The Slave Trade

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Endovelico
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The Slave Trade

Post by Endovelico »

Apollonius wrote:Volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade from all African to all American destinations - Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade - David Eltis and David Richardson (Yale University Press, 2010)
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assess ... aps/09.jsp


Image
The figure of 9,000 slaves to Europe is definitely too low. In Portugal alone it has been estimated an arrival of from 1,000 to 4,000 slaves per year, for nearly three centuries, with a probable total figure of 400,000. Eventually this population was assimilated so that hardly any black people were seen in Portugal before the independence of our African colonies. Recent genetic studies seem to indicate that at least 10% of the present Portuguese (white) population show the presence of African genes.
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Apollonius
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Re: Cool Maps

Post by Apollonius »

I think you are quite wrong about this. The research that went into the atlas this comes from is simply monumental. Although there are few real surprises in the figures, the detail is overwhelming.

I suspect that you are relying on mythology more than ships logs, studies relating to carrying capacity of vessels and ports, transaction records, and a large body of other evidence.




Not that the figures are new, but what really impresses most when you see a map like this is how few slaves were transported to the U.S. Several small islands in the Caribbean received far more.

Another shocking fact that you can easily extrapolate from this is the incredible fecundity of Afro-Americans. Tens of millions of immigrants came from Europe to the U.S. If they had a comparable reproduction rate, the population of the country would be at least a couple billion.
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Endovelico
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Re: Cool Maps

Post by Endovelico »

I have had access to some studies in Portugal about incoming slaves, and the figure I gave is quite possible. Many slaves arrived to Portugal not as part of slave shipments but as individual slaves already property of Portuguese subjects. In any ship arriving in Lisbon there would be regular passengers as well as their slaves, maybe no more than one dozen per ship. If you take into account the number of ships arriving and the fact that this went on for about three hundred years, you will see that the figure has to be a lot higher than the reported 9,000.
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Apollonius
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Re: Cool Maps

Post by Apollonius »

Endovelico,


By now I think this conversation should be moved to a whole new discussion, one perhaps entitled 'The Slave Trade'.



Here's a question for you. What, if anything, do Portuguese records tell us about the trans-Mediterranean slave trade?


My researches indicate between 1500 and 1850 between 750,000 and 1.5 million slaves were brought from Europe to North Africa. Almost all of the males were put to work as galley slaves, where they usually died within a year. Large numbers of females became domestics or concubines.
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Re: The Slave Trade

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Amazing post relocation! How does this work???
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
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Endovelico
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Re: Cool Maps

Post by Endovelico »

Apollonius wrote:Endovelico,


By now I think this conversation should be moved to a whole new discussion, one perhaps entitled 'The Slave Trade'.



Here's a question for you. What, if anything, do Portuguese records tell us about the trans-Mediterranean slave trade?


My researches indicate between 1500 and 1850 between 750,000 and 1.5 million slaves were brought from Europe to North Africa. Almost all of the males were put to work as galley slaves, where they usually died within a year. Large numbers of females became domestics or concubines.
The data I found confirms the severity of the problem, but indicate that many of those taken prisoners - the richer ones, at least - were freed after paying ransom. Portuguese coastal towns were not so severely subject to these attacks, as they were all on the Atlantic, but Berber (Barbary) pirates attacked Portuguese ships as much as those of other European countries. It is interesting to know that Cervantes was once made prisoner by those pirates, and ransom had to be paid. European rivalries contributed to pirates being able to keep their activity until the middle of the 19th century, and things only calmed down when France occupied Algiers in 1830. I was surprised at the figure of 1 million European prisoners taken by those pirates.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Apollonius »

My question was probably unfair. It's perhaps worth noting that Portugal is not situated on the Mediterranean, so it's not surprising that the Mediterranean slave trade played little part in its history. I do know that most of the coastline of Italy and large stretches of the French and Spanish litoral were a no-man's land because the threat of abduction was simply to great to settle there. Some villages fended off pirates from being on a rocky and inaccessible coast. These had watchtowers to warn of impending attack and special places where villagers could wait until the coast was clear.

