The Meanings of Conversion: Treaty Law, State Knowledge, and Religious Identity among Russian Captives in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This article examines the role of religious conversion in the rules worked out, on paper and in practice, between the Ottoman and Russian empires for the return of captives following their frequent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflicts. The author shows that the abolition of ransom led the Ottoman state to take the central role in the liberation of captives in private hands in its territories. For cultural and fiscal reasons, this required the state to define a test for captives' conversion to Islam, a matter which had previously been communally and religiously defined. The author traces the changing conversion tests used, and the ways they were manipulated by both captors and captives for their own ends, arguing that the legal definition of conversion undermined official trust, and perhaps community trust more broadly, in conversion's social role. This discussion sheds light on the connections between state knowledge, centralisation, and identity, while suggesting that Ottoman state intervention in matters of slavery and conversion, which has previously been seen as a product of the consciously reforming nineteenth-century Tanzimat, emerged earlier as a pragmatic result of Ottoman participation in the international arena.