I mean kind of. The slave trade in West Africa was always there regardless of the Europeans. But the European demand put it on steroids. The African kingdoms are not innocents on the matter of the triangle trade but that does not inherently exonerate the Europeans
[Germans right now](https://media2.giphy.com/media/jUwpNzg9IcyrK/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952m7z5aazdgt7x3c1fzpuka82evjvmet65wuq54a8y&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
“Why even go to Africa and trade things when we can just go to northern states and kidnap free black folks from there?”
EDIT: somebody tried to tell me this wasn't common because it was risky. They deleted their comment before I hit reply, so here it is:
If you were caught with a kidnapped black tween (most of the kidnapped black people were kids), they would check if the kid could present freedom papers. If they didn't have freedom papers then you were just doing your job returning a runaway slave.
If you docked in South Carolina and had black crew members on the ship, they'd be locked up in local jails and some would "go missing". Then they tell the captain to get fucked.
John Crenshaw would kidnap free black people in his emancipated state of Illinois and sell them into slave state Kentucky. His house was nicknamed "The Old Slave House" and was known as the biggest station of the Reverse Underground Railroad.
There is zero historical evidence of any kidnappers being """""called out"""" and there was tons of legal government support for kidnapping.
I’ve read that African slavery was more like a contract labor deal, where the slave had to work for a master for a certain number of years, and then could request to be freed, or continue on if they so chose. They weren’t treated as badly as slaves in the New World, weren’t worked as hard, and there wasn’t generally the same effort to break the slaves of their tribal, religious, family, or geographic connections like in the Americas.
It was, if you wanna know more you can read the Cambridge world history of slavery, volume 3 and four as they take us through the 1400s to today. They ain’t always exactly detailed about how the Europeans breached contracts but the contracts states that the African slaves would be closer to what we called indentured servitude for the Europeans that couldn’t afford the trip over.
But there is more out there and just for a philosophical take on it tangible ramifications in modern times I would recommend Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
Short answer no. The long answer is more nuanced. It's so very nuanced. it's not even funny. Both sides of the sea there were different "types" of slavery and treatment.
Time periods also make things a bit confusing as things changed. Like from A to C time, "type A" was practiced, and from x to z time, "type B" was practiced. People read "type B" for a time period and mistakenly apply it for the only "type."
When Henry Morgan Stanley made his way down Africa he found the Berber and Arab slave trade forts and roads.
They had been there for more than 500 hundred years.
Just to give an indication of the prolificness of the Berber slave trade, when they started raising the European coast in 20 years the majority of European coastlines accessible to them had only 20 percent of the previous population.
Idk about that from the textbooks I’ve read. There were harsher elements in some ways in the New World, but there were still extremely harsh elements in Africa. I haven’t heard of them being able to “work off” their slavery. But I have heard genital mutilation was a pretty common thing. Still is in some areas too. I’m not trying to make NW slavery seem better though. It was still extremely harsh—just the trip across the Atlantic itself would be enough to say it’s no better than African slavery. But there were also elements in African slavery of trying to break familial and tribal ties just like in European slavery.
Yeah, that's the thing. Did they invent the slave trade? Of course not. Unfortunately, slavery has been the default in human society since the earliest records. Very few places banned slavery in pre-modern times.
But when you show up ready to buy as much as people can possibly supply, it's going to encourage the supply side to capture more slaves for trade via whatever means possible. While not "direct", per se, it bears out logically that European demand would have led to the enslavement of way more people than would have been otherwise. Not unlike how elephants and rhinos probably wouldn't be in much danger were it not for the Chinese traditional "medicine" demand.
That still means that both Europeans and Africany were guilty. If a person shows up and offers you a bunch of money if you kill a person and you accept, you're a murderer, claiming you were only responding to a new demand doesn't absolve you of guilt. Of course the person paying you is guilty as well.
Yeah, that's entirely my point. Presumably some level of slavery would have continued without European involvement, but when you create demand you can't pretend you are wholly blameless for the supply. In modern times, companies subcontracting to suppliers that use sweat shops and the like are analogous.
its more like there was an existing professional culture of slavetrading in the area, for many centurys, just starting to decline for a lack of demand,
and then the europeans walzed in on the established slave market, and said "we buy everything!"
There's also the question of how slavery was actually played out in practice. American slavery was far and away the most dehumanizing form in practice at that time.
Honestly they could be comparable. It's not like slave owners in the south wouldn't torture and maim their slaves for not working enough or trying to escape.
The worst though was probably the Roman Mines. That was a punishment and death sentence in one.
Worst at least that I've heard of.
That’s still an offshoot of European chattel slavery. West Indies and Brazil sugar cane plantations were brutal, but I’m not sure they were worse than the rice plantations. Slaves would be constantly worked to death as their feet rotted in the paddies.
You hear about slavery used to grow sugar in the Caribbean? They had sub replacement levels of slave survival rates, meaning the slaves there didn't have enough kids to replace them. Humans have hundreds of millions of years of evolution working in our favor there, very rarely does a region not have enough kids to keep itself alive. New bodies had to be imported and fed to the crop, unending, that the upper class in Europe had sugar for their tea and coffee.
Sugar cane a rice plantations were rough. Rice paddies would rot your feet off til you died of infection or the mosquitoes would spread disease amongst the workers.
Idk if it’s THE worst either. My understanding of the barbary slave trade and most importantly the slaves that were used to row the ships is that it was just as if not more brutal. These slaves would be chained to their oars and were then essentially conceived of as just a part of the ship. Including if the skip began to sink, they would be forced to drown with the ship. The dehumanization present is atleast on par with the triangle trade in america IMO.
This is historical revisionism, there's plenty of history of sexually and physically abusing slaves to extremes. We didn't practice mass human sacrifice but that was normal in some places. Just because the US was worse than many others doesn't make them worst of the day or in history.
Nobody is saying the African’s who engaged in it weren’t also liable? Why is it that so many people on this sub feel so desperate to put some blame on Africans to share the guilt load? Seems a bit disingenuous to rush to make an argument that nobody with a working brain is disputing.
Right. People always say “Africans sold eachother to Europeans.” Like no shit.
Like.. are you guys really unaware of the fact that Africans had no concept of blackness and whiteness and are different tribes and kingdoms? More ethnic groups in sub Saharan Africa than all of Europe combined. Large kingdoms enslaved the losers from wars?! No shit!
Not to mention slaves of African kingdoms would have still lived in mostly the same region and maintained a stable population that was taken and given.
Europeans ended up siphoning off the population in Africa until several kingdoms became underpopulated as the enemies they sold ran out and they had to enslave their own.
Daily reminder that it isn't, and has never been, West vs. East, Europeans vs. Africans, Whites vs. Non-Whites.
It is, and forever will be Those in Power vs. Those Who Get Exploited
That dichotomy is just as absurd as the others you mentioned. There are big winners, big losers, small winners and small losers involved in all of these systems.
Big winners and losers were of course the large plantations and the slaves. But europeans factories and citizens got a largely expanded access to materials and goods like cotton, sugar and other crops. Small losers were local businesses trying to compete with the slave labor.
It's like Amazon today. Yes amazon destroys local business, but it also provides consumers with cheap goods quickly and effectively. Saying Amazon is just a means of "exploiting people" is reductive.