The question of ransom is an interesting one. It played a disproportionate role in Portuguese history, but must have been insignifcant to the trade as a whole. Most captured slaves had no rich relatives.

An interesting digression:


The shotgun marriage: Spain's annexation of Portugal, 1580 - Stephen Clissold, History Today, vol. 30, no. 7, 1980
http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-cli ... tugal-1580

... Portugal was still bleeding from the disaster suffered in 1578 when the flower of her nobility had been wiped out by the Muslim armies in the 'Battle of the Three Kings' at Alcazarquivir. Those who escaped death were enslaved, some being ransomed for sums which completed the ruin of an economy already exhausted by over-extended colonial ventures. Don Sebastian, the twenty-four year old King whose messianic crusading obsessions had precipitated the tragedy, was amongst those who fell. No one could say precisely what had been his fate. Although a body, said to be that of the young King, was later restored by the victors and given ceremonial burial in Portugal, rumours were soon rife that Don Sebastian had in fact escaped alive. His mourning subjects found comfort in the belief that he was living somewhere incognito until the moment should come when he would declare himself, resume his throne, and restore the country to its glorious destiny. Thus was born the myth of 'Sebastianism' with which a frustrated patriotism consoled itself during the ensuing years of alien domination. It was also to nourish a crop of colourful imposters and adventurers. ...


It seems that Portuguese experience with the Moors gave them an early opportunity to learn how to profit from the slave trade:

Henry the Navigator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_the_Navigator

The first contacts with the African slave market were made by expeditions to ransom Portuguese subjects enslaved by pirate attacks on Portuguese ships or villages. Henry justified this on the grounds that he was converting these captives to Christianity. As Sir Peter Russell remarks in his biography, "In Henryspeak, conversion and enslavement were interchangeable terms." He was a very strong Christian, and saw his efforts almost as a continuation of the crusades. His actions against native people who were not Christians were violent, and helped start a violent world trend. However his religious beliefs were sincere.


If few slaves were sold in Europe it was not for want of trying. Early on, in Portugal and elsewhere, it was found that there was simply no market for them.

Slavery doesn't opperate well in a peasant society. There are very few examples of its widespread use in such societies, whether in Europe or anywhere else*. Slaves just don't work with enough motivation and are too expensive and troublesome to maintain in that kind of environment.



In societies where ninety percent of the population are subsistance farmers, only in the mines was the use of slaves important. They also had some use in naval operations (galley slaves). A number of Islamic empires used them as soldiers, a practice you don't find elsewhere. This might hinge on the fact that although mercenaries figure very prominently in European warfare, they were absent in the Islamic world. You read where early Arab conquerors were much concerned with dividing up the booty in a proper manner, and there was a similar attitude in Turkish forces, but these were rewards given out after a successful campaign. It seems that while Muslims would fight for plunder or for religion, they could not be induced to fight for a salary.


Slaves were not even important in public works programs. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Incas, for example, used corvée labour of established peasant populations.


The one place outside the mines where slavery can really become really profitable is on the plantation. Sugar plantations got their start in the Middle East during the 7th to 9th centuries. They were established on Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Crete, Sicily) beginning from the 13th century and reached Granada and southern Castile during the 14th - 15th centuries, but outside the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia these areas were mostly not well suited for large-scale production, and of course there was always a labour shortage for this kind of work. The really profitable plantations date from the occupation of Medeira, the Canary Islands, and most notably, São Tomé, which became the model for the Caribbean and Brazil.







In terms of historigraphy, perhaps the most notable thing about the slave trade is how for the most part it is undocumented. The big exception is the Atlantic slave trade, where good records were kept. The internal African trade, the trans-Saharan trade, and the Indian Ocean trade, to say nothing of the Mediterranean trade or that of native North American** societies are known to have been important and long enduring, but in view of the fact that records are absent and we therefore have have largely anecdotal evidence and extrapolation from what we know about the organization of production in these socieites, definite numbers are difficult to assess.






