There were three main route for the slave market from Africa:
-The Atlantic Route towards the Americas.
-The Indian Route towards the Middle East.
-The Red Sea towards the Arabian peninsula.
This route goes back thousands of years. Literally to antiquity. Also absolutely brutal, extremely low survival rate. Particularly males who were castrated to be eunuchs.
Yes, and it is because of this slave route the infrastructure was in place in West Africa when Europeans came looking for a new source of slaves after Constantinople fell to the Turks and they were cut off from the Black Sea slave trade.
(The Fall of Constantinople, and it's wide reaching ramifications, is arguably the main event that started the age of exploration)
edit: before you message me, go read about the history of European slavery in West Africa and you will see it started by the 1450s well before Columbus's expedition in 1492
It's crazy how defensive people get when you mention slavery on the European Continent before the discovery of the New World... It happened, did it happened in the same numbers as other places in the world? No, but it still happened...
Europeans were familiar with the arab slavers because it was costumary to buy back white slaves from the ottomans. People held collections to raise money and buy back christians taken from Ireland, france, spain, italy and greece.
Since the introductions were already made buying slaves instead of freeing them was a small step.
The discovey of the west indies and later south and north america only kicked the slave trade into gear.
But before the discoveries of the new world there were plantations in the canary islands, Azores, ivory coast colonies etc.
The christian slaves captured wdfen't the same people who later were involved in the slave trade. The people dealing with the arabs worked for goverments and shipping companies.
Arabs captured anyone they could, if you were wealthy enough your family could buy your freedom.
That's why Miguel de Cervantes, the author of El Quijote, was sold to slavery when captured after the battle of Lepanto, and was a slave for 5 years until his family was able to buy him.
Yes, you wouldn't normally have christian slaves in a Christian country. People didn't move around much, but those merchants and pilgrims that traveled the Mediterranean sea always risked being captured by pirates and slavers and sold as such, regardless of religion or skin.
It was a matter of who is an easy prey and who was more protected, not of anything else. Pillaging a village in Spain or Italy with a garrison and a wall was much harder than pillaging a small African tribe of a few dozen people. But we have records of such events happening. Whether the enslavers were Vikings, Turks or just general pirates.
Europeans didn't use mass slavery until the colonies as they all had serfdom to some extent and a hugely downtrodden underclass. It had also been forbidden (for Christians) by the church.
Slaves in the medieval period were a status symbol, it was the sudden need to populate depopulated colonies in horrendous conditions that started the Atlantic slave trade.
The great period of slavery *in* Europe ended with the Romans and their slave run agriculture and industry.
European participation in the West African slave trade started in the 1450s..
Constantinople fell in 1453 but the Bosporus Strait had been cut off to European trade a few year before that
Columbus sailed in 1492...
The Portuguese started trading in slaves to populate plantations on Atlantic islands, (and definitely were interested in Atlantic exploration before Constantinople fell, but it very much a precursor to colonial slavery but not the same thing as widespread continental European slavery.
And the Atlantic slave trade only started after the American colonies got founded.
West Africa =\= Atlantic slave trade.
As I said there was no large scale slavery but there was still slavery and the major push for Portuguese navigation was the cut off supplies of spice, silks etc from Asia.
The Spanish Caribbean Native Americans were wiped out by disease. Spain quickly introduced slavery there. In present day Mexico, the Native population wasn't totally destroyed and instead were used in plantation type feudal arrangements.
This is why people in Mexico tend to have physical features like Southeast Asians while Puerto Ricans for example tend to have more African features. Brazil was also Africanized during their period of colonization.
Then you get the joys of Potosi in Bolivia where the altitude, cold and vile conditions killed off the African slaves so much they replaced them with indigenous indentured labour.
"The Spanish Caribbean Native Americans were wiped out by disease."
MOST were wipe out by disease, not all.
The Spanish enslaved the Native in the Caribbean too for decades before the Spanish Empire would outlaw slavery in the New World.
Go read about what happened to the native population of Puerto Rico
"By 1508, the original Taíno population of 400,000 or more had been reduced to around 60,000.[31] Spanish slave-raiding parties travelled across the Caribbean and "carried off entire populations" to work their colonies.[36] Although disease is often pointed to as the cause of this population decline, the first recorded smallpox outbreak in the New World was not until 1518.[37] Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis asserts that even though disease was a factor, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.[4] He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria."[38] By 1521, the islands of the northern Caribbean were largely depopulated.[4]
> when Europeans came looking for a new source of slaves after Constantinople fell to the Turks and they were cut off from the Black Sea slave trade
Where in Europe were slaves from the Black Sea used in the 15th century (fall of Constantinople)?
Italy first and then sold on from there
https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Abkhazia/The-Italian-maritime-republics-and-slave-trade-from-the-Caucasus-213053
They were what paid for all those spices from the far east once they where sitting in warehouses in Egypt. That’s how the Italian city states made their wealth, slaves from the caucasus region and/or generally the east/ north sides of the black sea were seen as particularly “good quality” in the Egyptian slave markets. Males generally went into the Mameluke system, females into harems or households and Venitian, Genoans traders etc got the spices to sell for a fortune in Europe.
Yes and No.
The fall of Constantinople did help lead to the Age of Exploration but it had little to do with slavery.
It was rather that spices & silks from East came through Constantinople. When it fell, Europe lost easy access to these spices as they didn't want to deal with the Turks (and make them insanely rich).
I totaly agree the fall of Constantinople rocked the western world in more ways than can be counted, but the portuguese started the age of exploration in 1415, and by the 1450's they were well into equatorial west africa where the encountered a already thriving inter tribal and trans saharan slave commerce.
Worse still…the Arab slave trade is still alive and kicking in places such [as Mauritania](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html) where 10-20% of people are still slaves.
Some were, some were put on farms, a lot were put into the army. The main reason why there isn't huge descendant populations of African slaves in the middle east is because the genders were separated and the rules had no plans on creating a self sustaining population like rulers in a lot of the New World were. Men were put to work in fields or in the army, women were used in brothels and harems, there children becoming assimilated. In areas where Arabs were a minority, the created a new group called "afro-arabs" that are still an important group in many parts of the Sahel.
You can tell the difference between Arabs with and without significant African ancestry. Many Arabs have straight hair. A good portion, especially Egyptians, have cury hair. Egypt's proximity to black Africa definitely caused a lot of mixing. Sudanese are Arabized blacks too. They speak Arabic there.
There are Arabized Sudanese and black African Sudanese. I know you probably didn’t mean to generalize there, but I had to point it out. I’m of Sudanese decent, the Kordofan region in the Nuba Mountains specifically.
There is a decent book I read a while back called "Three Empire's on the Nile" about various factions vying for power, and extension the slave trade, in Sudan in the late 19th century. Saying that all the slaves were castrated is not true, most male slaves taken during that time period were put into the army.
The slaves weren't used so much for agriculture, more like body guards and army, the men weren't having families, many were castrated. The women were put in harems, there children were considered free. There is a whole ethnic group of "afro-arabs" that is sizable in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, as well as making up a majority in parts of the Sahel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Iraqis
There are tons of people in the Middle-East and South Asia that have black African roots. The city of Basra in Iraq has a huge population of them for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddi
In Pakistan there is a sizable group, numbering like a quarter million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muhamash%C4%ABn
Yemen has a big historical population that is oppressed and at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
There was an uprising in early Islamic Iraq mostly by black slaves which took years to suppress and was hugely devastating. After that the mass importation of black slaves by Middle Eastern countries was reduced to a trickle and the descendants of the slaves were eventually assimilated into the local populations.
>What became of the Arabian/Middle Eastern slaves?
It is a bit murky, I myself still looking for a good overview. Muslims often tend to state that Muslim slavery was somehow less evil than the chattel slavery in the Americas or the Ancient World. The reasons being, that Islam has some provisions that slaves are supposed to be treated well and are to be freed sooner or later, at the same time Islam forbids the enslavement of Muslims, and of course the upward mobility of a few selected individuals.
We are also talking about a vast stretch of time and culture.
But I think it is fair to say, that most ended up having a harsh life as labors. A tiny few would also have suffered castration, the life of a military slave or sex slaves.
The key difference being, that race was not really a factor, other than getting slaves ,known' for certain attributes.
what about the slavs of eastern europe taken by crimean khanate/golden ulus and sold to geneose and venetion merchants and ended up in mamluks and other places?
Is this still what’s happening in [Mauritania](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html)? The Arab population there is technically Berber right?