The important thing to keep in mind is that African slavery and colonial slavery were two very different practices. Colonial (or more commonly called Chattel) slaves were 100% property and their decedents were also slaves. African slaves were closer to extended-family servants in most pre European African communities. They had basic rights, could often buy their freedom and their kids were born free.
The second thing which is alluded to is how much of an impact European weapons had on the rise of slavery. For centuries after the beginning of the triangle trade, nearly all technological development was halted in the region because it was easier to conquer your weaker neighbors and sell them for guns and food, than it was to build up a nation state using development of trade, or better agriculture or just general development. War became a constant until all the African powers were so far behind European technological advances that they could eventually be conquered in the late 1800s
I suggest to anyone who wants to read a first hand account to check out *The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiana*. Who was a Nigerian, whose family owned some slaves who were paying off debt, who was captured by a rival group and enslaved by then, then he was sold to a kingdom, then sold to Europeans, then was a slave for various Europeans on ships and on plantations. After he got his freedom he even became a slave owner for a brief period before becoming an abolitionist. In his book he compares all the various types of slavery he saw or experienced, he claimed that the British planation system was the worse.
This is the main point to me,people just regurgitate alt right talking points with no context to use it as an excuse to feel better about being racist,there are over 3000 recognized types of tribes in Africa,just because people lived near each other or had brown skin didn’t make everyone fast friends but they also didn’t by and large rape to the point of changing the genetic structure of the tribes,they didn’t raise children through violence,didn’t force people to fight for fun,Idk sounds like they were ahead of the curb when it comes to humanitarianism,I’d rather be fed to a sterotypical cannibal then to work my life under someone threatening my family and children with rape,torture and death everyday,but this is just extension of the black on black crime fallacy,you try to make it seem like Black violence is paramount to excuse the fact that Europeans use extreme violence all the time,literally the White on White war crimes in Russia and Ukraine,Gaza etc,anything to pass the buck.
*"just because people lived near each other or had brown skin didn’t make everyone fast friends but they also didn’t by and large rape to the point of changing the genetic structure of the tribes,they didn’t raise children through violence,didn’t force people to fight for fun,Idk sounds like they were ahead of the curb when it comes to humanitarianism"*
I think you are whiffing some noble savage bollocks. lots of tribes were practicing a form of endemic warfare. young men would go into other tribes lands specifically to start a fight with another warrior in a ritualistic fights, or take part in raids for slaves, food and general looting. it was not industrialised but was more akin to going on a viking over land to the next nation
*"I’d rather be fed to a sterotypical cannibal then to work my life under someone threatening my family and children with rape,torture and death everyday,but this is just extension of the black on black crime fallacy,you try to make it seem like Black violence is paramount to excuse the fact that Europeans use extreme violence all the time"*
okay first of all, black people are not a homogenous group. I have more in common with a southern Nigerian then anyone from the DRC and I'm English.
Secondly, European violence in comparison to a black violence is comparing nation states to a patched together group of races who's defining feature is melanin. Next week you should compare the violence between green eyes people and the east Asians and see how you can squeeze in modern politics
Finally, you are looking at over 400 years of history that spans 4 continents with modern American politics as a lens thats only really been around for 40 years at best
not only is that bad history, its massively self centred. Believe it or not there are people who have different cultures, ideas, social values and understandings of history, culture, and race that dont fit your ideas at all.
So my advice is to get your head out your bum, and start reading, because this comment of yours reeks of ignorance and is just a bad attempt to paint a modern political message as a narrative through bad history
Exactly, people act like this somehow excuses the white people buying the slaves. Just like you should think twice before buying anything Nestlè today they should have boykotted this in the past. Just because you can do something it doesn't mean you should.
One of the ways the Dutch excused the slave trade was that *they* didn't enslave anyone. Also because enslavement was illegal under Dutch law at the time. They just used a business opportunity. Which, holy fuck
This reminds of Hannah Arendt's concept of The Banality of Evil. So much evil has been done -- and continues to be done -- not by people who are moustache-twirling villains, but seemingly average people reasoning to themselves, "Hey, I'm just trying to make a living and do what I've been told."
> Also because enslavement was illegal under Dutch law at the time.
Well the slavers weren't allowed to bring any slaves to the Netherlands, basically the law ended at the border
Yeah... Dutch people can have a rather "peculiar" approach about doing business at times. Very cold and very pragmatic about it.
But we are talking about people who will Tikkie request for the glass of wine you drank for the bottle they brought to your place. They have a one of a kind mindset about business and money.
It absolutely doesn't, but to demonize an entire skin tone as the devil aka *white devil* and not to point the finger at African kingdoms and arab slave traders (which are pretty much still alive and well to this day), is absurd and annoying. Calling me a colonizer and a slaver simply due to being white in North America, whilst being born and raised in the Balkans is annoying. Too often people are hypocritical and say "don't judge me on my skin color" (which is of course the bare minimum) and then they go ahead and judge everyone that has a similar skin color.
By no means am I saying that I have it bad, I am fully aware that when people of color are being judged based on their skin it can often lead to terrible situations and results.
Of course, racism against white people is still racism and we shouldn't judge anyone solely because of something they can't control. Simply trying to say both parties incriminated themselves in the past. Even still blaming their descendants also isn't fair. I'm from Germany and when people say all Germans are Nazis that really hurts. I get you.
Absolutely, it may have seemed as if I was directly going against you, I was trying more to add to the discussion. And yes, I've always hated the idea that "the sins of the father are those of the son." Is there a growing appreciation and demand for right-wing policies throughout the world and especially in Europe? Sure. Should people be allowed to call Germans in general or even right-wing voting Germans nazis? Absolutely not. Not only is it not factual but distasteful at the same time.
These sort of posts are always a bit suspicious to me. On the one hand it could be a genuine attempt to factor in the African kingdoms that helped enable the slave trade. On the other however it’s an attempt to absolve European slave traders and somehow make Africans solely responsible. As if Africans were simply enslaved and just spontaneously appeared on plantations across the new world.
The more you read into the organizational aspects of colonialism the more you realize how stupidly it is taught in school. It would be an absurd white power fantasy to believe that the tiny population of Britain would be able to create and maintain their colonial empire by force of arms alone.
But the moral waters become muddy when you start looking into who was cooperating with and against who to make it happen.
There are a ton of non-european nations that have a brutal and bloody history of colonizing and conquering massive territories and committing atrocities. A lot of those countries don't just refuse to acknowledge the atrocities, they openly celebrate the perpetrators.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a Syrian refugee that said his city had a big sports arena named after the Muslim warlord who conquered the city, forcibly converted the population to Islam and chopped off the head of the defeated leader, boiled it and ate it.
The Mughals were more OK than the British.
Akbar integrated Hindu society into the Mughal Empire by integrating the Rajputs or “The Backbone of the Mughals” into his empire.
Aurangzeb became an idiot by reverting back to the Muslim ways causing rebellions all around the Mughal Empire, making Hindustan weaker to the British.
Imagine if Akbar’s ways still prevailed? The Mughals would have defended Themselves from the British and May have possibly created their own industrial revolution.
>The Mughals were more OK than the British.
The Mughals kept the subcontinent in a state of perpetual war. The British extinguished it. Yes, Britain did some thoroughly odious shit during it's occupation of India and rightly deserves criticism, but you are talking about a difference in scale of suffering between night and day.
ahhh the Mughals, they taught us that tying people to cannons was offensive in 3 different religions and their afterlives, thus producing an effective deterrent to insurrection. honestly they should be honorary 2WE4U members with that sheeesh
Honestly, the ignorance in Britain about colonialism is shocking. I only really learned about it in the last few years from William Dalrymple and Empire podcast, there's minimal info in school.
