As Ehud Toledano has noted, this narrow definition was met with an equally oversimplified response from Ottoman statesmen and writers. These elites countered that "kul/harem," or domestic slavery, was a considerably milder forms of the institution; in so doing, they ignored the more difficult circumstances of domestic slavery in which the majority of slaves were African. Nor did they account for the violent uprooting and harrowing migrations of these slaves' middle passage from Africa to the Ottoman provinces or to Istanbul.

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