Trigger Warning: Racism and Slavery
So this post is about the Barbary Pirates and the white slave trade. What the heck is that you may ask? Well from the 16-19th centuries there were some, more or less independent, states in North Africa (modern day Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya). These states together were known as the Barbary States and what they were famous for were the Corsairs. Basically these guys were pirates whose primary trade was to raid coastal towns on the European side of the Mediterranean Sea. They also raided ships and took as captives many white European men, women, and children. These people were sold into slavery, generally staying within the Barbary states and they were used for hard manual labor. I thank Wikipedia for this basic outline and the artwork. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
There endeth the lesson, because what this post is about is the perception of white victimhood. Now let me talk about Robert Davis.
Robert C. Davis is a professor of history at Ohio State university and he has published a rather bold little book entitled “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800″
Now this book came out in 2004 but thanks to all of the buzz about the Islamic State it has rediscovered some popularity. Anyways according to this article here, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/mar/10/20040310-115506-8528r/ and also here http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm Professor Davis found, using some new methods which he apparently invented, that between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved from about 1500-1800, give or take 50 years. Davis himself writes up all of his findings in a neat little article here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
(Davis estimates in this article that the number was between 850,000 to 1.25 million)
Now let me say exactly what is wrong with Davis’ arguments. This is important because Davis is the only thinker who has come up with the over 1 million number for the amount of Europeans enslaved by the Barbary Pirates. A brief internet search will yield you lots of people who have opinions on this, but the only scholar among them, aka the only person who has actually researched this and the person who all of these bloggers inevitably are getting their info from, is Robert C. Davis.
Problem 1: No other scholars corroborate either Davis’ evidence or his theory about how one could come up with these numbers.
In the academic world this is incredibly damning since the only way that your ideas can have merit is if other people, using your methods, come up with the same answers. This article http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/highereducation.books, also addresses Davis findings and it mentions another professor by the name of Dr. David Earle, who is also an expert in this field. Earle declined to speculate on the number of Europeans enslaved, on the basis of lack of information.
Even Ian Blanchard, another expert in a related field, conceded that, and I quote from the above article “We are talking about statistics which are not real, all the figures are estimates. But I don’t find that absolute figure of 1 million at all surprising. It makes total sense.” Blanchard claims that the estimate is reasonable, but that it is essentially made up, invented, created, and not really discovered.
Problem 2: Davis’ method for finding his impressive statistic is based on a guess which is unwarranted and unnecessary.
The various articles, and Davis himself, explains that the over 1 million number was arrived at through guesswork based on assumptions. Let me break it down.
- First Davis got his hands on the most accurate historical records he could find (every article assures us of this, although here we are essentially taking his word for it), then he determined a starting number of European slaves to be about 35,000 when the trade began in the 1500’s. (for that information you need to look at his article on the BBC as all of the other articles are vague on how he comes up with his initial number).
- Secondly, Davis went into estimation mode. He figured that the Barbary States would have wanted to maintain their population of Christian European Slaves and thus they would have needed to abduct at least 850,000 slaves from around 1530-1780 in order to offset the inevitable loss of slaves due to death, escape, ransom, or conversion to Islam.
- Third, Davis says that at most that number could have gone as high as 1,250,000. And this number is his maximal estimate.
However Davis has several problems in his method.
- He himself claims that the slaves held in the Barbary States during this period were not all white, or European, or Christian. In fact the Barbary pirates participated just as much in the African and Ottoman slave trades as they did in capturing people for themselves. So even if that starting number was 35,000 it is entirely possible (nay likely) that the number of slaves the pirates would have needed to abduct could have been offset by internal slave trading, or “legitimate” (in the sense of they bartered rather than abducted) trade with the African nations and the Ottoman Empire.
- Also Davis bases his estimate on the idea that slaves would have needed to be replaced because of death, escape, ransom, or conversion. We would only have some idea of this in the last 2 cases, since there really would be no way to know, (or even guess) at how many slaves would be dying or escaping. Again all of these losses could have been offset by internal slave trading, slave breeding, or the African and Ottoman trade.
The real problem is that Davis does not know something, and so he uses bad history, bad science, and bad logic. This is a form of the fallacy known as the appeal to ignorance, and it also involves the fallacy of suppressing evidence (though in this case we are suppressing the lack of evidence). Ultimately Davis flat out guesses at a number that is designed to shock, which brings us to the third problem.
Problem 3: Davis’ research is being driven by a political agenda which is designed to show that whites too were the victims of slavery. He wants you to know that White European Christians suffered at the hands of Black Muslim Africans. This is important so that you will also know that whites were not racist in their own enslaving tactics. In other words, Davis is a racist.
Davis writes in several places that his agenda is to educate the world on the reality of the slave trade. Specifically he wants people to know that slavery predated racism (which is something people know since the Romans enslaved people of all colors and creeds, even other Romans).
Davis says, and I quote ““One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature — that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true…”This sounds both obvious and also strangely political. It sounds as though Davis wants to remind all of us that slavery has nothing to do with race, nor did it ever have anything to do with race. If you think I am being unfair then here is what he has to say elsewhere on the matter.
