The Adventures of a Slave Girl (Sergüzest), written by the iconic Ottoman realist writer Samipasazade Sezai (1859–1936), was the first anti-slavery novel published in the Ottoman Empire. Set in Istanbul and Egypt at the end of the 19th century, it tells the story of Dilber, a Circassian girl sold into domestic slavery at only nine years old. We follow her through her tragic ordeal, dreaming of freedom and love even as she is sold from one abusive master to another. Sensational in its time for its explicit anti-slavery stance and its use of the politically taboo word ‘freedom’, the publication of this book placed the author under palace scrutiny and ultimately into voluntary exile. Supported by a full critical apparatus, this widely cited novel is published in English for the first time. As global slavery studies expand beyond the Atlantic, it offers rare insight into the gendered and racialised dimensions of child and female slavery in the late Ottoman Empire, in spite of the Tanzimat reforms aimed at cracking down on the trade.
