The Forgotten Slave Trade of the Central Asian Steppe

Sergey Ivanov, Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs (1909), Sevastopol Art Museum

Back in March, stimulated by a UN pronouncement and the late Christopher Hitchens, I wrote a blog about the Barbary Slave trade: https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/slavery-the-barbary-trade-to-modern-day

Then a Russian friend of mine urged me to write about a trade that had enslaved so many Russians. The story of the slave trade of Central Asia is much less well-known. The word slave comes from the Slav people who were captured and enslaved in Europe but mainly in Central Asia.

So here goes: this is about the slave system across the deserts and oases of Central Asia that operated at the same time as the Barbary slave trade. It is only recently that historians have begun to reconstruct it in full, and its ending was as dramatic as its three-hundred-year run.

The scale of the Central Asian slave trade was vast. According to the historian Jeff Eden, whose 2018 study Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge University Press) remains the standard modern account, as many as a million people were enslaved along the Russian and Iranian frontiers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It has to be remembered that the Central Asian societies had been converted to Islam, and the Koran permits enslaving prisoners of war (e.g. 47:4, 8:67), and treats the resulting status as commonly rendered "those your right hands possess". Sharia Law recognises this legal category, outlined in the Koran's text (4:3, 4:24, 23:5–6, 70:29–30). Furthermore, this status explicitly permits sexual relations between an owner and an enslaved woman he holds, which is distinct from marriage (4:3, 4:24, 23:5–6).

By the 1830s, contemporaries put the number of Russian captives held in the khanate of Khiva at around two thousand, with Persian captives far more numerous still and their ranks continually replenished by fresh raids. Slavery in Khiva, Samarkand and Bukhara was not simply a by-product of conflict; it was embedded in the culture. I visited Bukhara for the first time last year and recalled the dreadful fate of two British emissaries. In the early 19th century, the Emirate of Bukhara (in modern-day Uzbekistan) was a powerful, isolated Islamic state ruled by Emir Nasrullah Khan. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Persians captured by Turkmen raiders, but also Russian subjects captured along the imperial frontiers, were bought and sold in Bukhara's markets.

Eradicating or reducing this slave trade was a key humanitarian and geopolitical goal for the British. They hoped that by convincing local rulers to abolish slavery, they could strip Russia of its primary excuse for invading and annexing Central Asian territories (which Russia claimed was to liberate Russian slaves). This was all part of the so-called 'Great Game': the competition in Central Asia between the Russian and British empires. The British, concerned about their control in India (the 'Jewel in the Crown'), hoped to check Russian expansion by interfering in Afghanistan.

In December 1838, Colonel Charles Stoddart was sent to Bukhara by the British East India Company to forge an alliance with Emir Nasrullah Khan and persuade him to free his slaves.

Suspicious that Stoddart was a spy, Nasrullah Khan had him arrested. Stoddart was thrown into the notorious Siah Cha (the "Black Well"), a 21-foot-deep pit filled with filth, rats, and flesh-eating reptiles. He spent months in these horrific conditions and was forced to convert to Islam under threat of death. In 1841, Captain Arthur Conolly, an idealistic British intelligence officer, volunteered to travel to Bukhara to rescue Stoddart and salvage British relations with the Emir. However, Britain had just suffered a catastrophic defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842). Realising Britain was no longer a threat, the Emir arrested Conolly as well, throwing him into prison alongside Stoddart. He came to the conclusion the two British officers were of no diplomatic use to him, and on June 17, 1842, Stoddart and Conolly were led out to the public square and beheaded. The opportunity, at least in Bukhara, to end slavery was lost. It wasn't until Russian conquests in the 1870s that slavery began to be abolished in Central Asia.

Enslaved people worked the land, staffed workshops, served in households, and in some cases fought in local armies. The khanates' economies relied on this captive labour, and the great slave markets of the region were long-standing institutions rather than wartime improvisations. The supply of captives came chiefly from Turkoman raiding parties, nominally under the authority of the Khan of Khiva, who struck Persian territory and Russian settlements along the Caspian coast and sold their captives on into the khanate's markets. For the Russian Empire, the repeated seizure of its own subjects on its own frontier was intolerable: not only a strategic irritant but also, as far as St Petersburg was concerned, an affront to imperial prestige. Russian statesmen made good use of the issue. The presence of Russian captives in Khivan markets became a standing justification for military intervention, allowing conquest in Central Asia to be presented to European observers, who were, in any case, watching the unfolding 'Great Game ', as a humanitarian mission rather than an exercise in imperial expansion.

Russia had tried and failed to subdue Khiva twice before, in 1717 and again during the disastrous winter campaign of 1839–40 under Count Perovsky. It succeeded in 1873, when General Konstantin von Kaufman's forces took the city. The Khan of Khiva proclaimed the abolition of slavery within his territory that June, and a formal peace treaty was signed that August and known by several transliterations, most often the Treaty of Gandemian (also rendered Hendemian), which bound the khanate as a Russian protectorate and confirmed the end of the slave trade. Resistance did not end there: independent Turkmen tribes continued raiding until their defeat at the Battle of Geok Tepe in 1881 finally closed the last of the markets.

Much of what is known about the lived experience of captivity comes from a rare first-hand account: the narrative of Mirza Mahmud Taqi Ashtiyani, an Iranian who spent ten years enslaved among the Turkmen before gaining his freedom. His testimony is one of the few surviving records of Central Asian slavery. He describes the daily brutality of the system, the strategies captives used to survive it, and the endurance of the will to escape. It also carries a bitter irony: because most Persian captives were Shia Muslims and their Turkmen captors predominantly Sunni, their enslavement was often justified through a form of sectarian "othering," even though captor and captive shared a faith. The same violence we see today between these sects of 'the religion of peace'.

The most significant reassessment in recent scholarship concerns who actually ended the trade. The conventional account credits Russian arms and Russian policy with abolition. However, Eden's research complicates this: as Kaufman's forces closed in on Khiva in 1873, the khanate's internal order began to collapse, and enslaved people rose up on a scale large enough to be described as the largest slave uprising in the region's history. Rather than passively awaiting liberation by a conquering army, they actively undermined the Khan's ability to resist and pressed their own claims to freedom in the chaos of the khanate's defeat.

This matters because it unsettles the tidy narrative Russia told about itself at the time: that of an empire bringing civilisation and liberty to a benighted region. Without denying that the Russian conquest was also a crucial event that broke the system open, both views can be seen as true: an empire pursuing its own strategic interests, and thousands of enslaved people who did not wait to be handed their freedom but took an active hand in seizing it.

The Central Asian slave trade left as deep a mark on the societies of the Eurasian steppe as its Mediterranean counterpart left on the coastal towns of Europe, yet it has been far less studied, in part because so few captive voices survived to tell their own story. Ashtiyani's account is a rare exception, and it is precisely because such testimonies are scarce that Eden's archival work, which has been piecing together Russian, Persian and Chaghatai sources, has done so much to bring the system, and its ending, into clearer view.