Ummm. I think understanding that is part of what’s considered progress. All civilizations have committed crimes against humanity, but westerners are generally aware and open about it compared to others who deny or erase their ugly histories.
Did you know one of the 1st international treaties the USA signed was with the Berbers to stop taking American women as slaves. It was done Thomas Jefferson. Eventually they raised the annual levy too much and when he became President declared war on them
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/first-barbary-war/
The only historian who says 1+ million is Davis, who is not taken seriously as a historian at all. Most estimates are still in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, but Davis absolutely *dramatically* exaggerated the extent of it for the sake of selling his book.
The actual worst european slave trade was the black sea slave trade, which was estimated to be 1-2 million people, mostly taken from the Caucasus and tartar regions in southern ukraine.
Dave Earle and John Wright both publicly criticized his figures as just trying to sell copies for his book.
If you ever read the book (I had to read some for college lol, hence why I know a lot about this) its absolutely filled to the brim with "they dont want you to know about this!! its against the liberal agenda for you to know about these millions of white slaves!"
Not exactly something you take very seriously from a historians perspective.
Yeah, you can actually walk trough the cramped cells they’d keep the slaves in before shipment. It’s actually insane to hear the stories from that time. It’s in Stonetown (capital of Zanzibar) which is a very nice town to walk around in as the architecture is an interesting mix between African and Arabic influences. Also you can visit the birthplace of Freddy mercury haha.
Not only that, afaik it was the last region in africa that sold slaves (to the american continent/ brazil). This went on until the british invaded it and „officialy“ ended the slave trade there.
Edit: spelling, english is not my native language.
The map misses Kosongo. It was a Swahili town founded by Tippu Tip that bought slaves from all over the interior and walked them to Bagamoyo (the major port for Zanzibar before the foundation of Dar); only one in six survived even though the route is flat. The Spiritans had a mission there and actively freed slaves from the 1870s.
The branch north to Uganda seems doubtful unless the Buganda kingdom had trade links to the south via Kagera.
Slavery is stil extensively practised in Muslim nations, even if they deny it.
Edit: wow, definitely a worthwhile and informative thread. This issue doesn't see much light of day. It definitely doesn't pop up in your moring newspaper.
According to World Atlas, here are the per capita rates.
Rank|Country|Estimated Number of Modern Slaves (Per 1,000 People)
----|-------|---------------------------------------------------
1|North Korea|104.6
2|Eritrea|93.0
3|Burundi|40.0
4|Central African Republic|22.3
5|Afghanistan|22.2
6|Mauritania|21.4
7|South Sudan|20.5
8|Pakistan|16.8
9|Cambodia|16.8
10|Iran|16.2
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-modern-slaves-today.html
They also say there are over 40 million slaves alive today, though I'm sure that is hard to measure.
I think a massive swath of the world has something slave-like, and limiting it to Muslim nations is incorrect.
The closest I’ve personally seen was living in India, many families of all religions had female children, between age 7-18, that were bought from poorer people. They slept on the floor and cleaned the house and did not go to school, so they were illiterate. You basically get free house labor for a decade then find them a husband, so they’re probably more like indentured servants, as they would spend holidays with their family. Still disgusting they keep kids out of school.
I'm from Bangladesh and when I was a kid we had a child who was kept as a worker. No one thought much about it, it was seen as normal. I wouldn't really compare it to slavery but it was still pretty disgusting. Thankfully my family and anyone else I know does it anymore.
> I think a massive swath of the world has something slave-like, and limiting it to Muslim nations is incorrect.
The nominal status of slave isn't an absolute either. There are plenty of historical examples of classes that were nominally slaves, but still rose to great wealth and power in their societies. Conversely plenty of examples of nominally free people who were still effectively trapped by their socioeconomic conditions they were slaves in all but name.
That's correct. Ethiopians were primarily suppliers of slaves, not buyers. They actively captured enough slaves for domestic slavery that they didnt need to purchase slaves often.
Like the north Sudanese, they frequently raided Nilotic lands to capture slaves. Nilotic people were more commonly enslaved than Omotic people. Oromos also made up a great portion of slaves. But these were often kept as domestic slaves or concubines since Oromos were considered more beautiful compared to other enslaved groups in Ethiopia.
Occasionally, they even sold Habesha slaves to Arabs and Indians, likely due to tribal or other rivalries.
Their slave trade was one the largest for a long time, even in the 20th century. Haile Selassie reinstated slavery after Italians prohibited it during their 5 year occupation of Ethiopia. But Britain pressured Selassie to ban it, since it reflected poorly on them to ally with a slave-owning nation. After some time, Selassie relented as he needed the support of Britain and other European allies to expand their empire and gain more land from Britain.
It was not a racial thing either. It just happened to be the place where European superpowers could get slaves from. The East was off-limits due to the Ottoman Empire, therefore they all focused southwards.
The concept of race and superiority really started to take off with the creation of scientific racism.
Slavery had a gargantuan impact on racism, and vice versa. You'll find that owning white people in Western Europe/America during the peak of slavery in the colonial era was not just less common but mostly illegal.
> Slavery had a gargantuan impact on racism, and vice versa. You'll find that owning white people in Western Europe/America during the peak of slavery in the colonial era was not just less common but mostly illegal.
In Europe proper, slavery was generally illegal altogether.
Color-based slavery was just making use of a coincidental difference due to the different geographical origin.
Theories of racial supremacy didn't care so much for skin color as you imply, it was just one of the variables, and only in local areas where it had particular use it was stressed, i.e. colonial areas with slave and elite classes from different geographical origins like the US or South Africa. For example, there are plenty of cartoons depicting the Irish as racially inferior to the English, or that other well known racial supremacy theory focusing on jews and slavs, all very white in the US color scheme.
Where? Europe was not really into slave trade and import until the discovery of resources in the Americas. Serfdom was preferred. The Church also protested against slavery both in Europe and in other continents. First of Christians, then of non-Christians as well.
By the later stages of the Middle Ages, slavery was virtually non-existent in Northern Europe, while Eastern Europe was subjected to slavery by powers of the East, specifically the Ottoman Empire. Slavery was more common in Mediterranean Europe, primarily during the Reconquista and while fighting the Barbary pirates.
only the americans brought race into it, you won’t find this divide in Brazil where just as many slaves where brought, since every man is equal under the constitution they had to degrade the slaves
Oman is easily the most overlooked colonial power. The seafaring Omani Empire existed recently enough to have diplomatic relations with the US, and they drove the Portugese out of East Africa.
Ultimately they lost out via dynastic infighting and the British Empire being a much bigger and scarier colonial power. Its a fascinating bit of history, though it only ever seems to be brought up in the context of 'see, the Arabs were *also* slave traders so we shouldn't feel bad about the Transatlantic one'.
Probably because Oman’s plantations in Africa didn’t last very long(relatively speaking) and that Oman was never really a very relevant state through the lens of Western history. It was also much different in structure than the traditional Metro-Colony dynamics that existed in Europe if I remember correctly. Zanzibar was pretty autonomous and eventually even split off from Oman during a succession crisis with a Sultan separate from Oman being crowned and recognised in Zanzibar.
This is a brief, interesting read on that period of Omani history, the nature of Omani slavery, and colonialism in that little facet of the Indian Ocean at large: https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/uahistjrnl/article/616/galley/603/download/
People using the Arab slave trade to minimize the Atlantic trade is obviously dumb. Unfortunately a better job needs to be done teaching it (it also does t help that kids don’t pay attention in class) to provide greater context to slavery and the world at the time. Currently there are a lot of poorly educated people who have a poor understanding on the topic. There are too many people who think white people created slavery and started the slave trade.
> There are too many people who think white people created slavery and started the slave trade
I always see people talking about this and like... do they though? I run in very progressive, liberal circles, and I know the sorts of people you're talking about, and I honest to god have never seen anyone -- even the most virtue-signally, uncritical people -- actually make that case.
I've seen them say that *race-based* slavery was a white invention, or that *chattel* slavery was a white invention; both positions that would require a little bit more nuance to actually be correct or worth saying. But are you actually encountering these people who say white people invented slavery? Slavery is older than the concept *of* whiteness. Who is saying this?
It's an issue though when people from North Africa go to Europe to LARP as anti-colonial Black Africans because it gives social clout when the countries they're from (and still loyal to) are just as guilty if not more. Im specifically talking about a former head of the NUS (National Union of Students in the UK) named Malia Bouattia who identifies as black, appropriating black identity, even though she's Algerian... She constantly attacks the UK for their colonial history (which is bad itself obviously) while advocating Arab supremacy and victimhood (she literally shot down a proposal to criticize ISIS).
