Saturday, December 12, 2015

Video...ATLANTIC JIHAD: The Untold Story of White Slavery

One of Abraham Lincoln's three favorite books was Sufferings in Africa: The Astonishing Account Of A New England Sea Captain Enslaved By North African Arabs by Captain James Riley. It was long a bestseller and published in 1817.

Something rarely discussed in today's history books, but back when I was in school, we covered much of this information in our World History classes:


Please read the the YouTube blurb (emphases mine):
Iceland abolished slavery in 1117. Ironically thousands of Icelanders (including millions other Europeans) will be enslaved by Muslim pirates in the following centuries.

Whilst the Arabs have been acknowledged as a prime force in the early usage of slaves from Africa, very little has been written about their usage of White slaves, whether they were part of the Russian slave trade or those kidnapped by Arab pirates. However, in recent years, the research of some authors has been bringing this issue to light.

The origins of African slavery in the New World cannot be understood without some knowledge of the millennium of warfare between Christians and Muslims that took place in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and the piracy and kidnapping that went along with it. In 1627 pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa raided distant Iceland and enslaved nearly four hundred astonished residents. In 1617 Muslim pirates, having long enslaved Christians along the coasts of Spain, France, Italy, and even Ireland, captured 1,200 men and women in Portuguese Madeira. Down to the 1640s, there were many more English slaves in Muslim North Africa than African slaves under English control in the Caribbean. Indeed, a 1624 parliamentary proclamation estimated that the Barbary states held at least 1,500 English slaves, mostly sailors captured in the Mediterranean or Atlantic. Millions European Christians were kidnapped and enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 -- a far greater number than had ever been estimated before. Professor Robert Davis, in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, estimated that 1 million to 1.25 million White people were enslaved by North African pirates between 1530 and 1780.

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, We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people. 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. 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. 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.  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. 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.

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."

6 comments:

Ciccio said...

Nowhere was the effect of this slavery felt more than in Ukraine, the very word Slave comes from the Slavs who were living in the region at the time. As long as Crimea was part of the Ottoman Emprire the best and fittest boys in the region were shipped off to Constantinople and brought up as muslims, trained to be the Emperor's special forces. Russia bought Crimea, paid for it with a few million lives and only those ignorant of history could even dare suggest to give it away.

Anonymous said...

I recommend "White Gold" by Giles Milton as a great Christmas gift.

Anonymous said...

Second the "White Gold" recommendation.

Always On Watch said...

I, too, have read Giles Morton's book. Excellent!

christian soldier said...

excellent post AOW - great history--
I will look to purchase "White Gold"-
Carol-CS

Anonymous said...

Unless I find myself transcribing a video, it is a rare occassion when I watch a video from beginning to end without interruption or some other distraction...adult onset ADD? Anyway, as the documentary began to discuss Jensen the turncoat slaver, my gut turned sour as the tale took on the flavor of near hero-worship. Gah! Then it shouldn't shock when one reads:
Norwegian police ordered to disarm in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks.
despite
Child brides pose new challenge in ongoing refugee crisis
and
Mullah Krekar's desire to burn down the Norwegian Parliament, flag and constitution (same imam who instigated global bloodletting in the original cartoon crisis)
and
unprecedented stabbing spree ...all unrelated of course -
and utterly ignored by the
thousands of Norwegians lining up to volunteer as 'refugee guides'.

Seemingly ready for their destiny - without so much as a whimper. Ugh.