Simon Webb is the author of several non-fiction books, ranging from academic works on education to popular history. He works as a history consultant to television companies and filmmakers and also writes for various magazines and newspapers. He spoke with europeanconservative.com about his book The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam.
The traumatic memory of African slavery has been weaponised by left-wing extremists and converted into an ideological weapon. In the name of revenge, we’ve seen the desecration of monuments in Britain, America, and other nations. Yet your 2020 book, The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, is a powerful reminder that Europeans were also the victims of slavery.
The vandalism and desecration of statues during the Black Lives Matter disturbances in 2020 showed the awful ignorance of those protesting the transatlantic slave trade. In San Francisco, a statue of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, was daubed with red paint, presumably because protestors assumed that any white man wearing 16th-century clothing must inevitably have been involved in the slave trade. The marvellous irony was of course that Cervantes himself had actually spent five years as a slave in Algiers, after being captured at sea on the 26th of September 1575. That the statue of a former slave should be vandalised in this way is delicious!
The History of white slavery in the Islamic world is a long one, with millions suffering this fate over the centuries.
One great advantage of owning white slaves from Christian families, especially those who had been removed from their families as young boys, is that they had no family connections at court and were unlikely to be conspiring in favour of this or that claimant for the throne. In the Ottoman Empire, most Muslims had loyalties and allegiances to one faction or another, or perhaps they had relatives whose interests they were eager to advance. Some intrigued to overthrow a caliph or joined plots of some kind, based upon tribal loyalties. White men from Christian families were free of such temptations, which was why they were seen by many rulers as more trustworthy and less likely to be treacherous. For this reason, they made ideal soldiers or civil servants.
One sometimes hears the counter-argument that, unlike black Africans in European-dominated slavocracies, whites captured by Muslims often accrued great power and themselves became new elites. Is this a simplistic view?
It is perfectly true that white European slaves could attain high rank in Muslim countries, but this sometimes came at a terrible cost. In 1577, an English merchant ship called The Swallow was passing through the Mediterranean and happened to sail a little too close to Algiers. Barbary pirates boarded The Swallow and took the crew off to sell as slaves. One of the English sailors on board, a man called Samson Rowlie, rose to become Treasurer of Algiers—an enormously powerful position in the city-state. His preferment, though, came at a terrible cost: soon after he was captured, Rowlie had been castrated, and it was as a eunuch that he then achieved high office.
Although there were also instances of slaves becoming powerful among the Mamlukes and so on, such cases were very much the exception. Of the hundreds of thousands of slaves in the Muslim world, the vast majority lived in obedience to their owners.
Somewhat like the Romans centuries earlier, the economies of Islamic polities were very often reliant on slavery. Why were European slaves so highly valued?
One major reason was that white slaves were felt to be more suitable sometimes than Muslims to hold high office in Muslim territories and this is because they owed no tribal or family allegiances which might cloud their judgement and affect their impartiality. This was of course particularly so with eunuchs, who had no wives or children whom they might otherwise be tempted to favour. The creation of Muslim eunuchs was explicitly forbidden both in the Quran and the Hadith, which meant that only heathens or Christians were eligible to be castrated.
What—and how harsh—were the living conditions of a European forced into slavery in Arab lands?
When comparing the conditions under which black slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean or southern states of America lived, with those of white slaves in the Muslim world, it is of course important to distinguish between the exceptions in both cases and the generality. In the United States, for example, some black slaves virtually ran estates, having as much power as a white overseer. In the same way, there were certainly white slaves in North Africa and the Middle East who were also in positions of authority over others, but they too were few and far between. For the most part, the existence of slaves was miserable and hard.
While it is true that black slaves in America and the Caribbean were, from time to time, castrated, this was never a common occurrence and was usually inflicted due to exceptional circumstances, such as an accusation of rape. With the act of castration so likely to result in death, it would have made no sense to hazard the lives of slaves in this way too frequently. In Europe, by contrast, the castration of white slaves was carried out on an industrial scale. In Venice and the French city of Verdun, ‘castration houses’ were set up to produce eunuchs for export to Egypt and other Muslim countries. Such slaves were used to guard harems, among other things.
Do you think that contemporary debate regarding slavery as a worldwide phenomenon is too often decontextualised and used as a political weapon?
Slavery today is little more than a political weapon, a means of making all white Europeans feel guilty for the supposed actions of their distant ancestors. The subject of slavery has in recent years become quite literally a question of black and white. Upon hearing any mention of slavery, the mind of the average person in Britain or America turns unbidden, and as a matter of course, to the Atlantic slave trade. No other form of slavery is of the least interest to the average person and it is taken for granted that white people are always the villains of the piece. This is a pity, for it precludes a wider discussion of the topic, one which might shed light upon the essential nature of slavery, which has little to do with ethnicity.
What stance should the serious, impartial historian hold in this debate?
Slavery and the trade in slaves is the closest thing we see in world history to a universal custom. It was present in Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe from the earliest recorded history. The type of slavery upon which we dwell tells us something about our politics though. When we can look at any period in any culture and find slavery, the obsession with African slavery is peculiar and does not suggest objectivity. It looks rather as though some ideology is being promoted, one which requires that Europeans are shown in an unflattering light, as the villains of the piece. This is not history, but politics.