* The Helots in Spartan society are the most notable exception to the rule. I wonder what special factors were at play here for this to work? In any case, it seems not to have worked over the longterm, since the Spartans ceased to be important even before Alexander.


** Use of slave labour in aboriginal societies of the Northwest Coast and in the Caribbean appears to have been considerably more widespread than elsewhere in the Americas. While suitable for societies that have reached the chiefdom or pre-state level, It seems that once agriculture becomes well established, slaves are something that, excepting the special circumstances described above, only a small elite can afford for tasks relating to palace duties or other specialized tasks.
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Torchwood »

The Barbary pirates were not just a Mediterranean phenomenon - Morocco has a long Atlantic coastline. Their reach extended as far as the British Isles, especially between the end of England's war with Spain in the early 1600s (which terminated an alliance of convenience against a mutual enemy) and the 1650s, when Cromwell made the Royal Navy into a force to be reckoned with. The most notorious incident was the sack of Baltimore, Ireland.

It was a two way business, with Spain and the Knights of St. John from Malta raiding North African ships and coasts for galley slaves. No wonder Christianity and Islam have so much historical baggage.
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Ibrahim »

Torchwood wrote:It was a two way business, with Spain and the Knights of St. John from Malta raiding North African ships and coasts for galley slaves. No wonder Christianity and Islam have so much historical baggage.
IIRC the Ottoman and Order of St John commanders at the siege of Malta in 1565 had both been captured by their opponent and used as galley slaves earlier in their lives. The Ottoman admiral was felled by a local Maltese sniper, the present capital of Malta is now named after the commander of the knights. The siege was considered an anti-piracy expedition by the Ottoman authorities!
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Re: The Slave Trade

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Had a chance to take a really good look at Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by David Eltis and David Richardson (Yale University Press, 2010)


The Foreword to the book begins:

The transatlantic slave trade, which persisted for 366 years and resulted in the forced deportation of 12.5 million Africans to the New World, ranks as one of history's greatest crimes against humanity. Unlike the Nazis' five-year Holocaust in World War II, it was not driven by hatred and a desire to exterminate an entire people-- although one of slavery's long-term effects was a widespread contempt and even racist hatred for people of African descent. The overriding motive that lay behind the uprooting, enslavement, and coerced long-distance transport of millions of sub-Saharan Africans was greed-- the desire of European colonizers, including Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Danes, Swedes, Brazilians, and North Americans, to find the cheapest labor for the production and export of precious metals, sugar, rum, rice, tobacco, cotton, cotffee, indigo, and other luxury goods.


But by page 4 we learn that:


The strength and capacity of most West Africans brings us to a subject that is both surprising and upsetting to many uniformed reader: the indispensable complicty of Africans in creating and maintaining the slave trade, Even in the earliest history of the trade, the Portuguese discovered tha extreme hazards and counterproductivity of trying to capture and enslave West Africans on their own. West Africans could and did attack and sink some European ships in retaliation; the rulers of Kongo, Benin, and some other regions succeeded at times in temporarily stopping the trade in slaves. Yet the crucial point was the eagerness of African rulers and merchants to sell slaves. Similarity of skin color and other bodily traits, as Europeans viewed them, brought African rulers and merchants no sense of a common African idenity with the captives sold. And the sellers of slaves profited immensely from the acquisition of textiles, hardware, bars of iron, liquor, guns and gunpowder, tools and utensils of various kinds. Between 1680 and 183, when the trade had its most devastating impact on African societies, the price paid for slaves in Senegambia rose tenfold.

One of a large number of historical documents reprinted in the atlas:

To Royal African Company Chief Agents at Cape Coast Castle

An account of what goods are fit to purchase slaves att Ophra in Arda

Booges [cowries], all sorts of brass bassons great and small, and satin, all sorts of flowered and striped silks, red cuttanees, ginghams, chercolees, sallampores, all sorts of linnen, longcloth, Holland, muslins, white baftes, pintados, chints, linnes printed, beads of all sorts, chiefly yallow, lamon and greene, rangoes [beads], cases of spirrits, brandy, musketts 200, power 20 barrells, lead barrs 400, what linnens you send let it all be white.