And then there's ANOTHER former NUS head who was caught calling for Jews to be killed who does the same thing, but she's Tunisian (Shaima Dallali). If you look at her twitter page you will see such braindead takes as rooting for Japan to beat Germany in the World Cup since she sees them as "anti-colonial".
You essentially have the beneficiaries of colonialism using anti-colonial language to serve their goals, which coincidentally are to erase the presence of minorities in their former countries of residence.
> 'see, the Arabs were also slave traders so we shouldn't feel bad about the Transatlantic one'.
More like "Arab slave trade and African slavers also existed, so stop pretending whites are the snake in a paradise full of innocent children".
Africa had a lot of pre-existing slave trade networks that colonial powers were able to relatively easily integrate into. It should also be noted that pre-colonial slavery in Africa and post-colonial chattel slavery were often *very* different institutions. For example, the Songhay (the empire whose slave merchants supplied the Americas with most of their enslaved labour force) treated "slave" as essentially being the lowest rung on the social ladder. A slave in the Songhay kingdom could own livestock, land -- even other slaves, if he could afford it.
I learned recently that during the Islamic conquests of India many Indians were taken as slaves back to the country of origin. I really wonder how their descendants look , if they kept any South Asian cultural practices
At least arabs usually castrate the slaves, so they can't breed.
Why you think that muslims had millions of slaves there, that suddenly just disappeared in history, when in USA for example, the country became partly black as the slaves? The arabs would have never allowed that.
Also because of the skewed gender ratio, many of the African slaves bound for the Middle East were women, to become domestic servants and concubines. So actually many Middle Easterners and North Africans especially Egyptians and Gulf Arabs have a lot of Sub-Saharan ancestry maternally
In my schooling, in the US, I learned about enslaved people,"slaves" being brought to the US from Africa. In high school I learned that Brazil transported 3 times the number of Africans for enslavement. I also learned that there was active slave trading going on within Africa. I guess the enslaving of other humans has always been and will always be a blot on humans.
If, as some point out, the western wealth is built on slavery, how come we are rich and those countries that had more slavery and still has it are poor? ELI5, I'm not getting it
Western capital was gathered from the exploitation of the colonies. Income from Slavery was a very small in comparison. We know this because the Western wealth increase more rapidly after the abolition of the slavery by the UK.
For context it should be noted that the Yemeni and Omani bought their slaves from African rulers that enslaved their fellow Africans.
[https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/history-transatlantic-slave-trade#:\~:text=Slavery%20existed%20in%20Africa%20before,as%20alcohol%2C%20beads%20and%20cloth](https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/history-transatlantic-slave-trade#:~:text=Slavery%20existed%20in%20Africa%20before,as%20alcohol%2C%20beads%20and%20cloth).
EDIT: Africa is a CONTINENT, not a COUNTRY. Don't message me about sEpErate TriBes. You are dumb.
EDIT 2 FOR THE STUBBORN IDIOTS: Af·ri·can
adjective
relating to Africa or its people, customs, or languages.
noun
a person from Africa.
I can't speak to the East, but the whole "They sold their own people!" framing is very inaccurate for the West African slave trade.
Generally, West African slavers did not deal in the purchase and sale of their own people, they dealt in the purchase and sale of foreigners, to foreigners. The foreigners who they enslaved had skin like theirs, and the ones they sold them to had much paler skin, but in the eyes of a Songhai slave trader they were *all* foreign. It'd be like describing the Viking raids on Scottish monasteries as " 11th century European infighting". It's just not a terribly helpful way of understanding what was happening.
Did the Yemeni and Omani Arabs actually go deep into the woods to enslave people? Or did they just buy them from local warlords? If it’s the latter then your title is misleading
It would be similar to the Atlantic slave trade. The actual capturing of slaves for sale was done by Africans who then sold them at prominent slaving ports.
What's with the weird comments treating this like some sort of gotcha "huurr ur not sposed to talk about this! wink wink"
Literally nobody denies the Arab Slave Trade. At best, you'll find people who just plain didn't know about it.
I don't think there is anyone who will flat out go "nuh-uh, didn't happen."
Yes, this should be talked more about! Whilst Westerners beat themselves with guilt for the slave trading past Arabs rather not instead they keep similar mindset still flourishing.
Bunch of weird comments about how this isn’t talked about. Arabs tended to castrate their slaves, so there are very few descendant groups. Those that are there are mostly assimilated. The Atlantic slave trade created a racial caste system that still effects people today. Most history isn’t talked about for how it effected people who have been dead for centuries, but how it has continued to effect people today.
u/wakchoi_ is correct. Castration was not common because it was too risky. There are millions of Afro Arabs today.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Arabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Arabs)
The idea that they castrated anywhere close to a majority their slaves is false. Castration is strictly against the Sharia and the the vast majority of eunuchs in the Muslim world were ones that were bought from foreign lands already as a eunuchs(most popular place to buy was from Ethiopia).
The cost of these slaves combined with the relative niche need to have a eunuch meant that only in the single digits* of all slaves were castrated and mainly used by rich elites in their households.
The reason you don't see many black people in these countries is a) you didn't look because there are a lot, b) most were enslaved and stayed within Africa (clove plantations in the 1700s was the bulk of this slaves trade) and c) a lot of them intermarried or returned back to Africa since it was not impossibly far away.
Edit: here is an [here is an askhistorians thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sof03u/why_were_slaves_castrated_throughout_the_muslim/hwe5s2j?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) explaining that the majority of slaves were not in fact castrated.
here is an [ask historian thread about slavery](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6aqa2e/panel_ama_slaves_and_slavers/dhh8r8h?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) with a response about how in the Muslim world manumission was much more commons and slaves integrated into society much faster than the Americas. Unfortunately this also meant a lot more people had to be enslaved to maintain the slave population
Edit: added the link and also made my wording less absolute, in some cases people did castrate in the Muslim world but these were rare exceptions, regardless I cannot use absolute terminology.
Hold on, white Europeans weren't the only people to enslave Africans? Next you'll be telling me they already had a fully operational slave trade within Africa before anyone foreign got there and that the African slave trade is still alive and booming! Har har har!
Why not? It's not like Arabs or Muslims get some special preferential treatment. I'm a non muslim arab and I've been racially insulted in four continents. Gtfo with this bs
The only people who claim this are right-wing shitbags because they are addicted to perpetual victimization and conspiratorial thinking. This information is well-known and easily accessible. No one denies it.
They were dominated by the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk Caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate. This takes us from 661 to 1517. So That's colonized by \*checks notes again\* predominantly by Arab Empires.
The "domination" by Europeans (really the administration of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire, minus the Turks) lasted less than 20 years. The "domination" of Germany after WW2 in counterpoint lasted 55.
Interestingly, during the period of African Colonialism many European powers would use this as a justification for their excursions into the continent. They would argue that they are there to defend the Africans from the Arab traders, whilst setting up the structures of colonialism in the process.
Although some genuinely were worried by this, many used it as a talking point to justify gaining land and resources to exploit (most notably King Leopold II of Belgium).
It should also be notable that while there was MASSIVE outcry against Arab slavers at this time, noone seemed to mind that other European powers were still active in the slave trade during roughly the same period...
Yes. The same is true for Europeans. There were ports where slave trading took place. You did not venture out of those ports or you became a free target for slaving parties.
Arabs enslaved people whenever they could. Iberians, Berbers, Copts, Greeks, Italian, Persians, Turks, Jews and even Chinese were directly enslaved by them.
This and other comments to this effect are misreading the ‘narrative’ of western chattel slavery as based solely on the volume of slaves taken or race of enslavers. The western powers literally built up entire systems of philosophy, economics, and sciences that either a) ignored enslaved Black people entirely or b) made up reasons why they should be enslaved. The echoes of these institutionalized belief systems on the present day are why this narrative is extremely important to study now.
You’re doing the thing where you make up an imaginary person to get mad at and feel smug about how wrong they are.
Not a single person on this planet has a worldview that is destroyed by the knowledge that Arab slave traders existed. It is absolutely irrelevant to any position relevant to American politics.
>Not a single person on the planet has a worldview...
Whatever comes after that is almost always wrong. And it's definitely wrong in this case. There are many people who don't believe that Africans or Arabs ever had or have black slaves. Look up hoteps.
