The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did. The case of slavery is a pertinent one. For slavery has been a constant in almost every society since the dawn of recorded history. In antiquity, slaves came from Ethiopia and then farther afield. When the Muslim empires arose, they expanded the trade. As the Muslim empire spread across West Africa during the Middle Ages, it made possible the trading of black slaves across the Sahara. Some ended up in Muslim Spain and Portugal. But when Ferdinand of Aragon and Charles V agreed to a couple of hundred, and then four thousand, slaves to be shipped to the New World they can have had no idea of the change that they were bringing about. From the 1400s to the 1800s, somewhere between ten and twelve million Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the new world. The slaves that were brought out of Africa not only suffered the indignity of being ripped away from their homeland and taken abroad without their permission. They suffered the additional indignity of having been sold by their neighbors and families. There were times when the Portuguese, among others, seized slaves after a military campaign in Africa. But the overwhelming majority of slaves taken out of Africa durin...