“Slaves in Barbary could be black, brown or white, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish or Muslim. Contemporaries were too aware of the sort of people enslaved in North Africa to believe, as many do today, that slavery, whether in Barbary or the Americas, was a matter of race.”
What that statement proves is that the Barbary Pirates were not racist, in fact all that Davis has managed to prove is that the Black Muslim Barbary Pirates were actually gender and racial egalitarians, despite being slavers. Yet he pushes it further, he wants to also use this to prove that slavery in the Americas (which was being done by white Europeans of Black Africans and Native Americans) was in fact not motivated by racism. That is both false and also completely unrelated to all of his claims about the Barbary Pirates.
It is very telling that when the combined might of the British, French, and Americans eventually ended the Barbary slave trade that one of the conditions was that the pirates would stop enslaving white Christians. However the pirates remained free to enslave Africans as much as they liked.
It is also telling that during the time of the Barbary Pirates the slave trade in the Americas resulted in approximately 10-12 million Africans being enslaved. (this information is based on actual historical records of the cargoes of slave ships and census data taken from plantations, in case you were curious. The European slavers kept thorough records, how else could you figure out how much money you were going to make on your cargo?)
It is not that Davis is completely wrong about the Barbary pirates and their practices, but rather he wants to argue that since the Barbary pirates were not racist in their enslaving tactics (as they would enslave anyone who was not Muslim) then also the Europeans were not racist in their slaving tactics. This simply isn’t true. At best Davis wants to bring some light on an issue that is often overlooked, he is definitely a bad academic, and he is actually and undeniably a racist.
Technoracism: Living Critically 
What actually matters is NOT the motivation of the slavers, it’s the degree to which they damaged the minds, and bodies of their victims.
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To that extent I would agree. Slavery is absolutely morally reprehensible in whatever form it takes. There is no possible moral defense for it. My critique is not meant to support certain kinds of slavery, but rather to draw attention to the political agendas of those writing about the Barbary Pirates.
The Barbary Pirates were certainly immoral individuals, and whether they themselves were racist or not does not make them good people.
Though on a sliding scale of morality, the Barbary pirates damaged fewer bodies and minds, and did not act from a motivation of racism.
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In the 14th century CE, the Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote:
– :”beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.” “Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.”
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Do I need to defend or explain Ibn Khaldun?
For the longest time I had simply ignored this statement as I was unsure what it was supposed to prove. As it is presented it proves that a rather well known scholar was nationalistic in his defense of slavery, though not strictly speaking racist as the concept of race (as a biological fact defining people as completely different based on geographic regions of origin) had not yet been invented when this quote was written. (that distinction belongs more or less to Francois Bernier http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/2000/50/1.abstract)
Besides Ibn Khaldun had rather conflicting views on Africans, and even the quote explains that this applies only to the non civilized (aka non-Muslim) Africans. http://thirdresurrection.blogspot.com/2006/02/ibn-khaldun-on-african-blacks.html
Even taking all this into account, it would be impossible to say that Ibn Khaldun speaks, or even spoke, for the Barbary States. To be sure some people might have been influenced by his thinking, but without any political or historical context it would be impossible to tell whether he is expressing extremist views which most in his society did not approve, or mainstream views. Though given his nature as a scholar it is safe to say that his views were most likely only held by other scholars, and literate members of the upper class.
Yet the reason I hesitated to even respond to this is because it is unclear if this quote proves anything at all, especially as it is given with no citation, and is actually a combination of 2 different quotes.
Upon doing some research this quote is excerpted from the Muqaddimah, and most likely came from this page https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun. Which is a shame since if you check out this page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah you get a much more well rounded view. If anything you get the idea that Ibn Khaldun was more specifically ethnicist or nationalist. That is, he did not think that all of the Negro people (though that word is problematic as a translation for the Arabic word Zanj) were inferior, just the rest of Africa which he knew nothing about and where there were not yet any Muslim converts.
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In the beginning, there were white slaves in the colonies in North America. “damaged fewer bodies and minds” – the Arabs caught many millions of black slaves from Central Africa, starting before Muhammed. Later, it was a common saying that Allah had punished the black people by making them black, a sign that they were born to become slaves. When the Janjaweed militia makes the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the motivated the killing by saying that black people “were like monkeys”. Damage bodies – male slaves were castrated, many would regard that as a bodily damage. And being taken as a sex slave in a harem – could that not damage the mind?
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You seem to have misunderstood the scope of this article. My aim was to disprove some claims made by Robert Davis in comparing the Barbary Slave Trade with the European Slave Trade.
Of course you are wrong about there being white slaves in the colonies of North America. Unless by that you mean light skinned Native Americans? Of course if you mean white indentured servants then there are a few key differences between slavery, that was based on race and the ownership of black bodies, and indentured servitude, which was based on class. Beyond that difference, indentured servants retained certain political and legal rights, slaves (as property) had no rights at all. Indentured servants were also contracted for periods of years in a temporary business arrangement, it was not the case with the permanent slavery of Black bodies.
