The Bukhara slave trade refers to the historical slave trade conducted in the city of Bukhara in Central Asia (present-day Uzbekistan) from antiquity until the 19th century. Bukhara and nearby Khiva were known as the major centers of slave trade in Central Asia for centuries until the completion of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the late 19th century.
The city of Bukhara was an important trade center along the ancient Silk Road, through which slaves were traded between Europe and Asia. In the Middle Ages, Bukhara came to lie in the religious border zone between the Muslim and non-Muslim world, which was seen as a legitimate target of slavery by Muslims, and referred to as the "Eastern Dome of Islam". It became the center of the massive slave trade of the Samanid Empire, who bought saqaliba (European) slaves from the Kievan Rus' and sold them on to the Middle East, and as such constituted one of the main trade routes of saqaliba slaves to the Muslim world. The conquests and plundering of the Ghaznavid Empire brought a large number of slaves from India into the markets of Bukhara in the 10th and 11th centuries. Bukhara was also a center for the trade of non-Muslim Turkic slaves from Central Asia to the Middle East and India, where they composed the main ethnicity of ghilman (military slaves) for centuries.
