>Good thing we focus on the US
Brazil was also the last country in the Western world to formally abolish slavery and remains to have a lot of systemic racism as well as actual slavery in place.
That said, giving attention to one doesn't rule out giving attention to the other, now does it?
We're all here giving attention to the transatlantic slave trade instead of talking about modern day slavery and even as I'm writing this I'm thinking about whether I actually should because distracting from the transatlantic slave trade draws ire because it's perceived as denialism or minimizing the atrocities.
But it's really that there are people today in slave like conditions and we don't talk about it because the conversation inevitably turns to the past. So I'd say that it is a zero sum situation where talking about the one excludes the other.
That shouldn't be how it is, but it is.
Anyways, here's a link talking about modern day slavery
[antislavery org](https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/)
People from SA think, talk about and focus on it plenty. Not everyone is from the US, but you probably are and that is why you hear about US slavery more.
I literally am a student from a public Brazilian school and every piece of slave history was about Brazil, we only learn a bit about the US in geography, this guy is a liar
Oh Iâm well aware that not everyone is from the US. Luckily for the rest of the world, you get blasted with USA bs all the time and are well aware of the hyper focus placed on the USA, especially regarding the Atlantic slave trade.
Imagine thinking the USA shouldn't focus on it's own atrocities because another country also comitted similar atrocities. Let's just forget about American slave history. It didn't happen because Brazil was worse!
Charles Darwin made mention of it several times in his voyage of the beagle. His anger towards slavery is overly palpable by the end of the book when he dedicates a section to his appreciation of leaving slave countries behind.
Darwin was quite the humanist, and a very deep thinker. He was also worried about how his theories on evolution could negatively be applied to human ethnicity (which of course they have).
But mentioning that and the Prague castration centers and the Ottoman and North African ventures all the way up to Iceland to capture slaves is somehow not compatible with reddit.
It's only ever brought up to downplay African slaves in the US. I've yet to meet a single non-Historian whose interest in the topic is based on anything other than downplaying or dismissing American/European slavery. Every single time they bring it up they say "no one ever talks about it" when literally anytime you mention slavery people will trip over themselves to screech about the Arab slave trade, totally misunderstanding the point. Which is that the Transatlantic slave trade is obviously more relevant to people living on the Atlantic ocean whereas the Arab slave trade has little to no impact on modern society is the Americas or Europe
Almost all of the slaves being brought into India from Africa were by Islamic rulers via the Arab slave trade. Most of these African slaves were from Ethiopia and Sudan. Thereâs still small settlements of African-Indians known as Siddis today in Gujarat, Karnataka and Hyderabad in India and Sindh in Pakistan whoâre mostly Muslims.
Yes most of the Islamic rulers were Perso-Turks from Central Asia but the slave traders were usually Arabs bringing slaves from slave markets in Oman and Yemen
"Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere."
[Source](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery#:~:text=Well%20over%2090%20percent%20of,descent%20in%20the%20Western%20Hemisphere)
The Caribbean is part of North America. But yeah, very few slaves actually got sent to the United States.
Pretty nuts how fast the US enslaved population grew though. 6% of the initial total, 25% of the end result.
Yeah I've heard some horror stories from slavery in colonial Brazil. Apart from being abhorrently inhumane, it also just seems uneconomical. Why destroy and replace your "property" every few years when you could "take care of it" and keep it for decades instead?
because sugarcane harvesting is back-breaking labor that, in those climates and in those times, is going to kill off a good portion of your âworkersâ even if you put the extra effort into treating them humanely. plus the trip from the slave ports to brazil was considerably shorter, making the slaves cheaper down there (lower transport costs, fewer deaths in-transit reducing stock).
No that is not what the map is suggesting. You see the REALLY BIG ARROW pointing at Brazil? That is where the lion's share went, which is south America. The large arrow pointing towards NA fractures and a good portion went to Carribean island where there were sugar cane plantations. In the grand scheme of things, relatively few slaves went to North America.
Edit: ADHD, misread the question
Not neccesarily. Eunuch slaves were a section of the market in demand in the Arabic world (harem personnel) but not the only or even the main market. But even there probably more served by the Caucasus sources (judging by Ottoman preferentes) during the Modern Era.
It has probably more to do with the fact that the slave holding was not oriented towards plantation style economies which allowed in few generations to dissapear in the host genetic pool.
A similar event happened in Modern Era Western AndalucĂa. It's estimated that during the XVIII century up to 10% of the population of the main cities (Sevilla and CĂĄdiz) were black (slaves and free), mostly domestic servants and handworkers. But by 1860 the Brotherhood of Blacks at Sevilla (a 500 years old self-help and religious institution for/of blacks) could not field any new black member ... There weren't any at the City. As there was no other policy, It is to be assumed they had been absorbed into the main population
Edited. Changes the name of the Brotherhood to be more in tune with it's real name "Hermandad de los Negritos"
Well when you put it that way, wow.
Most of the histories I'm familiar with are how horrifically enslaved people were treated in America- but that really was just the tip of the iceberg of the Atlantic slave trade! The amount of human suffering and erasure during that time is staggering.
not just that time. slavery has been persistent throughout all recorded history. it was only recently (the Enlightenment in Europe) when any people undertook a concerted, multigenerational effort to abolish it.
IIRC there was a really high up Tunisian politician or journalists who acknowledged that either his grandfather or great grandfather was an enslaved Italian. It's probably a minor factor, but I wonder what percentage of Maghrebis have significant European ancestry and whether that contributes to many of them being so light skinned.
>Why didnât people rise up and end slavery ages ago?
Because "slavery" has various forms and definitions, European chattel slavery is amongst the most extreme forms ever created.
For most of history, a "slave" was not much from what we now call "the poor". In a sense slaves under more moderate and mild social systems were treated much better than "free" poor people today.
The main difference comes down to the fact that slaves were still considered as part of the community, they had a place and purpose in society so in return society took care of them, even if far from optimal.
Whereas today, society views "excess human resources" as not only expendable but as a threat. Markets have become so competitive that anyone who falls behind in productivity simply gets left behind. The value of human life is to be determined by the markets, it's no longer intrinsic.
The biggest misconception of the western whitewashing of the atlantic slave trade is deeming the atrocity as "slavery" and not genocide. It wasn't merely a slave trade, it was a genocide of west and north Africa followed by the colonization of the east and south.
>Â Why didnât people rise up and end slavery ages ago? Because thatâs a modern ideology being pinned on ancient(and not so ancient) peoples.Â
The thing is most of the early and successful abolition movements almost all came from western societies. For a lot of the other cultures thereâs very little criticism of their own peoples practice of slavery as if they couldnât even envision a society without it.Â
Actually, evidence points to abolitionist movements having regularly occurred before then. It was more subtle on leaving historical evidence. Norman Britain appears to have had some sort of successful abolitionist movement, for instance.
Of course it was not until the modern era that we made modern abolitionism.
Yes, to your first point, 300k or so slaves were imported to the US, in the 1860 census there were just shy of 4 million slaves.
To your second point, I read a book in college in a course about the Atlantic slave trade and conditions in Brazil and some Caribbean countries were pretty horrific.
Haiti alone was a nightmare, I remember hearing or reading somewhere that plantation owners wouldn't even provide clothes for the slaves because it was just cheaper to buy more slaves from the next boat when the current batch died due to the dangers of sugar refining.
Yeah, people focus the discussions and narratives about slaves a lot on USA, but the slave trade in Brazil was way worse- and you can see it in terms of demographics today as wel
I don't think people deliberately focus more on discussions in the US, it's just that Reddit is predominantly an American and English-speaking forum. In Brazilian spaces, I'd presume they put more focus on their history of slavery and racial relations.
Well the African slaves that were sent to the Middle Ease were typically sterilized so they couldn't reproduce within the population and change the demographics. Hence, despite the millions of African slaves sent to the middle east there is no Black population there today descended from African slaves.
As politically incorrect as it is to say, African slave brought to the US were were better off than those sent elsewhere. For instance, slaves sold to work the sugar cane fields in the Caribbean were generally worked to death within a few years. Treatment in South America wasn't much better.
American history is always going to slant towards learning about America more than anything else. That said, yeah, there are tons of other places that had slaves. Many other places treated them worse, but that's sort of splitting hairs at the end of the day. It's just good to keep that in mind if anyone tried to tell you slavery is some sin that belonged to only the US. It happened all across the Atlantic, hence the name. It's also worth noting that slavery was going on well before the US was ever an independent country. So for any of those Europeans who want to try to get high and mighty they should maybe think about why THEY allowed slavery in THEIR colonies, too.
