıskanıyorum ; İlhan Kızılay - Örenli Gelin SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Sobers-Khan, Nur. Slaves Without Shackles Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560-1572. Berlin: Klaus-Schwarz-Vlg, 2014. Heberer, Michael, Osmanlıda bir Köle: Brettenli Michael Heberer’in Anıları 1585-1588 (tr.) Türkis Noyan (Istanbul, 2003) Faroqhi, Suraiya, “Quis Custodiet custodes: Controlling Slave Identities and Slave Traders in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Istanbul” in Stories of Ottoman Men and Women (Istanbul, 2002), pp. 245-263 İnalcık, Halil, ‘Servile labor in the Ottoman Empire’ The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European Patterns (ed.) Abraham Ascher et al (New York, 1979), pp. 25-52 Sahillioğlu, Halil, ‘Slaves in the social and economic life of Bursa in the late 15th and early 16th centuries’ Turcica Vol. 17 (1985), pp. 43-112 Seng, Yvonne J., ‘Fugitives and factotums: slaves in early sixteenth-century Istanbul’ JESHO Vol. 34 (1996), pp. 136-169 Toledano, Ehud R., The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression 1840-1890 (Princeton, 1982) Zilfi, Madeline, Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, CUP, 2010)