On November 10, the IAUNRC was pleased to co-sponsor a lecture by Jeff Eden, Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. Dr. Eden is an alumnus of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies (M.A., 2010) and a long-time friend of CEUS and the Center.
Though originally scheduled to talk about the phenomenon of Central Asian Sunni Muslims enslaving fellow Sunnis, Eden instead opted for discussing the various strategies that slaves in Central Asia used to free themselves or otherwise transform their relationships with their masters. In his lecture, Eden addressed two case studies: the Kazakh steppe in the early 19th century and the Khivan Khanate in the aftermath of a large slave uprising in 1873.
In the case of the Kazakh steppe, Eden traced the efforts of the Russian imperial state to count the people living in slavery in the region and free them. In practice, however, this process secured the freedom of a minority of the enslaved, who were returned to their homelands. Others converted to Orthodox Christianity and became agricultural settlers in Russian territories, entering another form of unfreedom as “state peasants”. Others yet were adopted into their masters’ families, effectively preserving their previous conditions by couching them in terms of kinship rather than those of the master and the enslaved.
In Khiva, on the other hand, the enslaved secured their own freedom by revolting against the slaveholders during the upheaval caused by the Russian invasion of Central Asia. As Eden showed, however, their uprising was appropriated by the Russian state, which took credit for manumitting the Khivan slaves when in fact the Russian authorities’ abolition of slavery in Khiva was merely a reaction to an existing reality. Eden’s case studies show both the complexity of Central Asian slavery as a social institution and the centrality of Central Asians’ agency to the history of slavery and liberation in the region. The lecture was co-sponsored by the IAUNRC, the Islamic Studies Program, the Center for the Study of the Middle East, and the Global Slaveries, Fugitivity, and the Afterlives of Unfreedom program.