-- John Thorne, Ophra [Offra] in Arda, 4 Dec. 1681


-- From The English in West Africa, 1681-1683: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681-1699 (Oxford : published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1997)
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Re: The Slave Trade

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Inserted between the incredible maps, are reproductions of paintings and descriptive text depicting the trade. On the whole, this is misrepresentative. For example, there is the famous painting: Chaine d'esclaves venant de intérieur from an unknown 19th century French artist which was published in L'Afrique, ou histoire, moeurs, usages et coutumes des africain: Sénégal (Paris : Nepveu, 1814), which could easily give one the wrong impression since it shows the slaves being led away by Europeans, whereas in fact, virtually all Africans were captured by and marched away for sale by other Africans.


Information on the sources of African captives entering the Atlantic slave trade is limited, as is information on the circumstances in which they were enslaved and moved to the coast for the voyage to the planations and mines of the Americas. Some came from several hundred miles inland and took months to reach the African coast. Many, if not most, came from places much closer to the coast. Some captives from Senegambia and West Central Africa were victims of drought and famine. Others found themselves enslaved because of debt. But the largest single source of captives was violence, including warfare, state-sponsored raiding, and kidnapping. As the scale of the Atlantic slave trade grew, the circles of violence in Africa linked to transatlantic slavery intensified and widened.




Here's an excerpt which may be of interest to forum members. It tells us that there is a long history of concern to explain why Europe's birthrate is so relatively low:


A later writer, who was well acquainted with Africa, from his long residence there, has pointed out the very different circumstances of Europe and Africa, with regard to the advantages and disadvantages attending the propagation of the species in each. What numbers of both sex, says he, are there in the European world, who grow up and die, without ever having children! The increase of luxury has always been an enemy to matrimony; and accordingly, we find many decline it from choice, and many from necessity. The vain are deterred from it, from an unwillingness to abridge any part of the splendor of their appearance; and the indigent, from a certainty of multiplying their necessities.... In Africa none of these impediments prevail: there we find desire, unchecked by the dread of want, taking its full scope .... and here are no impediments against pursuing the dictates of natural inclination. Polygamy is universally practised in Africa, and contributes greatly to its populousness .... Hence it is, that Africa can not only continue supplying all the demands that offer for her surplus inhabitants, in the quantities it has hitherto done, but, if necessity required it, could spare thousands, nay, millions more, to the end of time, all of whom may be considered as rescued by this means from that certain death, which awaited them in their own country.


-- Robert Morris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee, King of Dahomy, an Inland Country of Guiney, to which are added, the Author's Journey to Abomey, the Capital: and A Short Account of the African Slave Trade (London : W. Lowndes, 1789)




All criticism aside, this is really an exceptional volume, though people like Endovelico may be displeased to learn that close to one half of the transatlantic slave trade was conducted by the Portuguese!


I really hope this inspires a similar cartographic account of immigration from Europe to the Western Hemisphere.
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Endovelico
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Endovelico »

Apollonius wrote:All criticism aside, this is really an exceptional volume, though people like Endovelico may be displeased to learn that over two-fifths of the slave trade was conducted by the Portuguese!
I was aware of it and have no excuses to present, although the correct figure seems to be around 20%. On the plus side I can only mention that Portuguese Jesuits were strongly against enslaving South America natives, although they seemed to be quite comfortable with enslaving Africans, and were partially successful in slowing such practice in Brazil. We also completely absorbed into our European population the 150,000 to 200,000 slaves and their descendants which we had in Portugal when slavery was abolished (in 1761, as far as European Portugal and Goa were concerned), in such a way that there were practically no blacks to be seen in Portugal prior to the decolonization. Although they can be found in our genes...
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Apollonius »

Went back and corrected the numbers for Portuguese involvement with the transatlantic slave trade. Reading a little more closely, it turns out that the real numbers are almost 6 million of captives, nearly half the total, were transported by the Portuguese. The British were also heavily involved: about 3 million. The French and Spanish transported about one million each. The Dutch transported about 500,000.
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Re: The Slave Trade

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You don't hear a whole lot about slavery in Africa, especially about European and American slaves in Africa. There were well over one million of them brought to various parts of the Islamic northern part of the continent between 1500 and 1818, about three times as many as were taken to what became the U.S. from Africa! Most of these came from Mediterranean shores. Life in the coastal regions of Portugal, Spain, France, and especially Italy, was extremely precarious throughout this period. In fact, apart from large centres like Naples where there was safety in numbers, most of the coast was abandonned from fear of pirate raids.