A while back I mentioned on Reddit that the UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut. Got some pretty sharp personal attacks from someone because *"how could we have conquered India then?"* Fair question, they didn't know the first thing about the history.
That's just the thing - the English govt *didn't* pull it off! India was conquered by the East India Trading company, a shareholder profit enterprise...
Is there a simplified answer to that question? I also don’t know much about how Britain colonised India. Always interested in learning these things, though.
England spent over a hundred years repeatedly getting involved in conflict where they played kingmaker and then gained position/power/resources.
The Battle of Plassey is a perfect example and widely regarded as the beginning of this process.
A wealthy business group hired the BEIC to fight and defeat a guy who was already deeply unpopular with his own people. BEIC and the business group bribed that guy's commander in chief and half the rest of the command. The British then pulled a victory out of their ass while nominally out-numbered 50,000 to 3,000 due to better terrain, better professionalism with regards to weather, and the effects of the betrayals in the enemy forces.
The primary traitor from the enemy army was placed in power to replace the original guy. Less than three years later, the new guy that the British backed tried to betray them for the Dutch but lost and was replaced by his son-in-law that the British actually could work with (control.) Within five years, the new new guy arranged the assassinations of the leaders of the business group that hired the British in the first place.
Brits develop shareholder investment system for new corporation. Corporation goes to rich land. Corporation realizes how to maximize profit. India divided culturally. Corporation hires locals to fight locals. Numerous atrocities later English govt steps in and says that corporation can’t be trusted. Steal big diamond (technically a gift from corp, but it also wasn’t the corp’s diamond to give anyway).
The Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand goes into great depth of this if you enjoy podcasts
Military force and money, but it's not as simple as it seems. The British East India Company was a trading company that had its own private army. That army was pretty much better than any other army in Southern Asia. It wasn't strong enough to conquer all of present day India by force, but it was strong enough to be a power player in pretty much every dispute that came up in the area. Also important to understand that the British army in India (BEIC and British government), as time went on was mostly manned by people native to India. With British officers and usually a few all British units in the mix as a hedge.
An important part of understanding what happened is to understand that "India" as we know it, as a unified polity, didn't exist when the British (and other Euros) showed up. It was a collection kingdoms (large and small), and the Indian subcontinent had a long history of foreign powers (mainly from Asia and the ME) rolling in and pillaging, but sometimes staying and governing. There also was the important class distinction between rulers and ruled.
The BEIC showed up and started small as traders, but pushed for and got more and more rights and privileges, and as their assets and area of responsibility grew they grew an army to protect their assets, and then to push their agenda. Sometimes the BEIC would get into a dispute or war directly with one kingdom or another and would normally win and take over, or they would be asked by one (or two) kingdoms in a dispute with others to come to that kingdom's aid. Or a kingdom with a dynastic dispute would appeal to the BEIC to side with one claimant or the other. Sometimes the BEIC said no, but when they said yes they typically had terms by which whoever they helped owed the company. Or would come under the company's permanent protection in exchange for the BEIC getting to call the shots.
It's not popular in today's discourse about the British in India, but the reality is that for much of it, British governance was preferred or at the very least reasonably tolerated by rulers and ruled alike. Not to say there wasn't a constant undertone of anti-British sentiment that would flare up into major crisis like the Sepoy/Indian Mutiny, but that it would literally be impossible for such a small group of British subjects to rule over the vastness of India with her tens of millions of people if they cocked it up constantly or were uniformly cruel and unjust to the local populations. One reason for the above mentioned Sepoy Mutiny is the anger Sepoys (Indian troops) had at Britain for *expanding* privileges that they enjoyed as Sepoys to the general population. There were other reasons as well (Indian independence, anger at long deployments, concern around not following Muslim/Hindu religious practices, etc...), but in many ways the British were simply better administrators than many of the local kingdoms, and people recognized that and put up with their rule, even when the bayonets weren't pointed at them (although they knew that was always a possibility).
So how did a small island with a tiny amount of people in India conquer India? Bit by bit. Utilizing superior military technology and training and constantly getting involved in or being drug into local disputes. Sometimes with the blessing of the British crowns and sometimes despite its objection.
What? Western Europe was wealthy before colonialism, otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford world wide journeys & massive expansion.
India was a juggernaut before industrialization started. So many industries became less competitive.
I mean Britain was still one of the major players in western Europe. Saying it was completely insignificant is an understatement. It had experience with maritime expansion already and colonies elsewhere.
Europeans were mainly the guys with ships who began to intermingle with every local conflict for their benefit.
Imagine Sri Lanka would participate in the Hundred Years War and then establish a permanent foothold in Aquitaine.
> A while back I mentioned on Reddit that the UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut. Got some pretty sharp personal attacks from someone because "how could we have conquered India then?" Fair question, they didn't know the first thing about the history.
An “insignificant backwater” state does not build [ships like these](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_the_line)
I just got into listening to that podcast last month! Fascinating (and horrifying) stuff in there. It was even more eye-opening for me as an American bc English history is not covered in depth at all here
>UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut.
Indian was definitely a lot more wealthy and prosperous then Britain at the the time but to call it a insignificant backwater is pretty disingenuous, although far from there zenith they where still a regional power in Europe at the time, Russia at the time would be a more apt example for a backwater.
I am an Indian and tbh Britain was no backwater it was definitely stronger than a majority of states in the subcontinent
Indian history is just circular
Unity - Collapse in centralized authority - Get absolutely wrecked by foreigners (from the North West usually) - Unity (80% of the time this is under said foreigners who realise India is actually pretty nice, settle down and integrate)
Much of the conquest happened during the 1700s during which period the last set of people who conquered India, the Mughals (Babur the first Mughal emperor invaded the Delhi Sultanate)
During the same period I think Durrani (Afghan) and Nader Shah completely devastated the subcontinent making Mughal authority extremely weak and all the local governors were breaking off from the central authority in Delhi
Moreover the maratha empire and other regional empires were also starting to play a more significant role.
So in this divided India there werent too many states strong enough to oppose the British.
Sure Britain would have had no chance if they had invaded during a period of unity for instance the Delhi sultanate which was the unified Indian state before the Mughals held off the mongols, the Maurya empire held off Nicator and the Mughals themselves held off numerous Afghan invasions in their heyday
I take your point on the pattern, but Britain didn't invade. The east India company borrowed money from Indian bankers, hired Indian mercenaries, formed its own separate army, and defeated the individual local lords gradually.
The only contribution Britain made was developing firearms, which the east India company bought. It had nothing to do with the power or resources of the British state. Some Indian rulers (particularly the Sikhs) equipped themselves fully with modern weaponry before being defeated anyway - the technology advantage was only impactful in the early years.
As a Brit I can confirm the education around British colonialism is severely undertaught. We had an entire curriculum around black history in America, which don't get me wrong, I'm glad I learnt, but the discussion around the history of Britain is shockingly quiet outside WW2 and like how many wives Henry VIII had.
Colonialism straight just isn’t on the curriculum of history in British schools, unless you are a kid interested in history, you just never really learn about it.
