Is there any evidence to back up David Starkey's claim that infanticide of mixed-race children was integral to the Ottoman slave trade?

Question

David Starkey made some controversial remarks in an interview a couple of years ago, in which he compared the Atlantic Slave Trade to its Ottoman counterpart. This question is not an appropriate forum in which to assess the rightness or wrongness of Dr Starkey's views more generally, but he made an assertion of fact which I hope this community might be able to test.

To begin with, Dr Starkey makes a number of claims which I think are pretty well-established:

1. Around 12 million Africans were transported to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade.
2. A comparable number of sub-Saharan Africans - Dr Starkey quotes 20 million, but it's unclear whether this refers to the entire Islamic Slave Trade, or the Ottoman Slave Trade specifically - were transported into the Ottoman Empire over a similar time frame.
3. There are a large number of people of African descent in the Americas today, perhaps as many as 100 million.
4. There are far fewer people of sub-Saharan African descent in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. Turkey, the empire's legal successor, only has a few thousand citizens of African descent. Saudi Arabia and Iraq have perhaps 2 million and 1 million citizens of African descent respectively.

(I will leave to one side the former Ottoman provinces in North Africa, which have seen older and deeper influxes of sub-Saharans than Early Modern chattel slavery, e.g. the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, Sultan Ismail's Black Guard.)

If we accept the above points, we are then forced to ask: Why did the victims of the Ottoman Slave Trade leave so few descendants? Dr Starkey's explanation is that the slave-masters systematically prevented them from multiplying, via the most horrific means, namely:

1. They castrated the men.
2. Whenever they impregnated any of the women, they would murder the resulting babies.

That Ottoman slave-masters systematically castrated their male slaves is, sadly, beyond any reasonable doubt. Whether castration was practised systematically enough to account for the comparative lack of people of sub-Saharan African descent today is not so clear, but clearly that most cruel form of mutilation was inflicted quite frequently. I have yet to see any evidence, however, for the mass-infanticide that Dr Starkey claims.

History, for more or less any region of the earth, is pretty blood-soaked. However, it seems unbelievable to me that men would murder their own children - not just one unhinged individual, but thousands of men, systematically, for hundreds of years. Is there any evidence that this in fact did happen in the Ottoman Empire?

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The question of what the actual explanation for the lack of people of sub-Saharan African descent in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire today has been asked in this its own question.

Answer 1

No. I was unable to find anything in the scholarly research backing up most of the assertions this gentleman made.

It is true that Ottomans castrated some (not all) male slaves. However, the children of female slaves were considered free, and it appears this happening was commonplace.

I also tried looking up infanticide in the Ottoman empire. What I could find is that it was considered to be the same as murdering an adult. Islam is quite specific about forbidding infanticide. Sharia has specific punishments for it, and the Koran and Hadiths even shame other societies for allowing it.

As for under what circumstances it happened anyway, the trigger largely appeared to have been matters of interpersonal social circumstances (eg: infidelity, sexual assault, etc.). The author found no evidence that children of the poor (or enslaved) were victims of it any more than the wealthy, once one accounts for the wealthy's better access to abortion services.

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So at this point, one might wonder why a "historian" might be making unsupportable historical claims. Surely doing so would be bad for his career, right?

It appears he ceased being a professional historian in the early 1990's, and has spent the 4 decades since as a professional political commentor. He's also got a history of upsetting people with racist statements, and these incidents appear to be escalating in offensiveness as time goes by. His most recent was a speech to a conservative conference which promoted the White Supremacist Great Replacement Theory.

So what it looks like we have here is a professional White Supremacist political commentator making unfounded historical claims, not an historian making well-supported historical points with racial implications.