Unlike Europeans conducting business with African slave traders, Muslim North Africans had nothing to trade for European slaves. It was illegal to sell Christians into slavery. Even more to the point, North Africa had nothing to offer that Europeans wanted.



Most slaves from Europe ended up in Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli. The men were typically put to work as galley slaves, usually dying within a year. The women became domestics or concubines.



One of the most readable books on the use of European slave labour in the Islamic world is:


White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves by Giles Milton (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004)


This is the extraordinary story of a Englishman who went to sea at the age of 11 years old and who, along with the rest of the crew, was taken prisoner on the return voyage from Genoa by Moorish pirates operating out of Salé. The biography of Thomas Pellow and the other characters in the book is documented by scores of primary sources but has been put together in such a way that it reads like an adventure novel. Every paragraph is gripping and I can recommend this book to anyone.


While the adventures of Thomas Pellow are simply amazing, in some ways the real star of the show is Moulay Ismail. Moulay Ismail ruled Morocco from 1672 to 1727. It is not widely remembered that he built a palace complex at Meknes that surpassed his contemporary Louis XIV's Versailles. Foreign observers noted that if each building were put adjacent to the other and strung end to end, it would be forty miles long! Such a truly gigantic building project was only possible because instead of stone, the buildings, the ramparts, and all the other structures were all made of pisé, a mixture of mud and lime. Some of the structures were further encased in concrete, or even occasionally, in marble.


This palace complex was constructed entirely by Christian slaves. For over forty years there were approximately 25,000 slaves working on the project at any one time. Every morning Moulay Ismail would go on an inspection tour of his immense complex of pleasure domes, chateaux, courtyards, gardens, barracks, armouries, stables, and warehouses, and since there was no question of seeing much of it on foot, he used a chariot, drawn by his wives and his Christian slaves.



In order to escape gruesome punishments and sure death from over-work and abyssmal living conditions, the great majority of Christians captives converted to Islam. This improved their chances of survival but these "renegades", as they were known, invariably ended up in the army or in the harem.

Most of Morocco's slaving activity at this time involved piracy on the open seas, but they also raided unprotected coastal villages. No place was safe, not even Norway or Iceland or Newfoundland. A not often recalled episode in English history was the raid inflicted on the West Country in 1625. A large flotilla of Moorish ships landed at several spots in Cornwall and Devon. They took away about 1000 English men, women, and children away to Morocco. Very few were ever heard from again.
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Re: The Slave Trade

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You hear claims that Islam tolerates Christianity but in Moulay Ismail's Morocco torture of Christian slaves in order to get them to submit to Islam was commonplace. The slaves were housed in underground dungeons called matamores, 'filthy and full of vermin', given inadequate and mouldy food, suffered crucifixion and burning, and of course beatings happened every day. The bastinado was widely practised: the slave was typically strung upside down in a room with a high ceiling, or tied to a sort of rotisary or spit while the soles of his feet were beaten until raw. Remarkably, some Christians refused to convert.

The most feared punishment was known as 'tossing'. 'The person whom the emperor orders to be thus punished,' wrote Pellow, 'is seized upon by three or four strong negroes who, taking hold of his hams, throw him up with all their strength and, at the same time, turning him round, pitch him down head foremost.' The black guards who performed this punishement were 'so dexterous by long use that they can either break his neck the first toss, dislocate his shoulder, or let him fall with less hurt'. Pellow said that they would continue to toss the slave until the sultan ordered them to stop.