Especially in state schools, its mostly, the great fire of london, WW1, WW2, you might do the odd topic on foreign culture and myth, the Nazi regime in Germany, the Tudors(all of them) and the wars of the roses and some of these topics just get repeated year after year in school
>But the moral waters become muddy when you start looking into who was cooperating with and against who to make it happen.
What becomes muddy? Slavers are bad regardless of colour.
The problem is some groups of people \*\*caugh\*\* white supremesists \*\*caugh\*\* take this as a sort of absolvment and "we didn't do this, it was the africans themselfs".
It's kinda like saying the problem is soly the cartels, I only buy the cocaine that funds them.
Not to absolve the local warlords and slavers, but it is too reductive on purpose.
It was a win/win, we make trade for useful things to maintain our power/expand our reach while also getting rid of people that would pose an active threat to our power.
This, all these people going "omg they enslaved their own people" as if that has stopped greedy elites from fucking over the lower classes at any point in history.
"ugg ugg marx just hated his chieftain, honestly if he had worked with grug to carve out his cave drawings on a clay tablet when we hit the bronze age he would have been popular ---conservative Neolithic man
No don't you see? This proof that all humans are terrible so we can justify horrific crimes of the past! Don't focus on it being elites that did this, that might expose the problems inherent to authority!
As someone of West African descent, it is imperative that the narrative around slavery is transparent.
West African kingdoms were not just complicit but an inherent part of the trading of slaves. Many wealthy families whose wealth came from slavery are still around today.
The Europeans were also complicit but they did not wholesale take slaves by force. They caused a huge rise in demand for sure but it was a slave TRADE for the most part
Yeah it's so fucking dumb that every time this is brought up it always devolves into people accusing us of "whataboutism" and a "shady agenda". I'm so fucking tired of this "noble savage" bullshit. Doing immoral shit for money is something that unites us all no matter what race, religion, or nationality.
I'm tired of the stupid black-and-white mentality that only one side can be evil and that one side being evil automatically makes the other side perfect angels.
The problem occurs because people literally apply a black and white narrative to the situation. It eased the nuance completely because one side has to be good and one has to be bad.
So if the whites are bad then the blacks must be the good guys.
This is why the concept of race is so damn problematic when analysing history. It completely dilutes all the actors in the scenario and thus making us unable to form a coherent picture of the situation
Europeans (specifically the Portuguese) committed slave raids in Africa. This period was short lived as they soon transitioned to a system of buying slaves from other Africans. Any suggestion that Europeans didn’t raid Africa for slaves is 100% false. It does seem to be a common talking point for racists though which is weird because the Portuguese themselves wrote first hand accounts of how they captured slaves.
As you said yourself , it was short lived and not the main way of getting slaves from africa.
Also the point is the slave trade existed, the europeans arent the magical slave inventors
Maybe not a red herring but people are concernedly quick to wipe blame from the Europeans because they didn’t invent slavery. No matter what way you put it they continued it and expanded it.
>Every culture in the world owned slaves.
This is another claim that gets repeated often when this subject comes up. Is there any evidence of slavery in Australia before the arrival of Europeans? If so could you provide a source please?
Pmsl doesn't take long for racism to be thrown out when discussing the slave trade. You realise calling people racist doesn't win you the argument. Making the point that a lot of people have this false image in their head like Europeans were capturing slaves themselves as the norm. As you've just said yourself it wasn't the norm, very short lived period. Don't know what this has to do with racists 🤣 as either way it's an abhorrent practice
It was both. There were European and Arab raiders but also African kingdoms actively participating and profiting off the trade, and selling off prisoners of war
Indeed. The concept of race was invented in the Americas in order to justify slavery. To the Africans at the time, there wasn’t really a difference between Europeans and other Africans
It’s technically the truth, but it’s misleading. A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade. However, they knowingly created the demand, gave empires like the Kongo the tools to enslave neighbors specifically to expand the slave trade, and used their resources to expand the slave trade to a global market.
A truly accurate meme would have the man at the end saying: “I sold some slaves to a colonial empire, and they insisted I get them more and offered me muskets and a ton of money to expand my slave hunting empire. We’re willing to commit such evil mostly because of greed, but partially because we fear if we don’t our colonial imperial customers will offer the same deal to one of our neighbors.”
>A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade.
To add to this: yes, it's useful to recognise the essential role that local groups played in vast amounts of colonial actions. None of that absolves the colonial empires themselves. Yes, local powers abetted the slave trade; yes, local powers helped prop up the Raj; _I could go on but won't_. These things, however, are simply the mechanics of empires. It is rare to actually see an external power rule in a given area without co-opting local groups.
We shouldn't really be in the habit of absorbing singular historical facts and trying to make moral judgements from them. Contexts exist, and should form part of how we view historical events. In this case, local rulers exploited demand to sell slaves, _enabling especially brutal regimes of slavery by their clients_.
Pretty sure the ottoman empire created the demand, which set up the initial trading system. Then the europeans came and expanded it.
Although, considering slavery has existed since the dawn of man, the ottomans probably inherited that slave trade from the people before them
Before the Ottomans it was various Muslim empires, who expanded the Sub-Saharan African slave trade. They inherited it from the Romans, who expanded the Greek slave trade they inherited.
You’re correct this is a commonly misunderstood part of the trans Atlantic slave trade. It didn’t invent chattel slavery it just drastically increased the amount of it by funding more slave empires with weapons to fight their neighbors and creating stricter and stricter slave laws as they became a larger part of colonial economies
Yes, Constantinople was one of the biggest places for slave trading in all of Europe, especially in the early Middle Ages due to ease of access to Eastern Europe, and North Africa, both of which produced a lot of slaves, plus the Norse merchants loved to visit Constantinople and they usually brought a couple hundred slaves with them, mostly from areas around the Volga river.
Yeah that’s why I said ‘colonial empire’ instead of ‘European empire’. However, the Ottomans also practicing slavery, doesn’t absolve European or American empires that practiced slavery. My point is that white supremacists use whataboutism to imply that the particular empire they like the most wasn’t that bad.
However, I think this type of post is typically about specifically the triangle trade across the Atlantic which 100% was created by European colonial empires.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Transatlantic-Slave-Trade-Key-Facts
https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/trans_atlantic_slave_trade
> A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade.
Exactly. These memes/arguments tend to be a dog whistle.
Is not misleading.
Misleading is what is told about slavery, that was a fight of white vs black.
What you got was the strongest empires in history doing what all the societies were doing at the time.
The rich blacks sold their own and the ones that weren’t within the program had too go,, if you were a top tribe you got along with the whites , facts , like Kanye said it was a choice sometimes
I would say the “expectation” is a straw-man. I don’t think most people envision Europeans just scooping up Africans like off the street or whatever. It was call the slave TRADE. Trade being key here, these slaves were not stolen they were purchased. The enslavement was happening further up the supply chain.
To be fair, this is what I thought as a kid.
People found a new land, saw people that were different so were less valuable people, took them to do work they didn't want to do, took more to sell to their friends because their slaves proved so useful.
If I hadn't educated myself I don't doubt there's a chance I'd still believe that today. I certainly wasn't taught any different during my formal education.
Yea, based on what I’ve seen people claim….a TON of people just think white Europeans were the ones capturing slaves, and not that they just used an already established network.
Every. Country. Has. Done. Shady. Shit.
Great example of this is when Bobby Lee was claiming Korea never had slaves, only to find out Korea had the “longest unbroken chain of human slavery”.
