This is a review and summary of The Forgotten Slave Trade by Simon Webb
This book is a very well-written, heavily researched book about, not the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which most Americans and Britons are familiar with, but about a whole different slave trade. One that started in around 81 to 100 AD, and accounted for the enslavement of millions of men and women, primarily of European descent.
Among the slaves were Slavs (whose name provides the root for the word slave), Ukrainians, Czechoslovakians, Russians, people from the Balkan states, and a variety of other individuals of European (and primarily white) descent.
Most of the people enslaved were opportunistically enslaved. Prior to a certain point, most of the enslavers were also of the same race as their captives.
They might have been taken in a raid or a battle, they might have been walking home and been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many millions of people were made slaves in the fashion. And given their very short life expectancy (under 17 years for males, 19 years for females) , many new slaves were needed all of the time to replensih them.
The author estimates that there were about 12.5 million new slaves needed every 25 years. Since this is the number of slaves estimated to have crossed the Atlantic during the 350 or so years of the later trans-Atlantic slave trade, clearly this ancient slave trade was a much larger and more extensive trade in human property than that which came later.
In addition, many people who were taken as slaves were neither Christian nor Muslim. As such, there was no one to protect them or fight for their release when they were taken.
Slavery was such a common occurenece that it would be nothing to people in a town to see long chain gangs of slaves led through their area on the way to either the slave markets, or to the places where castrations took place, or ultimately to their destination in Rome, England, Africa, or another place where they would be enslaved until they died.
White Europeans, along with many others, were enslaved for well over a thousand years, from the ancient world to the time of the Civil War. At any given time in England or in the ancient Roman empire, between 10 and 15% of the population were enslaved. This was complete slavery, as indentured servitude did not exist in the ancient world. A person was either free or they were enslaved.
In addition to the greater length of time in history that White slaves were subjected to enslavement, along with their shockingly low life expectancy (under 20 years for both male and female slaves), the barbarity of thier enslavement was something that modern people would certainy be shocked by.
In addition to the types of abusses that were common during the more-recognized trans-Atlantic slave trade, such as poor diets, being purchased in open markets and separated from families, being beaten, raped, or killed without consequence to the slave master,etc, White European slaves were routinely castrated if they were males.
The demand for castrated boys to become eunuch slaves was very high from African kingdoms, and in this case, most of the castrati were white.
There was a whole additional trade in specially castrated males. Outside of as punishement for the crime of raping a White woman, in general, male African slaves were not castrated.
Another common misconceoption of the slave trade in White Europeans, which lasted from the late 800s all the way to the time shortly after Thomas Jefferson was elected president, Thomas Jefferson was quite heavily responsible for ending the slave trade on the Barbary Coast.
At the time, White Americans, engaging in trade with Europe, had started to be captured by the privateers as soon as the War of Independence was over and America was not under British protection.
The British, and many other European nations, had by that time taken the policy of paying tribute to each of the Barbary Coast sultans, in order to allow their vessels to pass unmolested, their crews not enslaved.
Jefferson started what is now known as the Barbary Wars in 1801, the first year of his presidency, which finally ended the privateering and kidnapping of European vessels in 1805, primarily due to Jefferson’s intervention.
Yet, instead of seeing Jefferson as a hero to slaves, having almost single-handedly destroyed the slave trade in Whites, he has been demonised becsause he was a slave holder himself, as were all of his contemporaries, including Washington. Even though he wrote against slavery, he didn’t free his own slaves.
In the earliest days of the slave trade until its welcome end after the Civil War, there were some slave masters who treated their human property poorly, and there were those who treated them, if not as equals, then at least as well as their liverstock and animals. Which is to say they didn’t excessively abuse or kill them.
Due to the fact that the Slavs were not Catholics, and they were not Muslim either, they were not valued ior protected by either of the major world religions, and they were enslaved more than other groups of people were.
In fact, in these ancient times, slaves were often transported over land on foot, meaning that they woud pass thorugh many different countries, chained together in an obvious state of enslavement, unmolested by anyone.
With many middlemen along the way, and often changing “masters” several times over the course of their journey, they were transported to many diffent countries.
These slaves were in high demand by the Muslim sultans, particularly women and young boys. Sultans often demonstrated their power to other powerful sultans and society members by the number of enslaved women they were able to keep for themselves.
