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Join the Buffett Institute for a faculty research lunchtime talk on the first Friday of the winter quarter.  Faculty members will give a half-hour talk intended for a broad, multidisciplinary audience of Northwestern students, faculty and staff, followed by a conversational Q&A.

When the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia in the 1860s–1870s, the conquest was hailed across Europe as the event that ended Central Asia’s vast slave trade and liberated its slaves—a claim that has rarely, if ever, been challenged by historians. On the first Friday of the winter quarter this January, Jeff Eden, Assistant Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will challenge that claim through two dramatic case studies. The first case study shows how, on the eve of Russia’s conquest of the capital city of Khiva in 1873, the city’s slaves fomented the largest slave uprising in the region’s history, which prompted the abolition of slavery throughout Central Asia. The second case study reveals what happened to former slaves who escaped their Central Asian owners, fled to the Russian border, and sought protection from the purportedly “abolitionist” Tsar—only to find a surprising fate awaiting them.