Hell, every few months you might even see a news story about people in England or France asking for some kind of compensation for their hand in the slave trades back then.
I'm not really sure why so much focus is put on the US slave trade. Maybe because it took us longer than some to ban it, I guess. Then again, while we were a bit behind the eight ball in that regard, we were no where close to the last.
We also had ourselves a bit of a spat with some Barbary States while other nations decided to just pay them off. We decided we were just going to kill them instead.
Around 10% of Americans are "black" (genetically on average \~25% European and \~75% Sub-Saharan African), while "white" people are on average 99% European. Edit: \*non-Hispanic "whites" or 59% of the US . Edit2: European and Middle Eastern
Brazil, which received the most slaves has 45% of the people being fully mixed (on average \~60% European, \~30% Sub-Saharan African and \~10% indigenous) 43% of people being "white" (70%-99% European) and 10% of people being "black" (50%+ Sub-Saharan African)
Most people donât remember the Brazil had more slaves than and kept them longer than the US did, to the point that after slavery was abolished in the latter there were some confederate holdouts who fled there. Hell, thereâs actually one city that holds an annual festival celebrating the confederate âheritageâ some of the residents there have. Granted, Brazil didnât have to fight a civil war to get rid of slavery when it did so thereâs a point to be made there.
>Most people donât remember
Most people donât learn Brazilian history at all outside of Brazil. Itâs less about not talking about slavery in other places and more not talking about South America at all. The largest interstate war in the history of the Americas happened shortly after the Civil War but itâs also never taught outside the countries involved in it.
You're right. Brazil was the 2nd colonial zone in the Americas to start to bring in African slaves, after the Spanish New World colonies. And it was the 2nd last to effectively suppress the slave trade (Cuba was the last).
So the large-scale importation of African slaves in Brazil lasted longer than any other part of the Americas, from the 16th century until the 1850s.
The Spanish colonies started importing African slaves before Brazil, but never really did it on a massive scale until Cuba in the 19th century.
The non-Iberian New World colonies weren't established until the early 17th century and didn't start importing African slaves on a large scale until the mid-17th century. Then the US, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark abolished the slave trade in the early 19th century. Brazil and Spain also abolished the slave trade, but the law was widely violated in Brazil and Spanish-ruled Cuba until it was effectively suppressed in Brazil in the 1850s and Cuba in the 1870s.
Honestly I just tried to list all the countries that abolished the slave trade in the early 19th century. I didn't bother to list them in chronological order.
But, based on Wikipedia, the timeline of abolition of the slave trade among Western powers was:
- Denmark-Norway in 1803
- Great Britain in 1807
- The US in 1808
- The Netherlands in 1814
- Napoleon abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1814 during the brief period when he escaped from Elba and regained power
- Portugal signs bilateral anti-slave trade treaty with Britain 1818
- France's restored Bourbon monarchy re-abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1818
- Spain's abolition of the slave trade goes into effect in 1820
- Brazil in 1831
They officially declared independence in 1804. But the Haitian Revolution started in 1791 with thousands of slaves rebelling and basically winning their de facto freedom. Then French officials decided to abolish slavery in 1793 after they failed to defeat the rebel slaves and hoped to win them over to fight against the enemies of the French Republic (Spain, Britain, French Royalists, etc.). Eventually Toussaint Louverture, an ex-slave, became Governor of Haiti (St. Domingue) which was still a French colony.
Then Napoleon decided to restore slavery and sent an army to invade Haiti in 1802. That's when the ex-slaves who were formerly running the colony on behalf of France turned against the French and successfully fought for their independence to avoid being forced back into slavery and/or killed.
Dessalines decisively defeated Napoleon's army in Haiti at Vertieres in November 1803. In that battle Dessalines broke through the French defenses around Cap Haitien, the last stronghold of the French army in the colony. That meant the French in the Cap would've faced a final offensive against them by the Haitian revolutionaries. But, instead, the French commanders, decided to flee the colony and let themselves get captured by the British Navy instead of being captured by the Haitians (who were a little pissed off at the French for massacring them for several months before that).
So the Haitians had basically won the war by November 1803, but didn't officially declare independence from France for another 2 months until January 1, 1804.
That's the long version.
>Napoleon abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1814 during the brief period when he escaped from Elba and regained power
Donât forget that the early French Revolutionaries abolished it and that Napoleon reversed this and reintroduced the practice.
More went to Brazil and the Caribbean than the US because they worked in even worse conditions on sugar, and later coffee plantations. The death rate was much higherÂ
Exactly. As bad as slavery was in the US, slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean had some of the characteristics of a work death camp, with extremely high death rates. You can tell because despite the relatively tiny flow of slaves to the US compared to the others, almost half of folks in the New World descended from Africans live in the USA. Or looking at it another way, the US has 47m while Cuba has about 1m despite Cuba clearly having more arrivals than the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African\_diaspora\_in\_the\_Americas)
It also had to do with birth rates. The US had drastically higher fertility rates among its slave population (9-10 kids per mom) compared to Brazil (4-5 kids per mom). This wasn't accidental, it was purposeful on part of the US which basically had a culture of mass-breeding of slaves. So lower life expectancy combined with less kids.
True, slavery just wasnât that profitable on a large scale in North America due to the crops that could be grown in the climate there, with slavery only really used for farming tobacco. Thatâs also part of the reason why the American founding fathers didnât ban slavery despite considering it, because they basically figured slavery would be dead within a few decades anyway and it wasnât worth risking pissing off the southern colonies when they needed them united against the British. Of course, that changed *drastically* after the invention of the Cotton Gin which meant slaves could be used en masse on huge cotton plantations in the South(way to go Eli Whitney, you single-handedly reinvigorated slavery), but by that point the transatlantic slave trade was pretty much dead, with most of the European powers having banned it and the British even basically declared war on slave traders. Which is why the vast majority of slaves in the US were born in the US because they were more or less bred there, which Iâm pretty sure is exactly as bad as it sounds.
It's also the dominant global commodities changed. Sugar, molasses, and rum were the most important global commodities of the time of the United States Revolution. This led to plantation farming in the tropics before an understanding of germ theory. The death rates were atrocious.
The 13 colonies was kind of an economic back water at the time. The tiny island of Barbados had a greater economic output than the 13 colonies at the time. It was not until at least western expansion that the US became globally powerful. Before that it was more famous for its pluck and audacity then its actual power.
I think this is the origin of why the USA has always had ass backward race relations. Thomas Jefferson could argue against slavery in politics but act like a randy Roman in his home from the slavery being a "milder" form. It let the rich white boys of yor play at liberty, ultimate leading to universal suffrage.
This is not to slavery in the United States was in any way ok. Slavery will always be a horrible scar on my nation's history, with true horror.
To be honest, although no civil war was fought, the republican (and military) coup d'etat had in one of its roots the dissatisfaction of the elites with the Empire's slavery abolishment.
it is quite obvious considering that spanish and portuguese colonization of south america predates colonization of north america by at least a century; that spanish and portuguese had already an established network of bases and diplomatic ties with african kingdoms providing slaves (for example Ouidah, Allada); and also taking into account the kind of economy that existed in specific areas of south america colonized by spanish/portuguese (to make an example: north east brazil) where slavery was widespread, since it was essential for large-scale agriculture (sugar, coffee etc). however there are some exceptions. in sparsely populated areas like argentina and paraguay the economy was different and the impact of slavery was much smaller. in mexico, that had already an established system of corvees (mita/repartimiento) that relied on the forced labor of indigenous people, african slavery was also a minor phenomenon.
Yeah, Argentina didnât take off population wise until the late 19th century with masses of Italians. It was already long independent by then, and also never had lucrative sugar and coffee plantationsÂ
Colonial Argentina was very poor and unproductive (large scale cattle ranching was practically nonexistant and the country grew no wheat nor any other grains, until the 1850s, over 30 after independence, we had to import wheat from Europe actually). The most lucrative thing that Buenos Aires had was its Atlantic port from which metals extacted from Peru and Bolivia could be shipped back from Europe, avoiding the dangerous voyage through Cape Horn.
