Forced marriage
Forced marriage is a marriage in which one or more of the parties is married without his or her consent or against his or her will. A forced marriage differs from an arranged marriage, in which both parties consent to the assistance of their parents or a third party such as a matchmaker in choosing a spouse. There is a continuum of coercion used to compel a marriage, ranging from outright physical violence to subtle psychological pressure. Forced marriage is still practised in various cultures across the world in parts of South Asia and Africa; some scholars object to use of the term "forced marriage" because it invokes the consensual legitimating language of marriage for an experience, the opposite. A variety of alternative terms exist, including "forced conjugal association" and "conjugal slavery"; the United Nations views forced marriage as a form of human rights abuse, since it violates the principle of the freedom and autonomy of individuals. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that a person's right to choose a spouse and enter into marriage is central to his/her life and dignity, his/her equality as a human being.
The Roman Catholic Church deems forced marriage grounds for granting an annulment — for a marriage to be valid both parties must give their consent freely. The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery prohibits marriage without right to refuse of herself out of her parents', family's and other persons' will and requires the minimum age for marriage to prevent this. In 1969, the Special Court for Sierra Leone's Appeals Chamber found the abduction and confinement of women for "forced marriage" in war to be a new crime against humanity; the SCSL Trial Chamber in the Charles Taylor decision found that the term'forced marriage' should be avoided and rather described the practice in war as'conjugal slavery'. In 2013, the first United Nations Human Rights Council resolution against child and forced marriages was adopted. Marriages throughout history were arranged between families before the 18th century; the practices varied by culture, but involved the legal transfer of dependency of the woman from her father to the groom.
The emancipation of women in the 19th and 20th centuries changed marriage laws especially in regard to property and economic status. By the mid-20th century, many Western countries had enacted legislation establishing legal equality between spouses in family law; the period of 1975-1979 saw a major overhaul of family laws in countries such as Italy, Austria, West Germany, Portugal. In 1978, the Council of Europe passed the Resolution 37 on equality of spouses in civil law. Among the last European countries to establish full gender equality in marriage were Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, France in the 1980s. An arranged marriage is not the same as a forced marriage: in the former, the spouse has the possibility to reject the offer; the line between arranged and forced marriage is however difficult to draw, due to the implied familial and social pressure to accept the marriage and obey one's parents in all respects. In Europe, during the late 18th century and early 19th century, the literary and intellectual movement of romanticism presented new and progressive ideas about love marriage, which started to gain acceptance in society.
In the 19th century, marriage practices varied across Europe, but in general, arranged marriages were more common among the upper class. Arranged marriages were the norm in Russia before early 20th century. Child marriages were common but began to be questioned in the 19th and 20th century. Child marriages are considered to be forced marriages, because children are not able to make a informed choice whether or not to marry, are influenced by their families. In Western countries, during the past decades, the nature of marriage—especially with regard to the importance of marital procreation and the ease of divorce—has changed which has led to less social and familial pressure to get married, providing more freedom of choice in regard to choosing a spouse. Forced marriage was used to require a captive to integrate with the host community, accept his or her fate. One example is the English blacksmith John R. Jewitt, who spent three years as a captive of the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest Coast in 1802–1805.
He was ordered to marry, because the council of chiefs thought that a wife and family would reconcile him to staying with his captors for life. Jewitt was given a choice between forced marriage for himself and capital punishment for both him and his "father". "Reduced to this sad extremity, with death on the one side, matrimony on the other, I thought proper to choose what appeared to me the least of the two evils". Forced marriage was practiced by authoritarian governments as a way to meet population targets; the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia systematically forced people into marriages, in order to increase the population and continue the revolution. These marriage
Conscription
Conscription, sometimes called the draft, is the compulsory enlistment of people in a national service, most a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names; the modern system of near-universal national conscription for young men dates to the French Revolution in the 1790s, where it became the basis of a large and powerful military. Most European nations copied the system in peacetime, so that men at a certain age would serve 1–8 years on active duty and transfer to the reserve force. Conscription is controversial for a range of reasons, including conscientious objection to military engagements on religious or philosophical grounds; those conscripted may evade service, sometimes by leaving the country, seeking asylum in another country. Some selection systems accommodate these attitudes by providing alternative service outside combat-operations roles or outside the military, such as Siviilipalvelus in Finland, Zivildienst in Austria and Switzerland.
