The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

The lack of awareness of the slaving raids on England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been described by Professor Esra of the University of Exeter as ‘cultural erasure’ (Daily Telegraph, 2017). Although Professor Esra was referring specifically to the slave raids against Cornwall by ships sailing from Africa, this concept of cultural erasure applies more generally to the whole idea of slavery in the British Isles. At one time, the very concepts of ‘Irishness’ and ‘Englishness’ were inextricably bound up with the memory of the trade in English slaves. Dublin, the capital city of Ireland and iconic symbol of the Irish struggle for independence during the Easter Rising in 1916, was founded on the trade in English slaves, as too were Waterford and Limerick. The annual event of St Patrick’s Day celebrates the life of a boy who was seized from his own country and carried off into captivity; St Patrick was of course an English slave. According to tradition Ireland’s other patron saint, Saint Brigid of Kildare, was the daughter of a slave (Joyce, 1911). For the English, the association between their own national identity and the days when they were routinely carried off into slavery runs as deep as can be, because the idea of an ‘English’ nation began in a foreign slave market.