I am just curious about this. If everybody had slavery during the time and if you say it was better in the Ottoman Empire and Islamic countries why would you make it a problem?
Would it still called slavery after all? I still strongly deny the fact Ottoman Empire did not encouraged it or used it as a goverment policy but would it still called slavery if that was the labouring system of the age?
It was not better in ottoman empire, nor worse in fact. As I told, slaves' condition was very different if you were an official of Dîwan or a galley slave, for example. The only difference between slavery and other forms of oppression or labor is that, in general, a slave had no juridical personnality. In the worst status, like in Roman Empire, a slave was only a material possession. In Islamic rule, he had juridically an inferior status, near to a child's one, and of course all his life depended of his master, for the worst or the best... Nowadays this economical resources seems morally unsufferable, sure, but it is above all useless for Economy, and for that reason it had been abolished. We have replaced it by what Karl Marx called "capitalist exploitation". Some aspects of capitalism are not better than slavery, but as we economically depend on them, we are still accepting them.
Ottoman Empire did not encourage it because it had not to do, slavery was simply an economical system of which it had inherited and could not change. The reasons for which Europe suppressed it depends on its own history, and its own industrial revolution. It is noticeable that the Secession War in USA, opposing pro-slavery against anti-slavery, opposed in fact the Southern States which lived of Cane-sugar or cotton plants, and the North, which was more industrialized and did not economically on slaves.
And I never made a problem about former slavery in Ottoman Empire or former islamic word.
Slavery in Ottoman countries did subsist until 20th century because of an internal sclerosis and some archaic system which last, and its unability to access really at the "Industrial" or "Capitalist Age". And the last thing is that Ottoman Empire could not survive to modern ideologies of people's freedom and the raising of nations and citizenship. In the same time, this sytem collapsed in Iran, India, China, Japan...Btw, the collapse of ottoman Empire was more provoked by the awakening of nationalisms than a social revolt of slaves or oppressed classes. I know that the "official Turkish history" charged Foreign powers to have plot againt it. That was true, of course, it is the usual game of rival nations. But war between Europe and Ottomans, or between Ottomans and Persia did not begin in 19th century, it was since the first Ottomans conquests. It was just that, at a time, an Empire fall down because of its own internal failures.
