WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH
MORE
COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that a million or more European
Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and
1780 –
a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert
Davis<http://www.history.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=682>,
professor of history at Ohio State University
<http://www.history.osu.edu/>,
developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white
Christians
who were enslaved along Africa's Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher
slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn't try to
estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in
particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts
have
thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands.
Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25
million
European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa
from
the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis's new estimates appear in the book *Christian Slaves, Muslim
Masters:
White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy,
1500-1800<http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0333719662>
* (Palgrave Macmillan).

POINTER:
View entire article here:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm