The Ending of White Slavery

... (the orthodox variety, anyway) ... which efforts came after the outlawing of the trade in Black slaves, please note.

It's fitting that I end, for now, the series of posts devoted to excerpts from books on White Slavery with a book that describes the final blows to the system.

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

In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and fifty-one of his comrades were captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs. Their captors - Captain Ali Hakem and his network of fanatical Islamic slave traders - had declared war on the whole of Christendom. France, Spain and Italy had been hit in repeated raids. England’s coastal villages had also suffered a series of devastating attacks. Thousands of Europeans had been snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Sale in Morocco. Poked, prodded and put through their paces, they were sold at auction to the highest bidder.

Pellow and his ship-mates were bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco, Moulay Ismail, who bragged that his white slaves enabled him to hold all of Europe to ransom. The sultan was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of such scale and grandeur that it would surpass every other building in the world, built entirely by Christian slave labour.

Thomas Pellow was resourceful, resilient and quick-thinking, and was selected by Moulay Ismail for special treatment. As a personal slave of the sultan, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial Moroccan court, as well as experience daily terror. For twenty-three years, he would dream of his home, his family and freedom. He was one of the fortunate few who survived to tell his tale.

White Gold is an extraordinary and shocking story. Drawn from unpublished letters and manuscripts written by slaves, and by the padres and ambassadors sent to free them, it reveals a disturbing and forgotten chapter of history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.

****

From the epilogue, note again the reference to British toleration of the slavery:

Thomas Pellow’s return to England did not mark the end of the white slave trade. A steady stream of Europeans and Americans continued to be captured usually at sea - and held in wretched conditions in Algiers, Tunis and the great slave pens of Meknes. One of the most infamous incidents involving British mariners occurred in 1746, when the ship, Inspector, was wrecked in Tangier bay. All eighty-seven survivors were taken into captivity.

‘Large iron chains were lock’d around our necks,’ wrote Thomas Troughton, one of the ship’s crew, ‘and twenty of us were link’d together in one chain.’ It was five long years before Troughton and his surviving comrades were bought back by the British government. Their fellow slaves were not so fortunate; the ruling sultan steadfastly refused to release his French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch captives.

But in 1757, the vacant Moroccan throne was seized by Sidi Mohammed, a shrewd and capable individual who was more open to foreign influences than his predecessors. He was ‘endowed with penetration and judgement’, according to the French consul, Louis de Chenier, and enjoyed conversing with European guests at his court. His enlightened opinions raised many eyebrows among his advisors, especially when he declared that Morocco’s shattered finances would be better repaired by international trade than by piracy and slavery. His intention was to encourage vessels from every nation ‘to trade with and enter his ports, being desirous of peace with the whole world’. To this end, he declared war on the corsairs of Salé and Rabat, who had opposed his accession to the throne. They were attacked by his imperial guard and quickly brought to heel. The governor of Salé was brutally stoned to death, and the inhabitants of Rabat were ‘made to feel the resentment of the prince’.

The sultan followed his victory with a flurry of diplomatic activity. He proposed treaties with all the nations that for so long had been the victims of attack. In 1757, he signed a peace treaty with Denmark. Two years later, the British and Dutch also concluded a truce. Sweden followed suit in 1763, and the Republic of Venice added her name to a treaty soon after. Almost every European nation would eventually sign accords with the Moroccan sultan: France and Spain in 1767; Portugal in 1773; Tuscany, Genoa and the Habsburg Empire a few years later. In 1786, the newly independent United States of America also agreed a truce.

The once-great corsair fleet of Salé fell into disrepair during these long years of peace. After two decades of virtual inaction, many of the ships were rotting hulks, no longer seaworthy. European observers reported that the harbour contained no more than fifteen frigates, a few xebecs and some thirty galleys. It was a far cry from the days of old, and ships such as these were no match for the great navies of Britain and France. Yet old habits die hard, and Salé’s corsairs continued to cherish vainglorious dreams of renewing their holy war against Christendom. They recalled the time when their mighty fleet, working in tandem with the still-powerful corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, had wreaked havoc on European shipping. In those days, the white slave auctions had reaped far greater dividends than the more peaceful business of international trade.

Sultan Mohammed died in 1790; his successor, Moulay Sulaiman II, displayed rather more sympathy towards his Salé corsairs even though he ratified the treaties signed by his father. The new sultan went so far as to despatch his much reduced fleet back to the sea in the early years of the nineteenth century, with orders to attack European merchant ships that were trading with his enemies. There were fears that this was the prelude to full-scale hostilities against Christendom.

But the corsairs of Salé, and their fellow slave traders elsewhere in Barbary, were about to discover that they had finally met their match. In the summer of 1816 - exactly one hundred years after Thomas Pellow became one of Moulay Ismail’s slaves in Meknes - they were dealt a devastating blow from which they would never recover. In what was to prove a most extraordinary deus ex machina in the story of white slavery, the Pellow family of Cornwall was about to take its terrible revenge.

The call to arms against Barbary was led by the eccentric British admiral, Sir Sidney Smith. He was passionate about the issue of white slavery and had established a movement devoted to ending the trade for ever. It was called the Society of Knights Liberators of the White Slaves of Africa and it rapidly drew influential members from across Europe. When at the end of the Napoleonic Wars crowned heads and ministers gathered to discuss peace at the Congress of Vienna, which began in 1814, Smith and his knights elected to join them. They organised discussions on the fringes of the congress and petitioned for a military showdown with the lawless rulers of North Africa. ‘This shameful slavery is not only revolting to humanity,’ thundered Smith, ‘but it fetters commerce in the most disastrous manner.’

Sir Sidney and his knights drew attention to a trade that had ensnared at least one million Europeans and Americans over the previous three centuries. The largest concentration of white slaves had always been in Algiers. The city had a continuous population of about 25,000 captives between the years 1550 and 1730, and there were occasions when that number had almost doubled. During the same period, some 7,500 men, women and children had been held in Tunis and Tripoli. The number of slaves in Moulay Ismail’s imperial capital was more difficult to ascertain, even though the conditions in which they were held were better documented than elsewhere in North Africa. The 5,000 captives reported by European padres were contested by Ahmed ez-Zayyani, who claimed that the real figure was at least five times higher.

