Robert Davis' book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 has actually been out for several years, but I keep getting sent the press release below about it, and since it contains valuable information that is largely forgotten amid all the historical whitewash, I thought it would be worth posting.
I'm only sorry that Davis used the term "white slavery." I understand that this is a common term, but it is misleading here: it must be understood that these people were enslaved because they were non-Muslims, not because they were white. The Qur'an sanctions slavery and Islam allows for the enslavement of prisoners of war, and it was under those auspices that these slaving operations were conducted.
"When Europeans Were Slaves: Research Suggests White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Previously Believed," from Ohio State Research, with thanks to all who sent this in:
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).
“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.”
“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.”
As is noted in passing above, many of the slaves taken by the Barbary Corsairs were ransomed. Ransoming of their kidnapped victims was a major income producer for the Corsair states.
The paralells with current events off the Horn of Africa are chilling. The Somali pirates have revived a traditional Muslim industry and form of warfare against Dar el-Harb, all stricly in accord with sharia.
"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 is only calculating a period of 200 years. I doubt that the Muslims only started enslaving in the 16th century. They probably started in the 8th century. That's 800 more years. Maybe that's another 4 million Europeans enslaved to add to the number?
I attempted to have a similar book put on a highschool book list and was rebuffed as a bigot.
OT: Please help--Jack Renard, SLU professor of Islamic Studies, is coming to my church to discuss "Double Standards and Bigotry in the Way We Talk About Muslims."
I am researching this guy and building a list of questions. Any help is appreciated. Please contact me at remembermedina@yahoo.com.
It sounds as if Robert Davis' study is about the enslavement of people in Western Europe, and does not include all those taken from the lands of the Slavs, nor includ the girls kidnapped to be used as sex-slaves in harems from Georgia and Circassia, two places where, Muslims believed, the girls were especially good-looking. Indeed, if you see a good-looking Arab girl today, ask her if she thinks she may in fact have some Circassian or Georgian ancestor, or better still, tell her that you are sure she must. She may appear not to like the idea, but then, in the privacy of her own mind, she might think about it, and laughingly, seemingly indignantly, be sure to tell others, and thereby contribute just a little to the unsettlement of Arab minds, as they are forced, even through flattery, to consider their own grim histories.
It is amazing how the PC crowd are completely ignorant of episodes in history such as the Barbary Pirates.
Take the case of Robert Fisk, for instance, in his latest book, “The Age of the Warrior.”
He includes a piece on Shakespeare, “Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war, ” and comes out with this stunning factual inaccuracy.
“Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman Empire – then at the zenith of it’s power, remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans.”
Well, that is partly true for Britain, but not true at all for continental Europe.
What about the Ottoman Empire? It’s bloody, imperialistic wars, aimed at subjugating Europe under it’s rule, did not end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Greece lost it’s independence in 1461, eventually regaining it after 4 centuries of occupation.
After the occupation of Greece, the Ottomans continued their aggression in to the heart of Europe, besieging Vienna twice.
Important events include
The Breaking of the Siege of Vienna (14th, October 1529)
The Battle of Lepanto (7th of October, 1571)
The Battle of Khotyn (9th of October, 1621)
The Battle of Vienna (11th of September, 1683)
In 1565, one year after the birth of Shakespeare (1564), there occurred a decisive battle between the Ottomans and Christian Europeans – the siege of Malta. The Knights Hospitallers of St John, one of the last military orders founded during the Crusades, had been driven out of Rhodes by the Ottomans and relocated to Malta and were there assaulted by a massive Turkish military force but somehow managed to prevail. Had the Ottomans succeeded all Europe would have been open to invasion. And God only knows what would have happened to the Renaissance.
It is said that when Queen Elizabeth I of England heard of the victory, that against all odds, the Knights had held the strategically-important Mediterranean island, and that the Ottoman Fleet, badly mauled, had retreated, she ordered all the church bells in Britain rung in celebration, and a special prayer of thanksgiving to be written and recited in every church. The bells in the church in Stratford-on-Avon would have rung with all the others all over England so perhaps Shakespeare heard this in his cradle.