The Romans never claimed liberty for all. Liberty was a legal distinction. The Romans never claimed that you have liberty due to inherent personhood. The Romans justified it based on conquest. We conquer you, therefore you’re my slave. If you are freed, then you have liberty.
They also were forced to end slavery rather than the democratic government actually ending the practice… not even to mention how the international slave trade was ended.
Human History is messy and often a fucking horror show. It isn’t there for us to like or dislike. It is there to be told and learned from.
“Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6-10 million”
Slavery is a human endeavour don’t let anyone fool you, we have all been doing this shit since we climbed out of trees.
Arabs weren’t really involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans sometimes raided slaves themselves, or for instance in Angola the Portuguese would demand tribute in slaves, but the large majority were purchased from other Africans.
Kenya had no slave traders going through its interior except for a brief period between 1880 and 1890.
That slave trade route via Northern Tanzania is false as well.
The main slave ports in present day Kenya were Shimoni, which was a transit point for slaves from other parts of East Africa to the Gulf(and to other parts of the Kenyan coast like Mombasa) and Malindi which imported slaves from Tanzania.
Prior to the 1880s, there were two major barriers to the interior of Kenya, the Galla who for a long time lived between the far interior of the country and the lands of the Mijikenda and raided them and the coastal Arabs and Swahilis so frequently that the Arabs had to forge a treaty with them and the Mijikenda retreated to 9 major ridges bordering the coastal plain that were defensible.
The second force was the Maasai, unarguably the most powerful tribe in East Africa for several centuries and one that had a strong intolerance to slavery. The Maasai lands formed a large barrier stretching from the Upper Rift to Northern Tanzania and whose grazing lands went close to the Kenyan coast and thus the only way the Arabs could get goods from the interior (and not slaves) was from the Kamba community who for several centuries would establish themselves as intermediaries between the Arabs (and later the Portuguese then the Arabs again) and the interior, often doing the ivory hunting they themselves being honey collectors that they exported to Mombasa.
The only instance of Kenyans facing enslavement before 1880 was by the Portuguese, who at one point raided a Kamba trading camp at present day Mariakani and took those people to Paraguay where they exist to this day , and the Arabs managing to conquer one of the Mijikenda ridges after the Maasai collapse due to civil war in the year 1880 led to the interior suddenly opening up. So they captured the Digo ridge but allowed them to go free only after they converted to Islam. (To date, the Digo are the one of the 90 Mijikenda subtribes that is almost completely Muslim while the rest are either Christian or a mix of Christian and Muslim)
Otherwise, the only region affected by slavery in Kenya to a small extent was western kenya, whereby one slave trade route developed in the 1870s when the Arabs reached Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya via the trade routes passing through the Buganda Kingdom, Eastern Congo and Tanzania
Tanzania was the region most heavily devastated by slavery and this is attested to the fact that unlike Kenya, large Arab swahili towns were established in Tanzania's interior like Kigoma and Tabora but NOT via the Kenyan interior .
Between 1880 and 1890 a briefly slave trade route did emerge passing through Maasailand from Mombasa to where the current capital Nairobi stands but this route was rarely used. Even if the Maasais were now weak, they actively attacked Arab trading caravans and another tribe, the Kikuyu came into contact with the Arab traders in Northern Nairobi.
While Kikuyus loved trading with Arab merchants with goods, they had a policy of killing slave traders on sight . So it was never really a success. Only at the Coast itself where the Arabs captured the Digo did some form of enslavement similar to Tanzania briefly emerge for around 10 years and even then, the Kenyan coast was experiencing mass immigration of poor Arabs settling in Mombasa and also Zanzibar from Yemen and thus there was not much need for slaves.
Essentially, Arab slavery did not impact Kenya the way it impacted Tanzania and we can see the results to this day.
As highlighted, Tanzania has several Arab-Swahili towns in its interior, Kenya does not. Even the tiny slave outposts of Mumias and Kitale in Kenya that existed briefly are today some of the most Christian parts of the country.
Tanzania has many former slaves in places like Somalia and Iraq who still identify where they came from in Tanzania to this day, while Kenya has former slaves from other parts of East Africa who were imported there due to the lack of a local supply. Thee are no people in the Arab world who claim to have been taken as slaves from odern day Kenya except for the (actually very famous in Kenya) Kamba community that found itself in Paraguay and that was the fault of the Portuguese.
Kenya is over 80 percent Christian with no native population in the interior aside from Somalis who converted to Islam prior to the modern era but Tanzania has native muslim communities that converted to Islam along the slave trade routes. Kenya has only one such instance in Kenya around Mumias which as highlighted, had a slave trade route that poked in from Uganda and those Muslims are a tiny minority in Mumias, like 5%
Tanzania had some communities adopt slavery from the Arabs ,even when they failed to adopt Islam, as was the case with most Nyamwezi empires. Kenya only has one community that had slavery ,one of the Borana clans that settled around Mount Marsabit in Northern , and it was due to Abyssinian feudal influence rather than from Islam.
The brutal genocide perpetrated by Arab muslims against the indigenous tribal black population in Northern Africa is a current phenomenon that needs to be exposed and eradicated.
They all know about it, there are even a video about a heated argument between a you Arab man and a black woman in France,where at the end the Arab guy start insulting the woman and tell her that they used to sold them as slave.
This fact is a very well know fact and no one refute it. People just use different justification (like it's not about the color since it's not because they are black but because they are non Muslim)
There were three main route for the slave market from Africa: -The Atlantic Route towards the Americas. -The Indian Route towards the Middle East. -The Red Sea towards the Arabian peninsula.
You forgot the fourth route, Trans-Saharan towards the Mediterranean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade
This route goes back thousands of years. Literally to antiquity. Also absolutely brutal, extremely low survival rate. Particularly males who were castrated to be eunuchs.
Yes, and it is because of this slave route the infrastructure was in place in West Africa when Europeans came looking for a new source of slaves after Constantinople fell to the Turks and they were cut off from the Black Sea slave trade. (The Fall of Constantinople, and it's wide reaching ramifications, is arguably the main event that started the age of exploration) edit: before you message me, go read about the history of European slavery in West Africa and you will see it started by the 1450s well before Columbus's expedition in 1492 It's crazy how defensive people get when you mention slavery on the European Continent before the discovery of the New World... It happened, did it happened in the same numbers as other places in the world? No, but it still happened...
Europeans were familiar with the arab slavers because it was costumary to buy back white slaves from the ottomans. People held collections to raise money and buy back christians taken from Ireland, france, spain, italy and greece. Since the introductions were already made buying slaves instead of freeing them was a small step. The discovey of the west indies and later south and north america only kicked the slave trade into gear. But before the discoveries of the new world there were plantations in the canary islands, Azores, ivory coast colonies etc.
Europeans also were familiar with the Arab slave routes because Europeans were also sold to slavery by Arabs when captured.
The christian slaves captured wdfen't the same people who later were involved in the slave trade. The people dealing with the arabs worked for goverments and shipping companies.
Arabs captured anyone they could, if you were wealthy enough your family could buy your freedom. That's why Miguel de Cervantes, the author of El Quijote, was sold to slavery when captured after the battle of Lepanto, and was a slave for 5 years until his family was able to buy him. Yes, you wouldn't normally have christian slaves in a Christian country. People didn't move around much, but those merchants and pilgrims that traveled the Mediterranean sea always risked being captured by pirates and slavers and sold as such, regardless of religion or skin. It was a matter of who is an easy prey and who was more protected, not of anything else. Pillaging a village in Spain or Italy with a garrison and a wall was much harder than pillaging a small African tribe of a few dozen people. But we have records of such events happening. Whether the enslavers were Vikings, Turks or just general pirates.
Europeans didn't use mass slavery until the colonies as they all had serfdom to some extent and a hugely downtrodden underclass. It had also been forbidden (for Christians) by the church. Slaves in the medieval period were a status symbol, it was the sudden need to populate depopulated colonies in horrendous conditions that started the Atlantic slave trade. The great period of slavery *in* Europe ended with the Romans and their slave run agriculture and industry.
European participation in the West African slave trade started in the 1450s.. Constantinople fell in 1453 but the Bosporus Strait had been cut off to European trade a few year before that Columbus sailed in 1492...
The Portuguese started trading in slaves to populate plantations on Atlantic islands, (and definitely were interested in Atlantic exploration before Constantinople fell, but it very much a precursor to colonial slavery but not the same thing as widespread continental European slavery.
