Abstract
This article makes a case for a critical engagement with the Ottoman institution of slavery and slave trade in its globalist rethinking of the rise of the novel. It argues that production of late Ottoman Turkish novelistic writing hinged on a domestic imagination to which the labor of enslaved women was indispensable. Placing Namık Kemal's İntibah in conversation with other novels contemporaneous with it, the article underscores the interlacement between the genre‐conscious crafting of novelistic writing in the nineteenth‐century Ottoman Empire and the ubiquitous presence of enslaved women in the fictions from the period. As such, it highlights the necessity of reframing the transnational history of the novel by expanding the interrogation of its gendered and racialized economy to hitherto neglected Ottoman contexts of enslavement.