Although North Africa’s slave population had fallen to 3,000 by the time of the Congress of Vienna, Sir Sidney knew that this was a recent development. He was also aware that snapshot statistics told only part of the story. The number of slaves shipped to North Africa each year was always dependent on the rate at which they died, apostatised or gained their freedom. Dysentery, the plague and forced labour killed thousands, requiring the corsairs to put to sea in search of replacement captives. The ransoming of slaves also played its part in sustaining the flow. For two centuries, perhaps three, there had been an influx to Barbary of almost 5,000 white slaves each year.

The most powerful European leaders read Smith’s petition with interest, but did nothing more than pass a resolution that condemned all forms of slavery. Smith was initially disheartened, but soon discovered that his plea for military action had made a deep impression on the rulers of southern Europe, who continued to suffer considerable losses at the hands of the corsairs. They supported his battle-cry and pointed an approving finger at America, whose government had taken bullish action against North Africa. It had sent a fleet to Algiers just a few months earlier and successfully forced the authorities to release all their American slaves. With this mission uppermost in their minds, the southern European rulers began taunting Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, for his lack of enthusiasm for an attack on Barbary. They accused him of deliberately turning a blind eye to the ravages of the corsairs, since Britain stood to benefit whenever her trading rivals were attacked.

Lord Castlereagh was stung by these criticisms. He had been forceful in advocating the abolition of the black slave trade; now, he vowed to end the trade in white slaves as well. In the summer of 1816, he persuaded the British government to despatch a large fleet to the Mediterranean. Its goal was to compel the rulers of Barbary to stop seizing and selling European captives. There was to be no debate, no payment of bribes and absolutely no concession. ‘If force must be resorted to,’ read the British government’s statement of intent, ‘we have the consolation of knowing that we fight in the sacred cause of humanity.’

There was never any doubt as to who would command this great squadron. In public life he was known as Lord Exmouth, the Vice Admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. But among his friends and family in his native Cornwall he was more familiar as Sir Edward Pellew - a collateral descendant of the same West Country family as Thomas Pellow. The orthography of the Pellow name had changed in the intervening decades, and Sir Edward had acquired a wealth and status that placed him in a very different social stratum to the humble Pellows of Penryn. But he remained deeply attached to his Cornish roots and had chosen to settle his family in Falmouth, less than two miles from Penryn. He was certainly familiar with Thomas Pellow’s story and had a passionate interest in the white slaves of Barbary. When invited by Sir Sidney Smith to join the Society of Knights Liberators, Pellew had leaped at the opportunity. ‘I am greatly obliged to you, my dear Sir Sidney, for thinking of me among your knights,’ he wrote. ‘I shall give it all the support I can.’

Sir Edward Pellew was the right man to tackle the slave traders of Barbary. Bullish and resolute, he was prepared to use overwhelming force to achieve his goal. He had set his sights on Algiers, the most troublesome city in North Africa, fully aware that the defeat of the city’s corsairs would send an unmistakable signal to Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco. Pellew wanted nothing less than the total capitulation of every corsair and slave trader in North Africa.

His formidable fleet arrived off Algiers at the end of August 1816. He anchored his flagship, the Queen Charlotte, in the bay of Algiers and sent an uncompromising message to the ruling dey, Omar Bashaw. Omar was given one hour to capitulate unconditionally, release his slaves and renounce for ever the trade in captured Europeans. When the dey failed to answer, Pellew declared war.

His fleet made a most impressive sight as it manoeuvred into battle positions. He had eighteen men-of-war - some armed with more than 100 big guns - and his forces were bolstered by a squadron of six Dutch vessels. But his optimism about the battle ahead was tempered by the knowledge that Omar Bashaw was a shrewd military tactician, who had strengthened the city defences in anticipation of attack and had called upon the services of thousands of war-hardened fighters.

Each commander was aware that he was playing for the very highest stakes. If Pellew won the battle, the white slave trade would finally be brought to an end. But if he lost, the prestige of the Barbary corsairs would be hugely enhanced. The 3,000 slaves still being held in North Africa would be condemned to perpetual captivity, and European merchant vessels would once again be in danger of attack.

The battle began with a single shot fired from a land battery close to the shoreline. Whether or not it was fired accidentally will never be known, but it wrung a terrible response from the furious Pellew. He had already informed his various captains of the signal for action. Now, standing proudly on the deck of his flagship, he raised his hat high above his head, held it still for a moment, then swung it down towards the deck. As he did so, there was a thunderous roar as all the ships of his fleet opened fire. His own ship, the Queen Charlotte, heeled to port as her twenty-four-pounders blasted their first broadside at the city defences. In the maintop and foretop, the twelve-pounders also let rip, each gun unleashing 300 musket balls at the defending corsairs. As the townspeople of Algiers dived for cover, the other ships of Pellew’s fleet discharged broadside after broadside sending hundreds of cannon-balls crashing into forts, batteries and armed houses. The Amcrican consul, William Shaler, left a graphic account of the destruction wrought by Pellew’s big guns. ‘The cannonade endures with a fury which can only be comprehended from practical experience,’ he wrote. ‘Shells and rockets flyover and by my house like hail.’

The dey’s forces put up a stiff resistance, firing an increasing number of cannonades at Pellew’s fleet. The commander of the Impregnable reported that he had lost 150 killed or wounded, while the Glasgow was hit by dozens of rounds. Even more alarming was the accuracy of Omar’s snipers and sharpshooters. A group of them were hiding in the mole-head battery, from where they were able to pick out the finely uniformed officers on the decks of the British ships. Several had their sights on Pellew, aware that his death would be a devastating blow to the attacking forces. Two musket shots passed clean through Pellew’s clothing but - miraculously - left him uninjured. A third smashed the telescope he was clutching under his left arm. As the heat of battle intensified, a large splinter of wood was embedded in his jaw and a spent shot struck his leg.

Omar’s forces grew increasingly confident as the day wore on. They were wreaking havoc on Pellew’s fleet, shattering timbers with their heavy shot and disabling rigging and sails. ‘Legs, arms, blood, brains and mangled bodies were strewn about in all directions,’ wrote Lieutenant John Whinyates. ‘You could scarcely keep your feet from the slipperiness of the decks, wet with blood.’ Yet Pellew refused to withdraw to safety, for he believed it was his sacred duty to fight to the death. ‘The battle was fairly at issue between a handful of Britons in the noble cause of Christianity,’ he wrote, ‘and a horde of fanatics.’

As dusk descended over Algiers, the tide of battle slowly began to turn. By ten o’clock, the British forces had rained down more than 50,000 cannon-balls on Algiers, reducing the main town batteries to rubble. Pellew could now turn his attention to the great corsair fleet in the harbour. He unleashed firebombs and shells into the tightly packed vessels, with devastating effect. ‘All the ships in the port ... were in flames,’ he wrote, ‘which extended rapidly over the whole arsenal, storehouses and gunboats, exhibiting a spectacle of awful grandeur and interest no pen can describe.’ By one o’clock in the morning, everything in the marina was on fire, and the fireball was rapidly fanning out towards the city.

When dawn broke the next morning, Consul Shaler rubbed his eyes in disbelief when he saw the extent of the destruction. Much of the city lay in ruins, including his own consulate, and entire quarters of Algiers had ceased to exist. ‘The city has suffered incredibly,’ he wrote. ‘There is hardly a house without some damage, and many are ruined.’ The harbour presented an even more awesome sight. ‘The bay was full of the hulks of their navy,’ wrote Pellew’s interpreter, Abraham Salamé, ‘smoking in every direction.’ He added that ‘the most shocking and dreadful sight was the number of dead bodies which were floating on the water.’ More than 2,000 Algerines had been killed many of them corsairs - and an even greater number were fatally injured. The British, by contrast, had suffered 141 dead and 74 wounded.

Pellew was anxious to restart hostilities at first light, but he soon found that there was no need for further action. The dey of Algiers made a brief survey of his once-glorious capital and realised that he could no longer continue the fight. He surrendered unconditionally - a humiliating blow to his pride - and agreed to all of the British commander’s demands. These included the release of all the remaining slaves in Algiers, and the abolition - forever - of Christian slavery.

The 1,642 slaves being held in Algiers could scarcely believe that their ordeal was finally at an end. During the battle they had been chained together and moved to an underground cavern on the hillside above the city. When they learned of Pellew’s victory - and discovered that their guards had fled they tore free from their shackles and burst out of their temporary prison. ‘We rushed out of the cave,’ wrote the French slave, Pierre-Joseph Dumont, ‘and dragging our chains, pushed forward through brambles and thickets, regardless of the blood streaming from our faces and bodies. We simply did not feel our wounds any longer.’

Abraham Salamé was shocked at the condition of the newly liberated slaves. ‘When I arrived on shore, it was the most pitiful sight to see all those poor creatures, in what a horrible state they were.’ But for the slaves themselves, this was the moment they had dreamed of for many years. They cheered, they sang with joy and then - with one exultant cry - they shouted, ‘Long live the English admiral.’

Pellew himself was immensely proud of his role in destroying Algiers, and even more gratified when he was brought the news that Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco had also renounced slavery. The great slave auctions were to be closed in perpetuity, and all of the remaining captives were freed without further ado. ‘To have been one of the humble instruments in the hands of Divine Providence,’ wrote Pellew, ‘ … and destroying forever the insufferable and horrid system of Christian slavery, can never cease to be a source of delight and heartfelt comfort.’ Pellew’s name was feted across Europe, and many of the nations that had suffered from the white slave trade showed their gratitude for his triumphant victory, making him a knight of the Spanish Order of King Charles III and a knight of the Neapolitan Order of St Ferdinand. The Netherlands also gave him an honorary knighthood, as did the island of Sardinia. The Pope was so delighted by the news that he presented Pellew with a rare and extremely valuable cameo.

When Pellew finally returned home to his native Cornwall, he was given a hero’s welcome. For the first time in centuries, the local fishermen and traders could put to sea without any risk of being captured and held as slaves. Ministers in London were no less grateful, showering Pellew with honours. He was elevated to a new rank in the peerage and rewarded with a fabulous addition to his coat of arms. Henceforth, the heraldic shield of the Pellews was emblazoned with a Christian slave clutching a crucifix and breaking free from his fetters. It was a fitting symbol for a family that had a deep personal experience of the horrors of the white slave trade.

White Slavery in Early America

In They were White and they were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, revisionist author Michael A. Hoffman II put together a remarkable record of White slavery in America from historical documents. What follows is only a small part of the evidence he presents.

White Slavery in Early America

David Brion Davis writing in the New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1990, p. 37 states:

“As late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing shipments of white slaves, some of them Christians, flowed from the booming slave markets on the northern Black Sea coast into Italy, Spain, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands... From Barbados to Virginia, colonists.., showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from that of chattel slaves... The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.”

L. Ruchames in “The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America,” states that “the slave trade worked in both directions, with white merchandise as well as black.” (Journal of Negro History, no. 52, pp. 251-273).

In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the New World. In the debate the Whites were referred to not as “indentured servants” but as “slaves” whose “enslavement” threatened the liberties of all Englishmen. (Thomas Burton, Parliamentary Diary: 1656-59, vol. 4, pp. 253-274).

Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America quotes an early document describing White children in colonial servitude as “crying and mourning for redemption from their slavery.”

Dr. Hilary McD. Beckles of the University of Hull, England, writes regarding White slave labor, “...indenture contracts were alienable... the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity... as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer.” Beckles refers to “indentured servitude” as “White proto-slavery” (The Americas, vol. 41, no. 2, p. 21).

In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West Indies of 1701, we read of a protest over the “encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name of kidnapping.” (Emphasis added). In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White.

(“Some Observations on the Island of Barbados,” Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, p. 528). It is worth noting that while White slaves were worked to death in Barbados, there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help propagate native foodstuffs who were well-treated and received as free persons by the wealthy planters.

Of the fact that the wealth of Barbados was founded on the backs of White slave labor there can be no doubt. White slave laborers from Britain and Ireland were the mainstay of the sugar colony. Until the mid-1640s there were few Blacks in Barbados. George Downing wrote to John Winthrop, the colonial governor of Massachusetts in 1645, that planters who wanted to make a fortune in the British West Indies must procure White slave labor “out of England” if they wanted to succeed. (Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, pp. 125-126).

“...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly like slaves...” (Morley Ayearst, The British West Indies, p. 19).

