ETHNIC DIMENSIONS OF SLAVERY IN THE KHANATE OF KHIVA: A REASSESSMENT OF ORIGINS, SOCIAL STATUS AND EMANCIPATION (EIGHTEENTH–NINETEENTH CENTURIES)
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Objective: This article reassesses how ethnicity, religious affiliation, skill and gender intersected to produce a stratified slave society in Khwarezm. Method: Drawing on a triangulation of three principal source-bodies — Khwarazmian court chronicles (Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan, Munis, Agahi, Bayani), Iranian and Russian travel accounts and ambassadorial diaries (Mirpanji, Muhammad Ali Khan Ghafur, Murav'ev, Meyendorff, Vámbéry), and the archival collections of Orenburg (GAOO) and Tashkent (NAUz I-125), with critical synthesis of recent monographs by Eden (2018) and Tadjieva (2022). Results: The Khanate of Khiva (Khwarezm) was, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the largest centres of the Central Asian slave trade, holding between 29,000 and 40,000 enslaved persons on the eve of its conquest by the Russian Empire in 1873. Novelty: Despite the centrality of slavery to the khanate's agrarian, military and fiscal life, the role of ethnic origin in shaping the experiences, occupations and emancipation trajectories of enslaved people has received only fragmentary scholarly attention.
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