Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Episode: Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520sā1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Description: Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun...