History
One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as a given is that slavery has always been racial in nature – that only “black people” have been slaves. But this is a misconception. On the other hand, many Americans who are against increased measures for racial equality try to argue that slavery in the country actually wasn’t about race, by claiming that White Irish immigrants were enslaved in historic America, as well. If that were true, it would support the point that slavery wasn’t always racial in nature.
However, it is not true: while the Irish weren’t particularly liked by the rest of the White American public, they did not serve as slaves, but rather as indentured servants; they were under contract, retained their bodily autonomy and status as human beings, and eventually were released from their servitude after fulfilling their duties for a certain amount of years, usually five to seven. Their fare across the Atlantic to America was paid by their employer, and at the end of their contract, they received “freedom dues,” a monetary termination bonus to go forthwith. Many poor Irish folks willingly entered into contracts of indentured servitude as a way to escape terrible conditions in Ireland without much money.
So, if slavery in the recent history of America and England was, indeed, largely based on race, where and when in the world was it not?
There is a long history of forced slavery in practically every part of the world, and in many cases, it was not to do with race, but other factors such as nationality (were the captors at war with these people?) or simply convenience. For instance, new research shows that Privateers (called Corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in North Africa abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids that depopulated coastal towns all the way from Sicily to Cornwall.
Thousands of people in what is now modern-day Europe, many of who identified as Christians and would be considered “White” by most today, were seized every year to work as galley slaves, laborers, and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. In this case, the Privateers were indiscriminately enslaving anyone who happened to live in these ocean-side towns, simply because their location on the coast made it easy to abduct them.
The impact of these attacks was devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. Villages and towns on the coast of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France were hardest hit, but the Privateers, or Pirates, as they were commonly called, also seized people in Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. According to one account, they even captured 130 American seamen from ships that they boarded in the Atlantic and Mediterranean between 1785 and 1793.
As history shows us, humans will potentially enslave any group who they dislike, disagree with, or who is simply an easy target. The inhabitants of the coasts of Italy, Spain, France, Britain, Ireland, and Iceland were easy pickings for the Barbary Pirates. Americans and Brits already disliked dark-skinned people, and Africa was an easy place to get to by ship, so they enslaved Africans. In ancient Egyptian times and even in the Bible, people regularly enslaved others from their own nations and ethnic groups.
Slavery is not reserved for racial disparity, and no human being is inherently immune to the potential of becoming a slave by virtue of any immutable trait they may possess. The truth is, humans are capable of doing mass amounts of terrible things, and they’ll do it to anybody- nobody, no matter their skin color, ethnicity, nationality, or wealth, is inherently immune to or above the ill intentions of another human being.