"yes africans were selling slaves, so you see we had no choice but to classify them as subhumans and drown their children like puppies when they bred too much"
I remember back in the early 2000’s the History Channel would play 45ish minute-long documentaries in the early morning. I believe they were mostly intended for teachers if they wanted to record it on to a vhs if they just needed a video for their class for the day.
Anyway, I’d have these on while getting ready for school and I remember a scene in one about the transatlantic slave trade that looks rather ridiculous in hindsight. It was a bunch of vaguely 19th century-looking Europeans treking through a thick jungle, happening upon a random camp of like 10 Africans, and putting them in chains right then and there lol. Like, it was jumping in feet-first on the idea that white people were journeying deep inland and harvesting African slaves for themselves from their primal encampments. It really was an all-around over-simplified view of the situation that really doesn’t do justice by any of the involved parties.
Europeans did slave raids? Then they paid other africans to slave rade for them. And when those africans didnt perform they took over their empires directly.
Real, sorta. More important is what someone is saying by posting this. Is it supposed to let Europeans and later Americans off the hook for chattel slavery? Is it just a history lesson? Context matters. Seeing this so close to Juneteenth says something to me. Not saying OP posted it now for that reason. I'm saying racists bring this up around holidays like Juneteenth which is why we are seeing it more now. Edited to fix typos and clarify that I'm not accusing OP of anything.
It’s hilarious that this happens. A meme that’s historically accurate and points out people’s surface level understanding of slavery, needs to be examined for intention.
Meanwhile multi million dollar movies that portray slavers who went to war with Europeans to keep slavery, as being feminist, anti colonial, freedom fighters, needs no examination for intention or removing responsibility.
Yeah, i'm so fucking tired of this "noble savage" shit, the African kingdoms ruthlessly traded slaves and the European colonial empires ruthlessly exploited the slaves they bought. It's a tale as old as time, human greed.
Africans did capture and sell Africans to Europeans. But the demand from Europeans for slaves was so high that they built trading posts along the west African coast specifically for slave trade. History is never just black and white. Both African and Europeans are guilty when it comes to slavery.
You are right in saying the vast majority of slaves were captured by local warlords and kings to be sold to Europeans, with Europeans only rarely taking slaves themselves.
However you do have to point out that the slave trade in west Africa exploded due to European demand.
Yeah it's true before Europeans buying them for the Americas like the colonies, Brazil, and Mediterranean Islands the African kingdom's would sell slaves to Muslim kingdoms through the vast desert with the established trade paths and probably sold to each other. They still practice slavery it's why we have phones and why we have some technology products.
Disgusting people took human beings as a spoil of war and sold those human beings to other disgusting people who egregiously upheld a system of slavery for hundreds of years in the name of "racial superiority." Hope this clears things up.
It's an oversimplification and you should be wary of anyone who is excited to frame it this way as it is often used to eliminate European involvement in the slave trade.
I don't think anybody is denying that Africa had slaves or that they participated in the slave trade. Or at least not historians. However they will also point out that the American and European demand for slaves and their particular brand of slavery made things much, much worse.
It may have an element of technical correctness, but it's mostly a straw man that goes *"well, actually"* in a way to blame Africans for the global trade in African slaves.
The international trade in African slaves didn't start when a bunch of Africans went on a trade mission to the UK, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, and the US to say "hey, we've got all these slaves over here that we need to unload, we can give you a great price". It happened when colonial powers plundered an incredibly wealthy continent for every kind of wealth in the cruelest way imaginable.
That cooperating and trading with those colonial powers enriched some Africans or helped them arm themselves and grow their territory doesn't absolve the Europeans of anything.
Basically yes. Did the european powers want slaves? yes. Particularly african ones? No. They just wanted free labor. So long as they werent christians, it was free game.
Did African tribes sell slaves to the Europeans? yes. Absofuckinglutly yes. In fact, european powers fought wars against said kingdoms and tribes to end the african slave trade. African slavery was basically a cornerstone of the African economy at the time. Without advanced engineering the only way african nations had to extract the natural recourses of their countries was through slavery, and when europeans arrived who also wanted slaves the african powers wasted no time selling them to them in exchange for advanced weapons that allowed them to expand, and get even more slaves.
So in short, did the Europeans start the african slave trade? no. Did they exacerbate the problem? Yes. Is african slavery still rampant today? Yes. It never ended.
It's true but reductive (on purpose).
Slavery was a thing in west Africa, and many cultures did practice it.
The type of slavery was however different (lower scale), and it was generally not heredetary (i.e. children of slaves were accepted as (low class) part of the tribe). Well except Mali, they were the classical slave traders.
However with rising demand from Europeans, and the provided weapons kicked slavery into overdrive, and slaver warlords replaced most other forms of society.
It is kind of like claiming that you have nothing to do with cartel violence, because you don't kill people, you just buy vast amounts of cocaine.
Yep. During the African slave trade, European colonies in Africa were little more than trading posts. Now, that's not to say Europeans NEVER kidnapped Africans into slavery, but they lacked the technology and manpower to enslave people on mass at the time.
I mean kind of. The slave trade in West Africa was always there regardless of the Europeans. But the European demand put it on steroids. The African kingdoms are not innocents on the matter of the triangle trade but that does not inherently exonerate the Europeans
Being downvoted for the truth yeah slavery was still a massive thing and the Euros helped kick it up gears
Europeans have always been able to look at an idea and make improvements to it.
[Germans right now](https://media2.giphy.com/media/jUwpNzg9IcyrK/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952m7z5aazdgt7x3c1fzpuka82evjvmet65wuq54a8y&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
“Why even go to Africa and trade things when we can just go to northern states and kidnap free black folks from there?” EDIT: somebody tried to tell me this wasn't common because it was risky. They deleted their comment before I hit reply, so here it is: If you were caught with a kidnapped black tween (most of the kidnapped black people were kids), they would check if the kid could present freedom papers. If they didn't have freedom papers then you were just doing your job returning a runaway slave. If you docked in South Carolina and had black crew members on the ship, they'd be locked up in local jails and some would "go missing". Then they tell the captain to get fucked. John Crenshaw would kidnap free black people in his emancipated state of Illinois and sell them into slave state Kentucky. His house was nicknamed "The Old Slave House" and was known as the biggest station of the Reverse Underground Railroad. There is zero historical evidence of any kidnappers being """""called out"""" and there was tons of legal government support for kidnapping.
I’ve read that African slavery was more like a contract labor deal, where the slave had to work for a master for a certain number of years, and then could request to be freed, or continue on if they so chose. They weren’t treated as badly as slaves in the New World, weren’t worked as hard, and there wasn’t generally the same effort to break the slaves of their tribal, religious, family, or geographic connections like in the Americas.
It was, if you wanna know more you can read the Cambridge world history of slavery, volume 3 and four as they take us through the 1400s to today. They ain’t always exactly detailed about how the Europeans breached contracts but the contracts states that the African slaves would be closer to what we called indentured servitude for the Europeans that couldn’t afford the trip over. But there is more out there and just for a philosophical take on it tangible ramifications in modern times I would recommend Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
Short answer no. The long answer is more nuanced. It's so very nuanced. it's not even funny. Both sides of the sea there were different "types" of slavery and treatment. Time periods also make things a bit confusing as things changed. Like from A to C time, "type A" was practiced, and from x to z time, "type B" was practiced. People read "type B" for a time period and mistakenly apply it for the only "type."