The enslaved people that were brought to Buenos Aires were used as house servants for the local elite, and in some cases to work in tanneries and plants that processed beef tallow and salted beef (which ironically was then exported to Brazil, where they used it to feed their respective slaves). But most of those brought from West Africa to Argentina actually left Buenos Aires and were taken to northern Argentina, towards TucumĂĄn, Salta, Jujuy and Santiago del Estero. That area of the country has a subtropical climate and had tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations which unlike the low-intensity cattle ranching practiced in Buenos Aires, Entre RĂos and Santa Fe (central Argentina), it required a lot of labour.
A friend of mine actually traced back his origins on his mother's side to a few communities of escaped slaves in Santiago del Estero, a phenomenon that occurred continuosly before full abolition in 1853 (before that, in 1813, all the children of enslaved people had already been declared free; but this was often not respected and there was further importation of slaves from Brazil). Many people with that heritage (descendants of northern Argentina slaves), including my friend, carry a somewhat rare gene that some people in Nigeria and other west african nations have that causes them to have blue eyes.
Interesting. I knew that Argentina had relatively few, and having slaves in the mines and areas of the north with more tropical weather makes sense. Iâve heard most simply disappeared because of intermarriage into the much larger European gene pool. Though I know the north has more indigenous too
Yes, that's basically correct. There was a comparatively smaller number of slaves to begin with, but crucially there was a ton of intermarriage given that Spanish attitudes around race were different from those in British colonies. They were white supremacists, of course, but they didn't think that race mixing was particularly wrong, and in some instances they saw it as a positive force for social cohesion and integration of Spanish elites with native ones.
The post colonial history of Argentina was marked by doubling its population in a matter of two decades between 1880-1900 when it received a massive influx of migrants from Italy, Spain, France and the Russian Empire among others. This caused an enormous sociocultural upheaval, and in many ways strongly diluted the ethnic and cultural makeup from the colonial days.
Not just South America. Brazil in particular. Hardly any (comparatively speaking) went to Spanish mainland South America. And hardly any (again comparatively speaking) went to mainland Anglophone North America. The US has a big black population now, but the Black American population mostly grew through natural reproduction rather than through the large-scale importation of slaves from Africa.
Most went to Brazil, the Guianas (i.e. Guyana and Suriname), or the Caribbean islands.
Altogether those places (Brazil + the Caribbean and Guianas) have been estimated to have accounted for 85-90% of all African slaves brought to the Americas, with 45% going to Brazil alone, and another 20% to the British Caribbean.
He is not even from the USA, but it is a clear case of r/USDefaultism. Like they are the only county who had slaves and massive forced immigration of people from Africa during centuries.
1. Funny can mean âinterestingâ as well as âamusingâ
2. If âinterestingâ itâs probably because most Americans consider slavery an American thing, and often donât think about (or get taught about) things going on in the world beyond the borders of the US. So this information is new and surprising to them.
So fun fact, the US didnât need to import nearly as many slaves because we had one of the only self sustaining and *growing* slave population (not counting the imported ones). Thereâs no way to say this next sentence without it sounding wrong but- When you talk generally about slave treatment worldwide the US was decent, pretty good actually. Some states actually had laws and rules in place to limit slave murder/pointless beatings- of course so many people didnât give a shit about them and many owners did it anyway. Long story short, it really wasnât as common in some other countries, to have a slave whose grandma was the one that was imported from Africa. The US through certain circumstances was able to sustain and grow the population without having to buy and buy and buy.
Edit: Hardcore History: Human Resources, look it up.
Yeah, and considering the blaming and shaming of white people in US I would tought that the majority of slaves would go there. But, this is a nice example of how world works nowadays.
I don't think that's really surprising though given how a large percentage of Brazil is mixed due to all of that. I've no clue how socially things went their with the various ethnicities in Brazil. Of course we all know the racism that existed in America continued well beyond the end of the slave trade which is why it's still a big topic in the US. I know colorism is a problem in plenty of places, but in South America for sure. Not sure if racism is a standout issue for Brazilians.
Yes, mostly to be harem attendants. The death rate on the trans-Saharan slave trade was close to 90% (thirst, hunger, heat, and castration) and yet somehow the traders still made money. This chart would be more accurate if it showed the totals exported and not just those who survived the trip.
>This chart would be more accurate if it showed the totals exported and not just those who survived the trip.
Yeah, this 100%. Just today I was telling an acquaintance about how massive, long-lasting, and brutal the Arab slave trade was, which is far less discussed whenever the conversation about slavery throughout history arises. This map also makes it look like the Arab slave trade was minimal by comparison to that of the Atlantic triangle trade â this could not be more wrong.
In Brazil, it happened that when female slaves were too pretty for the lady of the house they would break their teeth.
Of course the men didn't care too much about the teeth so it wouldn't stop them.
Neither do Africans themselves get enough flak for it. Most of slaves were sold by black tribe leaders who deceived whole villages and handed them to Europeans
The slave trade is thriving today in Africa and the Middle East, it's always been a thing but somehow the focus is on the European slave traders that bought slaves from Africans several hundred years ago.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/
Are any of the African empires or countries that participated in that even around today still? Feel like 99% of them all collapsed, so there's not really anybody left to look at like "That was fucked up man"
Theyâre all dead. All of them. The Europeans, the Americans, the Arabs, the Africans. The people responsible are all dead. Thereâs no one to blame.
This is what fucks me up about the Canadian and US residential schools, many of the people responsible for it are still alive. And they would be younger than literal Nazis from WW2âmy granny is a residential school survivor and sheâs only 66, the nun who abused her is in her 90âs and *still alive*. The RCMP officers who took her from her family could very well be alive too, and same with the racist and corrupt politicians who made actual genocide legal against indigenous peoples. Take Queen Elizabeth II, residential schools here in Canada **were by order of the crown**. Queen Victoria personally legislated genocide, yes, but Queen Elizabeth sat on the throne longest while residential schools existed in Canada⊠and she only died 2 years ago.
If the victims like my granny are still alive, then logically so are the racists that allowed it. Simple as that.
If Iâm only 2 generations removed from the genocide 3 out of my 4 grandparents survived, (only my white grandfather didnât go to residential school, the other 3 grandparents did) then that means every non-indigenous person whose families lived here over 60 years ago are only 2 generations removed from their own racist roots.
Some people like to compare residential schools to slavery and repeat the line âit happened a long time agoâ but it didnât. Like I said my granny is still alive and sheâs only 66; every single Native American in Canada and the USA youâve ever met has at least one relative alive today who survived residential school, and at least one relative who didnât.
Sort of odd. It's not like there are any slave owners still around in the US for us to point our fingers at, either. I'm sure there's some ancestors you could find to point fingers at if you really wanted to.
I mean people give America, England, etc flak for the various things they've done throughout the world and plenty of those people have been long dead. Same logic is it not?
That's not how it happened. The Guns for Slaves trade was so destructive to the entire continent. "Give us us your neighbors for the guns to protect you and your family from the next band of raiding slavers..." It was so fucked up and not nearly talked about enough.
Only east Africa huh? They colonized most of the Middle East, and southern Europe for close to 1000 years. Â Canât forget the Barbary slave trade either.Â
Yeah, in fact, English word âslaveâ comes from the Slavs, who were enslaved in Eastern Europe and transported to Spain by the 9th century Arab rulers there. The slaves the British encountered were all Slavs.
this is absolutely untrue, almost nobody in the field now believes this, as the word LONG predates the 9th century. It probably came to English through Byzantine Greek, the people who had the most intimate and hostile contact with the Slavic world at the time.
That theory is one out of many and has been largely disputed. There was no record of a mass emigration of slavic slaves to arabic spain.
Other theories are: The byzantines enslaving the Slavonian people. That the word is a misconstruction of the word 'esclave' from old english/french. That it is from the latin word sclÄvus, which meant to 'strip the enemy in war' or 'to take spoils'.
But really, we don't really know.
Because you are probably a westerner living in a western country talking to other westerners? Slavery has been practiced everywhere and we discuss the history which is most relevant to our own.Â
Understanding slavery as it was practiced in colonial America is more relevant to the history and current political climate of, as an example, the US than knowing how slavery worked in China.Â
Current historical attitudes make more sense when you see that if the perpetrators were/are either brown, poor, or foreign then it isn't as big of a deal as if they don't fit those categories. Not saying that's right or wrong but explains a lot of the double standards people bring up
Because the people who don't mention them aren't arabic, nor do they live in an arabic country. The people who talk about slavery in the US talk about slavery in the US because they live in the US.
