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pillaged and captured people to sell them into slavery. Actually, the eastern borderland of the area was under a state of semi-permanent warfare upto the 18th century. It is estimated that more than three million Poles, Russians and Circassians were held as slaves in the Crimean Khanate, and it ended with the abolition of slavery in the 1780s after the Russians overran Crimea. Slavery was prevailing in the Otomman empire in early twentieth century. About 20 percent of the population of Istanbul were slaves, and as late as 1908 women were sold there.

Arabian  &  African  slave  trade

The Arabian world was engaged in trading in slaves for over a millennium, which apparently began with transporting slaves from Sub-Saharan regions. Merchants from Arabia, India and nearby regions captured people and after crossing the Sahara Desert  sold them as slaves in  Middle East, Indian Ocean region and Indian sub-continent. The coastal cities of Dar Es Salam, Mombasa and Zanzibar were the centres of their activities, where African and Arabian traders usually dominated. It is estimated that in the period between 650 and the early years of the twentieth century 11 to 17 million slaves were transported across Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Sahara Desert. The Moors from North Africa and Spain joined their ranks in the 8th century and came to be known as Barbary pirates. They captured people from Europe in the 15th and 16th century and exported the captives as slaves to North Africa. It is said that over 1 million Europeans were sold by the Barbary Pirates in the Ottoman empire and North Africa. Due to their raids on coastal villages and towns in Italy and Mediterranean islands, Italians and Spaniards fled from their homes leaving long stretches of seashore uninhabited. From 1600 onwards, the Barbary pirates began to foray into the Atlantic going as far as Iceland. Their commander Turgut Reis, known as Drugut in Europe, took the entire 5,000 to 6,000 residents of the Maltese island Gozo in 1551 for slavery in Libya. Due to their frequent raids, seashore watchtowers were constructed and churches fortified in the Balearic islands, and the island of Formentera was deserted. They continued to attack ships on the high seas upto the !9th century taking as slaves  the entire crew. When the United States became independent and began to trade with Europe, Barbary pirates raided American ships if they refused to pay ransom.        

Not much difference existed in African societies between free peasants and those who were vassals of some feudal lord. For instance, vassals in the Songhay Muslim empire did labour for their masters and offered crops as a tribute but their freedom was somewhat restricted.  They were more or less working class people. However, vassals in the Kanem Bornu empire were three rungs below the nobles and intermarriages between them were common, thus blurring the divisions. According to French historian Fernand Braudel, various forms of slavery permeated African Society and were parts of the social structure. “Slavery came in different disguises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries, even as traders” (Braudel 1984 p. 435).  Zanzibar was the leading port in African slave trade where African, Arab, Indian and European traders gathered to do business. Unlike  the Europeans, the Arabs carried out the raiding expeditions themselves often going deep inside the territories to capture slaves and preferred females over males. When the Europeans became their rivals in the eastern coast of Africa, the Arabs drove the captured slaves overland across the Sahara Desert to North Africa. In 1870, a German explorer (Gustav Nachtigal) witnessed slave caravans departing from Kukawa in Bornu to destinations in Libya (Tripoli) and Egypt. In fact, upto 1898 slave trade was the major revenue earner for the state of Bornu.

