Slavery in ancient Rome
Slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labor, slaves performed many domestic services, might be employed at skilled jobs and professions. Accountants and physicians were slaves. Slaves of Greek origin in particular might be educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, at mills, their living conditions were brutal and their lives short. Slaves had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation and summary execution. Over time, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. A major source of slaves had been Roman military expansion during the Republic; the use of former soldiers as slaves led inevitably to a series of en masse armed rebellions, the Servile Wars, the last of, led by Spartacus. During the Pax Romana of the early Roman Empire, emphasis was placed on maintaining stability, the lack of new territorial conquests dried up this supply line of human trafficking.
To maintain an enslaved work force, increased legal restrictions on freeing slaves were put into place. Escaped slaves would be returned. There were many cases of poor people selling their children to richer neighbors as slaves in times of hardship. In his Institutiones, the Roman jurist Gaius wrote that: the state, recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature; the 1st century BC Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus indicates that the Roman institution of slavery began with the legendary founder Romulus giving Roman fathers the right to sell their own children into slavery, kept growing with the expansion of the Roman state. Slave ownership was most widespread throughout the Roman citizenry from the Second Punic War to the 4th century AD; the Greek geographer Strabo records how an enormous slave trade resulted from the collapse of the Seleucid Empire. The Twelve Tables, Rome's oldest legal code, has brief references to slavery, indicating that the institution was of long standing.
In the tripartite division of law by the jurist Ulpian, slavery was an aspect of the ius gentium, the customary international law held in common among all peoples. The "law of nations" was neither natural law, which existed in nature and governed animals as well as humans, nor civil law, the body of laws specific to a people. All human beings are born free under natural law, but slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might have specific civil laws pertaining to slaves. In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population; the ius gentium was not a legal code, any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct."Vernae were slaves born within a household or on a family farm or agricultural estate. There was a stronger social obligation to care for vernae, whose epitaphs sometimes identify them as such, at times they would have been the children of free males of the household; the general Latin word for slave was servus.
Throughout the Roman period many slaves for the Roman market were acquired through warfare. Many captives were either brought back as war booty or sold to traders, ancient sources cite anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of such slaves captured in each war; these wars included every major war of conquest from the Monarchical period to the Imperial period, as well as the Social and Samnite Wars. The prisoners taken or re-taken after the three Roman Servile Wars contributed to the slave supply. While warfare during the Republic provided the largest figures for captives, warfare continued to produce slaves for Rome throughout the imperial period. Piracy has a long history of adding to the slave trade, the period of the Roman Republic was no different. Piracy was affluent in Cilicia where pirates operated with impunity from a number of strongholds. Pompey was credited with eradicating piracy from the Mediterranean in 67 BC. Although large scale piracy was curbed under Pompey and controlled under the Roman Empire, it remained a steady institution and kidnapping through piracy continued to contribute to the Roman slave supply.
Augustine lamented the wide scale practice of kidnapping in North Africa in the early 5th century AD. During the period of Roman imperial expansion, the increase in wealth amongst the Roman elite and the substantial growth of slavery transformed the economy. Although the economy was dependent on slavery, Rome was not the most slave-dependent culture in history. Among the Spartans, for instance, the slave class of helots outnumbered the free by about seven to one, according to Herodotus. In any case, the overall role of slavery in Roman economy is a discussed issue among scholars. Delos in the eastern Mediterranean was made a free port in 166 BC and became one of the main market venues for slaves. Multitudes of slaves who found their way to Italy were purchased by wealthy landowners in need of large numbers of slaves to labor on their estates. Historian Keith Hopkins noted that it was land investment and agricultural production which generated great wealth in Italy, considered that Rome's military
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a legal and significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and society. The main sources of slaves were war captives and organized enslavement expeditions in North and East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, it has been reported. In Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Empire, about a fifth of the population consisted of slaves in 1609. 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. After several measures to ban slavery in the late 19th century, the practice continued unabated into the early 20th century; as late as 1908, female slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire. Sexual slavery was a central part of the Ottoman slave system throughout the history of the institution. A member of the Ottoman slave class, called a kul in Turkish, could achieve high status. Castrated harem guards and janissaries are some of the better known positions a slave could hold, but slaves were often at the forefront of Ottoman politics.
