White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Believed (As in enslavement of whites, not prostitution)

Newswise ^ | March 8, 2004 | Ohio State University

[GrandEagle]

understand what you are saying, but slavery is not a form of spreading the faith, it is done for money.
Not always. Muslims, especially the really radical ones, view anyone non Muslim as less than human and unworthy of being treated in any way other than an animal. While it is true that slaves are bought and sold for money, many times they are traded for power. It is also a way of instilling terror, to force conversion of all but the strongest Christians.
Even in Africa, many of the tribes used slavery as retribution for loosing a "war" with them. Again they were sold for money or goods, but that was a fringe benefit. The driving force for slavery was power.
I will agree that the slave traders who brought slaves to other countries were in if for the money. Also, most western countries who bought slaves were in it for economic reasons.
There are many websites dealing with Muslims capturing Christians and forcing them to either convert of become slaves (or dead in many cases). Voice of the Martyrs has one called http://www.persecution.com for starters. They have a country by country report.
I also get news letters from a couple of groups that are trying the aid the Christians in Muslim and Communist countries. They are filled with testimonials and pictures of Christians who have been given that exact choice. Convert or die and you children will become slaves. Hands chopped off, feet chopped off, eyes poked out, and more. Malaysia is currently a VERY dangerous place for Christians.

[VOA]

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by
Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 — a far greater number than had ever
been estimated before.

"Hey, it's what we do!"
-- usual boilerplate response of Islamics when their inhumanity to non-Muslims
is exposed for all to see...

[Donaeus]

bttt

[LN2Campy]

That was a true incident -- it occured in Grindavik in the southwest of Iceland.

[cake_crumb]

Saint Patrick was a slave at one time.

[4CJ]

...and white slavery continued well into the 20th century, ladies and gentlemen...

The blind just ignore it. I mean, it's not like Christians are to blame ...

[TheDon]

Taking Christian European civilians as slaves by the victorious Ottoman troops were considered the spoils of war for the troops. Some young Christian boys were pressed into service as slaves for the gov't bureaucracy, and were well educated for that service. Millions of white, Christian, Europeans have no doubt been slaves.

[chesley]

I think I read that if you converted after enslavement, you weren't freed, but you could demand a Muslim master as a Christian couldn't own you.

[Cronos]

you won't get reparations as the slammies would have slaughtered the males when they were done with them and they would have raped the females. So, many 'arabs' may have euro blood.

[R. Scott]

Even here (The USA) indentured servants were often no better than slaves. There were cases of charges for food, clothing and shelter being added on to the original fee for passage, making for a life time of indenture.

[syriacus]

Baepler, Paul, editor White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. xiv, 310 p., 19 halftones. 1999 [University of Chicago Press]

Some of the most popular stories in nineteenth-century America were sensational tales of whites captured and enslaved in North Africa. White Slaves, African Masters for the first time gathers together a selection of these Barbary captivity narratives, which significantly influenced early American attitudes toward race, slavery, and nationalism.

Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.

The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.

Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.

[syriacus]

White Slavery in America

The topic of this story is a sensitive one yet one of great importance.  White slavery in America was real. There are many documents that verify the bondage, kidnapping and transporting of Brits to the Colonies as slaves.  The importance of this story will help those who cannot find a ship passenger list on their ancestor.  This story may not pertain to all who came to America that are not listed on ship passenger lists.

The Journal of Negro History #52 pp.251-273 states, “The sources of racial thought in Colonial America pertaining to slave trade worked both directions with white merchandise as well as black.”

Thomas Burton recorded in his Parliament Diary 1656-1659 vol. 4 pp. 253-274 a debate in the English Parliament focusing on the selling of British whites into slavery in the New World.  The debate refers to whites as slaves ‘whose enslavement threatened the liberties of all Englishmen.’

The British government had realized as early as the 1640’s how beneficial white slave labor was to the profiting colonial plantations.  Slavery was instituted as early as 1627 in the British West Indies.  The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series of 1701 records 25000 slaves in Barbados in which 21700 were white slaves.

