White Slavery In The Barbary States – Charles Sumner

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  • Paperback : 144 pages
  • ISBN-13 : 979-8699554096
  • Dimensions : 5 x 0.36 x 8 inches
  • Publisher : Notoir Books (October 18, 2020)
  • Language: : English

White Slavery: who didn’t experience it while growing up? Doing the dishes, walking the dog, doing homework, mowing the grass…

All kidding aside, the subject of this book is the little-known historical North-African practice of selling White Christian Europeans on the slave-markets of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. These sailors came for free with the ships that were entered by the Barbary pirates of yesteryear. On the slave-markets they were highly priced items. It was – for some Muslim masters – a goldmine, and a reason to enter European ships in the first place.

It all happened in the Barbary States, today the territory known as North-Africa. Algiers, for a long time the most obnoxious place in the Barbary States of Africa, with Tripoli and Tunis, used to be the chief seat of White, Christian slavery.

The revolting custom of White Slavery in the Barbary States was, for many years, the shame of modern civilization. The nations of Europe made constant efforts, continued through successive centuries, to procure its abolition, and also to rescue their subjects from its fearful doom.

This piece of forgotten history was delivered as a lecture before the Boston Mercantile Library Association in 1847. The lecturer – being an abolitionist – hoped that, by bringing this into the spotlight, it would help the cause of abolishing slavery – Black AND White – worldwide.