One of the biggest lies of the so-called ‘racial justice’ movement is that slavery was only by white people and only against black people. Worse, these race-baiting loons literally assert such obvious nonsense as that America invented slavery.
This is all utter garbage.
Slavery was practiced by nearly every human race and culture, throughout almost all of history. Non-whites were enthusiastic and brutal slavers: just ask the Moriori. The history of the African slave trade is a history of Africans enslaving each other for millennia. Europeans only got in on African slavery almost right before Europeans became the first culture in human history to consciously eradicate slavery.
The history of African – or more correctly, Arab – slavery is also a history of non-whites enslaving whites for centuries.
A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.
In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.
Davis estimates between one and 1.25 European Christians were captured and enslaved by North African Muslims from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis.
“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”
During the centuries of white slavery, Muslim pirates from the Barbary Coast in north Africa raided ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and marauded coastal towns and villages from Spain and France, to England.
The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior […]
Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.
Indeed, the fledgling United States’ first foreign war was to force the Arabs to stop enslaving American sailors. Hence, ‘the shores of Tripoli’ in the USMC anthem.
So, why aren’t children learning about that in school? Why aren’t white people demanding reparations from Arab states?
Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.
The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.
Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.
The other common claim is that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was somehow ‘unique’ in its brutality. Which is also another lie.
Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America.
“As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.
After all, women were prized – as they still are in Muslim slave markets in Libya and Tunisia – as sex slaves. Men were routinely castrated. And, something that was utterly unique to Muslim slavery: vast armies of slave-soldiers.
In the end, though, as Davis says, “Slaves were still slaves, whether they are black or white and whether they suffered in America or North Africa.”