These harems of concubines were the personal concubine-slaves of the sultans, to do with as they each pleased. Many of these concubines had illegitimate children with the sultan, who were then also slaves.
One of the stranger things during this time was the demand foir male eunuchs. With such a large harem of slave women, the sultans required guards for them.
So, they needed males. But these males could not be able to molest or rape the women they were supposed to be guarding. So, they must be castrated.
This lead to many problems, not the least of which was religious. It is not forbidden in Islam to have slaves. Quite the opposite; slavery was heavily practiced. It was, however, forbidden to mutilate one’s slaves. Castration is quite a severe mutilation.
So, someone had to perform this mutilation before the slaves were delivered, presumably getting around the forbidden act by having someone else perform the dirty work and then deliver the slaevs as castrati.
However, since without these sultan’s demand for these mutiliated slaves, this trade in mutiliated slaves would not have existed, it can be said that these sultans were in fact clearly violating the tenets of their faith.
The second problem was that castrating an adult male, particularly in the 10th through 15th centuries, when this was practiced on a large scale, was almost always deadly.
The bladder would rupture because when the penis was cut off for the castration, there would be so much scar tissue that the urethra wold become too narrow to pass urine. Eventually, the person suffering such a surgery wold die.
Considering the time these operations were performed, there were several considerations. A male adult, when the penis is cut off, even if there were modern surgical techniques and medicine, would usually die from shock.
In 2023, male castration can be performed without death in most cases, but this is a recent development. Prior to the last few years, it was not a surgery often recovered from. The body would go into a state of shock and subsequent death in 90-plus percent of cases during the time of this slavery.
The trade herein described of castrated prepubescent males, to be used as guards in the harms of the sultans in Africa, including Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, and other locations, flourished for centuries. It was usually performed on kidnapped and enslaved prepubescent males from Russia and the surrounding areas who, as mentined previously, were considered to be heathens.
The final problem was that, for these sultans, the castrated males could not be functionally castrated; they demanded complete and total castration.
There could be no remaining trace of a penis or scrotum when the castrati we delivered to the sultans. There could also be no penis or scrotum that grew back in subsequent and frequent inspections carried out on these slaves.
This is in distinction to the functional castrations which had already been practiced for years in certain parts of Italy. In order for a male opera singer to keep their falsetto voice, they had to fail to go through pubety.
In order ot accomplish this, there were several procedures that could be used. Males could have their testicles crushed. This would prevent them from going through puberty. There was a sugery that could be performed where an incision was made in the scrotum and a hot piece of metal inserted therein, causing the testicles to shrink and become non-functional.
Unfotunately, neither of these quite barbaric practices was enough to satisfy the sultans. While these practices were barbaric and painful, they did not often lead to death.
Thus, for the sultans, a solution must be found whereby a male could be completely castrated but still functional as a living being.
After several years, a passable solutuion was found, though this solution still had a very high mortality rate.
Once the procedure was carried out, and the sufficuent amount of time had passed for healing, the danger of death had passed as well.
In Venice and the French city of Verdun, ‘castration houses’ were set up. A prepubescent boy would have their penis and scrotum surgically removed, after which a round peg slightly lartger than a urethra was inserted into the urethra.
This would remain for three days, during which time they were not allowed to eat or drink. On the third day it was removed, and if all had gone well, the patient would pass urine.
After this, the male would recover, although many of them became permanenty incontinent and required the small peg all of the time in order to prevent urination. This caused the created eunuchs to often smell of urine, and to suffer from incontinence for their whole lives. As described previously, slaves did not have a very long life-span, which would have created a very high and continuing demand for this type of castrated slave, to continually replenish the supply of slaves demanded by the sultans.
Once the problem of how to create successful, surviving artifical male eunuchs had been solved, the trade in White European males to the Muslim sultans was booming. It continued to do so for many centuries.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the slave trade in White Europeans. Next to come were the Barbary “Pirates” in the 16th to 19th centuries.
The Barbary Pirates and the British Empire
When many of us think of pirates, we may reminesce about the toothless wonders in Pirates of the Caribbean, or of the peg-legged pirate in old cartoons.
They were more of a navy of the Ottoman or Muslim Empire than they were pirates in the colloquial sense. They were on the payroll of the sultans, and they shared their plunder with them.