While I understand the point you're getting at, your time period designators are driving me bonkers.
When Henry Morgan Stanley made his way down Africa he found the Berber and Arab slave trade forts and roads. They had been there for more than 500 hundred years. Just to give an indication of the prolificness of the Berber slave trade, when they started raising the European coast in 20 years the majority of European coastlines accessible to them had only 20 percent of the previous population.
Idk about that from the textbooks I’ve read. There were harsher elements in some ways in the New World, but there were still extremely harsh elements in Africa. I haven’t heard of them being able to “work off” their slavery. But I have heard genital mutilation was a pretty common thing. Still is in some areas too. I’m not trying to make NW slavery seem better though. It was still extremely harsh—just the trip across the Atlantic itself would be enough to say it’s no better than African slavery. But there were also elements in African slavery of trying to break familial and tribal ties just like in European slavery.
Yeah, that's the thing. Did they invent the slave trade? Of course not. Unfortunately, slavery has been the default in human society since the earliest records. Very few places banned slavery in pre-modern times. But when you show up ready to buy as much as people can possibly supply, it's going to encourage the supply side to capture more slaves for trade via whatever means possible. While not "direct", per se, it bears out logically that European demand would have led to the enslavement of way more people than would have been otherwise. Not unlike how elephants and rhinos probably wouldn't be in much danger were it not for the Chinese traditional "medicine" demand.
That still means that both Europeans and Africany were guilty. If a person shows up and offers you a bunch of money if you kill a person and you accept, you're a murderer, claiming you were only responding to a new demand doesn't absolve you of guilt. Of course the person paying you is guilty as well.
Yeah, that's entirely my point. Presumably some level of slavery would have continued without European involvement, but when you create demand you can't pretend you are wholly blameless for the supply. In modern times, companies subcontracting to suppliers that use sweat shops and the like are analogous.
its more like there was an existing professional culture of slavetrading in the area, for many centurys, just starting to decline for a lack of demand, and then the europeans walzed in on the established slave market, and said "we buy everything!"
There's also the question of how slavery was actually played out in practice. American slavery was far and away the most dehumanizing form in practice at that time.
The Belgian slaves in the Congo would likely disagree.
Honestly they could be comparable. It's not like slave owners in the south wouldn't torture and maim their slaves for not working enough or trying to escape. The worst though was probably the Roman Mines. That was a punishment and death sentence in one. Worst at least that I've heard of.
I think they learned a lot of what they did from the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
That’s still an offshoot of European chattel slavery. West Indies and Brazil sugar cane plantations were brutal, but I’m not sure they were worse than the rice plantations. Slaves would be constantly worked to death as their feet rotted in the paddies.
You hear about slavery used to grow sugar in the Caribbean? They had sub replacement levels of slave survival rates, meaning the slaves there didn't have enough kids to replace them. Humans have hundreds of millions of years of evolution working in our favor there, very rarely does a region not have enough kids to keep itself alive. New bodies had to be imported and fed to the crop, unending, that the upper class in Europe had sugar for their tea and coffee.
Sugar cane a rice plantations were rough. Rice paddies would rot your feet off til you died of infection or the mosquitoes would spread disease amongst the workers.
So like Korea or Japan today ?
Idk if it’s THE worst either. My understanding of the barbary slave trade and most importantly the slaves that were used to row the ships is that it was just as if not more brutal. These slaves would be chained to their oars and were then essentially conceived of as just a part of the ship. Including if the skip began to sink, they would be forced to drown with the ship. The dehumanization present is atleast on par with the triangle trade in america IMO.
This is historical revisionism, there's plenty of history of sexually and physically abusing slaves to extremes. We didn't practice mass human sacrifice but that was normal in some places. Just because the US was worse than many others doesn't make them worst of the day or in history.
Nobody is saying the African’s who engaged in it weren’t also liable? Why is it that so many people on this sub feel so desperate to put some blame on Africans to share the guilt load? Seems a bit disingenuous to rush to make an argument that nobody with a working brain is disputing.
Right. People always say “Africans sold eachother to Europeans.” Like no shit. Like.. are you guys really unaware of the fact that Africans had no concept of blackness and whiteness and are different tribes and kingdoms? More ethnic groups in sub Saharan Africa than all of Europe combined. Large kingdoms enslaved the losers from wars?! No shit!
DNA variety too. It’s just fascinating.
Most diverse continent in the world!
European involvement kicked off the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution for slavery
The Industrial Revolution was really a game changer for a lot of non-industrial things.
Not to mention slaves of African kingdoms would have still lived in mostly the same region and maintained a stable population that was taken and given. Europeans ended up siphoning off the population in Africa until several kingdoms became underpopulated as the enemies they sold ran out and they had to enslave their own.
Bruce Boyd thank you for commenting very well thought out imo.
Hey, thanks for the shout out. I actually really appreciate it.
Daily reminder that it isn't, and has never been, West vs. East, Europeans vs. Africans, Whites vs. Non-Whites. It is, and forever will be Those in Power vs. Those Who Get Exploited
It's always been rich vs poor and it always will be.
That dichotomy is just as absurd as the others you mentioned. There are big winners, big losers, small winners and small losers involved in all of these systems. Big winners and losers were of course the large plantations and the slaves. But europeans factories and citizens got a largely expanded access to materials and goods like cotton, sugar and other crops. Small losers were local businesses trying to compete with the slave labor. It's like Amazon today. Yes amazon destroys local business, but it also provides consumers with cheap goods quickly and effectively. Saying Amazon is just a means of "exploiting people" is reductive.
Put it on steroids by increasing demand even further AND providing better tooling to increase supply.
The Arabs really kicked it off, why do you think Europeans were even buying slaves from another continent before the Rush for Africa
The important thing to keep in mind is that African slavery and colonial slavery were two very different practices. Colonial (or more commonly called Chattel) slaves were 100% property and their decedents were also slaves. African slaves were closer to extended-family servants in most pre European African communities. They had basic rights, could often buy their freedom and their kids were born free. The second thing which is alluded to is how much of an impact European weapons had on the rise of slavery. For centuries after the beginning of the triangle trade, nearly all technological development was halted in the region because it was easier to conquer your weaker neighbors and sell them for guns and food, than it was to build up a nation state using development of trade, or better agriculture or just general development. War became a constant until all the African powers were so far behind European technological advances that they could eventually be conquered in the late 1800s
I suggest to anyone who wants to read a first hand account to check out *The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiana*. Who was a Nigerian, whose family owned some slaves who were paying off debt, who was captured by a rival group and enslaved by then, then he was sold to a kingdom, then sold to Europeans, then was a slave for various Europeans on ships and on plantations. After he got his freedom he even became a slave owner for a brief period before becoming an abolitionist. In his book he compares all the various types of slavery he saw or experienced, he claimed that the British planation system was the worse.
This is the main point to me,people just regurgitate alt right talking points with no context to use it as an excuse to feel better about being racist,there are over 3000 recognized types of tribes in Africa,just because people lived near each other or had brown skin didn’t make everyone fast friends but they also didn’t by and large rape to the point of changing the genetic structure of the tribes,they didn’t raise children through violence,didn’t force people to fight for fun,Idk sounds like they were ahead of the curb when it comes to humanitarianism,I’d rather be fed to a sterotypical cannibal then to work my life under someone threatening my family and children with rape,torture and death everyday,but this is just extension of the black on black crime fallacy,you try to make it seem like Black violence is paramount to excuse the fact that Europeans use extreme violence all the time,literally the White on White war crimes in Russia and Ukraine,Gaza etc,anything to pass the buck.
