GLC@Lunch: “The Fragmented Archive of Ottoman European Slavery”
Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 12:30—1:45pm | Hybrid
In person at Yale University, Rosenkranz Hall, Room 241, 115 Prospect Street, New Haven
Online via zoom
Note: In-person seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Emily Greble (GLC Research Affiliate; Nelson O. Tyrone Jr., Chair in History, Vanderbilt University)
“The Fragmented Archive of Ottoman European Slavery”
The study of slavery in late Ottoman Europe transcends national, imperial, and historiographical boundaries. In the nineteenth century, narratives of enslaved Christian women in the Ottoman Empire circulated as orientalist fodder, deployed to undermine Ottoman sovereignty. At the same time, slavery and its afterlives have been largely erased from European historiographies, leaving basic questions—such as what happened to Europe’s slaves?—unasked. Despite national revolutions and projects of statehood, enslaved women and children rarely returned home after manumission or the end of slavery; most were unwanted and excluded. This talk examines the challenges of studying slavery in nineteenth-century Ottoman Europe through a fragmented archive of enslavement. Focusing on enslaved women, it analyzes the racialized, gendered, and religious dimensions of slavery and traces how its norms and afterlives became embedded in the patriarchies of modern Europe.