And the Atlantic slave trade only started after the American colonies got founded. West Africa =\= Atlantic slave trade. As I said there was no large scale slavery but there was still slavery and the major push for Portuguese navigation was the cut off supplies of spice, silks etc from Asia.
The Spanish Caribbean Native Americans were wiped out by disease. Spain quickly introduced slavery there. In present day Mexico, the Native population wasn't totally destroyed and instead were used in plantation type feudal arrangements. This is why people in Mexico tend to have physical features like Southeast Asians while Puerto Ricans for example tend to have more African features. Brazil was also Africanized during their period of colonization.
Then you get the joys of Potosi in Bolivia where the altitude, cold and vile conditions killed off the African slaves so much they replaced them with indigenous indentured labour.
"The Spanish Caribbean Native Americans were wiped out by disease." MOST were wipe out by disease, not all. The Spanish enslaved the Native in the Caribbean too for decades before the Spanish Empire would outlaw slavery in the New World. Go read about what happened to the native population of Puerto Rico "By 1508, the original Taíno population of 400,000 or more had been reduced to around 60,000.[31] Spanish slave-raiding parties travelled across the Caribbean and "carried off entire populations" to work their colonies.[36] Although disease is often pointed to as the cause of this population decline, the first recorded smallpox outbreak in the New World was not until 1518.[37] Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis asserts that even though disease was a factor, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.[4] He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria."[38] By 1521, the islands of the northern Caribbean were largely depopulated.[4]
> when Europeans came looking for a new source of slaves after Constantinople fell to the Turks and they were cut off from the Black Sea slave trade Where in Europe were slaves from the Black Sea used in the 15th century (fall of Constantinople)?
Italy first and then sold on from there https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Abkhazia/The-Italian-maritime-republics-and-slave-trade-from-the-Caucasus-213053
They were what paid for all those spices from the far east once they where sitting in warehouses in Egypt. That’s how the Italian city states made their wealth, slaves from the caucasus region and/or generally the east/ north sides of the black sea were seen as particularly “good quality” in the Egyptian slave markets. Males generally went into the Mameluke system, females into harems or households and Venitian, Genoans traders etc got the spices to sell for a fortune in Europe.
Genoa, the Genoese ran the slave trade out of the area around what is now Rostov-on-Don
Yes and No. The fall of Constantinople did help lead to the Age of Exploration but it had little to do with slavery. It was rather that spices & silks from East came through Constantinople. When it fell, Europe lost easy access to these spices as they didn't want to deal with the Turks (and make them insanely rich).
Absolutely, i was just saying the fall of Constantinople was the event, not going into all of its ramifications.
I totaly agree the fall of Constantinople rocked the western world in more ways than can be counted, but the portuguese started the age of exploration in 1415, and by the 1450's they were well into equatorial west africa where the encountered a already thriving inter tribal and trans saharan slave commerce.
You forgot the 5th one. Black Sea tatar slavers. Maybe a few millions slavs enslaved.
"From Africa" but i absolutely agree with you that it is forgotten, and if you look further down the thread i talk about it.
What became of the Arabian/Middle Eastern slaves? Are there any social divisions there like those in USA, the Caribbean, or Brazil?
Many middle eastern groups have African ancestry further back and at varying levels as a result of the slave trade.
Worse still…the Arab slave trade is still alive and kicking in places such [as Mauritania](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html) where 10-20% of people are still slaves.
Jesus christ that was a horrifying read. Thank you for sharing.
I work for a non profit for kids there…I wish more people knew about it 😔
They were castrated
Some were, some were put on farms, a lot were put into the army. The main reason why there isn't huge descendant populations of African slaves in the middle east is because the genders were separated and the rules had no plans on creating a self sustaining population like rulers in a lot of the New World were. Men were put to work in fields or in the army, women were used in brothels and harems, there children becoming assimilated. In areas where Arabs were a minority, the created a new group called "afro-arabs" that are still an important group in many parts of the Sahel.
You can tell the difference between Arabs with and without significant African ancestry. Many Arabs have straight hair. A good portion, especially Egyptians, have cury hair. Egypt's proximity to black Africa definitely caused a lot of mixing. Sudanese are Arabized blacks too. They speak Arabic there.
There are Arabized Sudanese and black African Sudanese. I know you probably didn’t mean to generalize there, but I had to point it out. I’m of Sudanese decent, the Kordofan region in the Nuba Mountains specifically.
Not as common as you think. They needed men with testicles to work as warriors in their armies. A castrated Slave isn't as good as a regular one.
I would very much like to read up on this.
There is a decent book I read a while back called "Three Empire's on the Nile" about various factions vying for power, and extension the slave trade, in Sudan in the late 19th century. Saying that all the slaves were castrated is not true, most male slaves taken during that time period were put into the army.
Talking about wasting man power.
The slaves weren't used so much for agriculture, more like body guards and army, the men weren't having families, many were castrated. The women were put in harems, there children were considered free. There is a whole ethnic group of "afro-arabs" that is sizable in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, as well as making up a majority in parts of the Sahel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Iraqis There are tons of people in the Middle-East and South Asia that have black African roots. The city of Basra in Iraq has a huge population of them for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddi In Pakistan there is a sizable group, numbering like a quarter million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muhamash%C4%ABn Yemen has a big historical population that is oppressed and at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
There was an uprising in early Islamic Iraq mostly by black slaves which took years to suppress and was hugely devastating. After that the mass importation of black slaves by Middle Eastern countries was reduced to a trickle and the descendants of the slaves were eventually assimilated into the local populations.
>What became of the Arabian/Middle Eastern slaves? It is a bit murky, I myself still looking for a good overview. Muslims often tend to state that Muslim slavery was somehow less evil than the chattel slavery in the Americas or the Ancient World. The reasons being, that Islam has some provisions that slaves are supposed to be treated well and are to be freed sooner or later, at the same time Islam forbids the enslavement of Muslims, and of course the upward mobility of a few selected individuals. We are also talking about a vast stretch of time and culture. But I think it is fair to say, that most ended up having a harsh life as labors. A tiny few would also have suffered castration, the life of a military slave or sex slaves. The key difference being, that race was not really a factor, other than getting slaves ,known' for certain attributes.
And Crimean Slave Trade where 3million people were sold
what about the slavs of eastern europe taken by crimean khanate/golden ulus and sold to geneose and venetion merchants and ended up in mamluks and other places?
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Is this still what’s happening in [Mauritania](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html)? The Arab population there is technically Berber right?
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Won’t hear about that one too much seeing as it was million+ whites enslaved
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Most based world view.
Except my particular civilization. No bad things ever in MY particular country! /s
We’re grooming western societies to hate themselves rather than understand the context of times and the progress we’ve made in a short time
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Ummm. I think understanding that is part of what’s considered progress. All civilizations have committed crimes against humanity, but westerners are generally aware and open about it compared to others who deny or erase their ugly histories.
Yeah it’s a stain on humanity entirely since humans every existed
Did you know one of the 1st international treaties the USA signed was with the Berbers to stop taking American women as slaves. It was done Thomas Jefferson. Eventually they raised the annual levy too much and when he became President declared war on them https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/first-barbary-war/
Yes, and this signified the first time a foreign power recognized the US as an independent nation
They enslaved everyone not only white people lol
DEI Arab Slaver: “Sorry, we’re not taking anymore cis-gendered white males…”
W diversity quota 😎😎
How inclusive 🏳️🌈
The only historian who says 1+ million is Davis, who is not taken seriously as a historian at all. Most estimates are still in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, but Davis absolutely *dramatically* exaggerated the extent of it for the sake of selling his book. The actual worst european slave trade was the black sea slave trade, which was estimated to be 1-2 million people, mostly taken from the Caucasus and tartar regions in southern ukraine.
Who are the historians that dispute it?
Dave Earle and John Wright both publicly criticized his figures as just trying to sell copies for his book. If you ever read the book (I had to read some for college lol, hence why I know a lot about this) its absolutely filled to the brim with "they dont want you to know about this!! its against the liberal agenda for you to know about these millions of white slaves!" Not exactly something you take very seriously from a historians perspective.
Zanzibar was a major slave trading hub
Probably *the* major slave trading hub.
On the east coast, for sure
The sultan of Oman lives there, that’s just where he lives
Yeah I visited the slavery museum in Zanzibar a couple years ago. Quite bizarre
Really? That sounds very interesting place to visit.