Most often, this plunder was in the form of human slaves. For centuries, the pirate navy found targets along the coast of Africa (or the Barbary Coast) and terrorized their European neighbors. England was a common target, particularly English ships passing by the Barbary coastline.
Unfortunately for the British, it was quite common for their ships to be bombarded by the sultan’s navy, and the men aboard kidnapped and sold into slavery. There are some who escaped and lived to tell their tale. Most, however, did not live very long.
There were some so captured who were enslaved on the sultan’s ships as galley slaves, forced to row the very boats that would take more of their colleagues into slavery.
The men had to all row in unison, usually being whipped to force them to continue, and they could not leave their posts. Due to the horrid conditions, they had an average lifespan of only a few years.
Many of us have learned about the Barbary pirates, and how some of the coastal towns in the Barbary coast area were eventully abadoned due to the pirates.
In many of the coastal cities, this would happen again and again, until the cities along the coast would become abandoned due to this kidnapping and enslavement.
In contradistinction to the slave trade in male castrati by the sultans, the people enslaved by the Barbary navy were most often Christian.
They were residents of many of the European countries, in coastal towns and cities, and were practitioners of the Christian faith. In these instances, there were forces that wanted their return, but there was little that could be done.
This led to the issue of tributes. For centuries, while the Barbary pirates took their ships and invaded the coastal cities, the British and a few other nations who could afford to do so, would pay the sultans of the Muslim countries to allow thier ships to pass unmolested through thier waters.
However, as many people in the modern world realize, you can’t expect criminals to honor such commitments, and they will always be changing the terms of the agreements.
There will also always be other rulers who want to know why they are not entitled to tribute as well, and often they want more than the previous recipients of tribute have received.
In this way, paying trubute simply ensures that a country will always have new kingdoms to pay tribute to, and the cost will just keep going up.
This is precisely what kept happening to the British. They woulld pay tributes to such and such sultan. Then, that sultan would keep raising the price of the tribute.
And, when you are paying tribute to one sultan, another sultan is bound to demand why you don’t pay tribute to them. Then the next sultan would go out of their way to kidnap ships of the tribute-paying nation, demanding tribute for the slaves they have thus gotten. Paying tribute is not the way to proceed when dealing with criminal minded people.
This paying of tribute, and enslaving of the British seagoers and others, contined for centuries. It was not ended until the end of Thomas Jefferson’s first term, in 1805.
While Britain continued to trade with America for some time, it became clear that the new nation needed additional trading partners in order to flourish as a nation.
And this naturally brought them right in the firing range of the Barbary navy. The entrepreneur navy captured an American ship and demanded triubute.
However, Jefferson would not pay tribute. Instead, he sent a fleet of ships from the newly formed navy to attack the Barbary pirates. They were engaged in battle, and America’s ships had a decisive victory. The captives were released, and captives of theirs the Americans held were also released.
Once again in 1803, forces were sent to attack the Barbary pirates. Once again in 1805, the final year of the Barbary Coast pirates’ power, he sent an invading party to the offending sultan’s kingdom and attacked.
The Americans also forged an alliance with the sultan’s greedy brother, promising to overthrow the sultan and install him in the current sultan’s place.
However, this overthrow became unnecessary, as the sultan surrendered. Thus the Americans left, without helping the brother with whom they had forged an alliance.
Unfortunately, this was the first, but would not be the last, time that America promised something and did not honor its agreements. This has happened on other occasions since then, and according to the Wall Street Journal in 2019, “America’s involvement in the Middle East… also began with casting aside an ally.”
In this case, the captured slaevs were freed, and the Americans had gained their first international respect, along with the ability to trade unrestricted with Europe.
This lead to the freeing of the enslaved Americans, and also the beginning of the American policy of never paying ransom or giving criminals respect.
A Curious Footnote of History – The Super Soldiers
One of the more curious aspects of this ancient slave trade was that of the super slave soldiers. One of the sultans had the brilliant idea of creating a super-army using the most loyal people in the kingdom to be trained as unbeatable soldiers.
Who were these most loyal people? The friends of the sultan? His family? Of course not!
Those most loyal to the kingdom would be those who were brought there against their will, and who had the least to lose: the slaves!