“The many gradations of unfreedom among Whites made it difficult to draw fast lines between any idealized free White worker and a pitied or scorned servile Black worker... in labor-short seventeenth and eighteenth-century America the work of slaves and that of White servants were virtually interchangeable in most areas.” (David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, p. 25).

In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find a 1638 description of a White man, one Gyles Player, as having been “delivered up for a slave.”

The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White slaves in America in the 1770s wrote, “Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage” (Letters from America, London, 1792). Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters in their White slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a “Multitude of Cattle.”

The Quock Walker case in Massachusetts in 1783 which ruled that slavery was contrary to the state Constitution, was applied equally to Blacks and Whites in Massachusetts.

Patrick F. Moran in his Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland, refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the “slave-trade” (pp. 343-346).

The disciplinary and revenue laws of early Virginia (circa 1631-1645) did not discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in bondage. (William Hening [editor], Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. I, pp. 174, 198, 200, 243, 306. For records of wills in which “Lands, goods & chattels, cattle, moneys, ne-groes, English servants, horses, sheep and household stuff” were all sold together see the Lancaster County Records in Virginia Colonial Abstracts, Beverly Fleet, editor).

Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy (May 6, 1893): “Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware that between the years 1649-1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the plantations, as the colonies were then called, in politi-cal prisoners... where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves.”

Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia referred to bound Whites assigned to the treasurer’s of-fice to “belong to said office for ever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.” (Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. I, pp. 316, 318).

Certainly the enslaved Whites themselves recognized their condition with painful clarity. As one White man, named Abram, who was accused of trying to agitate a rebellion stated to his fellows, “Wherefore should wee stay here and be slaves?”

In a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London, Whites in bondage did not call themselves “indentured servants.” In their writing they referred to themselves as “England’s slaves” and England’s “merchandise.” (Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery, 1659).

Eyewitnesses like Pere Labat who visited the West Indian slave plantations of the 17th century which were built and manned by White slaves labeled them “White slaves” and nothing less (Memoirs of Pere Labat, 1693-1705, p. 125). Even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as “white slaves.” (Colonial Office, Public Records Office, London, 1667, no. 170)

Sot-Weed Factor, or, a Voyage to Maryland, a pamphlet circulated in 1708, articulates the plight of tens of thousands of pathetic young White girls kidnapped from England and enslaved in colonial America, lamenting that:

In better Times e’er to this Land
I was unhappily Trepan’d;
Not then a slave...
But things are changed... Kidnap’d and Fool’d...

The height of academic and media fraud is revealed in the monopolistic trademark status the official controllers of education and mass communications have successfully established between the definition of the word “slave” and the negro, while labeling descriptions of the historic experience of Whites in slavery a fallacy. Yet the very word “slave,” which the establishment’s consensus school of history pretends cannot legitimately be applied to Whites, is derived from the word Slav. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word slave is another name for the White people of eastern Europe, the Slavs. (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,858).

In other words, slave has always been a term for and a definition of a servile condition of White people. Yet we are told by the professorcrats that it is not correct to refer to Whites as slaves but only as servants, even though the very root of the word is derived from the historical fact of White slavery.

Jewish ‘Radanite’ slave-traders of the Arab Empire

Jews in Poland: A Documentary History: The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1998)

By A.D. 500 the Babylonian Talmud was written determining the character of Judaism as a national religion. It became a code of religious and civil law observed by the vast majority of Jewish communities in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud emphasized that Jews were a chosen people and therefore superior to others. It helped to create Jewish charisma and served as the basic text of Judaism.

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud was the basis for the ethical and cultural development of the masses of Orthodox Jews in central and eastern Europe until the German genocide of the Jews in World War II. It has formed the mentality and specific way of thinking of Orthodox Jews. It inspired the development of modern Jewish nationalism. The Babylonian Talmud gave to Judaism the character of an exclusive national religion of the Jews in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

[p.256]

After completion of the Babylonian Talmud in Mesopotamia the next most important cultural center of Jewish Diaspora was established within the Arab Empire, in Arab Spain, the most civilized country in Europe in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries. Arab Spain was the scene of flourishing Jewish culture between the 8th and 15th centuries.

[...]

The situation of Jews within the Arab Empire was normalized in A.D. 637 by the decree of Omar I. Jews in Islam were recognized as “tolerated infidels.” Most medieval Jews resided in Spain. Jewish medieval merchants were known as “Radanites.” They included western European Jews from France and Germany, as well as those from Arab Spain.

The term “Radanites” was derived from the name of the Arab-Christian border along the river Rhone (in Latin Rodanus) because of an intense slave trade which was conducted across it. The slaves were castrated in Verdun, Venice, and Lyon and sold by Jewish Radanite slave-traders to the Arabs of Spain. This Jewish slave trade also included girls and small boys who were properly indoctrinated in order to be used later by Arab rulers as bodyguards, slave soldiers and bureaucrats.

An alternate origin of the name “Radanite” was a Persian word for those who “knew the way.” This explanation was related to the leading role of Jewish merchants in trade after the fall of the Roman Empire. From the 7th century to mid-10th century Radanites controlled the trade which encompassed Europe, North Africa, and southern Asia including China. It was a period when Hebrew was the only language of world trade.

[p.257]

Arab Spain was the main market for slaves (eunuchs, girls, and young boys). Some slaves were sold as far away as China, which also bought furs, beaver skins, silk, and weapons. Exports from China to Europe included cinnamon, spices, musk, and camphor. The capital of Khazaria, Itil, was an important Jewish trading center. Jewish merchants played an important role in international trade after the fall of the Roman Empire. For two centuries they made Hebrew the only language of world commerce. Slavery, which was the foundation of the Roman economy, was important in the Arab Empire in which the Jews became the main merchants, trading with the infidels and bringing European slaves to Islam.

