Total Number of White People Enslaved by Black People Comprised One Tenth of The Total Atlantic Slave Trade Figure of Black People Enslaved by Whites

Does it help to tell it like it is? Slavery: It Was Never Just a White on Black Thing!

Black people in the UK, USA and Caribbean Islands are all too aware of the terrible crimes of injustice, cruelty and racism that comprised the Atlantic slave trade. Even today we can feel the deep-hurt of the slave trade that has been carried on in various forms of intolerable white racism and prejudice in the 20th and 21st Centuries. But the deep sense of hurt in Black communities continues also. For example, white delegates at an anti-racist conference in Barbados were asked to leave in 2002.

But I can't help wondering if that would have happened if all the delegates had known more about the history of slavery from the 17th Century onwards?

The BBC History Website tells us: "The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast."

Preachers in churches from Sicily to Boston spoke of the similar fates of black slaves on American plantations and white slaves in corsair galleys; early abolitionists used Barbary slavery as a way to attack the universal degradation of slavery in all its forms.
'This may require that we rethink our belief that race was fundamental to pre-modern ideas about slavery.'

This may require that we rethink our belief that race was fundamental to pre-modern ideas about slavery. It also requires a new awareness of the impact of slave raids on Spain and Italy - and Britain - about which we currently know rather less than we do about slaving activities at the same time in Africa

The Barbary States was a collective name given to a string of North African seaports stretching from Tangiers to Tripoli. These ports were under the nominal control of the Ottoman Empire, but their real rulers were sea rovers or corsairs who sallied forth from the coast cities to plunder Mediterranean shipping and capture slaves for labor or ransom

Ireland and the Sack of Baltimore

By way of one small example: the Village of Baltimore in County Cork,Ireland, was raided by Algerian "Barbary" Pirates, otherwise known as Corsairs, on June 20 1631. On that occasion, the pirates took one hundred people captive.

But that was no more than one event, in terms of people captured by the pirates from shipping between 1677 and 1680 it is likely that some 8,000 people were enslaved by the Barbary pirates - whose own Government had given them a free reign to attack European merchant ships at will. Many British, Dutch, German and Spanish peoples were captured and died as slaves.

The terrible cruelty inflicted upon these White slaves by their Black masters is not too dissimilar to accounts of Black slaves tortured by White masters. Those consigned to rowing galleys might not set foot ashore for decades, women were held as sex slaves in harems, and those who fell of exhaustion in their labours were whipped until they rose again.

As the BBC site tells us: Samuel Pepys gives a vivid account of an encounter with two white men who'd been taken into slavery, in his diary of 8 February 1661.

'...to the Fleece tavern to drink and there we spent till 4 a-clock telling stories of Algier and the manner of the life of Slaves there; and truly, Captain Mootham and Mr Dawes (who have been both slaves there) did make me full acquainted with their condition there. As, how they eat nothing but bread and water.... How they are beat upon the soles of the feet and bellies at the Liberty of their Padron. How they are all night called into their master's Bagnard, and there they lie.'

and:

for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000 - this is only just over a tenth of the Africans taken as slaves to the Americas from 1500 to 1800, but a considerable figure nevertheless. White slaves in Barbary were generally from impoverished families, and had almost as little hope of buying back their freedom as the Africans taken to the Americas: most would end their days as slaves in North Africa, dying of starvation, disease, or maltreatment.

There is a danger of the Far Right using this information to justify their own racial hatred, but excluding those poor, ignorant and deliberately self-blinkered, disenfranchised and deluded individuals, does knowledge such as this empower us all by freeing White people of some of that "White guilt" and empowering Black people to feel less victimised?

The Romans had whole African legions and an African emperor. For thousands of years millions of Europeans were bought and sold and died as slaves. Slavery truly is mans inhumanity to man - but it most certainly is not simply a White on Black thing.

I'd really like to know what people think about this question: Does this historical knowledge empower Black people to feel less hurt about slavery?


Robin