Crossing the Atlantic to reach the Americas known as the Middle Passage was one part of the triangular slave trade carried out by Portuguese, French, Dutch and British in which slaves were transported in holds of ships under suffocating conditions. After dropping the slaves in Carbbean islands, the ships would take cargoes like sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton, etc. and sail for Lisbon, Amsterdam, Liverpool or Nantes. On the voyage to West Africa from those ports, they would carry trinkets, pots & pans made of copper and tin alloys, cotton piecegoods (some imported from India), copper bangles & ornaments, alcohol, gunpowder, firearms and iron bars. Great profits were made on every unloading. Slave trade reached its maximum during the late eighteenth century when large numbers of people were captured by raids in the interior regions of Africa. Usually, such raids were mounted by African  kingdoms located in the coasts like the Oyo and Dahomey empires. They entered into regular contracts with the Europeans, who also used raiding parties by paying them bounties. Those captured people ended up as slaves in colonies of the Americas, and the British got the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies after the Spanish War of Succession. It is a reasonable guess that over hundreds of years, some 12 to 15 million people were taken as slaves by Europeans and nearly 15 percent of them were dead before  reaching the journey’s end.  Most of them were taken to the Americas, and the rest to Europe or South Africa. As late as the nineteenth century, such raids carried out from Sudan depopulated the eastern parts of the present day Central African Republic, where the population density is still abysmally low. In the opinion of some historians, the total loss of life during the long march with the slave caravans and during the raids far exceeded the number of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa when this overt commerce became covert. Others contend that the traders were themselves interested in keeping their captives alive and that availability of new types of food like cassava and maize form the Americas staved off the reduction in the numbers of people to some extent. This was particularly noticeable in western Africa during 1760-1810, and in Mozambique and surrounding areas half a century later. About the very large presence of males among the captives, obviously that was due to their ability to do hard manual work. Nonetheless, women were also rounded up during the raids so as to act as “brides” for the captives and their protectors or husbands were regarded as subsidiary catch for export. With the beginning of the labour-intensive harvesting (tapping) of rubber in late 19th and early 20th century, there were increasing frontier raids and to meet the demands of a booming slave trade in Africa. For instance, in the personal estate of  Belgian king Leopold II ((Belgian Congo) there was mass murder and enslavement of people forcing them to work in rubber plantations.  

European slave trade started getting bigger than the Arabian from the 16th century when export of slaves to the Americas commenced. In their colony in South Africa, the Dutch imported indentured labourers from Asia. With the enactment of Slave Trade Act of 1807, Britain banned slavery in its large number of colonies in Africa.

Slavery  in  the  Americas

Before Columbus discovered America, slavery in the inhabited parts of the continent like Central Mexico, Mississipi, Costa Rica, etc. (called Mesoamerica) also followed the practice of enslaving prisoners of war, indebted people and so on. The victims of human sacrifices carried out as rituals and religious ceremonies there were generally prisoners of war and slaves. According to an Aztec chronicle, in 1487 about 84,000 people were sacrificed in a temple inauguration. Slavery there was not hereditary, children of slaves were born free. The Incas were required to work free for the state’s purposes by a system known as mita. Extended     families or Ayllus would decide which member was to be deputed for this, and it is not clear if that was a form of slavery. Societies and tribesowning slaves in pre-Columbian America included the fishermen living along the coast of Alaska to California, the Comanche of Texas, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Caribs of Dominica, the Tupinamba of Brazil and so on. The Haidas of Pacific Nothwest (British Columbia) were fierce warriors and raided as far as California to capture slaves. About a quarter of the population of these tribes were slaves.

Brazil

When Brazil became a Portuguese colony, slavery turned out to be the main prop of its economy. Nearly 37 percent or about 3 million of all exported African slaves were sent there to work in the mines and to raise sugar cane. Initially, the Portuguese colonialists forced the native Tupi tribal people to work for them. But Tupis started dying, and from around 1550 imported African slaves were used. Slavery was abolished in Portugal in 1761, but continued in her colonies for long for its advantages. Firstly, the Africans were somewhat immune to tropical diseases. Secondly, their costs were a tiny fraction of the profits the colonialists reaped. Due to harsh working conditions, the slaves did not survive long, and on an average 15 percent of them died each year. To fill in the diminishing numbers of slaves, Bandierantas or bandits of mixed Portuguese and native parentage began raiding countries in the south along the Amazon river for native American Indians. Their attacks were so violent that a French traveller reported in 1740 of “…hundreds of miles of river banks with no sign of human life and once-thriving villages that were devastated and empty.”  To defend the tribals, Jesuit missionaries present in

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