Several countries conscript male soldiers not only for armed forces, but for paramilitary agencies, which are dedicated to police-like domestic only service like Internal Troops, Border Guards or non-combat rescue duties like Civil defence troops – none of, considered alternative to the military conscription. As of the early 21st century, many states no longer conscript soldiers, relying instead upon professional militaries with volunteers enlisted to meet the demand for troops; the ability to rely on such an arrangement, presupposes some degree of predictability with regard to both war-fighting requirements and the scope of hostilities. Many states that have abolished conscription therefore still reserve the power to resume it during wartime or times of crisis. States involved in wars or interstate rivalries are most to implement conscription, whereas democracies are less than autocracies to implement conscription. Former British colonies are less to have conscription, as they are influenced by British anticonscription norms that can be traced back to the English Civil War.
Around the reign of Hammurabi, the Babylonian Empire used. Under that system those eligible were required to serve in the royal army in time of war. During times of peace they were instead required to provide labour for other activities of the state. In return for this service, people subject to it gained the right to hold land, it is possible that this right was not to hold land per se but specific land supplied by the state. Various forms of avoiding military service are recorded. While it was outlawed by the Code of Hammurabi, the hiring of substitutes appears to have been practiced both before and after the creation of the code. Records show that Ilkum commitments could become traded. In other places, people left their towns to avoid their Ilkum service. Another option was to sell Ilkum lands and the commitments along with them. With the exception of a few exempted classes, this was forbidden by the Code of Hammurabi. In medieval Scandinavia the leiðangr, leding, lichting, expeditio or sometimes leþing, was a levy of free farmers conscripted into coastal fleets for seasonal excursions and in defence of the realm.
The bulk of the Anglo-Saxon English army, called the fyrd, was composed of part-time English soldiers drawn from the freemen of each county. In the 690s Laws of Ine, three levels of fines are imposed on different social classes for neglecting military service; some modern writers claim. These thegns were the land-holding aristocracy of the time and were required to serve with their own armour and weapons for a certain number of days each year; the historian David Sturdy has cautioned about regarding the fyrd as a precursor to a modern national army composed of all ranks of society, describing it as a "ridiculous fantasy":The persistent old belief that peasants and small farmers gathered to form a national army or fyrd is a strange delusion dreamt up by antiquarians in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries to justify universal military conscription. Medieval levy in Poland was known as the pospolite ruszenie; the system of military slaves was used in the Middle East, beginning with the creation of the corps of Turkish slave-soldiers by the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim in the 820s and 830s.
The Turkish troops soon came to dominate the government, establishing a pattern throughout the Islamic world of a ruling military class separated by ethnicity and religion by the mass of the population, a paradigm that found its apogee in the Mamluks of Egypt and the Janissary corps of the Ottoman Empire, institutions that survived until the early 19th century. In the middle of the 14th century, Ottoman Sultan Murad I developed personal troops to be loyal to him, with a slave army called the Kapıkulu; the new force was built by taking Christian children from newly conquered lands from the far areas of his empire, in a system known as the devşirme. The captive children were forced to convert to Islam; the Sultans had the young boys trained over several years. Those who showed special promise in fighting skills were trained in advanced warrior skills, put into the sultan's personal service, turned into the Janissaries, the elite branch of the Kapıkulu. A n
Mamluk
Mamluk is an Arabic designation for slaves. The term is most used to refer to non-muslimslave soldiers and Muslim rulers of slave origin. More it refers to: Ghaznavids of Greater Khorasan Khwarazmian dynasty in Transoxiana Mamluk dynasty Mamluk Sultanate Bahri dynasty Burji dynasty Mamluk dynasty The most enduring Mamluk realm was the knightly military caste in Egypt in the Middle Ages, which developed from the ranks of slave soldiers; these were enslaved Turkic peoples, Egyptian Copts, Circassians and Georgians. Many Mamluks were of Balkan origin; the "mamluk phenomenon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior class, was of great political importance. Over time, Mamluks became a powerful military knightly caste in various societies that were controlled by Muslim rulers. In Egypt, but in the Levant and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, mamluk factions seized the sultanate centered on Egypt and Syria, controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate.
The Mamluk Sultanate famously defeated the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Ain Jalut. They had earlier fought the western European Christian Crusaders in 1154–1169 and 1213–1221 driving them out of Egypt and the Levant. In 1302 the mamluks formally expelled the last Crusaders from the Levant, ending the era of the Crusades. While mamluks were purchased as property, their status was above ordinary slaves but they were not allowed to carry weapons or perform certain tasks. In places such as Egypt, from the Ayyubid dynasty to the time of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, mamluks were considered to be "true lords" and "true warriors", with social status above the general population in Egypt and the Levant. In a sense they were like enslaved mercenaries; the origins of the mamluk system are disputed. Historians agree that an entrenched military caste such as the mamluks appeared to develop in Islamic societies beginning with the ninth-century Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad; when in the ninth century has not been determined.
