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ridingbicycle t1_j6fr2nl wrote

Reply to comment by yolofreeway in ELI5:Why is barbary slave trade never talked about in mainstream history? by yolofreeway

Sure. But like I said, much pop history comes out of North America where it is felt much more than the Barbary Slave Trade.

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yolofreeway OP t1_j6frouz wrote

I think this is the most important reason. Thanks. I am not in the US and it is strange to me that in my country we do not talk about enslaving of our ancestors like it is talked about in the US

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ridingbicycle t1_j6fs9ch wrote

I think its easy to forget just how enormous the cultural influence of the US is. I live in the country next door so we obviously get it big time. But there's no escaping it anywhere in the world. Seems like almost everywhere you go, people know at least something about US history. Its kind of crazy.

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cammer_habibi t1_j6fxv4m wrote

Some pirates kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery is very, very different from Europeans kidnapping and transporting African slaves thousands of miles away to work on colonial plantations.

No one is downplaying the Barbary slave trade. But it's incomporable to the trans-Atlantic trade.

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Lumpy-Ad-2103 t1_j6gb6qg wrote

There’s also a lot of false narratives surrounding the Atlantic slave trade. Such as the vast majority of slaves being sold to Europeans by African rulers, not “kidnapped” by Europeans. The slave trade to what is now the United States made of a tiny proportion of slaves moved across the Atlantic. Approximately 12.5 millions Africans were transported across the Atlantic between 1525 - 1866, with approximately 10.7 surviving the voyage.

Of those 10.7 million about 388,000 ended up in the North America. The rest ended up in The Caribbean and South America. Over 4 million to Brazil alone. The United States was the only country where the slave population grew. In every other country the population dropped continually due to extreme disregard for their wellbeing and the work they were forced to do (mining, plantation work in areas with high rates of malaria, yellow fever, etc.).

This is in no way a defense of the slave trade or the suffering that was imposed on every individual that was forced to leave everything they’d ever known and robbed of everything. That includes those taken to North America. We need to understand the numbers and full tragedy of what took place, with most of it taking place outside of North America.

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cammer_habibi t1_j6gbvvs wrote

Agreed on many points. The fixation on North America in many ways downplays the sheer scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This was a massive movement of people from one hemisphere to another. It's on a different geographic scale from the Barbary slave trade.

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Lumpy-Ad-2103 t1_j6gk6kb wrote

It’s very true. For scale, more people sold in to slavery died crossing the Atlantic than were involved in the Barbary coast slave trade.

It’s also important to not disregard that trade either. It had a very different impetus and would play a substantial role on Mediterranean trade and politics, ultimately resulting in the French colonization of Algeria. This had a huge impact on all of North Africa and the shaping of the Mediterranean.

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