Firmly committed to the need to study varieties of slaveries outside the Atlantic World, the present session provides three case studies from the adjacent regions of Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia from the sixteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. We query the stories of a slave in Mughal India whose job was to carry the water-ewer of the emperor (for cleaning himself after going to the bathroom), a number of Shiite slaves (mostly Iranians) in Central Asia, and an east African women who had been brought to southern Iran and sold into slavery/concubinage to a merchant. These individuals were not engaged in hard labor, but served their societies with a variety of labor forms. Moreover, they all contested their condition: by seeking redress at legal institutions or by writing a biographical text in search of patronage. They thus navigated the contours of powerlessness vs. agency, and community formation vs. violence and exploitation.