A large percentage of officials in the Ottoman government were bought slaves raised free, integral to the success of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th century into the 19th. Many officials themselves owned a large number of slaves, although the Sultan himself owned by far the most. By raising and specially training slaves as officials in palace schools such as Enderun, the Ottomans created administrators with intricate knowledge of government and fanatic loyalty. In the mid-14th century, Murad I built an army of slaves, referred to as the Kapıkulu; the new force was based on the Sultan's right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. The captive slaves trained in the sultan's personal service; the devşirme system could be considered a form of slavery because the Sultans had absolute power over them. However, as the'servant' or'kul' of the Sultan had high status within Ottoman society, they could become the highest officers of state and the military elite, all taken children were well remunerated.
Slaves were traded in special marketplaces called "Esir" or "Yesir" that were located in most towns and cities. It is said that Sultan Mehmed II "the Conqueror" established the first Ottoman slave market in Constantinople in the 1460s where the former Byzantine slave market had stood. According to Nicolas de Nicolay, there were slaves of all ages and both sexes, they were displayed naked to be checked – children and young women – by possible buyers. In the devşirme, which connotes "draft", "blood tax" or "child collection", young Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia were taken from their homes and families, converted to Islam, enlisted into the most famous branch of the Kapıkulu, the Janissaries, a special soldier class of the Ottoman army that became a decisive faction in the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators, de facto rulers of the Empire, such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, were recruited in this way. By 1609, the Sultan's Kapıkulu forces increased to about 100,000.
A Hutterite chronicle reports that in 1605, during the Long Turkish War, some 240 Hutterites were abducted from their homes in Upper Hungary by the Ottoman Turkish army and their Tatar allies, sold into Ottoman slavery. Domestic slavery was not as common as military slavery. On the basis of a list of estates belonging to members of the ruling class kept in Edirne between 1545 and 1659, the following data was collected: out of 93 estates, 41 had slaves; the total number of slaves in the estates was 140. 134 of them bore Muslim names, 5 were not defined, 1 was a Christian woman. Some of these slaves appear to have been employed on farms. In conclusion, the ruling class, because of extensive use of warrior slaves and because of its own high purchasing capacity, was undoubtedly the single major group keeping the slave market alive in the Ottoman Empire. Rural slavery was a phenomenon endemic to the Caucasus region, carried to Anatolia and Rumelia after the Circassian migration in 1864. Conflicts emerged within the immigrant community and the Ottoman Establishment intervened on the side of the slaves at selective times.
The Crimean Khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East until the early eighteenth century. In a series of slave raids euphemistically known as the "harvesting of the steppe", Crimean Tatars enslaved East Slavic peasants; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of, to loot and capture slaves into "jasyr". The borderland area to the south-east was in a state of semi-permanent warfare until the 18th century, it is estimated that up to 75 % of the Crimean population consisted of freed slaves. A study of the slave market of Ottoman Crete produces details about the prices of slaves. Factors such as age, skin color, virginity etc. influenced prices. The most expensive slaves were those between 10 and 35 years of age, with the highest prices for European virgin girls 13–25 years of age and teenaged boys; the cheaper slaves were those with sub-Saharan Africans. Prices in Crete ranged between 65 and 150 "esedi guruş".
But the lowest prices were affordable to only high income persons. For example, in 1717 a 12-year-old boy with mental disabilities was sold for 27 guruş, an amount that could buy in the same year 462 kg of lamb meat, 933 kg of bread
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
History of slavery in Asia
Slavery has existed all throughout Asia, forms of slavery still exist today. The early Arab invaders of Sind in the 8th century, the armies of the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim, are reported to have enslaved tens of thousands of Indian prisoners, including both soldiers and civilians. In the early 11th century Tarikh al-Yamini, the Arab historian Al-Utbi recorded that in 1001 the armies of Mahmud of Ghazna conquered Peshawar and Waihand after Battle of Peshawar, "in the midst of the land of Hindustan", captured some 100,000 youths. Following his twelfth expedition into India in 1018–19, Mahmud is reported to have returned with such a large number of slaves that their value was reduced to only two to ten dirhams each; this unusually low price made, according to Al-Utbi, "merchants from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Central Asia and Khurasan were swelled with them, the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, mingled in one common slavery". Elliot and Dowson refers to "five hundred thousand slaves, beautiful men and women.".
During the Delhi Sultanate period, references to the abundant availability of low-priced Indian slaves abound. Levi attributes this to the vast human resources of India, compared to its neighbors to the north and west; the Siddi are an ethnic group inhabiting Pakistan. Members are descended from Bantu peoples from Southeast Africa that were brought to the Indian subcontinent as slaves by Arab and Portuguese merchants. Much of the northern and central parts of the subcontinent was ruled by the so-called Slave Dynasty of Turkic origin from 1206 to 1290: Qutb-ud-din Aybak, a slave of Muhammad Ghori rose to power following his master's death. For a century, his descendants ruled presiding over the introduction of Tankas and building of Qutub Minar. According to Sir Henry Bartle Frere, there were an estimated 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 slaves in Company India in 1841. In Malabar, about 15% of the population were slaves. Slavery was abolished in India by the Indian Slavery Act V. of 1843. Provisions of the Indian Penal Code of 1861 abolished slavery in India by making the enslavement of human beings a criminal offense.