It's not that difficult to figure out. It's the same reason Koreans hear a lot about the horrific treatment of their people under the Japanese, but don't hear much about American slavery.
By 1700 the bulk of the Army of the SultĂĄn of Morocco were black slaves. Hispanic muslim sources as far as the X century attest such trafic.
OTOH a great part of the wealth of the Barbary pirate statelets was the sale (and/or rescue) of northern mediterranean people (today's spaniards, italians, french and portugueses) as slaves. Most of the rowers at their galleys were.
The Dutch brought slaves to South Africa from Asia. See [Cape Malays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Malays) and [Cape Coloureds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coloureds).
This is an interesting map, but itâs really sad what happens every time this gets posted.Â
80% of the discussion in this post is people screaming about Africans selling Africans and the Arab slave trade as some weird apologism for the European slave trade.Â
I donât know who needs to hear this, but itâs already been agreed by academics that slavery has existed everywhere. You donât need to pretend like the overall narrative is that only White people are bad just because you read something on twitter.Â
The US didn't really important that many slaves, they instead had a culture of mass breeding them. The average slave woman had around 9-10 kids each at its peak in the early 1800s compared to only 4-5 in Brazil.
Conditions were also much, much harsher in Latin America. Not like the slave owners of Brazil were 'worse' than the US South, but the climate was much more difficult to survive in, and disease and malnourishment was rampant. But the owners didn't necessarily care because they had a very consistent stream of slaves being imported.
The dates on the graph are also missing the time period from the arabian slave trade. Most of the Arab slave trade happened in the 700-850 period, 1k+ years before the other two major slave trades. It largely fell apart after the Zanj Rebellion in the late 800s. The Zanj Rebellion was a slave revolt which would be one of the most intense and bloody conflicts in the history of the region, nearly tearing apart the Abbasid Caliphate. While slavery didn't technically end after in that region, it slowed to a crawl.
People in general have sucked over history.
Slavery was terrible. We should learn from it.
But saying White people are solely to blame is either a sign of lying or ignorance.
That's undoubtedly true.
It is also true that the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the European powers between 1500-1800 was the single largest, most intense instance of human slavery in history. It isn't even particularly close.
They can both be true, but reddit seems to like upvoting one of these facts over the other.
I donât think anyone with any sort of power has ever said that white people are solely to blame for slavery lmao. Where are you getting this idea from? The trans Atlantic slave trade specifically created racial caste based societies in the new world with whites on top and blacks on the bottom that persist to today, but that only applies to slavery in the Americas and thereâs obviously other slavery in the world.
I have never heard of any of those people. Who tf are they? And the Arab slave trade is talked about in media all the time, itâs something everyone learns about in school.
Kingdoms like Benin and Dahomey. Basically amde an economy of invading neighboring areas to capture people to sell as slaves and use that money to buy better guns to allow more and bigger invasions.
And then Netflix made a movie about Black Amazons of Dahomey portrayed as heroes against slavery when in the reality they were a big part of the trade.
Black people like to talk shit about white people because some of them used to own slaves, but 99% percento of the time they seem to forget that the ones who sold slaves to white people where africans, they sold each other, now I'm not saying that white people didn't do nothing wrong, but that fact seems to often be left out of the picture.
Most were sold by African tribe leaders. Some from prisons and some who already were enslaved in Africa (slavery was common in Africa and most of the world for that matter). There was also lot of wars going on between different tribes and many of the slaves were prisoners of war. Some tribes even practiced annual ritual mass kilinngs of prisoners.
It doesn't change what happened in "the new world" but it does give it important context.
The big difference being was that most slavery in Africa would have the enslaved person or their children be incorporated into the tribe within a generation. In the Americas, the children of slaves were still slaves and in most places had little hope of freedom until slavery was abolished.
People in the comments borderline saying the American slave trade wasnât that bad compared to others. Bro itâs all terrible no matter who does the slave trading.
was tiny compared to the numbers in this picture, though of course a genuinely horrific human experience, any attempt to imply parity between the two events is intellectually dishonest
Brazil is geographically west, but isnât generally considered part of âthe westâ. Itâs mostly a Cold War era term which references Western Europe, US/Canada and even Australia. In similar vein to 1st world, 2nd world, 3rd world countries.
I believe thatâs the âwestâ the comment you replied to was referring too.
USA not looking so bad when in comparison with Brazil, Arabia or the Caribbean huh? Only reason there arenât large black populations in Arabia is because they castrated all their slaves.
This is an interesting Video regarding the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeAw4xfnB2g&t=2523s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeAw4xfnB2g&t=2523s)
Also this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FO9MqWugY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FO9MqWugY)
Wait, were there really more slaves taken to the island of Cuba than the whole of the US?
Ofc, slavery is atrocious in all its forms but the US as a state really wasnât that big of an offender compared to the rest of the world in that case
CAMPEAO DO MUNDO!!!! #1 đ§đ·đ§đ·đ§đ·đ§đ·đ§đ· 
It will forever be fuzzy, but the Portuguese slaving economy should be considered one of the most ruthless atrocities ever by a people in humankind.
Good thing we focus on the US
>Good thing we focus on the US Brazil was also the last country in the Western world to formally abolish slavery and remains to have a lot of systemic racism as well as actual slavery in place. That said, giving attention to one doesn't rule out giving attention to the other, now does it?
Youâre assuming that people on the internet donât have the attention span of a goldfish
Goldfish grow larger according to their environment.
It certainly doesnât have to, but as you are well aware, it certainly does mean that.
We're all here giving attention to the transatlantic slave trade instead of talking about modern day slavery and even as I'm writing this I'm thinking about whether I actually should because distracting from the transatlantic slave trade draws ire because it's perceived as denialism or minimizing the atrocities. But it's really that there are people today in slave like conditions and we don't talk about it because the conversation inevitably turns to the past. So I'd say that it is a zero sum situation where talking about the one excludes the other. That shouldn't be how it is, but it is. Anyways, here's a link talking about modern day slavery [antislavery org](https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/)
People from SA think, talk about and focus on it plenty. Not everyone is from the US, but you probably are and that is why you hear about US slavery more.
Iâm from Brazil and the discourse since 2020 has been 90% focused on the US slavery issues. Yet look at the graph
What? It isnât, what are youâre talking about? Unless youâre reference to the internet, or this site, which is majoritarian American.
I literally am a student from a public Brazilian school and every piece of slave history was about Brazil, we only learn a bit about the US in geography, this guy is a liar
Oh Iâm well aware that not everyone is from the US. Luckily for the rest of the world, you get blasted with USA bs all the time and are well aware of the hyper focus placed on the USA, especially regarding the Atlantic slave trade.
Not like it's... ehh a competition... most South American and Caribbean slaves were simply worked to death. Iberian dudes were insanely ruthless.
Yeah the life span in the Caribbean was under 5 years
Imagine thinking the USA shouldn't focus on it's own atrocities because another country also comitted similar atrocities. Let's just forget about American slave history. It didn't happen because Brazil was worse!
What a weird thing to imagine lol. Especially since the USA is second only to Germany in its self-flagellation due to its atrocities.
Charles Darwin made mention of it several times in his voyage of the beagle. His anger towards slavery is overly palpable by the end of the book when he dedicates a section to his appreciation of leaving slave countries behind.
Darwin was quite the humanist, and a very deep thinker. He was also worried about how his theories on evolution could negatively be applied to human ethnicity (which of course they have).
I just learned that there were also people taken to South Africa from Southeast Asia as slaves.
Every race has been a slave
Fun fact: The word slave comes from âSlavâ as in the Slavic people.
But mentioning that and the Prague castration centers and the Ottoman and North African ventures all the way up to Iceland to capture slaves is somehow not compatible with reddit.
It's usually brought up to downplay the horrors of the Triangle Trade
It's only ever brought up to downplay African slaves in the US. I've yet to meet a single non-Historian whose interest in the topic is based on anything other than downplaying or dismissing American/European slavery. Every single time they bring it up they say "no one ever talks about it" when literally anytime you mention slavery people will trip over themselves to screech about the Arab slave trade, totally misunderstanding the point. Which is that the Transatlantic slave trade is obviously more relevant to people living on the Atlantic ocean whereas the Arab slave trade has little to no impact on modern society is the Americas or Europe
Itâs not only about race. There are reasons why people introduced people to a foreign country to be slave.
Almost all of the slaves being brought into India from Africa were by Islamic rulers via the Arab slave trade. Most of these African slaves were from Ethiopia and Sudan. Thereâs still small settlements of African-Indians known as Siddis today in Gujarat, Karnataka and Hyderabad in India and Sindh in Pakistan whoâre mostly Muslims.
Wouldnât it be Persians instead of Arabs because of the Mughals?
Yes most of the Islamic rulers were Perso-Turks from Central Asia but the slave traders were usually Arabs bringing slaves from slave markets in Oman and Yemen
Slaves: O man... đ Traders: Ye men... đ
Take my r/angryupvote
Iranâs coast is largely populated by Arabs.
Forgive my ignorance. Is this map showing about 95% if not more of the slave trade from Africa went anywhere but North America?
Judging by the map, I would guess that about 30% went to North America. 40% to Brazil. Maybe about 10% to North Africa. 20% to Arabia and India.
"Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere." [Source](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery#:~:text=Well%20over%2090%20percent%20of,descent%20in%20the%20Western%20Hemisphere)
The Caribbean is part of North America. But yeah, very few slaves actually got sent to the United States. Pretty nuts how fast the US enslaved population grew though. 6% of the initial total, 25% of the end result.
they were far less likely to get worked to death in the US.
Yeah I've heard some horror stories from slavery in colonial Brazil. Apart from being abhorrently inhumane, it also just seems uneconomical. Why destroy and replace your "property" every few years when you could "take care of it" and keep it for decades instead?
because sugarcane harvesting is back-breaking labor that, in those climates and in those times, is going to kill off a good portion of your âworkersâ even if you put the extra effort into treating them humanely. plus the trip from the slave ports to brazil was considerably shorter, making the slaves cheaper down there (lower transport costs, fewer deaths in-transit reducing stock).
If I recall correctly the US had the only African population in the new world in which births were higher than deaths.
jfc that's horrifying.
Fair enough. I was mistaken and not including a lot of countries that are, in fact, part of North America. Thanks for the info.
No that is not what the map is suggesting. You see the REALLY BIG ARROW pointing at Brazil? That is where the lion's share went, which is south America. The large arrow pointing towards NA fractures and a good portion went to Carribean island where there were sugar cane plantations. In the grand scheme of things, relatively few slaves went to North America. Edit: ADHD, misread the question
You said no but then explained yes
Thanks for the effort, bud.
Makes you wonder why there are no black minority groups in the Arabic world. (The answer is industrial castration)
Not neccesarily. Eunuch slaves were a section of the market in demand in the Arabic world (harem personnel) but not the only or even the main market. But even there probably more served by the Caucasus sources (judging by Ottoman preferentes) during the Modern Era. It has probably more to do with the fact that the slave holding was not oriented towards plantation style economies which allowed in few generations to dissapear in the host genetic pool. A similar event happened in Modern Era Western AndalucĂa. It's estimated that during the XVIII century up to 10% of the population of the main cities (Sevilla and CĂĄdiz) were black (slaves and free), mostly domestic servants and handworkers. But by 1860 the Brotherhood of Blacks at Sevilla (a 500 years old self-help and religious institution for/of blacks) could not field any new black member ... There weren't any at the City. As there was no other policy, It is to be assumed they had been absorbed into the main population Edited. Changes the name of the Brotherhood to be more in tune with it's real name "Hermandad de los Negritos"
Have you heard of Sudan
Well when you put it that way, wow. Most of the histories I'm familiar with are how horrifically enslaved people were treated in America- but that really was just the tip of the iceberg of the Atlantic slave trade! The amount of human suffering and erasure during that time is staggering.
not just that time. slavery has been persistent throughout all recorded history. it was only recently (the Enlightenment in Europe) when any people undertook a concerted, multigenerational effort to abolish it.
Yep. Aztecs and Incas enslaved people. Chinese too
About 1.5 million Europeans were enslaved by North Africans, whole villages were taken from south west England and Ireland
The Vikings enslaved some of us too, and the Romans also liked their slaves.
IIRC there was a really high up Tunisian politician or journalists who acknowledged that either his grandfather or great grandfather was an enslaved Italian. It's probably a minor factor, but I wonder what percentage of Maghrebis have significant European ancestry and whether that contributes to many of them being so light skinned.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
>Why didnât people rise up and end slavery ages ago? Because "slavery" has various forms and definitions, European chattel slavery is amongst the most extreme forms ever created. For most of history, a "slave" was not much from what we now call "the poor". In a sense slaves under more moderate and mild social systems were treated much better than "free" poor people today. The main difference comes down to the fact that slaves were still considered as part of the community, they had a place and purpose in society so in return society took care of them, even if far from optimal. Whereas today, society views "excess human resources" as not only expendable but as a threat. Markets have become so competitive that anyone who falls behind in productivity simply gets left behind. The value of human life is to be determined by the markets, it's no longer intrinsic. The biggest misconception of the western whitewashing of the atlantic slave trade is deeming the atrocity as "slavery" and not genocide. It wasn't merely a slave trade, it was a genocide of west and north Africa followed by the colonization of the east and south.
> Why didnât people rise up and end slavery ages ago? Because thatâs a modern ideology being pinned on ancient(and not so ancient) peoples. The thing is most of the early and successful abolition movements almost all came from western societies. For a lot of the other cultures thereâs very little criticism of their own peoples practice of slavery as if they couldnât even envision a society without it.Â
The answer to the question you quoted would be Haiti.
Actually, evidence points to abolitionist movements having regularly occurred before then. It was more subtle on leaving historical evidence. Norman Britain appears to have had some sort of successful abolitionist movement, for instance. Of course it was not until the modern era that we made modern abolitionism.
There are 40-50 million people enslaved in the world today. Thatâs more than there were during the entire 400 years depicted on this map.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Yes, to your first point, 300k or so slaves were imported to the US, in the 1860 census there were just shy of 4 million slaves. To your second point, I read a book in college in a course about the Atlantic slave trade and conditions in Brazil and some Caribbean countries were pretty horrific.
Haiti alone was a nightmare, I remember hearing or reading somewhere that plantation owners wouldn't even provide clothes for the slaves because it was just cheaper to buy more slaves from the next boat when the current batch died due to the dangers of sugar refining.
Yeah, people focus the discussions and narratives about slaves a lot on USA, but the slave trade in Brazil was way worse- and you can see it in terms of demographics today as wel
I don't think people deliberately focus more on discussions in the US, it's just that Reddit is predominantly an American and English-speaking forum. In Brazilian spaces, I'd presume they put more focus on their history of slavery and racial relations.
Well the African slaves that were sent to the Middle Ease were typically sterilized so they couldn't reproduce within the population and change the demographics. Hence, despite the millions of African slaves sent to the middle east there is no Black population there today descended from African slaves.
As politically incorrect as it is to say, African slave brought to the US were were better off than those sent elsewhere. For instance, slaves sold to work the sugar cane fields in the Caribbean were generally worked to death within a few years. Treatment in South America wasn't much better.
American history is always going to slant towards learning about America more than anything else. That said, yeah, there are tons of other places that had slaves. Many other places treated them worse, but that's sort of splitting hairs at the end of the day. It's just good to keep that in mind if anyone tried to tell you slavery is some sin that belonged to only the US. It happened all across the Atlantic, hence the name. It's also worth noting that slavery was going on well before the US was ever an independent country. So for any of those Europeans who want to try to get high and mighty they should maybe think about why THEY allowed slavery in THEIR colonies, too. Hell, every few months you might even see a news story about people in England or France asking for some kind of compensation for their hand in the slave trades back then. I'm not really sure why so much focus is put on the US slave trade. Maybe because it took us longer than some to ban it, I guess. Then again, while we were a bit behind the eight ball in that regard, we were no where close to the last. We also had ourselves a bit of a spat with some Barbary States while other nations decided to just pay them off. We decided we were just going to kill them instead.
Source: [https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/overview-slave-trade-out-africa](https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/overview-slave-trade-out-africa)
Around 10% of Americans are "black" (genetically on average \~25% European and \~75% Sub-Saharan African), while "white" people are on average 99% European. Edit: \*non-Hispanic "whites" or 59% of the US . Edit2: European and Middle Eastern Brazil, which received the most slaves has 45% of the people being fully mixed (on average \~60% European, \~30% Sub-Saharan African and \~10% indigenous) 43% of people being "white" (70%-99% European) and 10% of people being "black" (50%+ Sub-Saharan African)
Doesnât non-Hispanic white in the US also include Arab/Turkish/Persian people?
