The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

Sometimes, choosing one word or the other to describe an event or series of events can have the inadvertent effect causing us to forget how dreadful something was. Mention the word ‘pirate’, for instance and our thoughts turn perhaps to Long John Silver, Captain Hook from Peter Pan, Captain Pugwash or Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance. More recently, we have seen Johnny Depp’s character of Captain Jack Sparrow, as portrayed in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Just as with most other fictional pirates, Jack Sparrow is not vicious or depraved, but rather a vaguely humorous creation, more likely to cause amusement than he is terror or disgust. Pirates are picturesque and quaint. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the slavers who once infested the seas around Britain have become forgotten, because they were described as pirates, rather than given their correct name?