The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

Urging the removal of some Victorian statue or supporting a scheme to pay compensation to Caribbean countries for the suffering of their distant ancestors makes us feel both ethically virtuous and politically progressive. In the United States, guilt about the past treatment of African-Americans, not only during the days of the southern plantations but up to the institutional racism of the mid-twentieth century and later, serves the same function; to cause those white people with any pretension to being thought humane and liberal to keep constantly to the forefront of their minds the past suffering of black people, as exemplified by the slave trade. It hardly matters that both the scale and severity of this black slavery was far less than that of the white slavery at which we are going to be looking. The Atlantic slave trade is a handy talisman which, when brandished and wept over, shows that we are essentially right-thinking individuals.