All events · Conquest and the Slave Trades

The Khivan and Bukharan Slave Trade and Turkmen Raiding of Persia and Russia

c. 1500–1873 · South & Central Asia

Displacement Sexual Violence Abduction (Children)

Displaced

1 million

Russian officers who occupied Khiva in 1873 recorded the emancipation of roughly 29,300-40,000 slaves, most of them Persian; the Russian envoy Baron von Meyendorff estimated around 40,000 Persian slaves in the Bukhara khanate in 1820, and British travellers gave comparable orders of magnitude. Cumulative estimates of Iranians enslaved in Central Asia between 1500 and 1900 run to around a million, notably in Thomas Ricks's work, extrapolated from market and raiding accounts rather than counted. Contemporary numbers come from Russian and British travellers, diplomats and military reports.

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What happened

For centuries the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara were the principal slave markets of Central Asia, supplied chiefly by Turkmen raiders of the Yomut and Tekke tribes who took captives from Shia Persian Khorasan - religious opinion in the Sunni khanates treating Shia Persians as lawfully enslavable - and also by raids on Russian settlements, shipping on the Caspian and caravans. Slaves worked as agricultural labourers on irrigated estates, as artisans and in households; the trade was central to the economies of the oasis khanates. Captured Russians became a recurring pretext for Russian intervention, from the disastrous Khivan expedition of 1839-40 to the conquest of 1873, when General Kaufman's forces occupied Khiva and the khan was compelled to abolish slavery; Russian officers recorded the emancipation of tens of thousands, most of them Persian. Bukhara's slavery was formally abolished in 1873 as well, and finally with the fall of the emirate in 1920. Cumulative totals across the early modern period are extrapolations from traveller and diplomatic accounts, not counts.

Parties

Turkmen and Kazakh raiders captured Persians, Russians and others for sale in the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara

Disputed

Cumulative totals for the number enslaved over three centuries are extrapolations from traveller reports; only the 1873 emancipation figure has a contemporaneous administrative basis, and Russian sources had an interest in emphasising the trade as justification for conquest.

The denominator

The captives were taken from Khorasan and the Persian plateau, Russian and Ukrainian frontier settlements, and neighbouring Central Asian peoples over some 370 years, with no continuous source population. The firmest numbers are terminal: Russian forces recorded roughly 40,000 slaves freed in Khiva at the 1873 conquest and comparable numbers in Bukhara, and nineteenth-century Persian estimates of one million captives taken overall are extrapolations rather than counts.

Where the baseline comes from

Khanate of Khivaopen-edited
Slavery in Central Asia / Bukharaopen-edited

On the death toll

No death toll can be established. Raiding, forced marches across the Karakum and conditions of captivity killed an unknown number; travellers described high mortality on the routes from Khorasan but produced no figures.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourAbduction of ChildrenSexual Violence

Russian and British diplomatic and traveller accounts, and the Russian emancipation records of 1873, document forced agricultural and domestic labour, the taking of children and the sale of women as concubines.

Movements mapped

Captives from Khorasan and northern Persia to the Khiva slave market
Russian and Volga captives to Bukhara

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Uzbekistan, Iran, Kazakhstan

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.

Khivan slave tradeopen-edited
Bukharan slave tradeopen-edited
Khivan campaign of 1873 and the emancipation of slavesopen-edited