A recent book by an American professor has caused some uproar, by claiming over a million Europeans were enslaved by North Africans from 1500 until 1800.
I’m not sure what the uproar is about, unless it is simply a surprise to see the numbers quantified. Every student of literature knows (or should know) that Cervantes was captured by pirates and enslaved for several years and the the theme of a character being captured by or sold off to Barbary slavers is a fairly common one in romantic literature from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. In the U.S., the reputations of our Navy’s earliest frigates and the daring exploits of Stephen Decatur (to say nothing of the famous–on this board–declaration that the U.S. was not founded as a “Christian” nation in the Treaty of Tripoli), are all bound up with suppressing the pirate depradations of the Barbary Coast–which included their taking of slaves.
(The name Barbary comes, not from their being barbaric, but from the Berber origins of most of the pirate states.)
But the name “berbers” comes in turn from the word for “barbarians” (greek word, but courtesy of the romans).
The “uproar” is due to the anti-white racism of the left, which insists that no white could possibly have suffered as badly as a black. Whites, regardless of their specific situations as individuals, are always assumed to be privileged and powerful relative to non-whites, and the revelation that many whites have been enslaved and suffered as badly as any black slave upsets their ideological apple cart.
What upsets me is that I had to learn of white slaves from lunatic fringe right wingers, not mainstream historians.
Do you have a citation that this is the actual uproar? Or is it simply wishful thinking on your part?
Since the Berbers are certainly not “black” Africans, there does not seem to be much to support your contention that “the Left” is horrified that bad things happened to white folks. I have yet to find any review that expressed doubt about the information presented, which was why I asked the question you seem to have not actually answered.
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Perhaps you should read better mainstream historians. (We’ve dealt with the poor quality of history texts in U.S. high schools, before.) Note that the existence of that slave-taking is laced through much of our literature, as I mentioned, so there does not seem to have been any attempt to hide it, any more than the existence of European enslavement of whites by whites noted in previous posts was actually hidden from anyone.
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That is not established, although it is possible. The name barbara was given to the Berbers by the Arabs and the Arab lexicographers explained it as, alternatively, “babbling” or as having been introduced from a non-Arabic language in North Africa. The OED explicitly notes that it did not come into Arabic from the Greek. Given that the Sanskrit word for babbling and stammering takes basically the same form, it seems quite possible that the word has come down separately through many language families. Its resemblance to the Greek bárbaros and Latin barbarus meant that the Europeans eagerly made the association to “barbarian.” While it is possible that the word the Arabs encountered was actually a left-over loanword from the Roman occupation several hundred years earlier, the association has not yet been established and the Indo-European roots do not argue for such a borrowing.
That just might be because your sample of “mainstream” historians was limited – as is almost everybody’s, really. Let’s face it, most laypeople only learn of historical research when a big deal is made of it because it supports some agenda or another. The bulk of the population does not read actual works of historical research but rather depends on half-remembered school textbooks and TV specials, and as tom~ said,we know how good those are at facts.
As to how come Middle-Ages slavery is not more prominently featured in the sources more accessible to various posters, that has to do with many factors. Relative importance – In the parts of Western Europe that are usually of interest to English-speaking audiences (i.e. England, France, the HRE and Italy), abbeys and monasteries were a larger productive component than slave labor, in the AD1000-1400 time-frame (and never mind serfs!). Thus slaves were marginal and hardly worth mentioning, to many authors. Regional Bias – Yes, a quite healthy slave trade in the classic, non-race-specific pattern was going on all along around the Mediterranean, but, well, there we run into a bias towards disregarding whatever’s happening outside the area-of-interest. For contrast, myself, having grown up in a Spanish-speaking culture with a Hispanocentric bias in my textbooks, did have an awareness of medieval slavery and how it involved all sorts of peoples. At the least we knew that the guys rowing Venetian galleys at the 1204 sack of Constantinople weren’t in it as part of a sports club.
As mentioned earlier, there was a synergy of circumstances behind the 1500s-1800s African slave trade. The spike in demand caused by the discovery of new lands. The fact these new lands were far away from home soil, thus no risk in bringing in large alien populations. Long-standing declarations that it was OK to commercially enslave (as opposed to enslavement as a result of POW status, debt, or criminal conviction) “heathens” only. The eventual christianization of much of Europe, and the Ottoman takeover of the Balkans, North Africa and Transcaucasia, robbing Western Europe of their near sources of “heathens”. Conveniently, the opening of the Africa coast meaning access to an abundant source of “heathens” within easy range of the Europeans’ sphere of operations. (The Africans were first enslaved as heathens; only later did it become justified as based on racial degeneracy).
And of course some free market economists still look on it as just another form of commerce.
Its not a very economically efficient form, but in the pre-modern era, it was essentially little more than another form of trade. Moral aspects are largely irrelevant: the people are all dead and no amount of moral handwringing will change that, change their lives, or change the fact that this was basically trade with very unusual goods. Or perhaps not all that unusual.
Such as?
Or are you just pulling shit out of your ass in an attempt to slander a group of people with different views than you?
So tell me, what “uproar” are you talking about? I’ve noticed the book mentioned a number of places around the net, all of them apparently right-wingers of one kind or another who seem very pleased to have evidence that blacks were not the only ones ever to have been enslaved * en masse. * This fact is not common knowledge and creates certain problems for the lefties who believe that slavery in the New World was somehow absolutely unique and unparalleled.
I am at a loss to understand the relevance of this sentence to anything I said. I fail to see how the skin color of the * masters * is in any way important. The point is that many whites were slaves who suffered as badly as any black slave, that blacks were not the only people who ever suffered bondage, that an essentially false view of the history of slavery is used to justify bad public policies such as affirmative action and lunatic proposals such as slavery reparations.
So where did I say anybody was denying anything? And the question you asked is so vaque that it is difficult to tell what it is you are asking.
So where did I say that there was an organized, orchestrated campaign to “hide” anything? Often there is no need to actually hide facts; you need only to ignore them or to treat them as if they were somehow unimportant.
Let’s see:
syncrolecyne mentions that a book has caused an uproar.
I obliquely challenge that claim (since I have seen no uproar and cannot see what it would be about).
You post, pretending that some specific people were actually in an uproar because you dislike their politics, (based on your personal distate for specific political philosophies, but without actually providing a citiation that any of “those people” have done that of which you accuse them).
I ask where you have actually seen such an uproar.
You come back and ask “what uproar?”.
It would seem that my impression was correct, that you are simply ranting about people you dislike without actually having any evidence that “they” have done what you hope they have done so that you can be mad at them (still or again).