It was one of the reforms representing the process of official abolition of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, including the
Firman of 1830,
Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market (1847),
Suppression of the slave trade in the Persian Gulf (1847), the
Prohibition of the Circassian and Georgian slave trade (1854–1855), Prohibition of the Black Slave Trade (1857), and the
Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880. The Firman was issued in a time period when the Ottoman Empire was subjected to a growing diplomatic pressure from the West to suppress slave trade and
slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Abolitionist policy was also consistent with the modernization reform efforts of the
Tanzimat era. The
Firman of 1854 had banned the slave trade from the Caucasus. In 1855, the trade in African slaves to Crete and Janina was banned. This was a ban against one route of the African slave trade to the Ottoman Empire. In 1857, British pressure resulted in the Ottoman Sultan issuing a firman (decree) that prohibited the slave trade from the Sudan to Ottoman Egypt and across the Red Sea to Ottoman Hijaz. The firman did not prohibit slavery as such, nor did it prohibit slave trade as such: it merely prohibited the import of African slaves from lands outside of the empire across the borders to the Ottoman Empire. ==Aftermath==