The sultan was as eccentric as any Roman emperor:
Moulay Ismail also had an obsession with cats and had forty of them as pets, 'all of them distinguished by their names'. He always visited them when they were being fed by the slaves and was accustomed to throw them 'whole quarters of mutton'. On one occasion, the sultan was horrified to discover that one his favourite cats had snatched a rabbit from its warren and killed it. Instead of punishing the lave in charge, as everyone expected, the sultan ordered 'that an executioner should take that cat, that he should drag it along the streets of Meknes with a rope about its neck, scourging it severely and crying with a loud voice: "Thus my master uses knavish cats"'. Once this gruesome spectacle had been performed, the unfortunate feline had its head chopped off.




Pellow spent 23 years in Morocco. After conversion to Islam, which involved public circumsion, and no chance of being redeemed by any Christian nation since apostates were considered to have "turned Turk". Thomas Pellow was first given responsibilities for helping to guard the harem. Later he advanced high up in the army, which was kept busy squelching rebellion and raiding sub-Saharan Africa to replenish the sultan's 150,000 man strong black army. Virtually all of the sultan's troops were from sub-Saharan Africa or from Europe-- he distrusted everyone, but he especially distrusted his own people. All of his troops remained slaves. Shortly before Pellow ended up in Morocco Moulay Ismail closed the public slave markets: he bought all of them. They were needed for his building projects and his wars.

A description of the end of a typical campaign, where rebels holed up in a fortress were promised mercy if they surrendered:

The slaughter began as soon as they had laid down their weapons. Moulay ech-Cherif had no intention of allowing the rebels to escape with their lives and ordered every man in Guzlan to be killed and decapitated. His plan was to crry the rebel heads back to Meknes, where he would ceremoniously present them to Moulay Ismail. But the general had not counted upon the terrible heat of midsummer, which caused the heads to putrefy within hours of being cut off. 'They became so stinking to that degree', wrote Pellow, 'that he was obliged to be contented with the ears, which were all cut off from their heads and put up with salt into barrels.' Pellow added that the decision to dispose of these grisly trophies came not a moment too soon. 'For, had we carried so many stinking heads so long a way, it must certainly have very much annoyed the whole army, and probably have bred an infection in it'.

The troops were given a ceremonious welcome when they entered the great gates of Meknes. '[Moulay Ismail] was highly contented with the ears,' wrote Pellow, who added that 'the sight of the heads would have given him a great deal of pleasure, yet, as they were stinking ... he thought them far better left behind.' The sultan ordered the salt barrels to be opened and the ears removed, so that he could examine them more closely. His intention was to keep them in storage and send them as a grim warning to any chieftain suspected of rebellion, but they pleased him so much that he decided to keep them for himself. 'They were all at last strung on cords,' wrote Pellow, 'and hanged along the walls of the city.'



It is reputed that Moulay Ismail had 1500 wives and concubines.


And Wikipedia, which provides very little detail, does include one notable tidbit:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Ibn_Sharif
Moulay Ismaïl is alleged to have fathered 888 children. A total of 867 children, including 525 sons and 342 daughters, was noted by 1703 and his 700th son was born in 1721. ]This is widely considered the record number of offspring for any man throughout history that can be verified.

Apollonius notes that the sultan and the harem women had a decided preference for boys.
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Re: Cool Maps

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:Another shocking fact that you can easily extrapolate from this is the incredible fecundity of Afro-Americans. Tens of millions of immigrants came from Europe to the U.S. If they had a comparable reproduction rate, the population of the country would be at least a couple billion.
Hmm. I wonder if the relevant difference is slaves vs. free. as opposed to Afro-Americans vs. Europeans? Seems like slavers would have a different attitude to the "family planning" of those under their control than the local burghers.
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:You hear claims that Islam tolerates Christianity
It does, as simple scan of history will immediately demonstrate. Its also specifically mandated in the Quran.


but in Moulay Ismail's Morocco torture of Christian slaves in order to get them to submit to Islam was commonplace.
Reprehensible conduct by Moulay Islmail, and also specifically prohibited by the Quran. What were his Spanish contemporaries doing across the Strait?


