Exile and Migration in the Modern Era: The Last White Slaves

Elbruz Aksoy

 

Date: March 19, 2025

Time: 15:00

Location: Faculty of Business Administration, A101

 

Summary

This presentation examines the human trafficking that flowed from Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and the Caucasus, which remained as the last regions of White Slave acquisition in the world at the beginning of the 19th century, to the Middle East and the Mediterranean geography, with a special focus on White Slaves. In the presentation, the historical background of white slaves and the white slave trade from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey is illuminated through the testimonies of slaves and oral history data. The slaves and their trade acquired by the white slave traders, whose influence in the Ottoman capital increased from the beginning of the 19th century, from Russians, Circassians, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Nogays, Abkhazians, Georgians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians, are tried to be revealed in detail in the presentation within a two-hundred-year historical process.

In order to correctly express these slaves acquired from different ethnic origins and different geographies such as Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, the term "white slaves" is used in the study. The life experiences, life-holding experiences, and emancipation processes of the last white slaves, mostly Ottoman citizens, brought from the Caucasus after the 1850s, and numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are revealed through testimonies. The issue of the White Slaves and their trade, as a closed community that included slaves acquired in various ways from different people, is one of the subjects inherited from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey but is rarely talked about. Although the administrators of the early republican period ignored this "other" group, the oral history narratives in the study show that the White Slave trade continued its existence, albeit covertly, until the 1940s, and that the slaves who were sold lived among us until the 2000s. How the attitudes and perceptions towards the White Slaves within Turkish society were shaped throughout the 20th century and the challenging experiences of the slaves on their way to becoming free citizens are also revealed in this work within the framework of oral history narratives.

This presentation, which tells the story of the last White Slaves produced and sold in the world, is distinguished from previous studies by the oral history data and testimonies it contains in addition to the archive documents and written works it uses as sources. This study, which is written with a focus on remembrance and confrontation, aims to shed light on the misconceptions or unknown issues about White Slaves by listening to the White Slaves who were left in limbo and recording those last voices.