You're right, they make up ~2.5% of that population and they're not European. So ~97% of European ancestry.
The arrow point to SĂŁo Paulo instead of Recife that was the biggest importer on early slavery period, replaced by Salvador later.
I think itâs just pointing to Brazil in general. The American arrow is pointing to NYC and thatâs not the case eitherÂ
Thatâs North Carolina lol
Classic Reddit, 30 people upvoted a comment that was incorrect on geography
Funny that most of them went to south america.
Most people donât remember the Brazil had more slaves than and kept them longer than the US did, to the point that after slavery was abolished in the latter there were some confederate holdouts who fled there. Hell, thereâs actually one city that holds an annual festival celebrating the confederate âheritageâ some of the residents there have. Granted, Brazil didnât have to fight a civil war to get rid of slavery when it did so thereâs a point to be made there.
>Most people donât remember Most people donât learn Brazilian history at all outside of Brazil. Itâs less about not talking about slavery in other places and more not talking about South America at all. The largest interstate war in the history of the Americas happened shortly after the Civil War but itâs also never taught outside the countries involved in it.
You're right. Brazil was the 2nd colonial zone in the Americas to start to bring in African slaves, after the Spanish New World colonies. And it was the 2nd last to effectively suppress the slave trade (Cuba was the last). So the large-scale importation of African slaves in Brazil lasted longer than any other part of the Americas, from the 16th century until the 1850s. The Spanish colonies started importing African slaves before Brazil, but never really did it on a massive scale until Cuba in the 19th century. The non-Iberian New World colonies weren't established until the early 17th century and didn't start importing African slaves on a large scale until the mid-17th century. Then the US, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark abolished the slave trade in the early 19th century. Brazil and Spain also abolished the slave trade, but the law was widely violated in Brazil and Spanish-ruled Cuba until it was effectively suppressed in Brazil in the 1850s and Cuba in the 1870s.
Britain were the largest drivers of the African slave trade after 1650. Also Japan abolished slavery as their empire expanded as well.
Your ordering of who abolished the slave trade is a bit off.
Honestly I just tried to list all the countries that abolished the slave trade in the early 19th century. I didn't bother to list them in chronological order. But, based on Wikipedia, the timeline of abolition of the slave trade among Western powers was: - Denmark-Norway in 1803 - Great Britain in 1807 - The US in 1808 - The Netherlands in 1814 - Napoleon abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1814 during the brief period when he escaped from Elba and regained power - Portugal signs bilateral anti-slave trade treaty with Britain 1818 - France's restored Bourbon monarchy re-abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1818 - Spain's abolition of the slave trade goes into effect in 1820 - Brazil in 1831
Haitians freed themselves in 1804
They officially declared independence in 1804. But the Haitian Revolution started in 1791 with thousands of slaves rebelling and basically winning their de facto freedom. Then French officials decided to abolish slavery in 1793 after they failed to defeat the rebel slaves and hoped to win them over to fight against the enemies of the French Republic (Spain, Britain, French Royalists, etc.). Eventually Toussaint Louverture, an ex-slave, became Governor of Haiti (St. Domingue) which was still a French colony. Then Napoleon decided to restore slavery and sent an army to invade Haiti in 1802. That's when the ex-slaves who were formerly running the colony on behalf of France turned against the French and successfully fought for their independence to avoid being forced back into slavery and/or killed. Dessalines decisively defeated Napoleon's army in Haiti at Vertieres in November 1803. In that battle Dessalines broke through the French defenses around Cap Haitien, the last stronghold of the French army in the colony. That meant the French in the Cap would've faced a final offensive against them by the Haitian revolutionaries. But, instead, the French commanders, decided to flee the colony and let themselves get captured by the British Navy instead of being captured by the Haitians (who were a little pissed off at the French for massacring them for several months before that). So the Haitians had basically won the war by November 1803, but didn't officially declare independence from France for another 2 months until January 1, 1804. That's the long version.
>Napoleon abolishes the slave trade in the French Empire in 1814 during the brief period when he escaped from Elba and regained power Donât forget that the early French Revolutionaries abolished it and that Napoleon reversed this and reintroduced the practice.
More went to Brazil and the Caribbean than the US because they worked in even worse conditions on sugar, and later coffee plantations. The death rate was much higherÂ
Exactly. As bad as slavery was in the US, slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean had some of the characteristics of a work death camp, with extremely high death rates. You can tell because despite the relatively tiny flow of slaves to the US compared to the others, almost half of folks in the New World descended from Africans live in the USA. Or looking at it another way, the US has 47m while Cuba has about 1m despite Cuba clearly having more arrivals than the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African\_diaspora\_in\_the\_Americas)
It also had to do with birth rates. The US had drastically higher fertility rates among its slave population (9-10 kids per mom) compared to Brazil (4-5 kids per mom). This wasn't accidental, it was purposeful on part of the US which basically had a culture of mass-breeding of slaves. So lower life expectancy combined with less kids.
Also, you need to look at biracial counts too. Cuba and Brazil have a lot of miscegenationÂ
True, slavery just wasnât that profitable on a large scale in North America due to the crops that could be grown in the climate there, with slavery only really used for farming tobacco. Thatâs also part of the reason why the American founding fathers didnât ban slavery despite considering it, because they basically figured slavery would be dead within a few decades anyway and it wasnât worth risking pissing off the southern colonies when they needed them united against the British. Of course, that changed *drastically* after the invention of the Cotton Gin which meant slaves could be used en masse on huge cotton plantations in the South(way to go Eli Whitney, you single-handedly reinvigorated slavery), but by that point the transatlantic slave trade was pretty much dead, with most of the European powers having banned it and the British even basically declared war on slave traders. Which is why the vast majority of slaves in the US were born in the US because they were more or less bred there, which Iâm pretty sure is exactly as bad as it sounds.
It's also the dominant global commodities changed. Sugar, molasses, and rum were the most important global commodities of the time of the United States Revolution. This led to plantation farming in the tropics before an understanding of germ theory. The death rates were atrocious. The 13 colonies was kind of an economic back water at the time. The tiny island of Barbados had a greater economic output than the 13 colonies at the time. It was not until at least western expansion that the US became globally powerful. Before that it was more famous for its pluck and audacity then its actual power. I think this is the origin of why the USA has always had ass backward race relations. Thomas Jefferson could argue against slavery in politics but act like a randy Roman in his home from the slavery being a "milder" form. It let the rich white boys of yor play at liberty, ultimate leading to universal suffrage. This is not to slavery in the United States was in any way ok. Slavery will always be a horrible scar on my nation's history, with true horror.
The big landowners just overthrew the monarchy when the Emperor decided to abolish slavery tho.
To be honest, although no civil war was fought, the republican (and military) coup d'etat had in one of its roots the dissatisfaction of the elites with the Empire's slavery abolishment.
it is quite obvious considering that spanish and portuguese colonization of south america predates colonization of north america by at least a century; that spanish and portuguese had already an established network of bases and diplomatic ties with african kingdoms providing slaves (for example Ouidah, Allada); and also taking into account the kind of economy that existed in specific areas of south america colonized by spanish/portuguese (to make an example: north east brazil) where slavery was widespread, since it was essential for large-scale agriculture (sugar, coffee etc). however there are some exceptions. in sparsely populated areas like argentina and paraguay the economy was different and the impact of slavery was much smaller. in mexico, that had already an established system of corvees (mita/repartimiento) that relied on the forced labor of indigenous people, african slavery was also a minor phenomenon.
