Time to Set the Record Straight on Slavery

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A look into the past is instructive. According to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, 12.5 million African slaves were shipped to the New World between 1525 and 1866, and 10.7 million (about 86 percent) survived the trip. Of these, only 450,000 (about 4 percent of the total) were sent to America. The rest were shipped to South America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone received 4.9 million. {snip} And the black slave trade to the West pales in comparison to the white and black slave trade conducted by Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East in its barbarity and numbers.

The much larger and infinitely more barbaric Muslim slave trade began in about 711, capturing both whites and blacks in numbers much higher than those taken by the West, and Muslim slave-traders provided over 80 percent of those black slaves sold to the West. Of the slaves captured by Muslims for their own use, 80 to 90 percent died on the way to market. Of those shipped to North Africa for sale to Western slavers, about 30–50 percent died en route. Males slated for Muslim markets were castrated. Only 25 percent survived the operation. Their descendants in those nations are much smaller in number because most male African slaves were used as eunuchs and worked to death. Estimates of total black enslavement in Muslim nations range from 11 million to 32 million. Given the high mortality rate of capture and transport, the impact on black African tribes must have been genocidal.

The Muslim Ottomans, the Barbary pirates, Crimean Tatars, and Turks enslaved European, Russian, Mediterranean, and Caucasus whites between the 15th and 19th centuries. According to The Islamic Trade in European Slaves by Emmet Scott, the most conservative estimate is 15 million white slaves. Women and boys were preferred. Most of the women were sold into sex slavery, while boys were castrated and used as eunuchs. Crimean Tatars, who enslaved about 3 million, gave older men of little value to Tatar youths, who killed them for sport.

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Scott writes:

The great humanitarian impulse to end slavery, from the late eighteenth century onwards, came entirely from the Christian West, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was stamped out completely in most Christian lands.

In the Middle East, it was officially ended only due to pressure from the West:

That slavery no longer exists (officially at least) in the majority of Muslim territories is due entirely to the efforts of Westerners, and in fact Muslim societies vigorously resisted all attempts by Europeans to stamp out the slave trade in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was not in until the second half of the twentieth century that slavery was finally abolished in the Gulf States and the Arabian Peninsula — after intense Western pressure. Is it not about time that some of this information got through to students in our schools and colleges?

But slavery has not been abolished. Mauritania, the last nation to publicly condone slavery, officially outlawed it finally in 2007. However, the truth is that slavery in Mauritania is alive and well, with as much as 10–20 percent of the population (340,000 to 680,000) in bondage. Algeria (106,000), Sudan (35,000 or more), Libya (48,000), and certain other nations still practice slavery.

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