There are an estimated five million bonded workers in Pakistan though the government has passed laws and set up funds to eradicate the practice and rehabilitate the labourers. As many as 200,000 Nepali girls, many under 14, have been sold into sex slavery in India. Nepalese women and girls virgins, are favored in India because of their fair skin and young looks. In 1997, a human rights agency reported that 40,000 Nepalese workers are subject to slavery and 200,000 kept in bonded labour. Nepal's Maoist-led government has abolished the slavery-like Haliya system in 2008. According to a report of an expedition to Afghanistan published in London in 1871: "The country between Caubul and the Oxus appears to be in a lawless state. A slave, if a strong man to stand work well, is, in Upper Badakshan, considered to be of the same value as one of the large dogs of the country, or of a horse, being about the equivalent of Rs 80. A slave girl is valued at from four horses or more, according to her looks &c..
When I was in Little Tibet, a returned slave, in the Kashmir army took refuge in my camp. In Lower Badakshan, more distant places, the price of slaves is much enhanced, payment is made in coin."In response to the Hazara uprising of 1892, the Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan declared a "Jihad" against the Shiites. His large army defeated the rebellion at its center, in Oruzgan, by 1892 and the local population was being massacred. According to S. A. Mousavi, "thousands of Hazara men and children were sold as slaves in the markets of Kabul and Qandahar, while numerous towers of human heads were made from the defeated rebels as a warning to others who might challenge the rule of the Amir"; until the 20th century, some Hazaras were still kept as slaves by the Pashtuns. Slavery throughout pre-modern Chinese history has come in and out of favor. Due to the enormous population and high development of the region throughout most of its history, China has always had a large workforce; the Tang dynasty purchased Western slaves from the Radanite Jews.
Tang Chinese soldiers and pirates enslaved Koreans, Persians and people from Inner Mongolia, central Asia, northern India. The greatest source of slaves came from southern tribes, including Thais and aboriginals from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Guizhou. Malays, Khmers and black Africans were purchased as slaves in the Tang dynasty. Many Han Chinese were enslaved in the process of the Mongols invasion of China proper. According to Japanese historian Sugiyama Masaaki and Funada Yoshiyuki, there were certain numbers of Mongolian slaves owned by Han Chinese during the Yuan dynasty. Moreover, there is no evidence that Han Chinese, who were considered people of the bottom of Yuan society by some research, were suffered a particular
Barbary pirates
The Barbary pirates, sometimes called Barbary corsairs or Ottoman corsairs, were Ottoman and Maghrebi pirates and privateers who operated from North Africa, based in the ports of Salé, Algiers and Tripoli. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, a term derived from the name of its ethnically Berber inhabitants, their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland, but they operated in the western Mediterranean. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns and villages in Italy, France and Portugal, but in the British Isles, the Netherlands, as far away as Iceland; the main purpose of their attacks was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Arab slavery market in North Africa and the Middle East. While such raids had occurred since soon after the Muslim conquest of Iberia, the terms "Barbary pirates" and "Barbary corsairs" are applied to the raiders active from the 16th century onwards, when the frequency and range of the slavers' attacks increased.
In that period Algiers and Tripoli came under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, either as directly administered provinces or as autonomous dependencies known as the Barbary States. Similar raids were undertaken from other ports in Morocco. Barbary corsairs captured thousands of merchant ships and raided coastal towns; as a result, residents abandoned their former villages of long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy. Between 100,000 and 250,000 Iberians were enslaved by these raids; the raids were such a problem coastal settlements were undertaken until the 19th century. Between 1580 and 1680 corsairs were said to have captured about 850,000 people as slaves and from 1530 to 1780 as many as 1,250,000 people were enslaved. However, these numbers have been questioned by the historian David Earle; some of these corsairs were European converts such as John Ward and Zymen Danseker. Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, Turkish Barbarossa Brothers, who took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century, were notorious corsairs.
