Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity—salt—but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave–taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed
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