Spyropoulos, Yannis. “The Creation of a Homogeneous Collective Identity: Towards a History of the Black People in the Ottoman Empire.” International Journal of Turkish Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 25–46.
This paper presents three eighteenth-century documents from Crete which suggest that the Ottoman central administration attributed communal responsibility to the black people of Kandiye (mod. Herakleion). It argues that the case of Kandiye represented an Ottoman policy of treating the black people who lived in the Ottoman lands as belonging to an ethnic-racial community defined by skin color and that an examination of this policy can significantly advance our understanding of identity questions among African-Ottomans.
