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).
“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.”
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Contact Robert Davis, Davis.711@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
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we cannot argue over their books an lies arab history books post moorishh ,spanish to is romanized after 1492,our books were burned they had the reality truth.its like arguing the bible or koran ,they are given to people to argue over ,what is false are these books that camre affter ourswere burne or hidden in the zionistic temples.the object has been to seperate the negro from the moor as if they were two different people before mohammedism ,askanash ,yiddish judaism ,an 324 a.d council of nicea christianity.our vocabulary must be ours not what they branded us as slaves after they were slavs
the black is inside the womb of wombman all woman the reality creator.men take credit an lie on woman as being first so then they must do it to other men after ,thats the race race to be first
we schooling you male alllah worshipping mohammed morroc-cons right here in orlando florida on your reality story right here,this was morroco before where your from was called morroco,all you get is what they teach you in school,you get good knowledge in morroco but not here or there about the real moors or first moor from ruth of the moabites .red ruddy mohammedism its the ancient moors you call muslims .that got took as slaves after they raised mystic turks.you had to be raised to call your self white an your raiser black,for the purpose of rule an measure.thats why they call muhammed red,arabs from yemen are not the euro fake arabs you see in iraq /iran /jordon/ect,anwar sadat was killed by them on live t.v,,,,let me tell you how they do ramadan,,after fasting all day they eat three full course meals after the sun goes down so break fast is bout 8 pm an dinner is about 2 am.they got sick my friend justice the god he got sick,so thats backword right there cause moors do do nothing like that when fasting,wh fast allda an make up for it at night ,kills the wwhole cleanse ,it no cleanse its more poisining to eat when the body does not digest after 9 pm ,but these muslims do then they wanna argue wit anything an anyone that calls they self a moor not fom their region like they got a lockdown on moorish science which they dont know any,moore ,they only know islam of mohammed am forgot what the origin was .thats why all yoou hear is mohammedism from them and they got that as slaves after the moors fell an lessons replaced degreees for the common man an degrees only went to nobles an serfs, peasants got religion an lesson or mathematical subtractions of knowledge instead of degrees.i met people from morroco who knew moor than whats being put forth in this discussion.they knoweven if he does not.people there so busy trying not to be a skin color they forgot the light wont be without being in the dark first.they are not the moors but the moorish sons,the moors ae thee now called black/hispanic an all other brown eyed asiatics on the planet.the black a moor gets the shortest end of the stick an isplaced too start the race from the bottom position with all others taking turnriding piggyback to get up econimically in commerce which is status an class an has been miscalled now as nobility. oj wasnoble cause he was a rich atthlete ,that as you see is not nobility.noble drew ali ,c.m bey ,jose pimienta bey,empress verdiacee,we took mason an dixon to that line of north an south.christianity an mohammed style islam were both created by the franciscan brotherhood after i self lord am master was hidden in the masonic temples of europe
the world was not created 6000 years ago but thats the oldest history recollection of theirs,,hizzz tory can be no longer than that an that shows the reality of the moorish seal on the left side of the dollar bill which is 100000 years/ tears old at least.anyone who started calling themself ruddy red skin white to rule has to lie to maintain their power in termsof where it came from.they were called redmen by us but they told all the indian they created he was the redman.the people who speak spanish know this ask them thats why they say they the so called white was called the red man first ,the people enslaved by the anglish english were lied to in their new language about all colors
Yes Brother Terrell
Truth is so musically sweet to the ears. Thanks for your wisdom.
Jahdey
I think in order to stop repeating the same confusing arguments people have to clarify what they mean by such terms as black, white, Moor etc. and even Berber and Arab. For example, as we well know in sub-Saharan Africa and for early Arab writers many who are considered “red men ” such as the Northern Fulani are considered black in the West. Red of course in the early Middle East and now in Africa is a synonym for “white”. “Moor” in Spain usually referred to a dark brown to black person.. “Moor” in Morocco has come to mean the dark brown Hassaniyya and Zwaya – descendants of Berbers Sulaym Arabs and their European adn African slaves. These people consider themselves today “red” or white men in the sense that north Sudanese and other East Africans do. However, I wish someone would show me where the early Berbers and Arabians were described as anything but a dark brown to black color. Arabs (Syrians, Iraqis, etc) were not necessarily Arabians (who were definitely described as black and dark brown in early periods). The term Berber as used in ancient time was not synonomous with North African.
Jahdey (and the rest of you). Are Jamaican Rastas SO ignorant that they sit and cut/paste ideas from all over the web in ways that make NO sense? Some of you folks SWEAR you are erudites in this. No offence, but you really have got to be two screws short of a brainplate. As an African man from Ethiopia, I can’t understand you Rastas. Maybe the marijuana has burned away some of the resoning that you could use to make/cover some great points. But, it gets lost in the ridiculousness of your arguments which seriously have NO BASIS in any sort of FACT, and…….. then, there’s this seed of racial hatred that ou sow amongst each other, as if it is OK to be this way and try objective study. This is lopsided at its best. In genetic science, BLACK and WHITE do not exist, only people…… ONE HUMAN RACE (This is what Bob Marley spoke of, not this non-sense you have here.) Shame on you, brothers. You are no better than that racist stormfront site that claims everyone is “white”. Here, everyone is “black”. Ugh, I had enough wasting my time reading through this DRIVEL.