I found the following article when I was doing a search for information regarding the Barbery Pirates.
It's rather long, however, the information within this article is something that needs to be shared. I don't think the so-called "investigative reporters" do much beyond what is politically correct. If the reporters would look into this era of enslavement, as well as, today's slave trade it would help to open the eyes of millions.
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WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE
COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED
COLUMBUS, Ohio – 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.
Most other accounts of slavery along the 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 the 16th to 18th centuries.
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).
“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 the 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
and 1793.
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.
So
Davis developed a new methodology to come
up with reasonable estimates of the number of slaves along the
Barbary Coast.
Davis
found the best records available indicating how many slaves were at a
particular location at a single time. He then estimated how many new slaves it
would take to replace slaves as they died, escaped or were ransomed.
“The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem
upside down – figure out how many slaves they would have to capture to maintain
a certain level,” he said. “It is not the best way to make population
estimates, but it is the only way with the limited records available.”
Putting together such sources of attrition as deaths, escapes, ransomings,
and conversions, Davis calculated that about one-fourth of slaves had to be
replaced each year to keep the slave population stable, as it apparently was
between 1580 and 1680. That meant about 8,500 new slaves had to be captured
each year. Overall, this suggests nearly a million slaves would have been taken
captive during this period. Using the same methodology,
Davis has estimated as many as 475,000
additional slaves were taken in the previous and following centuries.
The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1
million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians
enslaved by the Muslims of the
Barbary Coast.
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.
While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in
the
Americas,
European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in
quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys
themselves.
Davis said
his findings suggest that this invisible slavery of European Christians
deserves more attention from scholars.
“We have lost the sense of how large enslavement could loom for those who
lived around the
Mediterranean and the threat
they were under,” he said. “Slaves were still slaves, whether they are black or
white, and whether they suffered in
America
or
North Africa.”
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