International Studies Quarterly
Slave Empire: Ottoman Islamic Slavery and State Formation
2026-07-13
Islamic slavery provided a distinctive, inherently internationalized model of successful state formation that illustrates important variations in institutional diffusion. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, this paper shows how slaves constituted the military-administrative institutions conventionally associated with the modern state before their European counterparts, in particular, a professional standing army. Reproducing Islamic slavery necessitated enslaving outsiders, and hence the external and internal faces of this institution were co-constitutive. Confounding expectations of the diffusion of superior institutional innovations, Europeans failed to emulate military-administrative slavery, illuminating deep-seated normative barriers to functional adaptation in the West and, more generally, highlighting cultural preconditions for mechanisms of diffusion. Later, an abolitionist “standard of civilization” legitimated European coercive institutional diffusion imposed on the Ottomans and other Muslim powers, ending Islamic slavery and hence a distinctive Islamic political model.