George Downing wrote a letter to the honorable John Winthrop Colonial Governor of Massachusetts in 1645, “planters who want to make a fortune in the West Indies must procure white slave labor out of England if they wanted to succeed.”  Lewis Cecil Gray’s History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 vol.1 pp 316, 318 records Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia, referring to bound whites assigned to the treasurer’s office. “To belong to said office forever.  The service of whites bound to Berkeley Hundred was deemed perpetual.”

The Quoke Walker case in Massachusetts 1773 ruled that; slavery contrary to the state Constitution was applied equally to Blacks and Whites in Massachusetts.

Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. 1 pp. 174, 198, 200, 243 & 306 did not discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in Bondage.

Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slaves 1659 consists of a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London referring to whites in bondage who did not think of themselves as indentured servants but as “England’s Slaves” and “England’s merchandise.”

Colonial Office, Public Records Office, London 1667, no. 170 records that “even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as “white slaves.”  Pages 343 through 346 of Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland by; Patrick F. Moran refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the “slave-trade.”

...  John Pory declared in 1619, “white slaves are our principle wealth.”

The above quotations from various authors are just the tip of the iceberg on the white slave trade of the Americas.  People from the British Isles were kidnapped, put in chains and crammed into ships that transported hundreds of them at a time.  Their destination was Virginia Boston, New York, Barbados and the West Indies.  The white slaves were treated the same or worse than the black slave.  The white slave did not fetch a good price at the auction blocks.  Bridenbaugh wrote in his accounting on page 118, having paid a bigger price for the Negro, the planters treated the black better than they did their “Christian” white servant....

Governments have allowed this part of American and British history to be swallowed up.  The contemptible black slavery has taken a grip on people associated with American History.  Yet, no one will tell of these accountings that are well established on to the middle 1800’s.... 

[longtermmemmory]

When the germans left the island, the locals hung the woman who had befriended a german soldier.

That also happened when the germans left Greece. Of course many of the colaborators sought refuge with the communists during Greece little post WWII "conflict".

During the ottoman years the choices were sometimes extreme; You were brutalized by the ottomans for not cooperating or you were killed by fellow greeks for cooperating.

[JerseyHighlander]

bump for later...

[pending]

"I want reparations!"

Ha ha... my first thought.
I only missed posting it first by 11 hours.

Sheesh this place is hard to keep up with part time, I better quit my job.

[Kenny Bunk]

The ransoming of slaves from the Barbay pirates and Turks was an official ongoing Christian effort for centuries.

Well into the 18th C, it was quite common for the Barbary Pirates to sweep in from the sea in their fast galleys, to prey on individual people just walking on the beach in Italy, France, Italy, and Spain, with women and female children as special targets. In lands under Muslim occupation in the Balkans, the Bosnians used the Albanians to kidnap likely slave prospects for their Turkish masters. Many thousands of Greeks, Macedonians and Bulgarians were also taken in slavery.

In all likelihood, Davis' numbers err on the side of caution!

[hosepipe]

White slavery what a concept...
In England serfdom was never or rarely taxed more than 10 percent..
WHOS THE SERF.?. WHos the slave.?..

[eleni121]

Conveniently forgotten/overlooked in all this really well known fact about slavery is that millions of Europeans Christians were enslaved by Muslim Turks long before this era. From the very beginning of the mohamedan imperialistic expansion to the 20th century Muslims both Turk and Arab captured, forcefully converted, and held in bondage and decimated millions of Christians from north Africa to the Middle East to Eastern and Southern Europe!

[CatoRenasci]

Indeed. Slavery seems to have been endemic to the ancient world and largely unquestioned in the world outside the Christian West. While the West practiced slavery, it was the Christian West which first determined slavery was WRONG and which essentially ended slavery. Does anyone seriously think a world in which the Reformation and the Enlightenment did not happen, and in which the 19th century was not dominated by the Western European powers and the United States, would not be one in which slavery still flourished openly ? (oh, it's still around, to be sure, but far less openly than before, and, at least outside of the Moslem world, rather rare.