They would be trained to become a super army, who would fight for the sultan. At least, in theory. It turned out that the slaves all spoke the same language, which the sultans did not speak, and were loyal to one another, and not the sultan slave master.
These were the grand viziers, and they were brutal. They started out as advisers to their sultans, but quickly became the true sultans.
In several cases, they decided that the sultan had no power over them, and they could rule themselves. So, they killed the sultan and took his throne. This occurred more than once, as these slave grand viziers were part of the history of the sultans for quite a while.
If you remember Jafar from Aladdin, it is likely that this would have been a common occurrence, with a much less happy ending than in the movie. Not only could the real Jafar have taken the throne from the sultan, he could have also decided to marry the princess if he had wanted.
The strangest part about the gtrand vizier slaves being adviser to, often taking the place of the sultan, is that it wasn’t a unique or short-lived idea. This occurred over centuries, with many sultans suffering a deadly fate at the hands of their viziers. But still they persisted, so strong was the desire for a super army that would enable them to defeat any enemy.
One would think that after the first sultan was murdered by his grand vizier that other sultans would think twice. But this happened many times, again and again.
The lure of having an invincible army at their disposal was so great that it defies logic.
Why would someone that had been ripped from their home and family against their will want to devote themselves to helping their captors?
The short answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t. Even more than that, the viziers would work together, as they could communicate with each other without detection. The apparent stupidity of the sultans was pretty incredible.
Conclusion
This is a highly recommended book. It is well footonoted and historically accurate. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade pales in comparison to this much longer lasting and much more barbaric trade in slaves of many White races.
No Africans, except those who had committed a crime while enslaved, had to endure castration without the use of anesthetics or antibiotics, so that they could then guard the harems of women the sultans kept to rape at will.
The author has asked the question of how this can be forgotten. It is not taught in school in this country, except as the briefest mention of pirates, where we have a fictitious image of what a pirate is, since they don’t exist today.
And this Wikipedia every is of the Barbary slave trade alone, which is considered to have occurred from the 16th to the 19th century. This does not account for the slave trade by Africans from the 5th century through to the 15th Century.
However, as shown previously, this was not the only group of White slaves. It has been estimated by some scholars that the human toll of the slave trade betwenn about 81AD and 1865, when the slave trade in many Western nations was outlawed, was about ten times as extensive as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in the area of 100 million individuals enslaved.
While the trans-Atlantic slave trade has been estimated at having about 12.54 million slaves, the trade in White slaves on the Barbary coast alone is estimated at having oiver 1 million victims.
This is a staggering number, and the vast majority of them were White, enslaved by Muslim and African sultans. However, the Barbary coast officially took place only between the 16th and 19th centuries.
The true extent of slavery of Whites, most particularly including non-Christian, non-Muslim Whites, such as those from the Slavic nations, Russia, Ukraine, and other states that are in that area, was far more extensive than just this brief historical footnote.
This author estimates that for each 25 years of the slave trade that took place from the ancient Roman empire until the mid-1860s, around the time of the Civil War in America, an estimated 12.5 million people were enslaved.
This is the same number of slaves transported to the Americas from Africa over the course of 350 years.
As a consequence, the human toll in slaves to Africa, rather than later from Africa, was for more extensive than that of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But, this is not taught in history classes, it is not commonly held knowledge, and it is not easy to learn about.
This is presumably because it does not fit the narrative that oppression has always run in one direction: from Whites to other races. This book, and the history it shares, tells quite a different story.
In fact, the slave trade in Whites, by other races, often African people of Black and Brown descent, was far more extensive and longer-lived than the more well-known slave trade.
However, this more extensive and much more barbaric trade was not stopped with a bloody civil war, as happened in America in order to free the Black slaves, but rather it quietly came to an end after America got involved. There are many things that are different about the slave trade in Blacks and the slave trade in Whites.
Of the trade in Whites, there was never such an outcry against it, followed by the use of physical force in order to stop it, with many lives lost on both sides, of all races (as many Blacks fought in the Civil War as well).
Literally, no one cared about the White slaves, who were seen as completely disposable people, who weren’t even considered human, for over a thousand years. But the Civil War allowed Americans to declare that slavery is evil, and we did something about it. Our people paid the ultimate price to stop it.
Whatever the resaon, it is certainly a curiosity in the unbalanced teaching of our shared history, where this portion of it has been literally erased and ignored.