The European pirates brought advanced sailing and shipbuilding techniques to the Barbary Coast around 1600, which enabled the corsairs to extend their activities into the Atlantic Ocean. The effects of the Barbary raids peaked in the early to mid-17th century. Long after Europeans had abandoned oar-driven vessels in favor of sailing ships carrying tons of powerful cannon, many Barbary warships were galleys carrying a hundred or more fighting men armed with cutlasses and small arms; the Barbary navies were not battle fleets. When they sighted a European frigate, they fled; the scope of corsair activity began to diminish in the latter part of the 17th century, as the more powerful European navies started to compel the Barbary States to make peace and cease attacking their shipping. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective protection continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs and the threat was subdued.
Occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary wars between the United States and the Barbary States, until terminated by the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. Piracy by Muslim populations had been known in the Mediterranean since at least the 9th century and the short-lived Emirate of Crete. Provence was plagued by Saracen slave raids in the Carolingian era. In 1198 the problem of Berber piracy and slave-taking was so great that a religious order, the Trinitarians, were founded to collect ransoms and to exchange themselves as ransom for those captured and pressed into slavery in North Africa. In the 14th century Tunisian corsairs became enough of a threat to provoke a Franco-Genoese attack on Mahdia in 1390 known as the "Barbary Crusade". Morisco exiles of the Reconquista and Maghreb pirates added to the numbers, but it was not until the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the privateer and admiral Kemal Reis in 1487 that the Barbary corsairs became a true menace to shipping from European Christian nations.
The Barbary pirates had long attacked English and other European shipping along the North Coast of Africa. They had been attacking English merchant and passengers ships since the 1600s. Regular fundraising for ransoms was undertaken by families and local church groups, who raised the ransoms for individuals; the government did not ransom ordinary persons. The English became familiar with captivity narratives written by Barbary pirates' prisoners and ransomed captives, as so many people were taken. After English colonists began to go to North America and be taken captive by Native Americans, both the colonists and people in England had some basis for considering the meaning of captivity for a Christian in an alien society. During the American Revolution the pirates attacked American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean. But, on December 20, 1777, Sultan Mohammed III of Morocco issued a declaration recognizing America as an independent country, that American merchant ships could enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast.
The relations were formalized with the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship signed in 1786, which stands as the U. S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty with a foreign power. As late as 1798, an islet near Sardinia was attacked
Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. The slave trade used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries; the vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from central and western Africa, sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were dependent on the supply of secure labour for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to sell in Europe; this was crucial to those western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires. The Portuguese were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, other European countries soon followed.
Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry, cutting timber for ships, in skilled labour, as domestic servants. The first Africans imported to the English colonies were classified as "indentured servants", like workers coming from England, as "apprentices for life". By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with the slaves and their offspring being the property of their owners, children born to slave mothers were slaves; as property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, were sold at markets with other goods and services. The major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch Empires. Several had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders.
These slaves were managed by a factor, established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were kept in a factory while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years, although the number purchased by the traders was higher, as the passage had a high death rate. Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade; the Atlantic slave trade developed after trade contacts were established between the "Old World" and the "New World". For centuries, tidal currents had made ocean travel difficult and risky for the ships that were available, as such there had been little, if any, maritime contact between the peoples living in these continents. In the 15th century, new European developments in seafaring technologies resulted in ships being better equipped to deal with the tidal currents, could begin traversing the Atlantic Ocean.
Between 1600 and 1800 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa. In doing so, they came into contact with societies living along the west African coast and in the Americas which they had never encountered. Historian Pierre Chaunu termed the consequences of European navigation "disenclavement", with it marking an end of isolation for some societies and an increase in inter-societal contact for most others. Historian John Thornton noted, "A number of technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce", he identified these as being the drive to find new and profitable commercial opportunities outside Europe as well as the desire to create an alternative trade network to that controlled by the Muslim Empire of the Middle East, viewed as a commercial and religious threat to European Christendom. In particular, European traders wanted to trade for gold, which could be found in western Africa, to find a maritime route to "the Indies", where they could trade for luxury goods such as spices without having to obtain these items from Middle Eastern Islamic traders.
Although many of the initial Atlantic naval explorations were led by Iberians, members of many European nationalities were involved, including sailors from Portugal, the Italian kingdoms, England and the Netherlands. This diversity led Thornton to describe the initial "exploration of the Atlantic" as "a international exercise if many of the dramatic discoveries were made under the sponsorship of the Iberian monarchs"; that leadership gave rise to the myth that "the Iberians were the sole leaders of the exploration". Slavery was prevalent in many parts of Africa for many centuries before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. There is evidence that enslaved people from some parts of Africa were exported to states in Africa and Asia prior to the European colonization of the Americas; the Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa, although it was the largest in volume and intensity. As Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique: The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes.
Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries... Fou
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
