Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
Slavery—White, Black, Muslim, Christian
By David Brion Davis
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker
Beacon, 433 pp., $30.00
Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
by Lamin Sanneh
Harvard University Press, 291 pp., $29.95
The origins of African slavery in the New World cannot be understood without some knowledge of the millennium of warfare between Christians and Muslims that took place in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and the piracy and kidnapping that went along with it.[1] In 1627 pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa raided distant Iceland and enslaved nearly four hundred astonished residents. In 1617 Muslim pirates, having long enslaved Christians along the coasts of Spain, France, Italy, and even Ireland, captured 1,200 men and women in Portuguese Madeira. Down to the 1640s, there were many more English slaves in Muslim North Africa than African slaves under English control in the Caribbean. Indeed, a 1624 parliamentary proclamation estimated that the Barbary states held at least 1,500 English slaves, mostly sailors captured in the Mediterranean or Atlantic.[2]
Review, 4870 words
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