Up until the 1990s, it was believed that the earliest mamluks were known as Ghilman and were bought by the Abbasid caliphs al-Mu'tasim. By the end of the 9th century, such warrior slaves had become the dominant element in the military. Conflict between these ghilman and the population of Baghdad prompted the caliph al-Mu'tasim to move his capital to the city of Samarra, but this did not succeed in calming tensions; the caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by some of these slave-soldiers in 861. Since the early 21st century, historians suggest that there was a distinction between the mamluk system and the ghilman system, in Samarra, which did not have specialized training and was based on pre-existing Central Asian hierarchies. Adult slaves and freemen both served as warriors in the ghilman system; the mamluk system developed after the return of the caliphate to Baghdad in the 870's. It included the systematic training of young slaves in military and martial skills; the Mamluk system is considered to have been a small-scale experiment of al-Muwaffaq, to combine the slaves' efficiency as warriors with improved reliability.
This recent interpretation seems to have been accepted. After the fragmentation of the Abbasid Empire, military slaves, known as either mamluks or ghilman, were used throughout the Islamic world as the basis of military power; the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt had forcibly taken adolescent male Armenians, Turks and Copts from their families in order to be trained as slave soldiers. They formed the bulk of their military, the rulers selected prized slaves to serve in their administration; the powerful vizier Badr al-Jamali, for example, was a mamluk from Armenia. In Iran and Iraq, the Buyid dynasty used Turkic slaves throughout their empire; the rebel al-Basasiri was a mamluk who ushered in Seljuq dynastic rule in Baghdad after attempting a failed rebellion. When the Abbasids regained military control over Iraq, they relied on the ghilman as their warriors. Under Saladin and the Ayyubids of Egypt, the power of the mamluks increased and they claimed the sultanate in 1250, ruling as the Mamluk Sultanate.
Throughout the Islamic world, rulers continued to use enslaved warriors until the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire's devşirme, or "gathering" of young slaves for the Janissaries, lasted until the 17th century. Regimes based on mamluk power thrived in such Ottoman provinces as the Levant and Egypt until the 19th century. Under the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo, Mamluks were purchased while still young males, they were raised in the barracks of the Citadel of Cairo. Because of their isolated social status and their austere military training, they were trusted to be loyal to their rulers; when their training was completed, they were discharged, but remained attached to the patron who had purchased them. Mamluks relied on the help of their patron for career advancement, the patron's reputation and power depended on his recruits. A Mamluk was "bound by a strong esprit de corps to his peers in the same household."Mamluks lived within their garrisons and spent their time with each
History of slavery
The history of slavery spans many cultures and religions from ancient times to the present day. However the social and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places. Slavery occurs rarely among hunter-gatherer populations because it develops under conditions of social stratification. Slavery operated in the first civilizations. Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery became common within much of Europe during the Dark Ages and it continued into the Middle Ages; the Byzantine–Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the capture of large numbers of Christian slaves. The Dutch, Spanish, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade after 1600. David P. Forsythe wrote: "The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom."
The Republic of Ragusa became the first European country to ban the slave trade - in 1416. In modern times Denmark-Norway abolished the trade in 1802. Although slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world, human trafficking remains an international problem and an estimated 25-40 million people were enslaved as of 2013, the majority in Asia. During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery. Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic child-slavery and -trafficking on cacao plantations in West Africa. Slavery continues into the 21st-century. Although Mauritania criminalized slavery in August 2007, an estimated up to 600,000 men and children, or 20% of the population of Mauritania, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor. Slavery in 21st-century Islamism continues, Islamist quasi-states such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Boko Haram have abducted and enslaved women and children. Evidence of slavery predates written records, has existed in many cultures.
However, slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires a high population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago. Slavery was known in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as in every other ancient civilization, including Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Babylonia, Ancient Iran, Ancient Greece, Ancient India, the Roman Empire, the Arab Islamic Caliphate and Sultanate and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas; such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, the birth of slave children to slaves. French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. "Slavery came in different guises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries as traders".
During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, with its slave traffic from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which held extensive, although coastal, colonial territories on the African continent, made the international slave trade illegal, as did the United States in 1808. In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the Western Sudan, including Ghana, Mali and Songhai, about a third of the population was enslaved. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves; the population of the Kanem was about a third slave.
