The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

To understand the subject of this book, which is of course slavery, properly it will be necessary to bear in mind that across the world slavery has been an accepted and unremarkable institution for thousands of years. It has been widely practised throughout the whole of human history, right up to the present day. According to the United Nations, there are currently somewhere in the region of 25 million slaves in the world (UN News, 2019). It is notable that even in the earliest mentions of slavery, dating back 4,000 years, there is no suggestion of novelty about the practice, which indicates that by the time people began recording their history in permanent form, slavery was already a long-established tradition. It is clear that almost without exception, early civilizations regarded slavery as simply a convenient way of ordering societies which were, in the main, hierarchical. The emperor or king was at the top of the social order and slaves at the bottom. We search in vain for any condemnation of slavery in ancient writings. Even in the Bible and the Qur’an, slavery is regarded as an unremarkable part of ordinary life. There are certainly safeguards for slaves and recommendations for their humane treatment, but nobody seems to find the state of affairs whereby human beings are bought and sold as being in any way peculiar, let alone undesirable. There is no suggestion during the first 4,000 years of human history that slavery might actually be wrong (Everett, 1997).