The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam

by (Historian) Simon Webb

That slavery had been widely practised in Britain in the past was also common knowledge at one time, although awareness of this has faded in recent decades. Glancing through books of popular history written and published in Britain before 1970 reveals many references to slavery in the country before the Norman Conquest, but these have tended to diminish with time. G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England, published in 1942, contains ten references to slavery as practised in Britain. By the time that Kenneth Morgan’s The Oxford History of Britain was published in 1984, slavery in the countries which make up the present-day United Kingdom is mentioned on only two pages. More modern books on the history of Britain omit the subject entirely and only mention slavery in the context of an institution inflicted upon black Africans. British History for Dummies, for instance, published in 2003, has quite a bit about Britain’s involvement with the slave trade in Africa, but a single, brief mention of English slaves during the Iron Age (Lang, 2003). Reading such a modern book about the history of Britain, nobody would guess that slavery was widely practised there during the thousand years of the Roman occupation and the Anglo-Saxon period.