Friday, August 3, 2018

Debunking The Alt-Right - The Barbary Slave Trade

“If all anti-Western partisans disappeared tomorrow, fair-minded people would still have to see the Atlantic slave trade as far more worthy of attention than the Barbary Slave Trade.”

Daniel Baker, M.A. in European History, George Mason University

1.  The trans-Atlantic slave trade was much larger than the Barbary slave trade.  I don't know where the poster gets the figure of "2.5 million"; Robert Davis's Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, which is still the main study on this topic (indeed, almost the only one in English), estimates the number of Barbary slaves at 1 million to 1.25 million.  slavevoyages.org documents the embarkation of 10,147,907 Africans on the Atlantic slave trade, and estimates the total, including undocumented slaves, was over 12 million.  And that doesn't include the slaves who died before ever reaching the ships.  The trans-Atlantic slave trade commands more attention than the Barbary trade because it was 10 to 12 times bigger.  A better question might be, "why is the trans-Saharan slave trade largely ignored in comparison to the trans-Atlantic slave trade"; North African slave traders bought or captured at least 7 million slaves, and possibly as many as 20 million, from sub-Saharan Africa.  For that, see paragraph 2.

2.  As Mr. Mazumdar very ably explains, the consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have lasted far longer.  Muslim slavers always justified their brutality as reserved for "infidels," whether they were enslaving war prisoners taken by the Barbary corsairs or black people purchased in sub-Saharan Africa.  Although today most people recognize this religious intolerance as indefensible, it had the happy side effect that it left slaves an escape route by converting to Islam.  Converts to Islam were supposed to be emancipated, and although owners often dragged their feet on this, there was never any question that the slaves' children would be free so long as they became and remained Muslim.  So the descendants of slaves in the Barbary states are pretty well equal to the Arab, Berber, or Turkish locals.  Furthermore, many of the Barbary slaves were ransomed back by the Christians.  The worst things about Western slavery were that it was A) race-based, and therefore B) heritable.  While Western slavers initially used religion to justify slavery, much as the Muslims had, that ideology was soon supplanted by the concept that people with dark skin were inherently inferior to those with light.  So converting to Christianity didn't help New World slaves like converting to Islam helped the slaves in North Africa.  Muslim religious intolerance and white racism have both survived the abolition of slavery, but the religious intolerance doesn't continue to haunt the Barbary slaves' descendants, because they've nearly all converted to Islam, while white racism does continue to haunt slaves' descendants in the West, because they can't "convert" to white.

3.  The context of the Barbary slave trade was a centuries-old Christian-Muslim feud in which both sides' behavior toward each other was pretty ghastly.  Muslims conquered, tortured, massacred and enslaved Christians; Christians conquered, tortured, massacred, and enslaved Muslims.  To the degree there was any difference, it favored the Muslims; the Muslims usually allowed Jews and Christians to keep their religion as second-class citizens, while Christians generally required Muslims to convert or die.  A considerable number of Barbary corsairs were actually renegade Englishmen, Greeks, or Italians who had converted to Islam; no such acceptance awaited Muslims who converted to Christianity, as the conversos of Spain discovered.  Thus, there is no real feeling among modern Europeans that the Muslims during the slave trade treated them worse than they treated the Muslims.  On the other hand, black African slaves didn't do anything to anybody that could remotely equal, much less justify,the Europeans, North African Muslims, and their own black neighbors conspiring to kidnap 17 to 32 million of them.

4.  I think you may have been hoping to hear that it's all because of leftist, anti-Western double standards and hypocrisy, and yes, I think the utter silence about the Barbary slave trade does have something to do with that.  It is amazing how the very people who heap scorn on white racists' self-serving tripe that black slaves were all happy members of the family will endlessly swallow the exact same fairy tales when told by Muslims or sub-Saharan Africans, and overlook things like the bastinado, white Christian slaves' accounts of surviving rape, or the oarsmen chained to the benches of the Barbary galleys.  The Atlantic slave trade, in addition to being an almost unimaginable human tragedy, is also a convenient political weapon for leftists and anti-Westerners, in a way that the Barbary slave trade is not.  But, given items 1, 2, and 3 above, I think you have to admit that if all anti-Western partisans disappeared tomorrow, fair-minded people would still have to see the Atlantic slave trade as far more worthy of attention than the Barbary slave trade.  There are plenty of good grounds to criticize SJWs on; why try to attack them for a choice of emphasis that they can so easily defend?