The prevailing cultural paradigm, ably exploited by Muslim spokesmen, casts Westerners as the perennial culprit — colonialism, slavery — and "non-white" people as the perennial victims. This construction, of course, glosses over the sorry history of Islamic dhimmitude and slavery. It is useful to note these things today because of the political uses that to which such whitewashes of history are being put. It is also useful to remember that the theological and legal justifications within Islam that allowed for this slavery persist today — notably in Sudan and Mauritania. It is important to note that these justifications aren't based on race, but on religion; hence the book's title: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.
Now a new book challenges the whitewashes and sets the record straight. From The Guardian, with thanks to Twostellas:
North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids which depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research. Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, labourers and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, it is claimed.Scholars have long known of the slave raids on Europe. But American historian Robert Davis has calculated that the total number captured - although small compared with the 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in later years - was far higher than previously recognised.
His new book, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, concluded that 1 million to 1.25 million ended up in bondage.
Prof Davis's unorthodox methodology split historians over whether his estimates were plausible but they welcomed any attempt to fill a gap in the little-known story of Africans subjugating Europeans.
By collating different sources of information from Europe over three centuries, the University of Ohio professor has painted a picture of a continent at the mercy of pirates from the Barbary Coast, known as corsairs, who sailed in lanteen-rigged xebecs and oared galleys.
Villages and towns on the coast of Italy, Spain, Portugal and France were hardest hit but the raiders also seized people in Britain, Ireland and Iceland. According to one account they even captured 130 American seamen from ships that they boarded in the Atlantic and Mediterranean between 1785 and 1793.
In the absence of detailed written records such as customs forms Prof Davis decided to extrapolate from the best records available indicating how many slaves were at a particular location at a single time and calculate how many new slaves were needed to replace those who died, escaped or were freed.
To keep the slave population stable, around one quarter had to be replaced each year, which for the period 1580 to 1680 meant around 8,500 new slaves per annum, totalling 850,000.
The same methodology would suggest 475,000 were abducted in the previous and following centuries.
"Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimises the impact that slavery had on Europe," Prof Davis said in a statement this week.
"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."
Prof Davis conceded his methodology was not ideal but Ian Blanchard, professor of economic history at the University of Edinburgh and an authority on trade in Africa, said yesterday that the numbers appeared to add up.
"We are talking about statistics which are not real, all the figures are estimates. But I don't find that absolute figure of 1 million at all surprising. It makes total sense."
The arrival of gold from the Americas and the shipping of slaves from west Africa squeezed the traditional business of the Barbary merchant fleet which was transporting gold and slaves from southern to northern Africa, so they turned their gaze to Europe, said Prof Blanchard.
Slaving
However David Earle, author of The Corsairs of Malta and Barbary and The Pirate Wars, said that Prof Davis may have erred in extrapolating from 1580-1680 because that was the most intense slaving period: "His figures sound a bit dodgy and I think he may be exaggerating."
Dr Earle also cautioned that the picture was clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe and black people from west Africa. "I wouldn't hazard a guess about the total."
According to one estimate, 7,000 English people were abducted between 1622-1644, many of them ships' crews and passengers. But the corsairs also landed on unguarded beaches, often at night, to snatch the unwary.
Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were captured in 1631, and there were other raids in Devon and Cornwall.
Reverend Devereux Spratt recorded being captured by "Algerines" while crossing the Irish sea from Cork to England in April 1641 and in 1661 Samuel Pepys wrote about two men, Captain Mootham and Mr Dawes, who were also abducted.
Last year it was announced that one of the richest treasure wrecks found off the coast of Devon was a 16th-century Barbary ship en route to catch English slaves.
Although the black Africans enslaved and shipped to North and South America over four centuries outnumbered Prof Davis's estimates of white European taken to Africa by 12-1, it is probable they shared the same grim conditions.
"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," said the author.
In comments which may stoke controversy, he said that white slavery had been minimised or ignored because academics preferred to treat Europeans as evil colonialists rather than as victims.
While Africans laboured on sugar and cotton plantations the European slaves were put to work in quarries, building sites and galleys and endured malnutrition, disease and maltreatment.
Ruling pashas, entitled to an eighth of all captured Christians, housed them in overcrowded baths known as baños and used them for public works such as building harbours and cutting trees. They were given loaves of black bread and water.
The pasha's female captives were more likely to be regarded as hostages to be bargained for ransom but many worked as attendants in the palace harem while awaiting payment and freedom, which in some cases never came. Some slaves bought by private individuals were well treated and became companions, others were overworked and beaten.