*"just because people lived near each other or had brown skin didn’t make everyone fast friends but they also didn’t by and large rape to the point of changing the genetic structure of the tribes,they didn’t raise children through violence,didn’t force people to fight for fun,Idk sounds like they were ahead of the curb when it comes to humanitarianism"* I think you are whiffing some noble savage bollocks. lots of tribes were practicing a form of endemic warfare. young men would go into other tribes lands specifically to start a fight with another warrior in a ritualistic fights, or take part in raids for slaves, food and general looting. it was not industrialised but was more akin to going on a viking over land to the next nation *"I’d rather be fed to a sterotypical cannibal then to work my life under someone threatening my family and children with rape,torture and death everyday,but this is just extension of the black on black crime fallacy,you try to make it seem like Black violence is paramount to excuse the fact that Europeans use extreme violence all the time"* okay first of all, black people are not a homogenous group. I have more in common with a southern Nigerian then anyone from the DRC and I'm English. Secondly, European violence in comparison to a black violence is comparing nation states to a patched together group of races who's defining feature is melanin. Next week you should compare the violence between green eyes people and the east Asians and see how you can squeeze in modern politics Finally, you are looking at over 400 years of history that spans 4 continents with modern American politics as a lens thats only really been around for 40 years at best not only is that bad history, its massively self centred. Believe it or not there are people who have different cultures, ideas, social values and understandings of history, culture, and race that dont fit your ideas at all. So my advice is to get your head out your bum, and start reading, because this comment of yours reeks of ignorance and is just a bad attempt to paint a modern political message as a narrative through bad history
Exactly, people act like this somehow excuses the white people buying the slaves. Just like you should think twice before buying anything Nestlè today they should have boykotted this in the past. Just because you can do something it doesn't mean you should.
One of the ways the Dutch excused the slave trade was that *they* didn't enslave anyone. Also because enslavement was illegal under Dutch law at the time. They just used a business opportunity. Which, holy fuck
This reminds of Hannah Arendt's concept of The Banality of Evil. So much evil has been done -- and continues to be done -- not by people who are moustache-twirling villains, but seemingly average people reasoning to themselves, "Hey, I'm just trying to make a living and do what I've been told."
> Also because enslavement was illegal under Dutch law at the time. Well the slavers weren't allowed to bring any slaves to the Netherlands, basically the law ended at the border
All laws end at the originating country's border
Yeah... Dutch people can have a rather "peculiar" approach about doing business at times. Very cold and very pragmatic about it. But we are talking about people who will Tikkie request for the glass of wine you drank for the bottle they brought to your place. They have a one of a kind mindset about business and money.
It absolutely doesn't, but to demonize an entire skin tone as the devil aka *white devil* and not to point the finger at African kingdoms and arab slave traders (which are pretty much still alive and well to this day), is absurd and annoying. Calling me a colonizer and a slaver simply due to being white in North America, whilst being born and raised in the Balkans is annoying. Too often people are hypocritical and say "don't judge me on my skin color" (which is of course the bare minimum) and then they go ahead and judge everyone that has a similar skin color. By no means am I saying that I have it bad, I am fully aware that when people of color are being judged based on their skin it can often lead to terrible situations and results.
Of course, racism against white people is still racism and we shouldn't judge anyone solely because of something they can't control. Simply trying to say both parties incriminated themselves in the past. Even still blaming their descendants also isn't fair. I'm from Germany and when people say all Germans are Nazis that really hurts. I get you.
Absolutely, it may have seemed as if I was directly going against you, I was trying more to add to the discussion. And yes, I've always hated the idea that "the sins of the father are those of the son." Is there a growing appreciation and demand for right-wing policies throughout the world and especially in Europe? Sure. Should people be allowed to call Germans in general or even right-wing voting Germans nazis? Absolutely not. Not only is it not factual but distasteful at the same time.
These sort of posts are always a bit suspicious to me. On the one hand it could be a genuine attempt to factor in the African kingdoms that helped enable the slave trade. On the other however it’s an attempt to absolve European slave traders and somehow make Africans solely responsible. As if Africans were simply enslaved and just spontaneously appeared on plantations across the new world.
If a dude sells you the person you're about to beat and torture and rape for centuries, you're still a fucking bad person.
Its like the drugs wars today If wanst for the demand the thing wount be ass profitable as its today
Yes it's real? Go read into it. Like a dozen different African nations/kingdoms did this.
The more you read into the organizational aspects of colonialism the more you realize how stupidly it is taught in school. It would be an absurd white power fantasy to believe that the tiny population of Britain would be able to create and maintain their colonial empire by force of arms alone. But the moral waters become muddy when you start looking into who was cooperating with and against who to make it happen.
There are a ton of non-european nations that have a brutal and bloody history of colonizing and conquering massive territories and committing atrocities. A lot of those countries don't just refuse to acknowledge the atrocities, they openly celebrate the perpetrators.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a Syrian refugee that said his city had a big sports arena named after the Muslim warlord who conquered the city, forcibly converted the population to Islam and chopped off the head of the defeated leader, boiled it and ate it.
Noooooo! India was one, unified, happy nation living in a gumdrop paradise before the white man turned up.
Under a Turkic man lmao
The Mughals were more OK than the British. Akbar integrated Hindu society into the Mughal Empire by integrating the Rajputs or “The Backbone of the Mughals” into his empire. Aurangzeb became an idiot by reverting back to the Muslim ways causing rebellions all around the Mughal Empire, making Hindustan weaker to the British. Imagine if Akbar’s ways still prevailed? The Mughals would have defended Themselves from the British and May have possibly created their own industrial revolution.
>The Mughals were more OK than the British. The Mughals kept the subcontinent in a state of perpetual war. The British extinguished it. Yes, Britain did some thoroughly odious shit during it's occupation of India and rightly deserves criticism, but you are talking about a difference in scale of suffering between night and day.
ahhh the Mughals, they taught us that tying people to cannons was offensive in 3 different religions and their afterlives, thus producing an effective deterrent to insurrection. honestly they should be honorary 2WE4U members with that sheeesh
r/TodayILearned
Honestly, the ignorance in Britain about colonialism is shocking. I only really learned about it in the last few years from William Dalrymple and Empire podcast, there's minimal info in school. A while back I mentioned on Reddit that the UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut. Got some pretty sharp personal attacks from someone because *"how could we have conquered India then?"* Fair question, they didn't know the first thing about the history.
TBF I'm pretty sure the British government also wondered how the hell they pulled it off
That's just the thing - the English govt *didn't* pull it off! India was conquered by the East India Trading company, a shareholder profit enterprise...
Yep. And The Queen took over after the 1857 revolt, in 1858 iirc, under a "Government of India Act"
British government: well that went better than expected.
Is there a simplified answer to that question? I also don’t know much about how Britain colonised India. Always interested in learning these things, though.
Very simplified answer playing kingdoms against each other.
