Much of the success of the abolitionist movement was due to its religion-based indignation over the enslavement of blacks, in which abolitionist leaders were able to define slavery as a vio- lation of universal human rights. But as difficult a struggle as that had been within the British empire, exposure to Ottoman slavery presented British observers with a different and more complicated version of a trade and an institution that was multiracial, multiethnic, and generally domestic. For many in Great Britain, these differences made little sense, or even little dif- ference, and the cruel circumstances of Caribbean and American plantation slavery that informed British commentators' definitions of slavery framed their perspective on domestic slavery, concubinage, and military slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 645