A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530-1780 – 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. Most other accounts of slavery along Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from 16th-18th Centuries. “Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.” 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 time period Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves. “Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said. Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. 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. Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of 17th Century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers. 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 1785-1793. *** Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan). 📷 : Scene at a slave market by Swiss artist Otto Pilny (1866-1936) painted in 1919. #archaeohistories

The white slave trade is well documented by hundreds of books and many have been written after extensive research. There is thus not an iota of doubt that the trade in white particularly white women was a fact of history. Yet not much is talked about this slave trade as the general perception is that the slave trade concerned mostly the black man. However, there is a subtle difference which must be noted. The difference is that the white slave trade of white virgins was basically to populate the harems, where many white women lived comfortable though secluded lives. They lived in relative comfort unlike the black man who was chained and made to do hard labor and the black m woman slept with the white man without any rewards or recognition and her children were also considered black. This slavery though not as terrible as the black slave trade which involved racialism, was never the less reprehensible. For women and girls who were kidnaped it was a harrowing time though some were well looked after. It was, however, a demeaning experience to be put up for auction, where some were stripped bare of all clothes. The white slave trade ended with the smashing of Muslim power in the great naval battles of the 19th century.

"Saqaliba", white European slaves were mostly of Slavic origin and considered luxury imports.... Slavery is a word well understood, but in the minds of most people, it is associated with the black slave trade from Africa to America across the Atlantic. Many people are not aware that a parallel form of slavery existed in the kidnapping of white men and women by North Africans and Arabs. The purpose of these captures was slavery. Another aspect of this slavery was white women (preferably virgins) to populate the harems of the Arab Sheikhs and Beys. The Arabs and the Moors were the foremost exponents of this trade as they had a penchant for fair and golden-haired white girls. This trade lasted much longer than the black slave trade and overshot it by hundreds of years. The black trade was stopped by an act of legislation. This did not happen in the case of the white slave trade which ended only after the Arabs and Moors were militarily crushed by the European powers. The onset of white slave trade began when the Muslim arms conquered almost the entire North Africa and Spain. It was at its zenith when the Mediterranean Sea almost became a Muslim controlled lake with the Ottoman Empire at its zenith. Even after the defeat of the Muslims, the slave trade was taken over by Muslim pirates called the Corsairs. The Corsairs were a daredevil lot and scoured the entire Mediterranean Sea. They also raided the coastal villages of Europe and kidnapped white girls. These girls have spirited away to the harems of the Arabs and sold at auctions where they earned a high price for the kidnapper. White men were also kidnapped for ransom and to work as slaves. There are reports that King Richard the lion heart was also kidnapped and released when a large ransom was paid for him. As far as the kidnapping of girls from the European coastal villages is concerned, the effect was one of fear and many villages shifted deeper away from the coast, to escape from the marauding Muslim pirates. Later the Muslim pirates started a preference for Slav girls who were fair and had golden hair. Raiding parties roamed the Baltic and the Aegean Sea for these girls. The magnitude of the slavery can only be estimated as no exact figures are available. Generally, it is estimated that the figure would be over a million. The Corsairs were the main exponents of this white slave trade and they also extracted a levy from the ships that sailed the Mediterranean Sea. In the period after 1609 in a span of a decade, almost 400 British ships were captured and the men made slaves and released only after a ransom was paid. Other who could not pay languished in Arab farms as workers and slaves till death. Later Britain paid a tribute and their ships were spared. But nations and settlements close to the sea in SE Europe and the Slav areas bore the brunt of this slavery. A fact that has now emerged is the massive kidnapping and abduction of white girls as slaves for the harems of the Arabs. This menace lasted for hundreds of years and it continued until the 19th century. In 1814 the European powers signed a convention to outlaw the attacks of the Berbers and the Ottoman Turks. The Christian nations now asserted and the rising White power inflicted heavy defeats on the Corsairs and the Turks. This rising European power led to the demise of the white slave trade. A point worth noting is that the slave trade in white women only stopped after the defeat of the Turks and Muslims and not by any act or edict. #archaeohistories