In this time period, the trafficking in girls from the Caucasus across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire attracted attention in the West.
In 1854, the Ottoman Empire banned the trade in white women after pressure from Great Britain and France.
[4] The Caucasian slave boys were to be escorted back to their families by some appointed trustworthy person, unless they had converted to Islam, in which case they were to be enlisted in military service; as for the girls, those who had converted to Islam were to have marriages arranged for them.
Abdulmuttalib Efendi, emir of Mecca, gathered support by asking the notables of Jeddah to write a letter of 1 April 1855 to the sharif and ulema of Mecca, where they condemned the Firman as concession to Europeans, since it authorized the Ottoman governors to ban slave trade, permitted non-Muslims to erect edifices in the Arab Peninsula, allow non-Muslim men to marry Muslim women and prohibited the interference in women's dress, and the notables of Jeddah petitioned the emir to petition the Sultan.
[10] When the firman of 1857 was introduced the following year, banning the African slave trade, the Hejaz was excluded from the prohibition.
In March 1858, the Ottoman governor of Trapezunt informed the British Consul that the 1854 ban had been a temporary war time ban due to foreign pressure, and that he had been given orders to allow slave ships on the Black Sea to pass on their way to Constantinople.
[3] In December 1858, formal tax regulations were introduced, legitimizing the Circassian slave trade again.