The slaves were housed in underground dungeons called matamores, 'filthy and full of vermin', given inadequate and mouldy food, suffered crucifixion and burning, and of course beatings happened every day. The bastinado was widely practised: the slave was typically strung upside down in a room with a high ceiling, or tied to a sort of rotisary or spit while the soles of his feet were beaten until raw. Remarkably, some Christians refused to convert.
Ghastly. Reminds me of the Inquisition's conduct towards Jews, and the conversos and moriscos.




The sultan was as eccentric as any Roman emperor
This is actually a good analogy.
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Ibrahim »

Torchwood wrote:The Barbary pirates were not just a Mediterranean phenomenon - Morocco has a long Atlantic coastline. Their reach extended as far as the British Isles, especially between the end of England's war with Spain in the early 1600s (which terminated an alliance of convenience against a mutual enemy) and the 1650s, when Cromwell made the Royal Navy into a force to be reckoned with. The most notorious incident was the sack of Baltimore, Ireland.

It was a two way business, with Spain and the Knights of St. John from Malta raiding North African ships and coasts for galley slaves. No wonder Christianity and Islam have so much historical baggage.
Interesting detail: the opposing commanders at the siege of Malta in 1565 had both been captured and served as galley slaves by the opposing side earlier in their lives. Gives the conflict an added frisson, no? Also, you'd think the largest pile of historical baggage would be between Europe and North Africa vs. the rest of Africa!



It also just occurred to be that Caribbean pirates are charming rogues, beloved of cinema, amusement park rides, and children's Halloween costumes, but their North African equivalents are not.
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Ibrahim wrote: It also just occurred to be that Caribbean pirates are charming rogues, beloved of cinema, amusement park rides, and children's Halloween costumes, but their North African equivalents are not.
An artifact of the days when all US children read Stevenson's Treasure Island. The ghastly pirates have been culturally sanitized just like cowboys and indians. North African pirates never had a place in children's literature to begin with.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Apollonius »

Ibrahim wrote:
Apollonius wrote:You hear claims that Islam tolerates Christianity
It does, as simple scan of history will immediately demonstrate. Its also specifically mandated in the Quran.



Yet Moulay Ismail considered himself to be an expert on the subject of religion. He used to harrangue all visitors on the virtues of Islam for hours before treating them to a display of public torture and execution.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Apollonius »

A useful book on the subject of Americans held as slaves in Africa:


Upon returning from her captivity among King Philip's "barbarians" and being reunited with the surviving members of her family, Mary Rowlandson declared. "Thus hath the Lord brought me and mine out of that horrible pit, and hath set us in the midst of tender-hearted and compassionate Christians." These "tender-hearted" neighbors resided in Boston, where the Rowlandsons remained for three-quarters of a year until they moved to Wetherfield, Connecticut, in 1677. Among these Bostonians was an industrious man by the name of Joshua Gee, a shipwright by trade. Three years after Rowlandson's return on January 25, 1680, Joshua Gee set sail from Boston harbor. Taking on a cargo of tobacco in Roanoke, Gee crossed the Atlantic on a trading voyage. Near the end of that journey, Algerian privateers boarded Gee's vessel and carried him into captivity. During his time in Africa, Gee served aboard one of the notorious Algerian slave galleys and went on numerous corsair raids, attempting to escape on at least one occasion. The famous judge and diarist Samuel Sewall helped to arrange his redemption, and Gee returned to a prosperous life; his son, also named Joshua Gee, eventually shared the pulpit of Boston's North Church with Cotton Mather. The elder Gee's story of seven years of slavery in Algiers-- a captivity far longer than that of the more renowned Rowlandson-- gives us the first Barbary captivity narrative from America.