"The most unlucky ended up stuck and forgotten out in the desert, in some sleepy town such as Suez, or in the Turkish sultan's galleys, where some slaves rowed for decades without ever setting foot on shore," said Prof Davis, whose book is published in the US by Palgrave Macmillan.
Many of the captured female slaves "worked as attendants in the palace haram"? Nice euphemism there for rape.
Would it be fair to say that in modern times Muslim slavers have been at the heart of the trade? The numbers of blacks taken in slaving expeditions by Arabs, often using Zanzibar and Pemba as jumping-off points for assaults on the hinterland, were larger than those taken by the Europeans, who never dared go beyond the coast, and relied solely on what Africans themselves supplied to them.
Slavery did not die out in the Persian Gulf but, rather, was suppressed by the British (who made use of naval power, and themselves did not enter the interior of Arabia in large numbers until the discovery of oil in this century); the unsurpassed authority on this matter is J. B. Kelly, whose book Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880, is incomparably dense, meticulous, thorough.
Indeed, while officially slavery ended, under Western pressure, in Saudi Arabia in the early 1960s, in fact it continues, in all but name, to this day. The slaves are mostly those Filipinos, Indians, Thais, and so on who are treated or mistreated as the whim of their Arab masters dictate. Occasionally one or two manage to escape when they accompany the family abroad. For two decades, the English press has periodically run stories about the unbelievable treatment of such "slaves" who manage to flee from their Saudi, or Kuwait, or U.A.E. masters (and mistresses), from Cadogan Gardens Square, or St. James, or addresses to that effect, to seek refuge from their cruel tormentors. In Saudi newspapers there are advertisements offering to swap Indian girls, for example, for a not-too-old American car. In Mauritania, Mali, and Sudan, Arabs still enslave blacks, yet this receives little treatment from the outside, and certainly none at all from that most corrupt and corrupting of institutions, the United Nations.
Does anyone really know what happens to those "Gastarbeiter" (Guest-Workers), especially the female ones, when their Saudi masters, having taken their pleasure, decide to rid themselves of them, one way or another? Has there been any intrepid journalist investigating this matter, any secret cameras deep within Saudi Arabia -- or interviewing those who do return, safely, to Thailand or the Philippines, to India or Bangladesh? No, of course there has not -- and there never will be. Off limits, not to be discussed. Islam recognizes and endorses slavery; it is in the Qur'an; it cannot be outlawed. That is the end of the matter. Unlike the American Constitution (which also recognized slavery) there is no mechanism for interpreting away what is the Qur'an, hadith, and sira.
There is hardly a single right recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is observed in Islamic societies, to the extent that they adhere to Islam. To the extent, of course, that they ignore the tenets of Islam, as Turkey has managed to do, and certainly some of the countries of Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, they do manage to enforce such rights.
Islam is a problem; vast populations have their identity wrapped up in an ideology that, having been formed from the seventh to tenth centuries, and then essentially frozen in time, cannot coexist with non-Muslims under modern conditions, and with the freedom of movement, and power of technology, that make dangers that might once have been geographically confined, now easily spread.
There is no solution: only a constant attempt to deprive Muslim states of weaponry, to end Muslim migration to dar al-Harb, to create an understanding of the common threat that the Jihad, whatever the perceived "localness" of its expression, is a world-wide phenomenon. A bomb that kills Buddhist monks in Thailand is linked to a bomb that goes off in Madrid, or Bombay, or Jerusalem, or Bali.
This article also shows the Guardian's ignorance of US history. They say the author "claims" that US seamen were captured and pressed into Barbary slavery. Claimed, hell! It's a fact. We fought a freakin' WAR over this issue, you bloody morons. Read the Jefferson papers which are posted online.
God, how I hate the freakin' Guardian.
"Dr Earle also cautioned that the picture was clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe"
Please.
Could somebody tell me where these non-christian whites were coming from in eastern europe? This sounds like a remarkably anti-orthodox christian statement. Who are these non-christian peoples?
TM Lucas: I believe the author is referring to the Caucusus as "Eastern Europe". Christianity did not arrive in the former Soviet Union until rather late in the game, around 900 or so. I'm not exactly sure, but there may have been pagan peoples in the Caucusus for a long time after that. The Caucusus was the Ottomans' happiest hunting ground for their prized blonde haired blue eyed rape victims-- oops, I mean "female harem attendents."