It is true that there was no large scale military threat to Britain from the Ottoman Empire, unlike continental Europe which was threatened. Britain was threatened by the Barbary pirates. These were Muslim pirates operating from North Africa. They did not seem to be formally affiliated to the Ottoman Empire but their goal was to take Christians as slaves and their justification was their contempt for infidels. They operated from quite early on in the history of Islam up until the early 19th century. It is estimated that they kidnapped 1.5 million Europeans from their homes to act as slaves. They raided coastal settlements on the North side of the Mediterranean and even conducted raids on places like Cornwall. It is said that from 1609 to 1616, England lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates. In fact, one of the first acts of the newly independent American Republic was to engage in a war with the Barbary Pirates. Thomas Jefferson said
“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.”
How're the Muslims gonna explain this one away? C'mon, take your best shot. We've heard them all anyway. Oh, Christians made the Inquistion, is it? Oh, yes, that's one of the excuses i never get tired of. Well, among other things, the Pope has formally apologised for the Inquistion. i'd like to see the Mohammedians apologise for "white slavery" (or whatever our Unholy Antiprophet deems right to call it)
Come on, is that all you've got? take another shot. We're all waiting.
Giles Milton's "White Gold" gives a fascinating and disturbing account of this topic.
Why stop at 1800? About 1870 one of the most famous of Britains Victorian explorers (so famous I cannot recall his name) bought his wife from a slave dealer in Turkish ruled Albania.
"Battle of Lepanto (1571)..."
-- from a posting above
An article posted here on June 29, 2005:
Celebrating Lepanto, 2021:
The year: 2021. The occasion: the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, where the Turkish fleet under Ali, the captain pasha, was defeated by the naval forces of Venice and of Spain (commanded by Don John of Austria, natural brother to the great Philip II, King of Spain). This victory helped repulse the constant efforts by the Muslim Turks to penetrate even further and seize even more Infidel lands in Eastern and Central and Southern Europe.
At the site of the engagement, the ships are all identical. Indeed, they all belong to the Eurabian fleet of a newly-expanded Eurabia, in which Turkey is the most populous member.
Of course, no one in his right mind would have wanted to label the ships with such words as "Turkish" or "European" (much less "Venetian"). "We are all Turks now," joked the French Foreign Minister, Ekmelledin Uzal, to his British counterpart, Manwar al-Oteiba. But of course, it would not do to label the sides "Turkey" and "Turkey."
Cornel West, Jr., son of the celebrated winner of two Nobel Prizes (one in literature and another for peace), was chosen to organize this event that holds so much significance for the world's peoples.
He was a natural choice. For, as president of the Eternal Peace and Dialogue-to-Death Foundation, which boasts 800,000 employees in 65 countries and is funded with the turned-over endowments of several self-extinguishing foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Soros Foundation, the Buffett Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Olayan, Khashoggi, and Khaddafy Foundations, as well as the assets of three dozen slightly smaller foundations that had similarly disbanded, from all parts of the globe.
It was he, the brilliant son of an even more brilliant father, who finally hit upon the right way to label those ships that were to re-enact the Battle of Lepanto in a spirit not of celebrating a victory (what does "victory" mean, and what is "defeat," when we are all the children of the same god, and all of us indistinguishable one from the other, after all?).
At first, Cornel West, Jr., possibly remembering how the Battle of Trafalgar was re-enacted years ago, when his father was still a hard-working University Professor at Princeton and celebrated winner of the 2005 Lannan Prize for Services to Culture and Humanity, or Humanity and Culture, or something -- thought the two sides might indeed be labeled the "Blue Team" and the "Red Team," as had been done for the Trafalgar anniversary. But then it was pointed out that the painting would be costly, and besides, what with the ozone layer constantly thinning out into nothingness, more and more people seemed to be suffering from daltonism, which meant that millions of spectators watching the re-creation on television would have difficulty distinguishing one team from the other.
Then West had a brilliant idea. It was, like all brilliant ideas, so obvious -- and yet, no one had thought of it. It would make clear, utterly and transparently clear, what wars and bloodshed were really all about. They were about nothing at all. They had nothing to do with any discrete quarrels, any venomous ideologies, any attempts by one side or another to conquer one side, or another.