On the other hand if you mean to point out that small fraction of Europeans who were more or less forced into indentured servitude, then you should read this article. https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/liam-hogan/%E2%80%98irish-slaves%E2%80%99-convenient-myth
As to whether or not we should dip back into the historical pool and dig up the pasts of Muslims and try to imply that somehow they have outdone Christians or Europeans in terms of sheer evils perpetrated on the world? Be my guest, but you are a bit off topic.
Slavery is about as old as humanity and various people groups from all over the world have made and kept slaves, including many Middle Eastern Nations, many European nations, China, India, and many African nations as well. That this is true in no way changes the facts that Robert Davis has overblown his “facts” about the barbary pirates, or the fact that European slavery outdid the Barbary states in deaths and in kidnappings.
But the bulk of your comments seems directed at somehow proving that Muslims are evil…because they are Muslims and are thus inherently wicked. Otherwise I could say of all of your examples that “of course some people are just bad.” But let me be more specific. As to the racism of the Janjaweed Militia, you should probably read up on them, the situation is more complex, and is based on ethnicity as well as resource allocations and old feuds, it is not (as you imply) because of Islam. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/features/darfur/fiveyearson/report4.html
As to the common saying that “Allah had punished the black people by making them black, a sign that they were born to become slaves.” I would still appreciate a quote or a link to your source for this common saying, because it is again somewhat complex. To be sure there were scholars like Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Sina, and many others besides who are quoted here. https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Qur'an,_Hadith_and_Scholars:Racism,
You might also see how this is explained and defended here, http://www.answering-christianity.com/muhammad_not_racist.htm
As to your final points about the treatment of male slaves who were castrated or sexually assaulted in harems. You are right of course that such acts are evil and damage the body and mind. But the issue is whether or not the Barbary pirates did more damage than the European slave trade. The numbers show that they did not. Even if Davis is to be believed that it was as many as 1.25 million slaves taken by the Barbary states this is still significantly less than the estimated 12 million slaves shipped from Africa by various European nations over the same period of history. http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates
This does not excuse what they did, as it was still evil, but as I said at the beginning, you misunderstood the scope of this article.
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Your thesis – that American slavery was a far greater evil than the enslavement of Europeans by Muslims because the former was based on racism – misses the bigger picture. You’re too committed to the narrative that Racism is the supreme evil to see 1) what really causes slavery, 2) how we justify slavery and 3) why the danger of slavery remains whenever the economic conditions are right. It’s hard to say whether racism, as embodied by the American South, or religious fanaticism that seeks to obliterate other cultures and torture others into accepting its faith, as embodied by the Barbary pirates, is a worse evil. But the key point is that these are only second-level realities to the main driver of slavery – simple human greed.
1) What Causes Slavery – slavery is an employment arrangement that exists when people live in low population densities. Most people can live a happy life in a mud hut with a garden. When there is a lot of open land, few people will choose to toil 10 hours a day growing crops or doing carpentry when they can simply forage a couple hours a day to gather food, and then spend the rest of the day making babies. When the thugs – or “businessmen,” “entrepreneurs,” “capitalists,” whatever term you prefer – decide they want to live in a big mansion, they need to get others to do the work for them. Since no one will willingly do this, they need to compel people to do it. Now, the plantation owners weren’t as powerful as today’s ultra-wealthy. They were closer to the local kingpin who owns two car dealerships than to an oligarch like Abigail Johnson or Sheldon Adelson. If some car dealer decided to keep my brother in chains and make him work dusk to dawn, I’d kill that bastard – and do it in the most painful, slowest way possible. All I’d have to do is sneak into his house at night, or maybe kill 2 or 3 hench-men who barely have an inch of height or 20 lbs of muscle on me so I can get to the Man. (Hardly a challenge, as long as I’m willing to lie in wait with a sword outside the restroom.) So what is the ambitious slave owner to do? He’s not going to enslave his own population, if he doesn’t want to crucified or boiled alive. He’s going to find people that no one cares about.
2) How We Justify Slavery – simply put, any way we can. If our slaves are prisoners of war, then it’s because they’re our enemies. If they’re of another religion, it’s because they worship false gods. If they’re of a noticeable different physical appearance, then it’s because they’re an inferior breed (whether by evolution, God’s design, sin, whatever). And make no mistake about it – all of your society’s institutions (church, schools, etc.) will adapt themselves to accommodate this rationale, no matter how farcical or depraved it is on its surface.
3) The Danger of Slavery Remains Whenever Economic Conditions are Right – if there was a population crash and our society started to dissolve (think the scattered survivalist bands in Walking Dead), slavery would be re-instituted immediately. So would it’s kissing-cousin, serfdom. No one would ponder its moral implications for one second. And since there is no longer any unifying culture among Americans, anyone would be fair game for enslavement, since it’s unlikely that large numbers of people would rally to the defense of whoever got enslaved. And we should note that “employment” is hardly a dignified, fair institution that supplanted slavery and serfdom because it was awesome. We’re employees rather than slaves because it’s cheaper for the Owners – they’d rather pay us a minimal salary than pay for our food, housing, and medical care. The higher the population relative to the number of available jobs, the more brutal and sadistic employment will be.