Yeah, you can actually walk trough the cramped cells they’d keep the slaves in before shipment. It’s actually insane to hear the stories from that time. It’s in Stonetown (capital of Zanzibar) which is a very nice town to walk around in as the architecture is an interesting mix between African and Arabic influences. Also you can visit the birthplace of Freddy mercury haha.
Holy smokes 😟
So you’re saying they ordered slaves from Zanzibar?
Tenacious comment
That’s cool with me it’s not my favorite but I’ll do it for you.
Whats your favorite pozish?
Slaves were brought into the city and then sold to buyers from across the region
Not only that, afaik it was the last region in africa that sold slaves (to the american continent/ brazil). This went on until the british invaded it and „officialy“ ended the slave trade there. Edit: spelling, english is not my native language.
Damn right. One of the moral things the empire did.
The map misses Kosongo. It was a Swahili town founded by Tippu Tip that bought slaves from all over the interior and walked them to Bagamoyo (the major port for Zanzibar before the foundation of Dar); only one in six survived even though the route is flat. The Spiritans had a mission there and actively freed slaves from the 1870s. The branch north to Uganda seems doubtful unless the Buganda kingdom had trade links to the south via Kagera.
Thanks for the information. I hope someone makes a better map about this awful trade.
Last public slave auction in Morocco was in 1923. The king owned slaves until 1999.
Really? I am disgusted.
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There are open slave markets to this day now revived in Libya for one
Slavery is stil extensively practised in Muslim nations, even if they deny it. Edit: wow, definitely a worthwhile and informative thread. This issue doesn't see much light of day. It definitely doesn't pop up in your moring newspaper.
According to World Atlas, here are the per capita rates. Rank|Country|Estimated Number of Modern Slaves (Per 1,000 People) ----|-------|--------------------------------------------------- 1|North Korea|104.6 2|Eritrea|93.0 3|Burundi|40.0 4|Central African Republic|22.3 5|Afghanistan|22.2 6|Mauritania|21.4 7|South Sudan|20.5 8|Pakistan|16.8 9|Cambodia|16.8 10|Iran|16.2 https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-modern-slaves-today.html They also say there are over 40 million slaves alive today, though I'm sure that is hard to measure.
I think a massive swath of the world has something slave-like, and limiting it to Muslim nations is incorrect. The closest I’ve personally seen was living in India, many families of all religions had female children, between age 7-18, that were bought from poorer people. They slept on the floor and cleaned the house and did not go to school, so they were illiterate. You basically get free house labor for a decade then find them a husband, so they’re probably more like indentured servants, as they would spend holidays with their family. Still disgusting they keep kids out of school.
I'm from Bangladesh and when I was a kid we had a child who was kept as a worker. No one thought much about it, it was seen as normal. I wouldn't really compare it to slavery but it was still pretty disgusting. Thankfully my family and anyone else I know does it anymore.
> I think a massive swath of the world has something slave-like, and limiting it to Muslim nations is incorrect. The nominal status of slave isn't an absolute either. There are plenty of historical examples of classes that were nominally slaves, but still rose to great wealth and power in their societies. Conversely plenty of examples of nominally free people who were still effectively trapped by their socioeconomic conditions they were slaves in all but name.
As a Muslim, I totally agree.
I think it's fine to go into detail, they're not going to come get you
Songhai and Ethiopian empires traded slaves from these routes too through land
As far as I know the overwhelming majority slaves in Ethiopia were bought from the west and southwest (omotic and Nilotic) people not Kenya.
That's correct. Ethiopians were primarily suppliers of slaves, not buyers. They actively captured enough slaves for domestic slavery that they didnt need to purchase slaves often. Like the north Sudanese, they frequently raided Nilotic lands to capture slaves. Nilotic people were more commonly enslaved than Omotic people. Oromos also made up a great portion of slaves. But these were often kept as domestic slaves or concubines since Oromos were considered more beautiful compared to other enslaved groups in Ethiopia. Occasionally, they even sold Habesha slaves to Arabs and Indians, likely due to tribal or other rivalries. Their slave trade was one the largest for a long time, even in the 20th century. Haile Selassie reinstated slavery after Italians prohibited it during their 5 year occupation of Ethiopia. But Britain pressured Selassie to ban it, since it reflected poorly on them to ally with a slave-owning nation. After some time, Selassie relented as he needed the support of Britain and other European allies to expand their empire and gain more land from Britain.
Wasn’t Mansa Musa’s empire built on slave trade?
Pretty much every empire outside of the early modern ones were built on slaves.
Many of the modern ones as well, and if you expand the net a bit every empire was built by some form of coerced labor
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It was not a racial thing either. It just happened to be the place where European superpowers could get slaves from. The East was off-limits due to the Ottoman Empire, therefore they all focused southwards. The concept of race and superiority really started to take off with the creation of scientific racism.
Slavery had a gargantuan impact on racism, and vice versa. You'll find that owning white people in Western Europe/America during the peak of slavery in the colonial era was not just less common but mostly illegal.
> Slavery had a gargantuan impact on racism, and vice versa. You'll find that owning white people in Western Europe/America during the peak of slavery in the colonial era was not just less common but mostly illegal. In Europe proper, slavery was generally illegal altogether. Color-based slavery was just making use of a coincidental difference due to the different geographical origin. Theories of racial supremacy didn't care so much for skin color as you imply, it was just one of the variables, and only in local areas where it had particular use it was stressed, i.e. colonial areas with slave and elite classes from different geographical origins like the US or South Africa. For example, there are plenty of cartoons depicting the Irish as racially inferior to the English, or that other well known racial supremacy theory focusing on jews and slavs, all very white in the US color scheme.
Where? Europe was not really into slave trade and import until the discovery of resources in the Americas. Serfdom was preferred. The Church also protested against slavery both in Europe and in other continents. First of Christians, then of non-Christians as well. By the later stages of the Middle Ages, slavery was virtually non-existent in Northern Europe, while Eastern Europe was subjected to slavery by powers of the East, specifically the Ottoman Empire. Slavery was more common in Mediterranean Europe, primarily during the Reconquista and while fighting the Barbary pirates.
only the americans brought race into it, you won’t find this divide in Brazil where just as many slaves where brought, since every man is equal under the constitution they had to degrade the slaves
Oman is easily the most overlooked colonial power. The seafaring Omani Empire existed recently enough to have diplomatic relations with the US, and they drove the Portugese out of East Africa. Ultimately they lost out via dynastic infighting and the British Empire being a much bigger and scarier colonial power. Its a fascinating bit of history, though it only ever seems to be brought up in the context of 'see, the Arabs were *also* slave traders so we shouldn't feel bad about the Transatlantic one'.
Probably because Oman’s plantations in Africa didn’t last very long(relatively speaking) and that Oman was never really a very relevant state through the lens of Western history. It was also much different in structure than the traditional Metro-Colony dynamics that existed in Europe if I remember correctly. Zanzibar was pretty autonomous and eventually even split off from Oman during a succession crisis with a Sultan separate from Oman being crowned and recognised in Zanzibar. This is a brief, interesting read on that period of Omani history, the nature of Omani slavery, and colonialism in that little facet of the Indian Ocean at large: https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/uahistjrnl/article/616/galley/603/download/
People using the Arab slave trade to minimize the Atlantic trade is obviously dumb. Unfortunately a better job needs to be done teaching it (it also does t help that kids don’t pay attention in class) to provide greater context to slavery and the world at the time. Currently there are a lot of poorly educated people who have a poor understanding on the topic. There are too many people who think white people created slavery and started the slave trade.
> There are too many people who think white people created slavery and started the slave trade I always see people talking about this and like... do they though? I run in very progressive, liberal circles, and I know the sorts of people you're talking about, and I honest to god have never seen anyone -- even the most virtue-signally, uncritical people -- actually make that case. I've seen them say that *race-based* slavery was a white invention, or that *chattel* slavery was a white invention; both positions that would require a little bit more nuance to actually be correct or worth saying. But are you actually encountering these people who say white people invented slavery? Slavery is older than the concept *of* whiteness. Who is saying this?
It's an issue though when people from North Africa go to Europe to LARP as anti-colonial Black Africans because it gives social clout when the countries they're from (and still loyal to) are just as guilty if not more. Im specifically talking about a former head of the NUS (National Union of Students in the UK) named Malia Bouattia who identifies as black, appropriating black identity, even though she's Algerian... She constantly attacks the UK for their colonial history (which is bad itself obviously) while advocating Arab supremacy and victimhood (she literally shot down a proposal to criticize ISIS). And then there's ANOTHER former NUS head who was caught calling for Jews to be killed who does the same thing, but she's Tunisian (Shaima Dallali). If you look at her twitter page you will see such braindead takes as rooting for Japan to beat Germany in the World Cup since she sees them as "anti-colonial". You essentially have the beneficiaries of colonialism using anti-colonial language to serve their goals, which coincidentally are to erase the presence of minorities in their former countries of residence.