It was 40% in Bornu. Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves; the population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in northern Nigeria and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th century. It is estimated. Half the population of Madagascar was enslaved; the Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the brief Second Italo-Abyssinian War in October 1935, when it was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces. In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II Ethiopia abolished slavery and serfdom after regaining its independence in 1942. On 26 August 1942 Haile Selassie issued a proclamation outlawing slavery; when British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century 2 million to 2.5 million people there were slaves.
Slavery in northern Nigeria was outlawed in 1936. Elikia M'bokolo, April 1998, Le Monde diplomatique. Quot
Impressment
Impressment, colloquially "the press" or the "press gang", is the taking of men into a military or naval force by compulsion, with or without notice. Navies of several nations used forced recruitment by various means; the large size of the British Royal Navy in the Age of Sail meant impressment was most associated with Britain. It was used by the Royal Navy in wartime, beginning in 1664 and during the 18th and early 19th centuries as a means of crewing warships, although legal sanction for the practice can be traced back to the time of Edward I of England; the Royal Navy impressed many merchant sailors, as well as some sailors from other European, nations. People liable to impressment were "eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 55 years". Non-seamen were impressed as well. Impressment was criticized by those who believed it to be contrary to the British constitution. Though the public opposed conscription in general, impressment was upheld by the courts, as it was deemed vital to the strength of the navy and, by extension, to the survival of the British influence and realm.
Impressment was a Royal Navy practice, reflecting the size of the British fleet and its substantial manpower demands. While other European navies applied forced recruitment in times of war, this was done as an extension of the practice of formal conscription applied by most European armies from the Napoleonic Wars on; the U. S. Continental Navy applied a form of impressment during the American War of Independence; the impressment of seamen from American ships caused serious tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. One of the 27 colonial grievances directly highlights the practice, it was again a cause of tension leading up to the War of 1812. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Britain ended the practice. Working and living conditions for the average sailor in the Royal Navy in the 18th century were harsh by modern standards. Naval pay was attractive in the 1750s, but towards the end of the century its value had been eroded by rising prices.
Sailors' pay on merchant ships was somewhat higher during peacetime, could increase to double naval pay during wartime. Until 19th-century reforms improved conditions, the Royal Navy was additionally known to pay wages up to two years in arrears, it always withheld six months' pay to discourage desertion. Naval wages had been set in 1653, were not increased until April 1797 after sailors on 80 ships of the Channel Fleet based at Spithead mutinied. Despite this, there were many volunteers for naval service; the work for individual sailors was less than on merchant ships as the naval crew size was determined by the number needed to man guns, around four times the number of crew needed to sail the ship. While the food supplied by the Navy was plentiful and good by the standards of the day and governments estimated that 50% of the sailors on a given voyage would die due to scurvy; the main problem with recruitment, was a shortage of qualified seamen during wartime, when the Navy had to recruit an extra 20,000 to 40,000 men.
Privateers, the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy all competed for a small pool of ordinary and able seamen in wartime, all three groups were short-handed. The recruitment figures presented to Parliament for the years 1755–1757 list 70,566 men, of whom 33,243 were volunteers, 16,953 pressed men, while another 20,370 were listed as volunteers separately. Although there are no records that explain why volunteers were separated into two groups, it is these were pressed men who became "volunteers" to get the sign-up bonus, two months' wages in advance and a higher wage. Volunteering protected the sailor from creditors, as the law forbade collecting debts accrued before enlistment; the main disadvantage was that enlisted deserters who were recaptured would be hanged, whereas pressed men would be returned to service. Other records confirm similar percentages throughout the 18th century. Average annual recruitment 1736–1783 All three groups suffered high levels of desertion. In the 18th century, British desertion rates on naval ships averaged 25% annually, with slight difference between volunteers and pressed men.
The rate of desertion started high fell after a few months on board a ship, became negligible after a year — because Navy pay ran months or years in arrears, desertion might mean not only abandoning companions in the ship's company, but the loss of a large amount of money earned. If a naval ship had taken a prize, a deserting seaman would forfeit his share of the prize money. In a report on proposed changes to the RN written by Admiral Nelson in 1803, he noted that since 1793 more than 42,000 sailors had deserted; the Impress Service was formed to force sailors to serve on naval vessels. There was no concept of "joining the navy" as a fixed career-path for non-officers at the time since seamen remained attached to a ship only for the duration of its commission, they were encouraged to stay in the Navy after the commission but could leave to seek other employment when the ship was paid off. Impressment relied on the legal power of the King to call men to military service, as well as to recruit volunteers (who were paid a bounty upon joining, unlike presse
Wage slavery
Wage slavery is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. It is used to refer to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary when the dependence is total and immediate; the term "wage slavery" has been used to criticize exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but of social stigma and status diminution. Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines.
Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful and appropriate. According to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "eferences abounded in the labor press, it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase"; the introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism. Some labor organizations and individual social activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor; the view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world. In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves". In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery: The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him...
They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him... What effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune... These men... the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need.... They must therefore find someone to die of hunger. Is that to be free? The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery and by opponents of capitalism; some defenders of slavery from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off.
This contention has been corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was available to free urban laborers at the time". In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote; some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as laborers were to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment; the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. However in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages.
It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper". Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition disappeared in the part of the 19th century. In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which prevailed at the South". E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, an artisan, who might'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the
Barbary slave trade
The Barbary slave trade refers to the slave markets that were lucrative and vast on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, which included the Ottoman provinces of Algeria and Tripolitania and the independent sultanate of Morocco, between the 16th and middle of the 18th century. The Ottoman provinces in North Africa were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, but in reality they were autonomous; the North African slave markets were part of the Berber slave trade. Perpetrated on Europeans, within in-land routes to indigenous European inhabitants; these peoples were systematically preyed upon and turned into slaves, acquired by Barbary pirates during slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, as far north as Iceland and in the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The Ottoman eastern Mediterranean was the scene of intense piracy; as late as the 18th century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean". For centuries, large vessels on the Mediterranean relied on galley slaves supplied by North African and Ottoman slave traders.
Ohio State University history Professor Robert Davis describes the White Slave Trade as minimized by most modern historians in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800. Davis estimates that 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders from Tunis and Tripoli alone, 700 Americans were held captive in this region as slaves between 1785 and 1815. However, to extrapolate his numbers, Davis assumes the number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates were constant for a 250-year period, stating: "There are no records of how many men and children were enslaved, but it is possible to calculate the number of fresh captives that would have been needed to keep populations steady and replace those slaves who died, were ransomed, or converted to Islam. On this basis it is thought that around 8,500 new slaves were needed annually to replenish numbers - about 850,000 captives over the century from 1580 to 1680.
By extension, for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could have been as high as 1,250,000." Davis' numbers have been challenged by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that true picture of Europeans slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe and black people from west Africa. Middle East expert and researcher John Wright cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation. Since no official records were kept but the authorities of Ottoman or pre Ottoman sources, observations across the late 1500s and early 1600s observers, estimate that around 35,000 European slaves were held throughout this period on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli, but in Algiers; the majority were sailors, taken with their ships. However, most of these captives were people from lands close to Africa Italy. From bases on the Barbary coast, North Africa, the Barbary pirates raided ships traveling through the Mediterranean and along the northern and western coasts of Africa, plundering their cargo and enslaving the people they captured.
From at least 1500, the pirates conducted raids along seaside towns of Italy, France, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men and children. On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore, Ireland were abandoned following the raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone had 466 merchant ships lost to Barbary pirates. While Barbary corsairs looted the cargo of ships they captured, their primary goal was to capture non-Muslim people for sale as slaves or for ransom; those who had family or friends who might ransom them were held captive, the most famous of these was the author Miguel de Cervantes, held for five years. Others were sold into various types of servitude. Captives who converted to Islam were freed, since enslavement of Muslims was prohibited. Sixteenth- and 17th-century customs statistics suggest that Istanbul's additional slave import from the Black Sea may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. The markets declined after the loss of the Barbary Wars and ended in the 1800s, after a US Navy expedition under Commodore Edward Preble engaging gunboats and fortifications in Tripoli, 1804 and when after a British diplomatic mission led to some confused orders and a massacre.
It ended with the French conquest of Algeria. The Kingdom of Morocco had suppressed piracy and recognized the United States as an independent country in 1776; the slave trade had existed in North Africa since antiquity, with a supply of African slaves arriving through trans-Saharan trade routes. The towns on the North African coast were recorded in Roman times for their slave markets, this trend continued into the medieval age; the Barbary Coast increased in influence in the 15th century, when the Ottoman Empire took over as rulers of the area. Coupled with this was an influx of Sephardi Jews and Moorish refugees, newly expelled from Spain after the Reconquista. With Ottoman protection and a host of destitute immigrants, the coastline soon became reputed for pirac
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