Description

Summary:
Facing one of the most important instances of slavery outside the Americas, early modern Ukrainian political actors used the language of redemption from slavery to gain moral capital in balancing the competing Eastern European empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Liberation was a central concern due to the high numbers of people captured by nomads and sold on the slave market, second only to sub-Saharan Africa. With Exodus and Moses as template, Ukrainians went from adaptation to Commonwealth institutional environments to exit and, finally, establishing the Hetmanate. Owing to some degree to their first-hand experiences of Ottoman slavery, which was far from the simplified image of plantation chattel slavery, many Ukrainians had a relation to liberty that depended on the context; in its Polish variant they at times cherished it, while others unfavorably compared it to the religious tolerance and even to slavery in the Ottoman empire.