Cotton Mather, who is more commonly associated with Indian captivity, called Barbary servitude "the most horrible Captivity in the world" and described the "Hellish Moors" who held Americans in bondage as "worse than Egyptian Task masters." Mather was well informed of African thralldom, and though Joshua Gee's narrative didn't see print until 1943-- reason enough for Gee's obscurity-- it is likely that many heard Gee's oral account of life in captivity as well as earlier tales of colonists lost in a far-off wilderness and ocean away. Although Barbary privateers began to take North American colonists as early as 1625, the written genre of the Barbary captivity narrative didn't flourish in the united States until the early nineteenth century. During these years, several survivors of Barbary captivity published immensely popular accounts of their suffering in North Africa, and the story of Barbary captivity became a common tale that involved hundreds of men and women, invoked public subscriptions for ransom funds, forced the government to pay humiliating tributes in cash and military arms to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. navy, and brought about the first postrevolutionary war. Among other things, these narratives reveal some of the earliest impressions Americans had of Africa at a time when the issue of chattel slavery in the United States increasingly divided the country. The account of Captain James Riley, for example, sold nearly a million copies, and Abraham Lincoln's biographers credit Riley's narrative for helping to change the future president's stance on slavery.

-- from the introduction of: White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of Amerian Barbary Captivity Narratives edited by Paul Baepler (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Ibrahim
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:
Ibrahim wrote:
Apollonius wrote:You hear claims that Islam tolerates Christianity
It does, as simple scan of history will immediately demonstrate. Its also specifically mandated in the Quran.



Yet Moulay Ismail considered himself to be an expert on the subject of religion. He used to harrangue all visitors on the virtues of Islam for hours before treating them to a display of public torture and execution.

Well based on the other details about him he sounds insane, so I might not put too much stock in his scholarship. Its a bit like using Torquemada as an example of Christianity: convenient if you have an axe to grind, but not very useful otherwise.
Ibrahim
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Ibrahim »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Ibrahim wrote: It also just occurred to be that Caribbean pirates are charming rogues, beloved of cinema, amusement park rides, and children's Halloween costumes, but their North African equivalents are not.
An artifact of the days when all US children read Stevenson's Treasure Island. The ghastly pirates have been culturally sanitized just like cowboys and indians. North African pirates never had a place in children's literature to begin with.
True. An enterprising hipster kid could be the first to dress up as a Malay pirate for Halloween, Lots of stylish sashes and so forth.

Speaking of Asia, if the initial debate was who kept the most slaves, or where the most slaves came from, it stands to reason that the overall champion slavers and slave victims would have to be Asia, simply based on relative population sizes and the history of civilization in Asia stretching the farthest back into history.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Apollonius »

Slavery is not just a historical phenomenon.

In the headlines:


New global index exposes 'modern slavery' worldwide - BBC News, 17 October 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24560937


Nearly 30 million people around the world are living as slaves, according to a new index ranking 162 countries.

The Global Slavery Index 2013 says India has the highest number of people living in conditions of slavery at 14 million.

But Mauritania has the highest proportional figure with about 4% of its population enslaved. ...



Estimated number of slaves

1. India - 13,956,010
2. China - 2,949,243
3. Pakistan - 2,127,132
4. Nigeria - 701,032
5. Ethiopia - 651,110
6. Russia - 516,217
7. Thailand - 472,811
8. DR Congo - 462,327
9. Burma - 384,037
10.Bangladesh - 343,192



Proportional ranking

1. Mauritania
2. Haiti
3. Pakistan
4. India
5. Nepal
6. Moldova
7. Benin
8. Ivory Coast
9. The Gambia
10. Gabon
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: The Slave Trade

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Ibrahim wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Ibrahim wrote: It also just occurred to be that Caribbean pirates are charming rogues, beloved of cinema, amusement park rides, and children's Halloween costumes, but their North African equivalents are not.
An artifact of the days when all US children read Stevenson's Treasure Island. The ghastly pirates have been culturally sanitized just like cowboys and indians. North African pirates never had a place in children's literature to begin with.
True. An enterprising hipster kid could be the first to dress up as a Malay pirate for Halloween, Lots of stylish sashes and so forth.
We still have a huge fish 'n chips chain called Long John Silver's. I bet I could survey the company headquarters for a week before I found one person who could relate the narrative of Long John Silver and how the character was directly related to food service.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

Teresa of Ávila
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