So the American slave owners were not uniquely evil parasites – they did what humans do, and what humans have always done, and what humans will do again if it’s easiest way to make a buck. If we want to advance human dignity and protect human beings from slavery (as well as the brutal employment arrangements that now torment millions around the globe), then we have to deal with something far more fundamental than Racism or Religious Fanaticism, something that might be far harder to eradicate (namely, the basic sins of greed, lust, ambition, etc.). That will prove to be a far harder challenge.
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I agree with you on majority of what you said up until the end. That bit about how humans are inherently evil. Everyone posses the capability to do great or terrible things. For instance, if the US were to change its socioeconomic identity to a more socialist one, the facilitator of racism, human greed, i.e capitalism, would be done away with rendering racism obselete. The unification of the proletariat on a national and hopefully global scale, would make a world where the term my brohers keeper isnt a cliche but something thats practiced in every aspect of society. It will be difficult but not impossible
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Jan, thank you for sharing your thoughts on slavery without sounding political or having an agenda. “If we want to advance human dignity and protect human beings from slavery (as well as the brutal employment arrangements that now torment millions around the globe), then we have to deal with something far more fundamental”
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I should begin by thanking you for your comment, and then I shall continue by defending myself against certain allegations, while bringing a critical eye to your comment.
First, my thesis was in fact not what you have stated here. My thesis was simply that Robert C. Davis used very poor methodology, backed by an undoubtedly racist agenda, to attempt to prove something which no one else has corroborated. But that is a minor technical quibble, your real issue with my blog seems to be that I do not understand the bigger picture of slavery.
As a side note you claim that the Barbary pirates were slavers due to their “religious fanaticism that seeks to obliterate other cultures and torture others into accepting its faith”. While this was not something I was in any way addressing it is fair to point out that the Barbary pirates had no particular interest in converting their slaves to their religion. In fact they had a decided economic interest in not converting them, since converting them would mean that they would no longer be able to legally be slaves. Now if you are simply generalizing about Islam, then this statement is problematic enough, but I won’t go and speculate about the lengths to which religious extremists go to make their points, that was never my goal.
Now your thesis has actually been quite well advanced by the famous economists Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in their rather famous book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974). You can look up a summary of it here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_on_the_Cross). The idea that slavery basically reduces to economic advantage or disadvantage in a free market system, was a rather popular idea in the study back in the 1970s. In general the idea of slavery basically put may indeed, at various times in history, reduced to a rather simple economic formula of mutual benefit. But my point, though not my main point as I have already stated, was that European and American slavery was historically unique for being racist. I don’t think anyone really argues that point any more, but in case you need to look it up, here are a few good articles on it.
(http://socialistworker.org/2010/10/21/the-roots-of-racism)
(http://www.unesco.org/bpi/eng/unescopress/2001/01-91e.shtml)
(http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm)
To be sure slavery is a rather ancient institution, though I am not sure how helpful it is to generalize about the ways in which different societies had slaves. Romans and Greeks had similar systems of slavery, Vikings had thralls, slaves as prisoners of war were rather common all throughout the ancient world.
Now on to your points.
(1) “slavery is an employment arrangement that exists when people live in low population densities”.
Except that this is not entirely accurate, and here I will be referring to the situation in American slavery, as a study of other kinds would be irrelevant. The difference between the worker who makes very little, and the slave who makes nothing is that the worker is free to go and die as they see fit. The slave is not, the slave cannot die without their master’s permission. They are not allowed to die until the master sees fit to let them. The worker may find another job, the slave may not. The worker has legal representation and is considered to be a member of society with rights and privileges. The slave has no legal representation, as property cannot be represented on its own behalf but only on behalf of an interested third party. The slave also has no rights and no privileges, the master may dispense with his property as he sees fit. The slave is not employed, the slave is an object in the master’s inventory. A job is a temporary situation, but slavery is permanent.
(2) “How We Justify Slavery – simply put, any way we can”.
This seems fair enough, as American slavery is a great example of how Christianity, Science, Politics, Tradition, Nature, and any social institution besides Abolition was co-opted to justify slavery. It also seems pointless to say so, but I will say it anyways, that still does not make it just. Simply because the majority of social institutions have provided their seal of approval does not provide any sort of overriding moral justification for an activity or an event. The easy go-to here is how Nazi Germany had pushed most of its social institutions in justifying the holocaust. This scenario also points out exactly what is flawed with this kind of socially relativistic thinking. While societies remain isolated they need only justify their decisions to themselves. Yet within a global community, of which the US and Europe were definitely a part during the slave trade, the justification must be made to all other nations within that community. It is not enough to justify it to ourselves, we have to justify it to everyone else, and if everyone else disagrees then we have not justified it at all.