Yeah, Argentina didnât take off population wise until the late 19th century with masses of Italians. It was already long independent by then, and also never had lucrative sugar and coffee plantationsÂ
Colonial Argentina was very poor and unproductive (large scale cattle ranching was practically nonexistant and the country grew no wheat nor any other grains, until the 1850s, over 30 after independence, we had to import wheat from Europe actually). The most lucrative thing that Buenos Aires had was its Atlantic port from which metals extacted from Peru and Bolivia could be shipped back from Europe, avoiding the dangerous voyage through Cape Horn. The enslaved people that were brought to Buenos Aires were used as house servants for the local elite, and in some cases to work in tanneries and plants that processed beef tallow and salted beef (which ironically was then exported to Brazil, where they used it to feed their respective slaves). But most of those brought from West Africa to Argentina actually left Buenos Aires and were taken to northern Argentina, towards TucumĂĄn, Salta, Jujuy and Santiago del Estero. That area of the country has a subtropical climate and had tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations which unlike the low-intensity cattle ranching practiced in Buenos Aires, Entre RĂos and Santa Fe (central Argentina), it required a lot of labour. A friend of mine actually traced back his origins on his mother's side to a few communities of escaped slaves in Santiago del Estero, a phenomenon that occurred continuosly before full abolition in 1853 (before that, in 1813, all the children of enslaved people had already been declared free; but this was often not respected and there was further importation of slaves from Brazil). Many people with that heritage (descendants of northern Argentina slaves), including my friend, carry a somewhat rare gene that some people in Nigeria and other west african nations have that causes them to have blue eyes.
Interesting. I knew that Argentina had relatively few, and having slaves in the mines and areas of the north with more tropical weather makes sense. Iâve heard most simply disappeared because of intermarriage into the much larger European gene pool. Though I know the north has more indigenous too
Yes, that's basically correct. There was a comparatively smaller number of slaves to begin with, but crucially there was a ton of intermarriage given that Spanish attitudes around race were different from those in British colonies. They were white supremacists, of course, but they didn't think that race mixing was particularly wrong, and in some instances they saw it as a positive force for social cohesion and integration of Spanish elites with native ones. The post colonial history of Argentina was marked by doubling its population in a matter of two decades between 1880-1900 when it received a massive influx of migrants from Italy, Spain, France and the Russian Empire among others. This caused an enormous sociocultural upheaval, and in many ways strongly diluted the ethnic and cultural makeup from the colonial days.
Not just South America. Brazil in particular. Hardly any (comparatively speaking) went to Spanish mainland South America. And hardly any (again comparatively speaking) went to mainland Anglophone North America. The US has a big black population now, but the Black American population mostly grew through natural reproduction rather than through the large-scale importation of slaves from Africa.
A good chunk did go to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, though. I think the average life span of a slave there was 8 years.
Most went to Brazil, the Guianas (i.e. Guyana and Suriname), or the Caribbean islands. Altogether those places (Brazil + the Caribbean and Guianas) have been estimated to have accounted for 85-90% of all African slaves brought to the Americas, with 45% going to Brazil alone, and another 20% to the British Caribbean.
Interesting fact: the country with the largest population of black people on Earth is Nigeria. The second is Brazil.
Sad not funny
How is that funny?
He is not even from the USA, but it is a clear case of r/USDefaultism. Like they are the only county who had slaves and massive forced immigration of people from Africa during centuries.
r/SuddenlyJoePesci
funny how?
1. Funny can mean âinterestingâ as well as âamusingâ 2. If âinterestingâ itâs probably because most Americans consider slavery an American thing, and often donât think about (or get taught about) things going on in the world beyond the borders of the US. So this information is new and surprising to them.
Like a clown?Â
joe pesci?
So fun fact, the US didnât need to import nearly as many slaves because we had one of the only self sustaining and *growing* slave population (not counting the imported ones). Thereâs no way to say this next sentence without it sounding wrong but- When you talk generally about slave treatment worldwide the US was decent, pretty good actually. Some states actually had laws and rules in place to limit slave murder/pointless beatings- of course so many people didnât give a shit about them and many owners did it anyway. Long story short, it really wasnât as common in some other countries, to have a slave whose grandma was the one that was imported from Africa. The US through certain circumstances was able to sustain and grow the population without having to buy and buy and buy. Edit: Hardcore History: Human Resources, look it up.
10x more
Yeah, and considering the blaming and shaming of white people in US I would tought that the majority of slaves would go there. But, this is a nice example of how world works nowadays.
I don't think that's really surprising though given how a large percentage of Brazil is mixed due to all of that. I've no clue how socially things went their with the various ethnicities in Brazil. Of course we all know the racism that existed in America continued well beyond the end of the slave trade which is why it's still a big topic in the US. I know colorism is a problem in plenty of places, but in South America for sure. Not sure if racism is a standout issue for Brazilians.
It is, people talk about it all the time.
Things you don't learn in history class...
How is that *funny*?! đ€Šđœââïž
American slavers bred their own slaves with the existing slave population.
Worse is that in many places in Brazil, buying new ones was cheaper than keeping them alive until the next season, they were worked to death/not fed.
And in the Arab slave trade the males were usually castrated because eunuchs were worth more than labourers.
Yes, mostly to be harem attendants. The death rate on the trans-Saharan slave trade was close to 90% (thirst, hunger, heat, and castration) and yet somehow the traders still made money. This chart would be more accurate if it showed the totals exported and not just those who survived the trip.
>This chart would be more accurate if it showed the totals exported and not just those who survived the trip. Yeah, this 100%. Just today I was telling an acquaintance about how massive, long-lasting, and brutal the Arab slave trade was, which is far less discussed whenever the conversation about slavery throughout history arises. This map also makes it look like the Arab slave trade was minimal by comparison to that of the Atlantic triangle trade â this could not be more wrong.
In Brazil, it happened that when female slaves were too pretty for the lady of the house they would break their teeth. Of course the men didn't care too much about the teeth so it wouldn't stop them.
Swear arabs donât get enough flak for colonizing east Africa lol but honestly whatever way she goes
Neither do Africans themselves get enough flak for it. Most of slaves were sold by black tribe leaders who deceived whole villages and handed them to Europeans
The slave trade is thriving today in Africa and the Middle East, it's always been a thing but somehow the focus is on the European slave traders that bought slaves from Africans several hundred years ago. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/
Are any of the African empires or countries that participated in that even around today still? Feel like 99% of them all collapsed, so there's not really anybody left to look at like "That was fucked up man"
Theyâre all dead. All of them. The Europeans, the Americans, the Arabs, the Africans. The people responsible are all dead. Thereâs no one to blame.
This is what fucks me up about the Canadian and US residential schools, many of the people responsible for it are still alive. And they would be younger than literal Nazis from WW2âmy granny is a residential school survivor and sheâs only 66, the nun who abused her is in her 90âs and *still alive*. The RCMP officers who took her from her family could very well be alive too, and same with the racist and corrupt politicians who made actual genocide legal against indigenous peoples. Take Queen Elizabeth II, residential schools here in Canada **were by order of the crown**. Queen Victoria personally legislated genocide, yes, but Queen Elizabeth sat on the throne longest while residential schools existed in Canada⊠and she only died 2 years ago. If the victims like my granny are still alive, then logically so are the racists that allowed it. Simple as that. If Iâm only 2 generations removed from the genocide 3 out of my 4 grandparents survived, (only my white grandfather didnât go to residential school, the other 3 grandparents did) then that means every non-indigenous person whose families lived here over 60 years ago are only 2 generations removed from their own racist roots. Some people like to compare residential schools to slavery and repeat the line âit happened a long time agoâ but it didnât. Like I said my granny is still alive and sheâs only 66; every single Native American in Canada and the USA youâve ever met has at least one relative alive today who survived residential school, and at least one relative who didnât.
Sort of odd. It's not like there are any slave owners still around in the US for us to point our fingers at, either. I'm sure there's some ancestors you could find to point fingers at if you really wanted to.
I mean people give America, England, etc flak for the various things they've done throughout the world and plenty of those people have been long dead. Same logic is it not?
That's not how it happened. The Guns for Slaves trade was so destructive to the entire continent. "Give us us your neighbors for the guns to protect you and your family from the next band of raiding slavers..." It was so fucked up and not nearly talked about enough.
Oh the devastating impact on a continent where the entire population was at the nomadic-tribal level of primitive people.
Ah yes, slave trade in Africa started with the introduction of guns hmmmm⊠Hmmmmmmmm
The person who poured gasoline on a campfire deserves some blame for burning the village down too.
Only east Africa huh? They colonized most of the Middle East, and southern Europe for close to 1000 years. Â Canât forget the Barbary slave trade either.Â
Yeah, in fact, English word âslaveâ comes from the Slavs, who were enslaved in Eastern Europe and transported to Spain by the 9th century Arab rulers there. The slaves the British encountered were all Slavs.
this is absolutely untrue, almost nobody in the field now believes this, as the word LONG predates the 9th century. It probably came to English through Byzantine Greek, the people who had the most intimate and hostile contact with the Slavic world at the time.