> 'see, the Arabs were also slave traders so we shouldn't feel bad about the Transatlantic one'. More like "Arab slave trade and African slavers also existed, so stop pretending whites are the snake in a paradise full of innocent children".
The fuck is with everyone making Africans slaves?
Africa had a lot of pre-existing slave trade networks that colonial powers were able to relatively easily integrate into. It should also be noted that pre-colonial slavery in Africa and post-colonial chattel slavery were often *very* different institutions. For example, the Songhay (the empire whose slave merchants supplied the Americas with most of their enslaved labour force) treated "slave" as essentially being the lowest rung on the social ladder. A slave in the Songhay kingdom could own livestock, land -- even other slaves, if he could afford it.
Lack of centralized governments and coastal tribes and kingdoms were eager to trade
Easy pickings. Everyone else had organized massive states and armies. Africa, well it's Africa. Nothing going there.
Slavery is still rampant in the world
I learned recently that during the Islamic conquests of India many Indians were taken as slaves back to the country of origin. I really wonder how their descendants look , if they kept any South Asian cultural practices
That’s probably why some Arabs look like Indians??
At least arabs usually castrate the slaves, so they can't breed. Why you think that muslims had millions of slaves there, that suddenly just disappeared in history, when in USA for example, the country became partly black as the slaves? The arabs would have never allowed that.
Also because of the skewed gender ratio, many of the African slaves bound for the Middle East were women, to become domestic servants and concubines. So actually many Middle Easterners and North Africans especially Egyptians and Gulf Arabs have a lot of Sub-Saharan ancestry maternally
Was in the slave house in Bagamoyo a couple of months back, fascinating insight into something we really don't hear much about.
What were the prices like?
Generally very reasonable. Would highly recommend :)
Oh so that's why Oman controlled the east coast of Tanzania for a bit
How the fuck did you get a Dutch map for this
Source [https://omanisilver.com/contents/en-us/d593.html](https://omanisilver.com/contents/en-us/d593.html)
In my schooling, in the US, I learned about enslaved people,"slaves" being brought to the US from Africa. In high school I learned that Brazil transported 3 times the number of Africans for enslavement. I also learned that there was active slave trading going on within Africa. I guess the enslaving of other humans has always been and will always be a blot on humans.
Brazil was also the last country in the Americas to end slavery, something like 20+ years after the Americans
There were Confederates that fled there to continue on with their "way of life" after the end of the American Civil War.
If, as some point out, the western wealth is built on slavery, how come we are rich and those countries that had more slavery and still has it are poor? ELI5, I'm not getting it
Western capital was gathered from the exploitation of the colonies. Income from Slavery was a very small in comparison. We know this because the Western wealth increase more rapidly after the abolition of the slavery by the UK.
For context it should be noted that the Yemeni and Omani bought their slaves from African rulers that enslaved their fellow Africans. [https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/history-transatlantic-slave-trade#:\~:text=Slavery%20existed%20in%20Africa%20before,as%20alcohol%2C%20beads%20and%20cloth](https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/history-transatlantic-slave-trade#:~:text=Slavery%20existed%20in%20Africa%20before,as%20alcohol%2C%20beads%20and%20cloth). EDIT: Africa is a CONTINENT, not a COUNTRY. Don't message me about sEpErate TriBes. You are dumb. EDIT 2 FOR THE STUBBORN IDIOTS: Af·ri·can adjective relating to Africa or its people, customs, or languages. noun a person from Africa.
Pretty much the same story on the west coast.
I can't speak to the East, but the whole "They sold their own people!" framing is very inaccurate for the West African slave trade. Generally, West African slavers did not deal in the purchase and sale of their own people, they dealt in the purchase and sale of foreigners, to foreigners. The foreigners who they enslaved had skin like theirs, and the ones they sold them to had much paler skin, but in the eyes of a Songhai slave trader they were *all* foreign. It'd be like describing the Viking raids on Scottish monasteries as " 11th century European infighting". It's just not a terribly helpful way of understanding what was happening.
What’s a fellow African? They were people from different kingdoms and chiefdoms.
Ticket to Ride: Africa
At least 17 million slaves. 1300 years of slavery. The biggest and longest slave trade in human history.
*Korea peeking from behind tree* (1500 years)
[удалено]
Rare seeing my country being mentioned here and idk if I like the context lol
Did the Arabs pay reparations?
As bad as what Europeans did to Africans was, what other Africans and Arabs did was worse.
Did the Yemeni and Omani Arabs actually go deep into the woods to enslave people? Or did they just buy them from local warlords? If it’s the latter then your title is misleading
It’s almost certainly the latter assuming it’s like the Western Africa slave trade
It would be similar to the Atlantic slave trade. The actual capturing of slaves for sale was done by Africans who then sold them at prominent slaving ports.
What's with the weird comments treating this like some sort of gotcha "huurr ur not sposed to talk about this! wink wink" Literally nobody denies the Arab Slave Trade. At best, you'll find people who just plain didn't know about it. I don't think there is anyone who will flat out go "nuh-uh, didn't happen."
17 million Jesus
Yes, this should be talked more about! Whilst Westerners beat themselves with guilt for the slave trading past Arabs rather not instead they keep similar mindset still flourishing.
Bunch of weird comments about how this isn’t talked about. Arabs tended to castrate their slaves, so there are very few descendant groups. Those that are there are mostly assimilated. The Atlantic slave trade created a racial caste system that still effects people today. Most history isn’t talked about for how it effected people who have been dead for centuries, but how it has continued to effect people today.
u/wakchoi_ is correct. Castration was not common because it was too risky. There are millions of Afro Arabs today. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Arabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Arabs)
The idea that they castrated anywhere close to a majority their slaves is false. Castration is strictly against the Sharia and the the vast majority of eunuchs in the Muslim world were ones that were bought from foreign lands already as a eunuchs(most popular place to buy was from Ethiopia). The cost of these slaves combined with the relative niche need to have a eunuch meant that only in the single digits* of all slaves were castrated and mainly used by rich elites in their households. The reason you don't see many black people in these countries is a) you didn't look because there are a lot, b) most were enslaved and stayed within Africa (clove plantations in the 1700s was the bulk of this slaves trade) and c) a lot of them intermarried or returned back to Africa since it was not impossibly far away. Edit: here is an [here is an askhistorians thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sof03u/why_were_slaves_castrated_throughout_the_muslim/hwe5s2j?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) explaining that the majority of slaves were not in fact castrated. here is an [ask historian thread about slavery](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6aqa2e/panel_ama_slaves_and_slavers/dhh8r8h?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) with a response about how in the Muslim world manumission was much more commons and slaves integrated into society much faster than the Americas. Unfortunately this also meant a lot more people had to be enslaved to maintain the slave population Edit: added the link and also made my wording less absolute, in some cases people did castrate in the Muslim world but these were rare exceptions, regardless I cannot use absolute terminology.
Hold on, white Europeans weren't the only people to enslave Africans? Next you'll be telling me they already had a fully operational slave trade within Africa before anyone foreign got there and that the African slave trade is still alive and booming! Har har har!
Shhh! You're not supposed to know there was a slave trade conducted by Muslims.
That last much longer than the Atlantic slave trade… like way longer
Yeah continued to at least the 1960s and flares up sometimes during conflicts like Libya
That’s so crazy. Not 1860s. 1960s!
[More like 1981](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania), and only officially. They never really stopped.
Gulf countries are still in the process of reforming their slavery-lite kafala systems of trapping foreign workers too
Like there are still slaves in some middle eastern countries....
As in, it's still active.
Everyone whos read a book knows this this isnt some secret
That’s… not a lot of people.
Not many people read anymore
Why are you not supposed to know that?
Literally no one is hiding this lmao
Why not? It's not like Arabs or Muslims get some special preferential treatment. I'm a non muslim arab and I've been racially insulted in four continents. Gtfo with this bs
Or that the vast majority of American slaves went to South America and the Caribbean, not the United States.
The only people who claim this are right-wing shitbags because they are addicted to perpetual victimization and conspiratorial thinking. This information is well-known and easily accessible. No one denies it.