No, wars -- Man's Inhumanity to Man -- was all about The Other. Man, especially Western man, European man, or European man's mutated descendants in North America, who were consumed with the need to create, and then to mount a campaign against, The Other. It could be anything. It didn't matter. In the time of Lepanto, it was the terrible Turks, the malignant and the turbaned Turks, the Turks of "Mama li turchi" used to scare little Italian children.
And so it came to pass, that in 2021, in the re-created Battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes lost a hand (and later would lose his freedom to a renegade, a Christian-turned-Muslim slave-master named Venedikili Hasan Pasha, a future Beylerbey of Algiers), each side bore the exact same label -- a label that showed the futility of all warfare, of all distinctions, of all the silliness that Western man, especially, has inflicted on the otherwise naturally peaceful people in this naturally harmonious world (don't you find it getting just a little hot, and stuffy, and harder to breathe, in this wonderful still fossil-fuel-driven world of ours?).
And this is what the great son of the even greater father decided to do:
He labeled the ships of the Venetians, and the other European contributors to the fleet, "The Other." And then he labeled all the ships that represented the naval fleet of the Ottoman Turks with signs that read "The Other."
And that was that. The Battle of Lepanto. "The Other" vs. "The Other." For there is no "Other" now, in 2021. And in truth, there never really was "the Other" -- for "the Other" was simply a construct of the Western world, one which the peaceful non-Westerners made the terrible mistake of borrowing from them.
As Mustafa Schwartz-Weiss Kara-Akyol al-Padovi, the Italian Minister of Culture, noted, "yes, we are all Turks and Muslims now. We are all "The Other" now. Alhamdulillah, we are all friends, there will be no more war. There didn't have to be war in 1571. We could all have saved a lot of time, a lot of pain, if only the Venetians and the Spanish had understood then what everyone in Europe now understands."
Fruit drinks were sold. There was loukoum. There was iced Moroccan mint tea There were hubble-bubble pipes.
A splendid time was had by all.
[Posted by Hugh at June 29, 2005]
Fear of brutal enslavement by the Barbary Pirates caused the American merchant shipping in the Mediterranean to come to a screeching halt in 1793, once the word got out that there would be no more British naval protection for the increasingly competitive upstart Americans. Ian Toll's masterful book "Six Frigates" (Norton Books, 2006) documents this development which left Ambassador Thomas Jefferson inParis "absolutely suspended between indignation and impotence ."
In Toll's words:
"American vessels had once been ubiquitous in the Mediterranean. Now, in a matter of weeks, they vanished. Seamen who had braved the most awesome winter gales the North atlantic had to offer were paralyzed by the fear of ensavement in North Africa. Vessels bound for the Straits of Gilbraltar could not be manned at any rate of pay. Maritime insurance premiums doubled and then tripled, U.S. government bond prices collapsed, and merchant houses were bankrupted."
As a result , the nascent American congress passed on March 10, 1794 an "Act to Provide a Naval Armament" creating the heretofore unheard of sum of $600,000 to build six frigates to help protect our merchant ships off the Barbary coast.
As a result, the U.S. Navy was founded !
An exciting, well documented exhibit at Boston's USS Constitution Museum graphically displays America's initial entanglement on the Barbary Coast with the frigate USS Philadelphia.
Our foray there resulted the loss of that ship
and the subsequent heroic rescue of American navymen.
It's a great read and it's also sadly remarkable that this conflict still exists. Jefferson and other Founding Fathers were well aware that the "Musselmen" thought nothing of enslaving Christians and other infidels.
Now in the age of the internet, jet travel and potent WMD's, this issue can no longer be avoided.
Islam's time of using it's so called religion to enslave , torture and physically destroy people and whole ethnic groups is becoming ever more widely exposed. This exposure is the first and very necessary step to its eventual elimination.
Hopefully, through gentle but forceful education
this retrograde force of Mohammedism (Churchill's words)will be escorted into the dustbin of history. This will take at least 100 years in my estimation.
