On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, First Edition. Edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Introduction One way or another, we have all benefited from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death; whether we agree with the main arguments or not, we have all had to address them, mull them over time and again, and incorporate them into our own work. For me, this is the main – and highly significant – achievement of Professor Patterson, for which we are in his debt. However, this piece, I am inclined to say “almost naturally,” will deal mostly with my own criticism, developed over three decades of research and writing on Ottoman history and the history of Ottoman enslavement. Some of my points are relevant also to enslavement in other, non‐ Ottoman, Islamic societies. Professor Patterson is a sociologist, and – for better or for worse – his Slavery and Social Death is a classic work in historical sociology. It would therefore be naively futile to expect that historians of particular societies during specific periods of time would not find faults, misconceptions, or mere inaccuracies in his work. Almost by definition, to historians most sociological work is “decontextualized,” or “ahistorical.” Indeed, perhaps one of the strongest critiques of Patterson’s work is offered by Joseph C. Miller in his The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (Miller 2012: 20–22, 31–33, 70–71). Patterson’s book, argues Miller, examines slavery on a “sweepingly global scale, though not historically.” The dynamic elements that the work does address, he continues, are not of “a historical sort that would embed 7 Ottoman Elite Enslavement and “Social Death” EHUD R. TOLEDANO