In "Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade", Prof. Alan Fisher, who writes from an overall apologetic point of view, at least included a table that records honestly the immense scale of what has been termed the Tartar "harvesting of the steppes" for Christian slaves. A random sampling of years and captives is provided, for example(s): 800,000 from Moscow in 1521; 200,000 from "South Russia" in 1555; with the numbers taken from Lvov in 1589 simply recorded as "immense"..And the magnitude of Muslim enslavement of Hindus was even greater as documented triumphally by numerous Muslim chroniclers. K.S. Lal's excellent work on this subject ("Muslim Slave System in Medieval India" is now available online here:
http://www.bharatvani.org/books/mssmi/
Cervantes fought (and lost his hand) at the battle of Lepanto, when a Christian fleet defeated the Turkish fleet. The Turks had been building their naval power throughout the mediterraneanwith the intent of making it a moslem lake. They were only stopped by force and bravery, (though according to the church, also by prayer.)
It dealt a heavy, though not final blow to the Turks, but was the turning point in the sea power of the Med. It started to become a sea policed and not pirated.
The victory at Lepanto had another bonus. From the captured Turkish ships were liberated more than 10,000 Christian galley slaves.
An exerpt from the poem Lepanto,
'And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!'
Islam does not mean submission, it means slavery, of body and mind.
Andrew, Thanks for the information on the Slavic slave trade. It should be further noted that the Russian delegates tried to float the idea of "reparations" to them for this trade from the Islamic world at the infamous 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban. Not sure what happened to it.
Peter: Thanks for posting the stanzas from Don Juan of Austria. At least Lord Byron knew what he was dying for when he joined the War for Greek Independence.
You can find lots more information about Don Juan in Paul Fregosi's book, "Jihad in the West," if you haven't read it already.
Submission is slavery in itself. Islam is whole system. After enough programming, oops, religious instruction, no one can think for himself and becomes a slave to the state and to the immans. The clerics keep a tight grip on the population, not for the good of their souls, but in order to maintain their own personal power base as did the Popes and Christian clergy of old. However, the Islamic grip is more encompassing and far reaching. The punishments are more extreme because any deviation for the "party line," any free thinking could topple them. Thus, Islam is a Soviet-stye totalitaran ideology that calls itself a religion.
The first military action by the newly formed United States was to fight and defeat the Barbary Pirates. Hence, the line in the anthem of the U.S. Marines about the "shores of Tripoli". Then as now the Europeans preferred to appease, by paying tribute to the pirates and ignoring the problem. Then, as now, the U.S. took a more direct approach.
The fact that European captives of North African pirates became slaves is well known. What is less often remarked on is that the converse was also true - and that Christian Sicily, Venice, Malta, and Spain were as happy to engage in this piracy as any of the Barbary states. Indeed, the opposing sides regularly organized mutual exchanges of slaves. On both sides, however, this slavery was tempered by the possibility of rising to high positions through conversion: Leo Africanus, captured by Spanish pirates, converted and became a crony of the Pope, while Euldj Ali (formerly Occhiali) went from being a Calabrian fisherman captured by Algerian raiders to being a captain and finally the ruler of Ottoman Algeria. For details, cf. Fernand Braudel's History of the Mediterranean, vol II, p. 875 onwards.
Yeah, details, but the Christian powers (now Post-Christian) are no longer raiding for, buying, and keeping slaves. Muslim lands do not tremble at the thought of Christian terrorists infiltrating them and committing mass murder. But the Muslims are still doing this, and are constantly committing mass murder.
"no longer raiding for, buying, and keeping slaves"
Neither are the ex-Barbary States, whatever Mauritania or Sudan may be doing. And "white slavery" is alive and well in Eastern Europe, in supposedly Christian Romania:
http://www.iabolish.com/news/press-coverage/2003/ta11-11-03.htm
In arabic the work for slave, searvant, black (the color), and black person are all the same.
Hense: Abdulrahman, Abdulazziz, etc. etc. ...
Charming, isn't it?
It's very pleasant to find wise words here.
Good job, Joe!
Paul
Are you spamming Paul?
Not too much sence in your comment.
Regards,
Steeveguy
What? I do not spam and hate it as well. Why do you call me a spammer, Steeveguy???
You're probably the one who's spamming man!
My dear Paul and Steeveguy:
I take a rather dim view of spammers trying to use my site to advertise their wares. You two spammers may not have noticed, but I have removed the email addresses and URL's you entered. Why? Because they are irrelevant to this site, and by the nature of your comments you clearly have nothing to add to the conversation here.
Cordially,
RS
Steeveguy, You should take it easier, this guy is not spamming since he's back here.
I meant nothing personal, I was wrong.
It just seemed like that.
Sorry
Regards,
Steeveguy