Please remind us also to watch PBS shows on the McCarthy hearings and the Nuclear Freeze movement.
The Europeans and Americans have been pretty poor customers for slaves, as cultures go. They took it up for a brief period and then went around the world trying to abolish it. The Moslems, Orientals, and the Africans themselves have been the real enthusiasts. All those cultures that believe people are essentially ants. The American Indians kept Indian and black slaves as well.
There would have been no international African slave trade without the Arabs. It would have been confined to the incessantly warring African tribes themselves. Any book, even by a liberal historian, will make it clear that it was the Arabs alone who created and used the slave-trading routes. They bought the slaves from tribes in the interior and sold them to the rest of the world from the handful of ports that exist on the African continent. Most of the African slave trade went to the Middle East. About 5 percent went to the Americas.
It's significant that all African slavery, including America's, was supplied by Moslems.
Not completely accurate. The latter is 100% accurate yes, but the former, no. For 'Americans' if we extend the history back as being times from say 2000 BC to now, then 'Americans' have practised slavery. We as a nation however are a young nation, and we only had slavery for the first century of our nation's life and then abolished it completely -- better than most countries, yes.
however, in the case of Europeans slavery was commonplace before Christianity -- think of the Spartans and their slave society etc. Athens had 60% or more of it's population as slaves
In the medieval world only the rich lands: the Byzantines and Moslem lands could afford slaves.
As the Black Death killed much of the population, the cost of slave labor increased.
Note that in the Domesday book compiled by William the conqueror in 1086, nearly 10% of the population of England were slaves. The trade of slaves was made illegal in England by the 12th century. the Scandanavians had thralls
the world as a whole did not actively stop slavery until the Methodists came along -- and in the 1800s only.
Untrue. Arabs and Muslims had little or no direct contact with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Muslims controlled North Africa and the Sahara. Powerful pagan tribes such as Ashanti and Dahomey controlled the rain forest West African coast where almost all slaves were shipped for the Atlantic trade. The pagans and Muslims fought over control of the Sahel, the savannah belt between the desert and the jungle. The pagan tribes did not allow Muslims/Arabs to come into contact with their European customers.
Most of the African slave trade went to the Middle East.
This is true. Though a good many went to India, also.
About 5 percent went to the Americas.
I think you've mixed up a statistic here. The East African and trans-Sahara slave trade lasted from the 7th to 20th centuries. (By Muslims. It's much older than that.) The Atlantic trade from West Africa lasted from the 15th to 19th centuries.
Nobody really knows how many were shipped by either route, but most reasonably unbiased historians estimate roughly similar numbers, with perhaps 15M to 20M from North and East Africa (by Arabs), but spread over a much longer period, and perhaps 12M to 15M across the Atlantic (by white guys) over a shorter period.
IOW, your 5% number is way off. It is possible you have confused the percentage of slaves shipped across the Atlantic who wound up in what is now the USA, which was about 5%. (Somehow the US, 5% of the trade, is morally held responsible for all of it.)
It's significant that all African slavery, including America's, was supplied by Moslems.
Nope. Just wrong. I'm sure Moslems would have been more than happy to have this monopoly, but they never did, except towards the middle and end of the 19th century, when Europeans had given up the trade.
It is also significant that AFAIK Muslims never developed an indigenous abolition movement. Changes in their slavery practice were always forced on them by the West.
It is also interesting that most Muslim slavery was not truly economic in nature. The slaves weren't used on vast profitable plantations, as in the western hemisphere.
Most Muslim slaves were luxury items of consumption, not production. Concubines, enunchs, domestics, soldiers, not workers.