[p.259]

Jews in service of Boleslaus the Great minted his coins and inscribed on them the name of the Polish sovereign with Hebrew letters. Besides such highly valued craftsmen there were active in Poland Jewish slave-traders. Ever since the time when the economy of Rome was based on slavery the slave trade has continued. In the 11th century the main slave market was in Arab Spain, then the most civilized country in Europe. The Catholic Church fought against slavery and this fight is documented in the treatise “Infelix Aurum” by the first patron saint of Poland, and since A.D. 997 the first bishop of Gdansk, Adalbert or Wojciech (voy-chekh). In the struggle against the slave trade the family of St. Adalbert lost the Czech throne in Prague to their opponents supported by Jewish slave traders. One of 18 sculptures on the 1170 bronze door made for the cathedral of Gniezno depicted the scene of redeeming manacled Christian slaves by a Polish bishop from Jewish merchants in the presence of the son of King Boleslaus the Great, the second formally crowned King of Poland, Mieszko II (990-1034).

The oldest Jewish community in Poland existed in Przemysl. It was apparently composed of Jews from the Khazar kingdom which was conquered in A.D. 965 by the Kievian Rus. The Turkmen Khazar state was located between the Black and Caspian Seas. The first Jewish colonies in southern Poland were apparently organized to exchange forest products, horses, hides, furs, swords, and slaves of both sexes from the west for luxury goods from the east. The Jews generally used Arab money mostly from Spain and their main operation was in the Czech capital of Prague where Boleslaus the Great ruled in 1003-1004, when Bohemia was a part of his empire.

[p.266]

White slaves in America

From the introductory chapter to Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York University Press, New York, 2008):

In the summer of 2003, archaeologists excavated a seventeenth century site outside Annapolis, Maryland, and discovered the skeleton of a teenage boy. Examination showed the boy to have died sometime in the 1660s. He was about sixteen years old and had tuberculosis. His skull showed evidence of a fearful mouth infection, and herniated discs and other injuries to his back were synonymous with years of hard toil.

The youth was neither African nor Native American. He was northern European, probably English. His remains were found in what had been the cellar of a seventeenth-century house, in a hole under a pile of household waste. It was as if the boy was of so little account that after he died he was thrown out with the rubbish.

Forensic anthropologists believe the youth was probably an indentured servant – the deceptively mild label commonly used to describe hundreds of thousands of men, women and children shipped from Britain to America and the Caribbean in the 150 years before the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Most of these servants paid their passage to the Americas by selling the rights to their labour for a number of years. Others were forcibly exiled and sold in the colonies as servants for up to fourteen years. Many were effectively enslaved.

While the Spanish slaughtered in America for gold, the English in America had to plant for their wealth. Failing to find the expected mineral riches along the eastern seaboard, they turned to farming, hoping to make gold from tobacco. They needed a compliant, subservient, preferably free labour force and since the indigenous peoples of America were difficult to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported Britons deemed to be ‘surplus’ people – the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the dissident – and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from three years to life.

This book tells the story of these victims of empire. They were all supposed to gain their freedom eventually. For many, it didn’t work out that way. In the early decades, half of them died in bondage. This book tracks the evolution of the system in which tens of thousands of whites were held as chattels, marketed like cattle, punished brutally and in some cases literally worked to death. For decades, this underclass was treated just as savagely as black slaves and, indeed, toiled, suffered and rebelled alongside them. Eventually, a racial wedge was thrust between white and black,
leaving blacks officially enslaved and whites apparently upgraded but in reality just as enslaved as they were before. According to contemporaries, some whites were treated with less humanity than the blacks working alongside them.

Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums and, ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. England’s richest man was behind this mass expulsion. It was presented as an act of charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who imported four ‘Irish boys’ into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not brought ‘some cradles to have rocked them in’ as they were ‘so little’.

A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those, such as vagrants and petty criminals, whom England’s rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued for England’s gaols to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000 convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados and England’s other American possessions before 1776. All manner of others considered undesirable by the British Crown were also dispatched across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. They ranged from beggars to prostitutes, Quakers to Cavaliers.

A third group were the Irish. For centuries, Ireland had been something of a special case in English colonial history. From the Anglo-Normans onwards, the Irish were dehumanised, described as savages, so making their murder and displacement appear all the more justified. The colonisation of Ireland provided experience and drive for experiments further afield, not to mention large numbers of workers, coerced, transported or persuaded. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies. And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation continued as a fact of life in Ireland.

The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped. Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside by gangs of kidnappers or ‘spirits’ working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based at every sizeable port in the British Isles, spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto ships bound for America. London’s most active kidnap gang discussed their targets at a daily meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral. They were reportedly paid £2 by planters’ agents for every athletic-looking young man they brought aboard. According to a contemporary who campaigned against the black slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an average of around 10,000 whites a year – doubtless an exaggeration but one that indicates a problem serious enough to create its own grip on the popular mind.

Along with the vast numbers ejected from Britain and forced to slave in the colonies were the still greater multitudes who went of their own free will: those who became indentured servants in the Americas in return for free passage and perhaps the promise of a plot of land. Between 1620 and 1775, these volunteer servants, some 300,000, accounted for two out of three migrants from the British Isles.4 Typically, these ‘free-willers’, as they came to be called, were the poor and the hopeful who agreed to sacrifice their personal liberty for a period of years in the eventual hope of a better life. On arrival, they found that they had the status of chattels, objects of personal property, with few effective rights. But there was no going back. They were stuck like the tar on the keels of the ships that brought them. Some, of course, were bought by humane, even generous, masters and survived their years of bondage quite happily to emerge from servitude to build a prosperous future. But some of the most abused servants were from among the freewillers.

It invites uproar to describe as slaves any of these hapless whites who were abused, beaten and sometimes killed by their masters or their masters’ overseers. To do so is thought to detract from the enormity of black suffering after racial slavery developed. However, black slavery emerged out of white servitude and was based upon it. As the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr has observed:

When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.

It has been argued that white servants could not have been truly enslaved because there was generally a time limit to their enforced labour, whereas black slavery was for life. However, slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of its subject. To be the chattel of another, to be required by law to give absolute obedience in everything and to be subject to whippings, brandings and chaining for any show of defiance, to be these things, as were many whites, was to be enslaved. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 1700s, described indentured servants as ‘more properly called slaves’. Taking his cue, we should call a slave a slave.

The Oxford Dictionary defines as slaves persons who are the legal property of another or others and bound to absolute obedience: in short, ‘human chattels’. By this definition white servants were the first slaves in America and it is upon their labour, and later that of African-American slaves, that the nation was initially built. Today, tens of millions of white Americans are descended from such chattels. It is a shame that few in America claim these largely forgotten men and women of the early frontier as their own.