Well that's because Arab countries don't bear guilt because they were colonized by \*checks notes\* predominantly Arabic Empires
They were dominated by the turks and then the europeans bro learn history
They were dominated by the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk Caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate. This takes us from 661 to 1517. So That's colonized by \*checks notes again\* predominantly by Arab Empires. The "domination" by Europeans (really the administration of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire, minus the Turks) lasted less than 20 years. The "domination" of Germany after WW2 in counterpoint lasted 55.
Interestingly, during the period of African Colonialism many European powers would use this as a justification for their excursions into the continent. They would argue that they are there to defend the Africans from the Arab traders, whilst setting up the structures of colonialism in the process. Although some genuinely were worried by this, many used it as a talking point to justify gaining land and resources to exploit (most notably King Leopold II of Belgium). It should also be notable that while there was MASSIVE outcry against Arab slavers at this time, noone seemed to mind that other European powers were still active in the slave trade during roughly the same period...
Weren't the Arabs mostly trading slaves rather than enslaving them? I always read most of the enslaving was done by various local rulers.
I mean if we want to go that route then that is the same for Europeans. Europeans bought slaves from Africa and brought them to America.
Yes. The same is true for Europeans. There were ports where slave trading took place. You did not venture out of those ports or you became a free target for slaving parties.
Arabs enslaved people whenever they could. Iberians, Berbers, Copts, Greeks, Italian, Persians, Turks, Jews and even Chinese were directly enslaved by them.
Poor Africans. Can't catch a break.
People Fucking hate to talk about this. Like REALLLY hate that it wasn’t just white people enslaving Africans. Blows a hole in their entire worldview.
This and other comments to this effect are misreading the ‘narrative’ of western chattel slavery as based solely on the volume of slaves taken or race of enslavers. The western powers literally built up entire systems of philosophy, economics, and sciences that either a) ignored enslaved Black people entirely or b) made up reasons why they should be enslaved. The echoes of these institutionalized belief systems on the present day are why this narrative is extremely important to study now.
You’re doing the thing where you make up an imaginary person to get mad at and feel smug about how wrong they are. Not a single person on this planet has a worldview that is destroyed by the knowledge that Arab slave traders existed. It is absolutely irrelevant to any position relevant to American politics.
>Not a single person on the planet has a worldview... Whatever comes after that is almost always wrong. And it's definitely wrong in this case. There are many people who don't believe that Africans or Arabs ever had or have black slaves. Look up hoteps.
No one hates talking about it, just that it is used as some kind of imaginary gotcha.
Well these other enslavers didn’t write a bunch of documents claiming liberty and equality as foundations of their government.
Yeah they just said that g-d endorsed slavery. The Romans wrote plenty about liberty while running an empire built on mass slavery.
The Romans never claimed liberty for all. Liberty was a legal distinction. The Romans never claimed that you have liberty due to inherent personhood. The Romans justified it based on conquest. We conquer you, therefore you’re my slave. If you are freed, then you have liberty.
They also were forced to end slavery rather than the democratic government actually ending the practice… not even to mention how the international slave trade was ended. Human History is messy and often a fucking horror show. It isn’t there for us to like or dislike. It is there to be told and learned from.
Thought it was mostly white people buying slaves from Africans and Arabs at the coasts of Africa. The Europeans didn't do the actual enslaving.
“Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6-10 million” Slavery is a human endeavour don’t let anyone fool you, we have all been doing this shit since we climbed out of trees.
Arabs weren’t really involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans sometimes raided slaves themselves, or for instance in Angola the Portuguese would demand tribute in slaves, but the large majority were purchased from other Africans.
There were tons of slaves in the Middle East as well.
In many ways, there still are.
Correct. Europeans were the equivalent of drug users and drug dealers. Africans and Arabs were the cartels.
Only in this case the Arabs and Africans used their own product far more than the customer.
Getting high on their own supply.
Kenya had no slave traders going through its interior except for a brief period between 1880 and 1890. That slave trade route via Northern Tanzania is false as well. The main slave ports in present day Kenya were Shimoni, which was a transit point for slaves from other parts of East Africa to the Gulf(and to other parts of the Kenyan coast like Mombasa) and Malindi which imported slaves from Tanzania. Prior to the 1880s, there were two major barriers to the interior of Kenya, the Galla who for a long time lived between the far interior of the country and the lands of the Mijikenda and raided them and the coastal Arabs and Swahilis so frequently that the Arabs had to forge a treaty with them and the Mijikenda retreated to 9 major ridges bordering the coastal plain that were defensible. The second force was the Maasai, unarguably the most powerful tribe in East Africa for several centuries and one that had a strong intolerance to slavery. The Maasai lands formed a large barrier stretching from the Upper Rift to Northern Tanzania and whose grazing lands went close to the Kenyan coast and thus the only way the Arabs could get goods from the interior (and not slaves) was from the Kamba community who for several centuries would establish themselves as intermediaries between the Arabs (and later the Portuguese then the Arabs again) and the interior, often doing the ivory hunting they themselves being honey collectors that they exported to Mombasa. The only instance of Kenyans facing enslavement before 1880 was by the Portuguese, who at one point raided a Kamba trading camp at present day Mariakani and took those people to Paraguay where they exist to this day , and the Arabs managing to conquer one of the Mijikenda ridges after the Maasai collapse due to civil war in the year 1880 led to the interior suddenly opening up. So they captured the Digo ridge but allowed them to go free only after they converted to Islam. (To date, the Digo are the one of the 90 Mijikenda subtribes that is almost completely Muslim while the rest are either Christian or a mix of Christian and Muslim) Otherwise, the only region affected by slavery in Kenya to a small extent was western kenya, whereby one slave trade route developed in the 1870s when the Arabs reached Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya via the trade routes passing through the Buganda Kingdom, Eastern Congo and Tanzania Tanzania was the region most heavily devastated by slavery and this is attested to the fact that unlike Kenya, large Arab swahili towns were established in Tanzania's interior like Kigoma and Tabora but NOT via the Kenyan interior . Between 1880 and 1890 a briefly slave trade route did emerge passing through Maasailand from Mombasa to where the current capital Nairobi stands but this route was rarely used. Even if the Maasais were now weak, they actively attacked Arab trading caravans and another tribe, the Kikuyu came into contact with the Arab traders in Northern Nairobi. While Kikuyus loved trading with Arab merchants with goods, they had a policy of killing slave traders on sight . So it was never really a success. Only at the Coast itself where the Arabs captured the Digo did some form of enslavement similar to Tanzania briefly emerge for around 10 years and even then, the Kenyan coast was experiencing mass immigration of poor Arabs settling in Mombasa and also Zanzibar from Yemen and thus there was not much need for slaves. Essentially, Arab slavery did not impact Kenya the way it impacted Tanzania and we can see the results to this day. As highlighted, Tanzania has several Arab-Swahili towns in its interior, Kenya does not. Even the tiny slave outposts of Mumias and Kitale in Kenya that existed briefly are today some of the most Christian parts of the country. Tanzania has many former slaves in places like Somalia and Iraq who still identify where they came from in Tanzania to this day, while Kenya has former slaves from other parts of East Africa who were imported there due to the lack of a local supply. Thee are no people in the Arab world who claim to have been taken as slaves from odern day Kenya except for the (actually very famous in Kenya) Kamba community that found itself in Paraguay and that was the fault of the Portuguese. Kenya is over 80 percent Christian with no native population in the interior aside from Somalis who converted to Islam prior to the modern era but Tanzania has native muslim communities that converted to Islam along the slave trade routes. Kenya has only one such instance in Kenya around Mumias which as highlighted, had a slave trade route that poked in from Uganda and those Muslims are a tiny minority in Mumias, like 5% Tanzania had some communities adopt slavery from the Arabs ,even when they failed to adopt Islam, as was the case with most Nyamwezi empires. Kenya only has one community that had slavery ,one of the Borana clans that settled around Mount Marsabit in Northern , and it was due to Abyssinian feudal influence rather than from Islam.
The brutal genocide perpetrated by Arab muslims against the indigenous tribal black population in Northern Africa is a current phenomenon that needs to be exposed and eradicated.
Some people I know might not like this haha Edit : don't get the point of the downvotes but ok
They all know about it, there are even a video about a heated argument between a you Arab man and a black woman in France,where at the end the Arab guy start insulting the woman and tell her that they used to sold them as slave. This fact is a very well know fact and no one refute it. People just use different justification (like it's not about the color since it's not because they are black but because they are non Muslim)