Fred, it was Sir Samuel Baker. Did he buy her to "save' her? Certainly she was a loyal companion and went with him on his expeditions, and apparently was fearless and tough. Lucky man! I am sure she could have left him, under British law, if he was unkind to her, but evidently he adored her.
Hugh, once, as a 9 year old kid, I checked out this library book about the Middle East. It fed my romantic but stupid notions about the world of Islam. One of the things that stands out in my mind was the fact that the author went out of his way to say that Arabs don't all look like we think they do, and indeed, there were all kinds of pictures of very European people, blondes, red heads, blue eyed people....now I know why!
I question the way to come with the number, it remind me of people who said the Perian invades ancient greek the army number in the millions. People who study the science of supply highly dodth both number. All moderm army and navy have officer study this science. I help set the breaking of the fast and Istar dinner at the Islanist Center I go to, we only get afew hundred each night and it than huge operation. In the ancient world you might grather a huge army of one million man for afew week
before they must live off the land or the army must breack up into smaller units an travel out of the area. Most battle only have afew thousands take part on both sides. Even today supplies are very inportant to military operation, that one reason why we didnot invade Afghtan with than huge army Afghtan
is than supply officer worst nighmares.
I've owned this book for two years now and it's a fantastic read. Though a bit pricey, I highly recommend it, as well as "White Gold" for anyone interested in studies of Christian slavery.
Islamic slavery WAS racial and it still is. That's why they enslave black Muslims in Darfur. That's why the word for 'slave' comes from 'Slav.' That's why the first thing the Morrs did when they landed in Spain was abduct 8000 blonde women and sell them into sex slavery in Africa. And of course, that's why Arabs are dark-skinned today. They were white before they all took to raping African women as their favorite pasttime. It's not a coincidence that blonde women are more likely to get raped in Europe than brunettes. You would hear about anti-Semitic rape incidents if that were the case, but you don't. It's native Swedish chicks the Somalis and Iraqis rape. Islam is an incredibly racist doctrine. Don't forget to cram that fact down the throat of every leftist who ever dares defend it. They may take no issue with anti-Semitism, white slavery, or the slavery of 100% of the Muslim women in this world, but tell them about this and they'll think about the RoP a little differently.
I found it surprising but even the BBC gets it on this issue:
"By extension, for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000 - this is only just over a tenth of the Africans taken as slaves to the Americas from 1500 to 1800, but a considerable figure nevertheless. White slaves in Barbary were generally from impoverished families, and had almost as little hope of buying back their freedom as the Africans taken to the Americas: most would end their days as slaves in North Africa, dying of starvation, disease, or maltreatment."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
It's interesting that the BBC article was authored by Prof. Rees Davies, any connection I wonder?
BTW - I've just finished reading White Gold by Giles Milton - highly recommended.
I knew it! Defender of Islam isn't Muslim at all. He's I think German. First, no Muslim would write 'Istar.' They would know that its 'iftaar.' Arabs and Persians confuse their 'i's with 'e's and their voiceless consonants with voiced ones. His grammatical errors are too consistent with simple English idiosyncracies that with actual syntactic or orthographic differences between English and any Eastern language. He can't be Paki because Urdu speakers make the same easy-to-make mistakes as French speakers. No, he'a Western European. No real Muslim would write 'Islamist' center either. They would be too entrenched in the art of taqiyya to make that mistake. He's just a Judeophobic, Muslim apologist commie.
It has cost Europeans dearly to "let sleeping dogs lie" with regard to history. While the West has choosen to move on and let history to the historians, Muslims, for one, have choosen to continually pick the scabs of history when they were the apparent "victim", while conveniently ignoring when they were the aggressor, such as when enslaving Africans and Europeans. It is the Muslim world's failure to progress that makes it stew hatred of the other, non-Muslim, and fantasize about a phony Muslim paradise whether in the past of in the future.
The rest of the world would do well to remind Muslims of Islam's bigoted, violent and hateful past, as well as their terroristic present.
In France they started again with the riots: In the small city Romans in Southfrance, this Monday, because 16-year old, named Iliess El-Jouaghi, died on his flight from the police in a stolen car.
http://www.kybeline.com/2008/10/01/franzosischer-herbst-kommt-wieder-erste-unruhe/