The global history of enslavement and the struggle for historical perception

The global history of enslavement is an extremely complex and often intensely debated topic, especially when it comes to comparing the different systems of exploitation across cultures and eras. For a long time, the focus of historical research was predominantly on the transatlantic slave trade, while other massive systems ofHuman trafficking have been pushed into the background. However, a critical examination of historical sources reveals a far broader and more inconvenient picture of human exploitation spanning continents, religions, and millennia. The comparison between the Oriental and Western slave trade forces us to question established narratives and thebrutal realities of the past without considering ideological filters. Ultimately, it’s about understanding the universal mechanisms of power, oppression, and the commodification of human beings that have shaped entire civilizations.

Relativization of historical responsibility

In the historical debate, the narrative is sometimes attempted that the participation of indigenous African actors in the slave trade serves to relativize their own historical responsibility. This view aims to gloss over the dark chapters of one’s own past and shift the blame onto other groups. However, thea compelling question as to how the respective share of different cultures and religions in the abduction and enslavement of millions of people is actually to be assessed. When looking at these historical dimensions, one first uses the available statistical estimates, which, however, often differ greatly from one another.

The Statistical Dimensions of Oriental Trade

Various researches put the number of Africans abducted as part of the Oriental slave trade between the 7th and 20th centuries at around 17 million people. This huge number is spread over the routes through the Sahara with about 9 million, over the Indian Ocean with about 4 million and over the Red Sea with over 4 million victims.the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with estimates of 11 to 15 million people being abducted. Other analyses come to the conclusion that 5 to 10 million people were transported via the Sahara alone and another 5 to 6 million people were transported via the Indian Ocean. Within the African continent itself, up to14 million people have fallen into slavery, although the extent and duration of this intra-African trade can hardly be quantified exactly to this day.

The fuzziness of historical lore

Despite these vast dimensions, experts repeatedly emphasize the lack of accurate and complete records for the Oriental slave trade. Between the 7th and 19th centuries, more than 9 million people are said to have been displaced to the north in the course of trans-Saharan trade alone, organized by North African merchants and their allies.Traders reached the coasts of Africa, they simply entered existing exchange cycles in many regions without initially fundamentally changing them. The lack of documentation is particularly evident in historical examples, such as one of the most active ports in the Persian Gulf, which did not keep any register of the import of slaves.Sources make precise number speculation about the true extent of human tragedies in the Oriental region almost impossible.

The temporal expansion of the various slavery ice systems

An objective comparison of the historical periods reveals massive differences in the duration of the respective slavery systems. While the transatlantic slave trade of the European nations took place over about 150 years, the various forms of Muslim and Trans-Saharan trade extended over about 1200 years and even longer. This enormous time spanillustrates how deeply rooted and persistent the exploitation of human labour was in certain cultures. The large cotton plantations in Egypt owed their enormous wealth entirely to the exploitation of enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa. When the Sultan of Oman set foot in Zanzibar in 1840, this led to an extraordinary expansion of the slave trade, withup to 20,000 people were brought to the island every year.

The cruel reality on the islands of the Indian Ocean

The abducted people were mostly captured in cruel raids deep inland and transported onwards on ships. Some of the victims were shipped to the ports of Arabia, the Persian Gulf and the Mascarene Islands, but the vast majority remained directly on site. These people, under the brutal supervision of unscrupulous overseers, had toClove fields, which founded the enormous wealth of the islands. In 1849, there were already about 100000 slaves in Zanzibar, and in 1860 this number rose to 200000. With a total population of only 300000 inhabitants at the time, this means that the overwhelming majority of the population consisted of disenfranchised and enslaved people.

The Universal Nature of Slave Owning Societies

These historical facts lead to the inevitable realization that both the Islamic and the Western world are to be regarded as classic slave-owning societies. Both Greco-Roman antiquity and the medieval and modern Occident, as well as the Muslim empires, were largely based on the institution of slavery.Slave rule also claimed countless human lives, and the suffering of the exiles from the Near East is in no way inferior to the later exploitation of Africa. The change in sources of supply for enslaved labor was the result of a random concatenation of historical events, technical advances in seafaring, and geopolitical shifts.had nothing to do with modern racism, but followed age-old patterns in which strangers were denied equal membership of humanity.

Assessing historical suffering and inhumanity

The living conditions of slaves in ancient times were fundamentally different from those on the plantations of the New World, which were run like large capitalist enterprises. The difficult question arises as to how one can assess and evaluate the respective inhumanity of these systems without falling into the trap of justifying trivialization. If you want to know the history ofOppression in a rough overview, one must compare different forms of massive violence and humiliation. The symbolic submission through the traditional binding of women’s feet bears no relation to the physical destruction and deportation of millions of people over 2 millennia. Without one or the other form of oppressionin order to justify this, it must be noted that the historical actors of slavery lacked the aesthetic and cultural sense of borders that still guided other societies in their own forms of cruelty.