(3) “The Danger of Slavery Remains Whenever Economic Conditions are Right”
Strictly speaking I don’t think I can argue with you here, since this isn’t really an argument so much as a move of cynical resignation. That is you are not really proving this point so much as you are doomsaying, prophesying that if people were desperate enough then slavery would pop right back up. Also this contradicts your earlier point about slavery being something which the powerful foist on the powerless. If slavery pops up in times of anarchy and chaos then slavery is something which the poor and desperate do to the weak. Except that was not at all the situation with European and American slavery. You needed to have quite a bit of capital and manpower to forcibly kidnap, enslave, and condition people into a lifetime of enforced servitude. This was not something done in desperate economic times, it was something done in booming economic times. If you look at the profiles of European and American slavery from the 16th and 17th century you find that they were driven by an economic need for free labor in order to make sugar cane plantations profitable. (http://www.livescience.com/4949-sugar-changed-world.html) So no, slavery is not something you find in desperate situations where populations crash, since in such times escape is all too easy and taking care of someone who is otherwise useless is rather difficult. Slavery is the unique province of the rich and the powerful, and in the case of America it was the unique province of the racist.
Your final point, that slavery is the result of the sin of greed or ambition, is rather interesting. I would agree, but only in the most general sense. I do not wish to commit myself to some complex theology of human morality which argues that all humans are basically depraved in the exact same way. That is too simplistic and also does not explain why some people kill, steal, enslave, rape, maim, or assault, and others…don’t.
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White people (aka European descendants) WERE unique as the first people to try to ABOLISH slavery. I suggest you listen to this here:
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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Sowell is your source. He is both a well respected scholar and also a rather famous conservative. I cannot in any way impugn his credentials, though as to the moral notion of white peoples being the first to abolish slavery, surely you see the problems here.
First the obvious, abolishing a practice by which you have profitted from theft and kidnap, does not in any way really make up for your theft and kidnapping. It is an admirable and necessary first step towards reconciliation and reparations, but on its own it rings hollow. It is not enough for the thief to vow never to steal again, they must also repay what they took.
Secondly specific European countries at different times in history and for different reasons decided to end their own society’s participation in the slave trade. This did not actually effectively abolish slavery until most nations, including the latecomers in the 19th century agreed. This was a global business model and only a global decision could have undone it, a decision which was not officially reached until…actually it hasn’t been officially decided yet. It kind of got unofficially decided in 2004 or so, simply because no countries allow it officially anymore. But White people never decided this as a race.
Also you are simply wrong. The Qin dynasty abolished slavery in China around 200 bce, and the Xin dynasty abolished it around 20 ce. The abolition didn’t stick however.
Also even before this in the Maurya Empire (3rd century bce India) Ashoka abolished the slave trade, but left slavery itself intact.
I know it’s Wikipedia but the sources are sound.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline
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Okay, nice rebuttal on historical abolition. I’m glad to hear it was tried by others earlier too.
But slaves bought by Europeans in Africa were not kidnapped but bought off of African slave owners. Can you give me an example of African slaves actually kidnapped from Africa? And who is responsible for reparations then? Those slave owners are long dead.
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I suppose in one sense you are correct. The majority of African slaves sold off to the Transatlantic trade were captured prisoners of war, imprisoned criminals, or simply directly kidnapped by mostly African traders. http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Ships_and_the_Middle_Passage#its4
However your implication is that if Europeans only participated in the buying and selling of slaves then they are not responsible for their initial kidnapping.
That is certainly not true of the illegal slave trade as it stands in our current world. Buyers and sellers are held to be just as legally culpable, in some cases even more so, than those who do the direct kidnapping. It also does not make any sense to claim that the Europeans did not kidnap their slaves since they only kidnapped them second. They continued to keep these people in bondage as slaves and thus had an equally immoral share in the kidnapping. That is, when you take possession of a person who has been kidnapped, and you continue to hold that person against their will, or ship them across the sea against their will, then you are kidnapping them. Dr. Alexander Falconbridge described at least 4 different specific kidnappings in his, although in general he claimed that “Most of the Negroes shipped off from the coast of Africa are kidnapped.” http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slavetrade.htm
The book “Liverpool and Slavery: A Historical Account of the African Slave Trade. Liverpool: A. Bowker and Son, 1884.” outlines several incidents of kidnapping done directly by British traders from Liverpool.http://umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/slavery2/collection.html,
Other sources for kidnapped slaves include,
http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/the-slave-trade, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/africa/capture_sale.aspx, http://www.accessgambia.com/information/how-were-slaves-acquired.html, http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=368&Itemid=227,
I do not wish to deny that Africans had a part in slavery, and there is a very good article on the cooperative nature of the slave trade here. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/41431. To be sure various African people groups participated willingly in the slave trade, and profited greatly from it.
However even when we admit quite freely that African people had an equal role to play in slavery, this admission in no way removes even an ounce of guilt from the European and Americans who also participated.
