Slavery and Household Formation in Ottoman Aleppo, 1640-1700
Abstract Focusing on a seventeenth-century Syrian city, this study examines the practice of slavery as a strategy for building elite households in the Ottoman Empire. After an overview of the slave trade and the social and political conditions which sustained it, it constructs a demographic profile of the slaves and slaveholders and concludes with case studies of how slaves were integrated into selected military-administrative, merchant and ulama families. Valued as servants, soldiers, companions, and business agents, slaves were integrated to a wide range of elite households, in some cases providing critical human resources for the households’ continuity.
The Relation of the Slave and the Client to the Master or Patron in Medieval Islam
In antiquity and in the Middle Ages slavery played a significant role in the military, economic, political and social life of the Near East. Many studies have been made of these aspects of life, but little has been said in the context of Islam about the psychological bonds which, at least to some extent, characterize the relationship between slave or freedman and master. The institution of ‘mutual alliance’ also played an important part in Islamic history, and there were certain similarities between the relation of the ‘ally’ to the patron on the one hand, and of the freedman to the former master on the other. But it is the purpose of this discussion, in part, to point out some basic differences between the two relationships.
Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity
This comprehensive study of Roman sexuality and the ideologies of masculinity discusses a wide range of ancient texts, arguing that native Roman concepts of masculinity did not rely on the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but were instead structured around such antitheses as free versus slave, dominant versus subordinate, and masculine versus effeminate.