The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

slavery is a custom which is found from the very beginning of recorded history. It appears to be a universal practice; the default setting, if you like, for civilizations. Because in the last couple of centuries slavery has been frowned on in some quarters and its abolition urged, it is easy to forget how widespread and accepted it was in almost every culture we study. The modern repugnance for slavery can lead us to take a jaundiced and distorted view of history. So terrible was the Atlantic slave trade that we might be tempted to regard is as a wicked aberration on the part of Europeans, rather than as part of a wider and more general pattern of world history in which all types of slavery fit without remark. This will be an important consideration when we look at the conditions of slavery under which white people were held in Africa and the Middle East, for the accusation might be made that examining those events is a way of minimizing the horrors of the triangular trade, about which most of us know. This is not at all the case. Rather, the intention is to put slavery in general into a proper historical context, one which will enable us to look dispassionately at the subject, without adopting a partisan attitude to this or that aspect of it.