As for reparations? Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a brilliant article about this here. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/,
My two cents on reparations is that if we as a nation have historically profited from slavery, which cannot possibly be denied, then we as a nation should pay back reparations to the now-living descendants of slaves. However the problem there is that slavery did not end in the 1860s. It continued in various forms well up until the 1940s. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/27/1068168/-The-lie-about-when-slavery-ended#. Again this is a national debt, not a personal one acquired by individuals who personally engaged in the trade. Rather it is a national legacy which has affected all of us.
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I’m not saying that historical Europeans and Americans are not responsible but just not more so than people of colour.
Also, I myself and most other people alive today had no responsibility in slavery so myself and most others are not responsible for paying taxes towards reparations to the descendents of slaves (who even themselves had no experience of slavery). Individuals not societies should be held accountable.
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Insofar as America today, is a country which was built by slaves and maintained through slave labor and which profited from the work of those slaves, the death and treaties of the first peoples and the systemic racism and sexism which made it strong…then yes you and me and all Americans are responsible for this.
One helpful way to look at slavery in America is to understand that the entire country, north and south, profited from it right up till the end of the civil war. From a moderate site,
“In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.” https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slavery-and-anti-slavery/resources/was-slavery-engine-american-economic-growth
Also we can’t hold the individuals responsible because they are all dead. Their descendants are numerous and intermarried into society, in fact I am one of them. My ancestor was named Isaac Cantrell and he owned a man named Sam, a man named Walt, a woman named Polly, and a young child named Will. He may have owned more than this, and I know that other members of my ancestral line owned slaves, but I say this as a person who accepts his responsibility in this. Yet we can hold America responsible, especially the government which runs it and has never issued so much as an apology for slavery. That would be a start at least.
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family history has been passed down that a ancestor of ours was captured by the Pirates of Tripoli
Surname/HOOK. To date have not located information to confirm or correct. Can you help me?
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Although genealogy is my hobby I must confess that my skills at it do not extend far beyond the United States. I have had some success in using familysearch.org and ancestry.com, but beyond that I don’t think I can offer you too much assistance.
I can say this, trust your family history and legacy. If there is no physical evidence then by all means tell your story, the worst that could happen would be that someone might reveal evidence that disproves your story and then you finally know the truth.
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Janus since you are an expert on the Barbary Slave Trade — how many European slaves do you estimate were owned by black muslim north africans during the aforementioned centuries? Please let me know the methodology you are using to arrive at your specific figure — if you say “I don’t know” then you should think twice before you criticise a guy like Davis. Anyone can nitpick methodology, so lets hear your figures and more importantly why you believe those figures to be true. Hopefully it is something more than “I don’t have any estimate”, because that would just be a cowardly way out by an individual who wants to have a position on an issue yet pretend they don’t have one.
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Dino Velvet, let me first say, thanks for coming to my page and sharing your thoughts.
Now let me say secondly…did you actually read my article? In it I clearly mention what was wrong with Davis’ method, and my arguments are rather thorough. Your comment does not seem to dispute this, instead you seem to have committed a number of logical fallacies.
You are accusing me of making an illegitimate appeal to authority, when in fact I make no claim to be an “expert on the Barbary slave trade”. So this claim of yours is simply false.
You also attack me directly, and not my claims. So you are committing the fallacy of ad hominem, an attack against my person and character rather than my position.
Also why should I claim to know something when I clearly point out in my article that most other scholars refuse to make this estimate? That is most scholars who are not Robert Davis, refuse to estimate this number. If I have proven, as I am quite sure that I have, that such estimation is not accurate or even really possible then how do you expect me to make the same mistake of which I am accusing Davis? I do not know what your answer to these questions might be as you seem to think I have some position on this which I am keeping hidden.
I have no hidden agenda, and I have been quite clear in my article about what I am proving and what I am not proving.
One final point, that I am unable to accurately estimate the numbers of slaves taken by the Corsairs does not mean that Davis’ estimate is right. That would be a version of the appeal to ignorance, and since we do not accurately know then we should refrain from making wild guesses.
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Also the Barbary pirates were not “black” in the sense that you may be thinking, they looked much like the current inhabitants of North Africa. If you had to determine their ethnicity I would urge you to go and look at drawings and sketches from the time period which clearly depict them in different ways than are blacks of that time period. Insofar as they were African then yes I suppose you could, as some are wont to do and as Davis seems to imply, lump them in with everyone else on the huge continent of Africa and call them “black” but that would be a bit of an oversimplification.
But here, you might enjoy this little piece. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Barbary-slave-trade-which-led-to-the-enslavement-of-nearly-2-5-million-white-Christian-Europeans-completely-ignored-in-comparison-to-the-Transatlantic-slave-trade
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There is only one “problem” here good sir: that Blacks had white slaves, for sex and labor. That fact rains on many, many parades.
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No, there are many “problems” here, but let me just start with the problems you point out.
You must understand that without context, facts, evidence, or even a handy internet link your statement evokes logical fallacies on several levels.
