E181 | 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 in 2012 at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University Cambridge, having previous completing a BA in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian) at the same institution in 2006. Her PhD dissertation, entitled, ‘Slaves without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers: 1560-1572,’ was a microhistorical study of the social and cultural context of slavery in the early modern Ottoman Empire, using a selection of legal and archival documents as well as manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman and Persian. From 2012 to 2013, Dr. Sobers-Khan was the Iran Heritage curator for Persian manuscripts at the British Library, where she was engaged in creating a digital reference tool for the Persian manuscripts held in the BL. She is currently working as a curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, where she is responsible for the collection of manuscripts and art of the Ottoman Empire.

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 studying Ottoman intellectual history.

See: Sobers-Khan, Nur. Slaves Without Shackles Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560-1572. Berlin: Klaus-Schwarz-Vlg, 2014.

For complete bibliography and more, visit http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/12/slavery-istanbul-ottoman-empire.html