White slavery as one form of jihad

From Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa:

The Tripolitan ambassador in London had explained to Thomas Jefferson years earlier that the Barbary states’ policy toward the Christian world “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” This duty to war on the infidels was called jihad. The Barbary corsairs’ jihad was not based on xenophobia, nihilism, or religious fundamentalism, although the deys varied in their religious fervor and asceticism. Rather, it was the Barbary way of life, a state of perpetual, organized, state-regulated maritime violence and kidnapping, sanctioned by time and the Islamic sense of superiority over Christians. Although their jihad did not have an explicit political goal, as restoring the caliphate (the furthest geographical advance of Islam into southern Europe) is to twenty-first century militant Islam, slave-taking was jihad, and the tactics employed by the corsairs were a form of terrorism, a method of seaborne violence meant to intimidate the peoples of Europe. [pp.17-18]

More Barbary Terror

From Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa:

... historically, the major point of contact between the Barbary regencies and Europe was slavery: corsair ships sailing out of the Maghreb seized European merchant ships and sold their crews and passengers into captivity.

For centuries, the Barbary states had run a lucrative racket of enslaving Christians. Algiers, which Mordecai Noah, later the American consul to Tunis, called “the sink of iniquity and curse of humanity,” was the “great depot” of Christian slaves. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Algiers alone was said to have held thirty thousand captives—in the 1620s, more British subjects lived as slaves in Islamic North Africa than as freemen in the colonies of North America. At the height of the corsairs’ activity, their audacity shocked Europe. In 1631, corsairs descended on the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, and seized the entire population, carrying them back to slavery in Algiers. Algerine corsairs raided villages as far away as Cornwall and Devon in England for men, women, and children. Of course, the coastal areas of Tuscany, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Greek isles were closer to the North African ports from which the corsairs sailed, and easier and more constant targets, since they did not have a coast guard or military force sufficient to stop or deter hit-and-run raids.

By 1800, the racket was simple and time-tested. Ships of all the mercantile nations wanted to trade throughout the Mediterranean. Barbary mariners have loosely come down through history as “pirates,” but in fact the corsairs were state-owned or state-syndicated, and their practices were not outlawed under the slowly evolving notions of the law of nations. Indeed, under Islamic law, the seizures of ships from Christian countries were an article of faith, part of the jihad against nonbelievers. Armed Barbary ships darted out from a dozen ports to seize European ships and their cargoes, which, upon their return to port, Barbary courts condemned as lawful prizes, with the result that the European seamen and passengers carried back to Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli, were enslaved.

White slavery on the Barbary coast was essentially a system of regulated commercial kidnapping, the Christians seized from Europe or America in the first instance with the notion of being trading back for cash. In fact, the entire Barbary enterprise was regulated by foreign nations. For generation upon generation, European kingdoms entered into treaties with each of the Barbary regencies, paying an annual bribe called “tribute” as protection money against the seizure of any of their subjects for the duration of the treaty. From time to time, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, and Britain sent naval squadrons to deter or punish the Barbary corsairs—or at least to try to force upon the Barbary rulers a new treaty reducing the amount of tribute exacted. But for the most part, the European nations were willing to pay cash, or tribute in the form of naval stores, gunpowder, or ships, for the privilege of having their ships and mariners remain unmolested. That paying tribute was a protection racket was widely understood, but paying the Barbary rulers a “license” for trade was less expensive than constantly convoying ships or attacking the Barbary powers in their heavily fortified ports. Besides, wealthier kingdoms recognized that while they could afford to pay off the Barbary powers, other, poorer, European nations could not. With a wink and a nod, the payments by the wealthy kingdoms of northern Europe tacitly encouraged Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis to seize the ships of the poorer maritime nations of southern Europe, thereby disproportionately raising their costs of doing business. Based on that logic, in the 1780s, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the Barbary “Corsaires” might “be privately encouraged by the English to fall upon [American vessels], to prevent our Interference in the Carrying Trade; for I have in London heard it as a Maxim among the Merchants, that, if there were no Algiers, it would be worth England’s while to build one.” The poorer and smaller mercantile states that could not afford regular tribute suffered large losses of seafaring men—the bagnio contained mostly Portuguese, Neapolitans, Sardinians, Sicilians, and Greeks—which helped preserve the mercantile dominance of Britain, Sweden, and Denmark.

After British Admiral Lord Nelson’s triumph at the battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, the Royal Navy was able to establish an effective blockade of French-controlled Mediterranean ports, which ranged from Spain through the Adriatic. The British naval ascendancy in the Mediterranean meant that the Barbary corsairs had fewer targets, and the Barbary regencies were forced to promote legitimate trade and to downplay slave taking. While the Barbary regencies were increasingly integrated into Europe by virtue of shipping goods during the Napoleonic Wars, it would be a mistake to think that the taking of Christian slaves was on the wane—particularly by Algiers. Taking and ransoming European slaves remained critical to the economies of Islamic North Africa, a foundation of their society and culture, and literally a life-and-death issue for the ruling dey, whose support among the janissaries required a constant refreshing of the number of slaves held captive. [pp.13-15]

The Barbary terror

From the introduction to Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2006):

Almost everywhere in the eighteenth century, men were in chains…

In Russia, millions of serfs lived a brutish existence tied to the land and at the sufferance of their manorial lords until Tsar Alexander II freed them in 1861. In the Levant and Istanbul, the burgeoning population needed bread, leading the Tartar rulers of the Crimea to raid the Ukraine, Russia, and Caucuses for hundreds of thousands of white Christians to work as slaves growing wheat in the steppe.

[…] slavery had existed in Islamic North Africa, the so-called Barbary states, for centuries, and was a constant threat to Europe. From dozens of ports in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, Islamic corsairs darted out in their row galleys, and later, in their sailing xebecs and feluccas, to seize European ships with their Christian crews and passengers (and cargoes). They boldly landed bands of armed pirates on the coasts of southern Europe and carted off peasant farmers and nobles, fishermen and goat herders, clerics and tradesmen, to slavery in Barbary. The corsairs sometimes seized the entire population of a village; coastal areas of Andalusia, Sicily, Calabria, Tuscany, and the Greek islands were depopulated by “manstealing” over the course of several hundred years.