It is the fallacy of suppressed evidence, since you do not present any evidence to back up this claim and since you are ignoring any evidence which might prove you wrong. It is a fallacy of the red herring since even if your statement is true it in no way invalidates the well researched history of European enslavement of Africans. That is, it is a well established fact, go here https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/slvtrade.htm and here http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=369&Itemid=145 to learn more, that White enslavement of Black peoples involved forced labor, rape, and legalized murder.
Now let me set those obvious things aside and address your primary concern. You say that that “fact” rains on many, many parades. But I see you making an appeal to the people, also a logical fallacy. You are attempting to reveal information which you seem to believe should cause people to hang their heads in shame over a perceived moral indignation. Your appeal is an attempt to claim that the truly elite, those people like yourself, understand something that the rest of society does not. What do the rest of us not understand?
That black enslavement of whites was just as bad, if not worse, than white enslavement of blacks.
As you can see from my article and the numerous comments I have made, that “fact” is simply wrong.
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Thank you for sharing your opinions. Although I disagree with most of them I appreciate your civil response to people’s thoughts. There seems to be a lot of passion behind the concept of “racism,” race as a concept being coined in 1794 by one man (not all of Europe), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
If Adolf Hitler really was part Jewish as the follow article suggests, then I’m curious what you would call him? How can a man be “racist” if he is his own enemy? “Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.” (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/7961211/Hitler-had-Jewish-and-African-roots-DNA-tests-show.html)
The former England [soccer] player John Barnes put it very well in the Times this week: “Race is not a scientific reality. You could find a tribe in Africa who are genetically closer to Europeans than to an African tribe a hundred miles away. Some Saudis have whiter skin than Italians.” (source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/17/race-is-a-myth-deborah-orr)
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Thanks for your feedback and your interesting questions. Let me see how best to answer them.
The idea of race actually predates Blumenbach by over a century. Scholars generally agree that the idea of race as “a major division of humanity displaying a distinctive combination of physical traits transmitted through a line of descent…” (from Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott, “Introduction” in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2000), viii.) was invented by Francois Bernier in 1684.
Bernier published his A New Division of the Earth in order to geographically categorize the earth according to the various groups of people which lived in the parts he had visited. The notion of race was invented, or at least first used, by him in order to differentiate the peoples of the world into superior and inferior groups based on what he thought were universal, within the racial categories anyway, characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Bernier
http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/2000/50/1.abstract
As for whether or not Adolph Hitler was a man of complex ethnic ancestry? I suppose most people in the world are. Most people who identify as white would in fact be able to trace their ancestry, via genetic typing, to various parts of the world. However this genetic typing for ethnicity is not without controversy, as you see here https://dna-explained.com/2013/10/04/ethnicity-results-true-or-not/.
Yes I would still consider Adolph Hitler to be a racist, but that is because of how he acted rather than who he was genetically. Hitler reinforced the European racial categories and used them to target and harm people who were racially Jewish or Roma. Now since race is a social, rather than purely scientific, category then it continues to thrive based on public perception and the history of political power dynamics which have defined whiteness as the norm, and all else as a kind of inferior deviation. Whether Hitler was “truly” white or not does not matter since he thought he was white, or in his case the super-white of the Aryan, and so did everyone else in his society. In fact if his followers had thought he was Jewish they most likely would have treated him in the same fashion that they were treating all the Jews during the Holocaust. So Hitler acted out of white supremacy and used the public perception of whiteness in order to demonize non-white peoples living in Germany and turn them into scapegoats. Racism is about your attitudes and your actions, not about whatever your genetic makeup might be.
So in the end I agree with you that there is no genetic or scientific evidence for race. Nonetheless there is a long global history of using the idea of race to cast people in broad categories of superiority and inferiority. The troubling thing about racism is that we tend to know it’s scientifically empty, and yet we continue to employ it at every level of society and to determine the value of every person.
You could consider the case of Serena Williams, and the ways in which her supposed “natural” athletic prowess is often blamed for her success, rather than any skill on her part which may have been honed by hours of practice.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/09/serena-williams-grace-banal-racism
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/serena-williams-policing-of-black-bodies_us_55a3bef4e4b0a47ac15ccc00
http://qz.com/490859/only-sexism-and-racism-can-explain-why-serena-williams-doesnt-earn-more-in-endorsements/
You could also consider the fact that a recent study found that among med students at a prestigious American medical school, “about half endorsed false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. And those who did also perceived blacks as feeling less pain than whites, and were more likely to suggest inappropriate medical treatment for black patients…”
https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/04/medical-students-beliefs-race-pain/
Finally in so many ongoing ways in society racial bias continues to favor whites over blacks, and this can be and is still being statistically measured.
It remains one of humanities greatest crises.
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I stumbled upon your article while researching the Barbary Slave Trade. I really enjoyed reading this entire discussion, even those that seemed to take offense to your original rebuttal of the proposed 1.2 million white slaves during that period. Thanks for initiating the conversation. You, sir, are a very informed individual Janus762 😊
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Janus762 I understand that what I am about to ask is not related to the initial article but you have covered so many other “arguments” in your answers that I would really like your help on two things I have encountered that I am not able to respond to.
