In today’s episode of Manthropology, we discuss the horrors of slavery, and how they are sadly ubiquitous throughout the world—and yes, we’ll also discuss how slavery is not, in fact, a uniquely white evil.

The word slave is derived from the word Slav, the Eastern European ethnic and linguistic group that was overwhelmingly used as a source of chattel in the Mediterranean world, by both Arabs and Byzantines. Seems to me that if a tribe’s name is turned into a synonym for “unpaid chattel laborer”, there were probably a lot of them being shanghaied. How many white slaves were taken, might I ask? Well in the 19th century alone there were About 1 million throughout the Muslim world, the Muslim slave trade started pretty much around the same time as the religion itself (620 CE), so…probably an equivalent amount to the 10 million sent to the Western Hemisphere, and that’s me being as gentle as possible. And that’s not even counting the black slave trade which also went on in the Muslim world…and still goes on right now as we speak; how many of those were taken as slaves? Well it is estimated that between 1500-1900—yes, 1900—there were 5 million black slaves bought and sold throughout the Arab world…and then imagine that happening for another 900 years back.

So we can see that at least one direction of slave trading was at minimum as extensive and likely far more extensive than the trans-Atlantic. Slavery also existed in Africa, and amongst Mesoamericans, and amongst Northern European countries…and India and China…so, uh, yeah, it’s pretty ubiquitous.

Having taken in all this information, some of you are probably asking, were there relatively few slaves imported to, say, the US, and so many to a place like Brazil?

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