I didn’t know the early civilizations traded slaves so far away. Ignorance fought.
I’ve wondered if there was much slavery just prior to the new world colonization? The Feudal system and peasants provided cheap and easily exploited labor. It seemed to have replaced the need for slaves. Just my impression. We studied the feudal system in history classes but I don’t recall slavery being mentioned and how common it was during the feudal period.
New world colonization required a very large and cheap work force. Which unfortunately meant making use of the slave traders and the African tribes willing to supply the people.
Just to emphasize that point, it is my understanding that there is no archeological evidence supporting the existence of Jewish slaves in Egypt. I apologize if this is a hijack.
There is a lot of archeological evidence supporting the evidence of people from Canaan being in Egypt. There is not much archeological evidence of people who are identified as Jews being so. There is a lot of evidence of upheaval and movement of peoples in the region during that time. AN excellent book about that era is 1177 BC, the year Civilization Collapsed.
As for the OP, I will note that there is an underlying ignorance there especially by the use of “African tribes”, when in fact at the time most of the trade on the African side was conducted by established political entities like teSonghai Empire, the Dendi Kingdom and earlier the Mali Empire,
Sure slavery was talked about a lot in our history classes. Going back to the Greeks, Egyptians and other civilizations.
I don’t recall much being said about it in the Middle Ages. Feudalism provided the cheap labor. I’m sure slavery did exist in some areas during that time, but I don’t recall it being a focus in our studies of the Middle Ages.
Slavery came up again as we studied new world colonization. The Dutch West India Company for example was covered and their role in the slave trade.
Of course history classes have to be selective in what they cover. There isn’t time to cover every single detail over a period of hundreds or thousands of years.
During the Middle Ages the Catholic Church’s stance was generally against slavery and as time went on, most of the nations in western Europe ceased to practice it, with the feudal system arising to replace it. While some people think of serfs as being identical to slaves, there were differences. Most significantly, a feudal lord could not chain up a bunch of serfs, move them, and sell them wherever he pleased. The serfs were legally tied to their plots of land, and could not be moved off the land by force as long as the rule of law was in effect. (Of course, this being the Middle Ages, there would be periods of time when the rule of law was not so much in effect.)
There were some exceptions to the anti-slavery policies in western Europe, allowing that convicted criminals or prisoners of war could in some cases become de facto slaves. One common usage of slavery was the galley slaves who rowed ships prior to the arrival of more advanced shipbuilding that made them unnecessary.
And yet the Jesuits running Georgetown University were one of the largest slave owners in the US as late as the 1830s. Spain and Portugal (stalwart, Catholic countries) were large participants in the slave trade will past what anyone would call the “Middle Ages”.
They were not nation states and the word “tribe” is not by default derogatory. The use of the words “empire” and “kingdom” by yourself could also be interpreted as ignorance.
No and neither were any states until the invention of the national idea in the 19th century europe.
however, the emergence of kingdoms and state structures essentially similar to the medieval europe or the pre colonial americas began in the late classical period of of the Mediterranean world.
in the context of the African case, it is as it is ignorant and fallacious and us derived from old outdated racist ideas about the African history. To call a Mali empire or a Ghana empire as tribal is quite stupid, one would have to call the early French kingdoms “tribal.”
only by someone who has entirely false ideas about the history of the various states in Africa and is stuck in the early 20th century vision of the Tarzan Africa as a documentary.
history records the states, and the other polities that traded. if there were only the online resource with the citations that one could possibly read about this extensive documentation…
Look, if you don’t know about something, that’s fine. Ask about it.
But, as a general rule, the fact that YOU are ignorant about something doesn’t mean that “little has been said” about it. I am ignorant about the causes of the decline of the Mughal Empire. I am ignorant about the current status of trade and diplomatic relationships between Argentina and Uruguay. But it would never occur to me to assert that my ignorance is a product of a lack of information on the subject.
The literature on the Atlantic slave trade is massive, and just about any work that attempts to deal with that trade in any detail at all will also talk about the various West African kingdoms that were integral to the development of trans-Atlantic slavery. There are also historians of the various regions and kingdoms of West Africa who, while not interested only in slavery, write in considerable detail about the effects of international trade—including the trade in human beings—on the region.
As someone who teaches US history, and who has to get through a lot of stuff in a semester, i don’t have time to go into multi-lesson detail about the African corner of the “triangle trade” that characterized Atlantic commerce. I do, however, make clear to my students that the trade was a sophisticated system of international competition and cooperation, that it involved the movement of slaves and of manufactured goods and of unprocessed raw materials like sugar and tobacco, and that the kingdoms and empires mentioned above by AK84, as well as much smaller ones like Whydah, were important players in the development of the Atlantic economy and therefore of the slave trade.
This stuff is also mentioned in just about every college-level US history textbook that i’ve previewed in the last decade. Students of colonial American history should come away from their classes with a clear understanding that the slave trade did not simply involve a bunch of Europeans jumping of the boat on an African beach and grabbing the first black people that they saw.
In his defense the most popular depiction of slavers is from Roots which had a bunch of white people using black minions to capture slaves. Since most of history taught in this country is American or European history and african history is not taught much, most people probably do not think of the slave trade as being controlled by powerful African kingdoms who grew rich off the slave trade.