1) How would you respond to this persons argument? I have never heard of Colonials putting poor white people in a better economic place to disparage the slaves more: “attached inferiority” came after slavery ended and it was because poor white and black people began to band together against the wealthy. So rich politicians made it so people of color were to be seen as lesser beings to create racial divide so that they could say “you are poor but at least you are not black.”
2) I often feel I hear white males support racism with comments such as “there is no such thing as white privilege I’ve worked hard for everything” or “blacks are racist too.” When I then categorize them as racist they at times come back with, “I can’t be racist my girlfriend/wife is black/mexican/asian etc.
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Thanks for your questions.
In response to (1) to the idea that the notion of inferiority only became attached to race after the end of slavery. In one sense this seems true since there was a definite, measurable, political, and violent backlash against the now free Blacks in former slave states. So yes, there was an enhanced emphasis on the racial inferiority of blacks among poor whites who were definitely desperate to claim their own piece of that elusive American dream.
On the other hand it’s absurd to think that race had no sense of hierarchy, of white supremacy and black inferiority, prior to the end of slavery. This does not make any practical sense when you consider that the logic of owning another person, aka of forcibly holding another person in bondage against their will, does not apply to those you consider to be your equals. Humans have always believed that their prisoners were inferior, if for no other reason than to justify brutality against them. This also doesn’t hold water historically, especially when you consider that in A New Division of the earth by Francois Bernier (published in 1684 and long before anyone in Europe even thought about ending slavery) that Bernier distinguishes Europeans as white and Africans as black, and he defines the Africans as lacking the civilization and refinement of the Europeans. Clearly Bernier thought that Africans were racially inferior. This is echoed by every philosopher and scientist of race all the way up until the mid 20th century. So there is a clear history of race being based on white supremacy.
In response to (2) there are a few things here so I want to take them one by one.
“I have earned everything I have and so I know I have no white privilege.” You might consider showing them this article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html You may also consider the simple fact that this is in no way true, nor does anyone think it is true. As infants we depend entirely on our caretakers, we are not earners then. As children and as adolescents we also depend greatly on our caretakers to provide us with education, financial means, and social opportunities we could otherwise not get for ourselves. To have succeeded in life is only possible because you had a great deal of help, and because you continue to have a great deal of help. One of those assets is whiteness, though of course not always as black people have also succeeded.
“Blacks are racist too.” You might show them them this article. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/15/884649/- The issue here is that aren’t black people also racist? The simple answer is no, since race is a system of power and privilege predicated on the presumption of whiteness. In other words, only white people benefit from racism, and even if a black person tried to be racist this would only mean that they were using a system of race (which is based on the presumption of white supremacy) to try to gain benefits for themselves based on their own whiteness. Which, if the culture at large thinks they are black then they gain no benefits. Simply put, racism is a top down system and it only goes one way. Black people are perfectly capable of discriminating against white people but they do not do this as part of a history and a social system of benefits that they gain by doing this. Instead they do it as a person against a system where black violence against white bodies is often retaliated on in a way which harms all black bodies rather than only some. Since all blacks are to blame for the actions of one in a racist system.
“I can’t be racist, my significant other is my official race card.” The idea here is that if a white person takes it upon themselves to marry or date a person of a race other than white then this proves that they are not racist. You never hear non-whites arguing that dating a white person proves that they are not a racist. Such a statement is absurd and meaningless. It is only white people who hope to prove their non-racism by taking their intimate partner and showing them off as a kind of token. A proof of their goodness and their racism free-ness. Show them this article, http://allvalid.com/all/yes-you-can-be-racist-if-youre-dating-a-black-person-drop-that-excuse/
Ask them what they think this proves and why they feel the need to use someone, they claim to love, as a tool for their own social gains. To trot your partner out in this way and put them on display to prove your bonafides is as far as I can tell, one of the most racist things you can do.
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My apologies for being almost three years late to this party. I just stumbled across this article during a caffeine induced, tangent-filled, research project that is completely unrelated to the subject matter discussed above. The title of this work was what peaked my interest and, subsequently, held my attention all the way through the comments above. I have read, literally (this term being used in the actual literal, not figurative, sense), thousands of articles and debates on a numerous variety of topics over the years. Throughout my studies, I cannot honestly recall seeing a more well versed and professional debate taking place in any forum, on any topic, outside of the comment section of your article. Please keep in mind that I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with the subject matter, but simply amazed and genuinely pleased that healthy, professional, educated, and civil debates between opposing views still exist. I truly hope that the maturity and class that is displayed by those involved here is carried on, passed around, and appreciated by others. To all those who participated in the discussion above– Thank you for valuing education and professionalism above name-calling, anger, and profanity. It’s refreshing to see that individuals can still disagree on certain subjects and debate them properly, instead of spewing hate/discontent towards those who disagree with their words. Mahalo!
P.S.- Stay Classy.
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