Barbary slavery differed from slavery elsewhere both in the spirit in which the corsairs operated and the way Barbary societies used slaves. As historian Robert C. Davis notes in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, “in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad—for the wrongs of 1492 [when Ferdinand and Isabella finally expelled the Moors from Spain], for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim. . . .” But the Barbary slave trade was driven as much by economics as by religious ideology. The corsairs needed oarsmen for their row galleys, and the captives were even more valuable when traded for ransom. Factoring in losses from the plague, malnourishment, mistreatment, and periodic ransomings, Professor Davis estimates that in the 250 years of peak slave-taking by the Barbary corsairs, from 1530 to 1780, at least one million, and perhaps as many as one and one-quarter million, white Christians were enslaved in Islamic North Africa. Even in the eighteenth century, as the number of slaves the Barbary pirates needed dwindled because sailing ships had replaced galleys, approximately 175,000 white Christians were carried off into slavery.

[…] The governments of Europe either paid tribute to them to prevent their subjects from being enslaved, or were too poor to do so. For the United States, free trade was both a policy and a belief: trade would increase wealth even as it increased freedom. But with no navy and little money, the new republic’s merchant ships and crewmen were prime targets for capture and enslavement. The promises of free trade were imperiled.

John Foss, a seaman in the brig Polly out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which sailed from Baltimore bound to Cadiz, Spain, in September 1793, was one of those who became enslaved. Like many who experienced slavery in Algiers, Foss wrote a detailed account of his experience.

After being captured at sea, Foss and his fellow Americans were

taken to the palace of the ruler, the dey of Algiers, through a surging crowd which stunned them “with the shouts, clapping of hands and other exclamations of joy from the inhabitants; thanking God for their great success and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers. . . .” The dey greeted them with a speech declaring he would never make peace with their country, finishing, “now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.” The next morning, a heavy chain link was hammered around each man’s ankle, and Foss called the “dreadful clanking” sound of the iron chain each man had to carry “the most terrible noise I ever heard.” The captured men then began their work as slaves, mining rocks in the nearby mountains and hauling them by bodily force down to the port to repair or extend the seawall at the harbor, or working at the port carrying freight on their backs, goaded along by guards with pointed sticks, like cattle prods, with dreadful beatings or death never a distant possibility.

More from Bat Ye’or

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam (Associated University Presses, London, 1996)

On hostage taking:

Hostage-taking is a classic tactic of the jihad. At the theological-juridical level, it is legal and moral. The hostage - a harbi prisoner - represents a military asset for the exchange of prisoners or for obtaining a ransom to finance the war effort. In both cases, the harbi (American, European or any other), becomes a dehumanized object, deprived of the inalienable rights attached to any human being. This dehumanization is a fundamental aspect bound up with the concept of the harbi. A particular occasion can transform any harbi, no matter who, into a hostage. In the past, frontier raids and piracy at sea, particularly from the Maghreb, provided a considerable reserve of hostages destined for slavery, if they were not redeemed financially. Until 1815, Morocco and the Barbary Coast constituted veritable pirate states, growing rich on the human booty carried off from the dar al-harb. (p. 217-8)

****

On the remarkable assimilative capacity of Islam:

This stream of converts to Islam was swelled by the throng of freed men and captured slaves. Ibn Ishaq, biographer of the Prophet, was the grandson of a Christian captured in 633 by Khalid b. al-Walid at Ayn al-Tamar (Iraq). Abu Hanifa (d. 767), founder of the school of Hanafi law, was the son of a Zoroastrian slave; the Persian Ibrahim al-Mawsili (742-804), who composed classical Arabic music, had been taken captive as a child at Mosul; Jawhar al-Siqilli (the Sicilian), who conquered Egupt (969) for the Fatimid al-Mu'izz and founded al-Qahira (Cairo) and the al-Azhar mosque (972), was a Christian slave sold at Qairuan. (p.234)

****

On manageability of the Dhimmi:

Several factors help to prepare a situation propicious to the manipulation of communities or individuals. Among these, one could mention vulnerability, ideological conditioning, corruption, loss of identity, or historical amnesia.

Vulnerability is integrated into dhimmitude, since the dhimmi, conquered by war and defenseless, is reduced to perpetually repurchasing his life. In addition, the right claimed by the Muslim authority to ratify the appointment of the spiritual leader of the dhimmi community enabled it to interfere in this choice to its own best interests, impose its own candidate, and deepen the schisms of a venal nature which were corrupting the institutions. Thus the morality and cultural level of the communities declined, and this domestic discredit increased the contempt of the outside environment.

Ideological conditioning grafts itself onto vulnerability. The janissaries provide the most perfect example of this situation. Young Christian children abducted during razzias, allocated within the quint of war booty or by the devshirme, were reduced to slavery and converted to Islam. Subjected to an intense military and religious education, they constituted the Muslim power’s elite troops. Blind and fanatical tools of the sultan, they became the cruellest persecutors of Christianity, which was henceforth attacked by its own sons. The janissary incarnates the quintessence of dhimmitude, brought to its perfection. (p. 236-7)

Bat Ye’or, ‘Jihad on the Seas’

I’m doing some reading-up on White slavery at the moment, the Barbary corsairs and whatnot. The following is from one of Bat Ye’or’s books on Islam:

Rapidly exploiting sea-warfare techniques of the conquered Christian populations, the Arabs carried the jihad to the coasts of Europe. The populations of Cyprus (649) and the islands of Cos, Rhodes (672), and Crete (674) were slaughtered or enslaved. The Cyzicus peninsula was ravaged (670) and Paros was reduced to an uninhabited desert. The coasts of southern France and Italy were plundered.

After the forced Islamization of the Jewish and Christian Berber tribes of the Maghreb and the strengthening of Arab-Islamic power, Maghrebian pirates under the Aghlabid dynasty (800-909) undertook a number of expeditions along the European coasts in conjunction with Arabs from Spain. During the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, such razzias depopulated Sardinia, Sicily, the coasts of Italy and southern France and, in the eastern Mediterranean, the Cyclades, the regions of Athos, Euboea, and along the Greek coast.

