Tag: transatlantic slave trade

3,251 words

Jukka Korpela
Slaves from the North: Finns and Karelians in the East European Slave Trade, 900–1600
Brill, Studies in Global Slavery, Volume 5, 2019

There is a history of human bondage in Europe that the textbooks rarely teach. While the transatlantic slave trade—with its millions of African captives, its plantation economies, and its enduring racial legacy—has commanded the attention of scholars and the public for generations, another vast machinery of enslavement operated across the eastern half of the continent for centuries, harvesting lives from the forests of Finland and Karelia to the steppes of Central Asia and the slave markets of Istanbul, Cairo, and Bukhara. (more…)

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

1,401 words

In March 2026, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. The phrasing is sweeping and unequivocal, reflecting the immense suffering associated with the Atlantic system. Yet the certainty of this claim sits uneasily with the historical record. Once we step back and examine slavery across a wider span of time and geography, the picture becomes far more complicated, and less suited to simple hierarchies. (more…)

706 words

Contemporary liberalism often appears strange and unmoored, but it sits squarely within an older moral tradition: Western abolitionism, a movement that combined genuine humanitarian concern with a pronounced fanatical element. From its inception, abolitionism elevated distant moral causes above domestic social obligations, rejected incremental improvement, and justified coercion in the name of absolute moral ends. (more…)

1,183 words

David Eltis
Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025

David Eltis’s Atlantic Cataclysm is an indispensable book for college students and anyone seeking a nuanced, deeply researched, and global understanding of slavery. This masterwork, grounded in decades of archival research and statistical data, obliterates parochial and mythologized versions of the Atlantic slave trade. It compels readers to reassess what they think they know about slavery, particularly the tendency to see it as a uniquely American tragedy. (more…)

1,196 words

The British Caribbean today is defined in the global imagination by Afro-West Indian culture. Reggae, calypso, Rastafarianism, carnival, and the distinctive Creole dialects have become central to how outsiders view the region and how the region views itself. (more…)

1,750 words

Tony Martin
The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront
Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1993

Starting in January of 1993 and lasting nearly six months, [1] a notable affray occurred between a lone Africana Studies professor on one side and a large, nationally-networked coincidence of ethnonationalist Jews on the other. The Africana Studies Professor was Tony Martin (1942 – 2013) of Wellesley College. Martin became the target of the Organized Jewish Community when he assigned a book to his students called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The book was written by historians from The Nation of Islam and it documents the fact that many Jews – especially Sephardic Jews from Portugal – were involved in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. (more…)

2,886 words

A new pandemic of Gibsmedat Fever is spreading across the country at an alarming rate. This causes strange changes in behavior, such as greatly inflaming the entitlement complex already endemic in blacks. In earlier times, they merely believed that they were owed a living at public expense. After infection, they believe they deserve to be made independently wealthy with no effort on their part. (more…)

854 words

The link between the transatlantic slave trade and industrial growth in Britain is a recurring theme in public discussions. There is a widespread assumption that the slave trade’s profitability required Britain to compensate the descendants of Africans, since it helped to enrich some institutions. It is true that the slave trade made profits, but its contribution to the economy was marginal. Technological change rather than the slave trade was the force that propelled the Industrial Revolution. (more…)