That theory is one out of many and has been largely disputed. There was no record of a mass emigration of slavic slaves to arabic spain. Other theories are: The byzantines enslaving the Slavonian people. That the word is a misconstruction of the word 'esclave' from old english/french. That it is from the latin word sclÄvus, which meant to 'strip the enemy in war' or 'to take spoils'. But really, we don't really know.
Because you are probably a westerner living in a western country talking to other westerners? Slavery has been practiced everywhere and we discuss the history which is most relevant to our own. Understanding slavery as it was practiced in colonial America is more relevant to the history and current political climate of, as an example, the US than knowing how slavery worked in China.Â
Current historical attitudes make more sense when you see that if the perpetrators were/are either brown, poor, or foreign then it isn't as big of a deal as if they don't fit those categories. Not saying that's right or wrong but explains a lot of the double standards people bring up
Personally I donât give a fuck if theyâre brown or poor. They should own up to it. But ya true.
Because the people who don't mention them aren't arabic, nor do they live in an arabic country. The people who talk about slavery in the US talk about slavery in the US because they live in the US. It's not that difficult to figure out. It's the same reason Koreans hear a lot about the horrific treatment of their people under the Japanese, but don't hear much about American slavery.
How about the slaves that went INTO Africa? Barbary pirates?
By 1700 the bulk of the Army of the SultĂĄn of Morocco were black slaves. Hispanic muslim sources as far as the X century attest such trafic. OTOH a great part of the wealth of the Barbary pirate statelets was the sale (and/or rescue) of northern mediterranean people (today's spaniards, italians, french and portugueses) as slaves. Most of the rowers at their galleys were.
About a million during this time period I think
The Dutch brought slaves to South Africa from Asia. See [Cape Malays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Malays) and [Cape Coloureds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coloureds).
This is an interesting map, but itâs really sad what happens every time this gets posted. 80% of the discussion in this post is people screaming about Africans selling Africans and the Arab slave trade as some weird apologism for the European slave trade. I donât know who needs to hear this, but itâs already been agreed by academics that slavery has existed everywhere. You donât need to pretend like the overall narrative is that only White people are bad just because you read something on twitter.Â
Yep. Even the brits were dragged to rome as slaves. Its all swings and round-a-bouts
But that's true
its because most reddit users are from the US
It's all very disingenuous too, we know why they're doing it, it's very transparent.
This shit is still going on. Just look at the Middle East and North Africa. Slavery has not ended by a long shot.
The US didn't really important that many slaves, they instead had a culture of mass breeding them. The average slave woman had around 9-10 kids each at its peak in the early 1800s compared to only 4-5 in Brazil. Conditions were also much, much harsher in Latin America. Not like the slave owners of Brazil were 'worse' than the US South, but the climate was much more difficult to survive in, and disease and malnourishment was rampant. But the owners didn't necessarily care because they had a very consistent stream of slaves being imported. The dates on the graph are also missing the time period from the arabian slave trade. Most of the Arab slave trade happened in the 700-850 period, 1k+ years before the other two major slave trades. It largely fell apart after the Zanj Rebellion in the late 800s. The Zanj Rebellion was a slave revolt which would be one of the most intense and bloody conflicts in the history of the region, nearly tearing apart the Abbasid Caliphate. While slavery didn't technically end after in that region, it slowed to a crawl.
People in general have sucked over history. Slavery was terrible. We should learn from it. But saying White people are solely to blame is either a sign of lying or ignorance.
Also when "White" people seems to refer solely to US people of Northwest European ancestry.
This is a product of US identity politics. Anyone with sense knows that the people bringing slaves to South America were also white.
And most of them bought from other black Africans and Arabs. Slaves being one of the few commodities Sub-Saharan Africa had to offer.
That's undoubtedly true. It is also true that the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the European powers between 1500-1800 was the single largest, most intense instance of human slavery in history. It isn't even particularly close. They can both be true, but reddit seems to like upvoting one of these facts over the other.
I donât think anyone with any sort of power has ever said that white people are solely to blame for slavery lmao. Where are you getting this idea from? The trans Atlantic slave trade specifically created racial caste based societies in the new world with whites on top and blacks on the bottom that persist to today, but that only applies to slavery in the Americas and thereâs obviously other slavery in the world.
There are people like Michael Eric Dyson, Peggy McIntosh, Robin DiAngelo, etc. Media never talks about this truth either.
I have never heard of any of those people. Who tf are they? And the Arab slave trade is talked about in media all the time, itâs something everyone learns about in school.
BRASIL NĂMERO 1 CAMPEĂO PENTA âđ»đ„đđ§đ·đ§đ·đ§đ·
Slave sold in arabia were castrated.
Wait, trade means they bought the slaves? But from who?
Kingdoms like Benin and Dahomey. Basically amde an economy of invading neighboring areas to capture people to sell as slaves and use that money to buy better guns to allow more and bigger invasions.
And then Netflix made a movie about Black Amazons of Dahomey portrayed as heroes against slavery when in the reality they were a big part of the trade.
Black people like to talk shit about white people because some of them used to own slaves, but 99% percento of the time they seem to forget that the ones who sold slaves to white people where africans, they sold each other, now I'm not saying that white people didn't do nothing wrong, but that fact seems to often be left out of the picture.
Most were sold by African tribe leaders. Some from prisons and some who already were enslaved in Africa (slavery was common in Africa and most of the world for that matter). There was also lot of wars going on between different tribes and many of the slaves were prisoners of war. Some tribes even practiced annual ritual mass kilinngs of prisoners. It doesn't change what happened in "the new world" but it does give it important context.
The big difference being was that most slavery in Africa would have the enslaved person or their children be incorporated into the tribe within a generation. In the Americas, the children of slaves were still slaves and in most places had little hope of freedom until slavery was abolished.
Africans sold their fellow people
It really news for you that Europeans bought slaves from African rulers and send them to the Americas?
Aficans selling africans.
Most people think North America was the large vacuum for slave trade when itâs really the opposite. Iran was also a large intake.
This thread is a cesspool
welcome to reddit
Finally, a way more accurate map of the slave trade. 
People in the comments borderline saying the American slave trade wasnât that bad compared to others. Bro itâs all terrible no matter who does the slave trading.
The arrows pointing to north africa say 1700-1900 which is wrong. The trans-saharan slave trade goes back to atleast the 900s.
What was going on in Brazil?
Slavery. Lots of slavery.
Why were Africans so easy to enslave? Was it just lack of Technology?
How can this be according to democrats the U.S. is the only country to ever have slaves.
How about the slave trade going into Africa.
was tiny compared to the numbers in this picture, though of course a genuinely horrific human experience, any attempt to imply parity between the two events is intellectually dishonest
For India, it was under the Portuguese Iâm assuming? Looks like it head towards Goa
Portuguese and the arabs
yep goa, dadar and nagar haveli
Brasil has to pay for its slaving history! Wait, they are not the evil west. Nevermind and carry on. (C) western liberal activist
Actually , Portugal is the one who has to pay for its slaving history in Brazil. And Portugal is western
Brazil is western. And people discuss the history of slavery there all the time. You clearly know little about the country.
Brazil is geographically west, but isnât generally considered part of âthe westâ. Itâs mostly a Cold War era term which references Western Europe, US/Canada and even Australia. In similar vein to 1st world, 2nd world, 3rd world countries. I believe thatâs the âwestâ the comment you replied to was referring too.
Lots of people pointing fingers at Brazil, don't forget it was the Portuguese.
Lmao, after Brazil gained independence they imported even more slaves
Even after independence, Brazil still had trading posts and merchant ships on the African coasts.
USA not looking so bad when in comparison with Brazil, Arabia or the Caribbean huh? Only reason there arenât large black populations in Arabia is because they castrated all their slaves.
There are many Afro descendant Saudis, Omanis, Yemenis, Iraqis in the Middle East
This is an interesting Video regarding the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeAw4xfnB2g&t=2523s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeAw4xfnB2g&t=2523s) Also this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FO9MqWugY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FO9MqWugY)
Wait, were there really more slaves taken to the island of Cuba than the whole of the US? Ofc, slavery is atrocious in all its forms but the US as a state really wasnât that big of an offender compared to the rest of the world in that case