Landing on Crete in 827 or 828, Arabs from Spain laid waste the island in the space of twelve days, enslaving the populations of twenty-nine towns and sparing one single site where Christians could retain their religion. Moving on to the island of Aegina (gulf of Corinth), they destroyed or deported all the inhabitants as slaves. After having subjugated Bari (842) in southern Italy, then Messina (843) and Modica (844) in Sicily, the Muslim armies set siege to Rome (846). During the 852-53 campaign against Castrogiovanni, Catania, Syracuse, Noto, and Ragusa in Sicily, the Tunisian al-Abbas “took booty in all these territories, ravaged, burned.” During the expedition to the island in summer 853-54, al-Abbas “destroyed the Christians’ harvests and sent expeditionary forces in all directions.” After a six-month siege, the inhabitants of Butira pledged to hand over to him six thousand prisoners, who were then led away. Every year, harvests were laid waste, villages burned and destroyed, towns conquered and reduced to ruins. In the course of the 857-58 campaign, the inhabitants of Cefalu (Sicily) obtained peace by promising to leave their town and abandon it to the Muslims, who then destroyed it. In 878 Syracuse fell after a nine-month siege: “Thousands of its inhabitants were killed and booty acquired, the like of which had never before been taken in any other town. A very small number of men were able to escape.” After pillaging the town, the invaders destroyed it. In 902, the inhabitants of Taormina were decimated by the sword.

This general picture of destruction, ruin, massacre, and deportation of urban and rural captive populations was common to all the conquered territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Well documented by contemporary Syriac, Greek, and Arabic chronicles, the few examples provided illustrate a general situation as it recurred regularly during the seasonal razzias, over the years, and for centuries. These chronicles, in great part translated and published, are well known to specialized historians and indicate clearly, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the rules of jihad concerning booty, the fifth part, the fay, levies on harvests, and the fate of populations (conversion, massacre, slavery, or tribute) were not just vague principles laid down by a theoretical treatise on warfare, construed by some obscure theologian. The Arabs, stirred by their profound belief and the conviction of belonging to an elite nation, superior to all others (Koran 3: 106), put them into practice, feeling that they were thereby fulfilling a religious duty and executing the will of Allah.

It must be stressed, however, that massacre or slavery of the vanquished peoples, burning, pillage, destruction, and the claiming of tribute were the common practices during the period under consideration of every army whether Greek, Latin, or Slav. Only the excess, the regular repetition and the systematization of the destruction, codified by theology, distinguishes the jihad from other wars of conquest or depredation.

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam (Associated University Presses, London, 1996) p.50-51.

Waugh on Slavery

Was He Right to Free the Slaves?

by Evelyn Waugh

Published in the Daily Express, 15 July 1933

The celebrations now being organized for the centenary of William Wilberforce are likely to command very tepid enthusiasm in the countries principally affected by the philanthropist’s work. On the one hand, the present generation of negroes would sooner not be reminded of their antecedents, while the few responsible whites are well aware that the emancipation of the slaves created a series of economic, social and political problems that are no nearer solution now than they were a hundred years ago.

If William Wilberforce could return to public life today and see the effects of his work, the speeches shortly to be made in his honour would ring in his ears with peculiar irony. None of the great movements of the nineteenth century is more typical of its age than that for the freeing of the slaves. It depended on all those fallacies that are being abandoned today: the idea of a perfectible evolutionary man, of a responsible democratic voter, of the beneficial effect of mechanization, and, above all, on sentimental belief in the basic sweetness of human nature.

There are always honourable exceptions in any general racial condemnation, and, heaven knows, the white people of the north have not made such a success of their own civilization that they can afford any extravagance of phrase. But it is not too much to say that in general character the descendants of the Negro slaves in the British Empire are a thriftless and dissolute lot. It is an unexpected development from the simple, woolly-headed, golden-hearted Bible-reading old darky that was held up as an example to European subscribers - the good old Uncle Tom who was to grow in the air of freedom in to an educated, prudent and pious family man and citizen. The sugar plantations have been ruined or mechanized, and the Negroes, instead of following the example of the indentured coolies and becoming small proprietors, working long hours in the country, drift to the intermittent employment of the towns. They have proved quite unfit for retail trade: they are clumsy mechanics, a superstitious and excitable riff-raff hanging round the rum shops and staring listlessly at the Chinese, Madeiran and East Indian immigrants, who outstrip them in every branch of life.

In Liberia, where they have been put in political power, they have erected a rigid racial bar between the immigrant and the aboriginal Negroes, and have introduced a system of forced labour more onerous than the slavery from which they were themselves freed. It was interesting, when the report on conditions in Liberia was published, to notice the concern that it aroused. The greater part of the British public had no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world. We had so often been told in school that the British people had stamped out slavery that we had come to look on it as something wholly obsolete - as until a few weeks back we imagined the persecution of Jews was obsolete. I have no first-hand experience of Liberia, but from all accounts I should say that slavery there exists in a far more offensive form than anywhere else, for it is the process of degrading a free people in their own country.

It is not the state of slavery so much as the process of enslavement that is intolerable: and it is worth noting that the European slave trade was principally for the transport of people already enslaved. That is to say, the traders purchased captives from the warrior tribes. Undoubtedly the trade stimulated the raiding, but free blacks first captured other free blacks and then sold them to the whites.

I have seen slave-owning communities in Abyssinia and Arabia and got the impression that the slaves are far better off than wage-earners in those countries. For one thing, there is no unemployment. In a country which is not socially organized on an industrial basis - that is to say, with old-age pensions, free hospitals, unemployment relief, etc. - the employer of free labour uses his workers on a subsistence wage for the best years of their life, and then turns them off without further obligation. In the houses I visited in Abyssinia the courtyards were full of decrepit old men and women, long past any useful service, who were fed regularly and sufficiently, and had no other duties than to prostrate themselves once or twice a day when their master went in or out. It is a matter of prestige to support a large household. In the old days of West Indian slavery the charge of ill-treating his slaves was one of the most odious that could be brought against a planter, and in many islands was tantamount to a challenge to a duel.

William Wilberforce was inflated by the true nineteenth-century arrogance of thinking a little local uplift could reverse the development of centuries. Slave raiding has from remotest times been the hobby of the warrior tribes of Africa: slave ownership has been one of the postulates of every civilization. British wealth and British sentiment were strong enough to upset a system which, like any other, had abuses but also many redeeming virtues, but British intelligence was not up to anticipating the problem it created.