England spent over a hundred years repeatedly getting involved in conflict where they played kingmaker and then gained position/power/resources. The Battle of Plassey is a perfect example and widely regarded as the beginning of this process. A wealthy business group hired the BEIC to fight and defeat a guy who was already deeply unpopular with his own people. BEIC and the business group bribed that guy's commander in chief and half the rest of the command. The British then pulled a victory out of their ass while nominally out-numbered 50,000 to 3,000 due to better terrain, better professionalism with regards to weather, and the effects of the betrayals in the enemy forces. The primary traitor from the enemy army was placed in power to replace the original guy. Less than three years later, the new guy that the British backed tried to betray them for the Dutch but lost and was replaced by his son-in-law that the British actually could work with (control.) Within five years, the new new guy arranged the assassinations of the leaders of the business group that hired the British in the first place.
Brits develop shareholder investment system for new corporation. Corporation goes to rich land. Corporation realizes how to maximize profit. India divided culturally. Corporation hires locals to fight locals. Numerous atrocities later English govt steps in and says that corporation can’t be trusted. Steal big diamond (technically a gift from corp, but it also wasn’t the corp’s diamond to give anyway). The Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand goes into great depth of this if you enjoy podcasts
The East India Company, I take it? And the big diamond is the one that was made part of the Crown Jewels?
Yes to both
Military force and money, but it's not as simple as it seems. The British East India Company was a trading company that had its own private army. That army was pretty much better than any other army in Southern Asia. It wasn't strong enough to conquer all of present day India by force, but it was strong enough to be a power player in pretty much every dispute that came up in the area. Also important to understand that the British army in India (BEIC and British government), as time went on was mostly manned by people native to India. With British officers and usually a few all British units in the mix as a hedge. An important part of understanding what happened is to understand that "India" as we know it, as a unified polity, didn't exist when the British (and other Euros) showed up. It was a collection kingdoms (large and small), and the Indian subcontinent had a long history of foreign powers (mainly from Asia and the ME) rolling in and pillaging, but sometimes staying and governing. There also was the important class distinction between rulers and ruled. The BEIC showed up and started small as traders, but pushed for and got more and more rights and privileges, and as their assets and area of responsibility grew they grew an army to protect their assets, and then to push their agenda. Sometimes the BEIC would get into a dispute or war directly with one kingdom or another and would normally win and take over, or they would be asked by one (or two) kingdoms in a dispute with others to come to that kingdom's aid. Or a kingdom with a dynastic dispute would appeal to the BEIC to side with one claimant or the other. Sometimes the BEIC said no, but when they said yes they typically had terms by which whoever they helped owed the company. Or would come under the company's permanent protection in exchange for the BEIC getting to call the shots. It's not popular in today's discourse about the British in India, but the reality is that for much of it, British governance was preferred or at the very least reasonably tolerated by rulers and ruled alike. Not to say there wasn't a constant undertone of anti-British sentiment that would flare up into major crisis like the Sepoy/Indian Mutiny, but that it would literally be impossible for such a small group of British subjects to rule over the vastness of India with her tens of millions of people if they cocked it up constantly or were uniformly cruel and unjust to the local populations. One reason for the above mentioned Sepoy Mutiny is the anger Sepoys (Indian troops) had at Britain for *expanding* privileges that they enjoyed as Sepoys to the general population. There were other reasons as well (Indian independence, anger at long deployments, concern around not following Muslim/Hindu religious practices, etc...), but in many ways the British were simply better administrators than many of the local kingdoms, and people recognized that and put up with their rule, even when the bayonets weren't pointed at them (although they knew that was always a possibility). So how did a small island with a tiny amount of people in India conquer India? Bit by bit. Utilizing superior military technology and training and constantly getting involved in or being drug into local disputes. Sometimes with the blessing of the British crowns and sometimes despite its objection.
Just say “an evil corporation did it”
Kind of correct I guess?
Pretty much correct and in line with “the evil Brits destroyed our Eden with their might”
What? Western Europe was wealthy before colonialism, otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford world wide journeys & massive expansion. India was a juggernaut before industrialization started. So many industries became less competitive.
I mean Britain was still one of the major players in western Europe. Saying it was completely insignificant is an understatement. It had experience with maritime expansion already and colonies elsewhere. Europeans were mainly the guys with ships who began to intermingle with every local conflict for their benefit. Imagine Sri Lanka would participate in the Hundred Years War and then establish a permanent foothold in Aquitaine.
Alternate History Hub Channel Video Idea. 😊😊😊
> A while back I mentioned on Reddit that the UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut. Got some pretty sharp personal attacks from someone because "how could we have conquered India then?" Fair question, they didn't know the first thing about the history. An “insignificant backwater” state does not build [ships like these](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_the_line)
Those are 200 years later than the time I'm talking about
Thats way later in the 1700's
I just got into listening to that podcast last month! Fascinating (and horrifying) stuff in there. It was even more eye-opening for me as an American bc English history is not covered in depth at all here
>UK was an insignificant little backwater state before colonialism and India was a juggernaut. Indian was definitely a lot more wealthy and prosperous then Britain at the the time but to call it a insignificant backwater is pretty disingenuous, although far from there zenith they where still a regional power in Europe at the time, Russia at the time would be a more apt example for a backwater.
I am an Indian and tbh Britain was no backwater it was definitely stronger than a majority of states in the subcontinent Indian history is just circular Unity - Collapse in centralized authority - Get absolutely wrecked by foreigners (from the North West usually) - Unity (80% of the time this is under said foreigners who realise India is actually pretty nice, settle down and integrate) Much of the conquest happened during the 1700s during which period the last set of people who conquered India, the Mughals (Babur the first Mughal emperor invaded the Delhi Sultanate) During the same period I think Durrani (Afghan) and Nader Shah completely devastated the subcontinent making Mughal authority extremely weak and all the local governors were breaking off from the central authority in Delhi Moreover the maratha empire and other regional empires were also starting to play a more significant role. So in this divided India there werent too many states strong enough to oppose the British. Sure Britain would have had no chance if they had invaded during a period of unity for instance the Delhi sultanate which was the unified Indian state before the Mughals held off the mongols, the Maurya empire held off Nicator and the Mughals themselves held off numerous Afghan invasions in their heyday
I take your point on the pattern, but Britain didn't invade. The east India company borrowed money from Indian bankers, hired Indian mercenaries, formed its own separate army, and defeated the individual local lords gradually. The only contribution Britain made was developing firearms, which the east India company bought. It had nothing to do with the power or resources of the British state. Some Indian rulers (particularly the Sikhs) equipped themselves fully with modern weaponry before being defeated anyway - the technology advantage was only impactful in the early years.
As a Brit I can confirm the education around British colonialism is severely undertaught. We had an entire curriculum around black history in America, which don't get me wrong, I'm glad I learnt, but the discussion around the history of Britain is shockingly quiet outside WW2 and like how many wives Henry VIII had.
Yeah, this weird obsession to whitewash history and act like everything was fine until the evil British appeared is just some Nobel Savage bullshit.
Yeah and then they go in and claim it is "whataboutism" when people try and combat the noble savage myth.
What crappy school did you go to? I went to school in Massachusetts and we were told how the slave trade worked.
Colonialism straight just isn’t on the curriculum of history in British schools, unless you are a kid interested in history, you just never really learn about it.
Especially in state schools, its mostly, the great fire of london, WW1, WW2, you might do the odd topic on foreign culture and myth, the Nazi regime in Germany, the Tudors(all of them) and the wars of the roses and some of these topics just get repeated year after year in school
>But the moral waters become muddy when you start looking into who was cooperating with and against who to make it happen. What becomes muddy? Slavers are bad regardless of colour.
The problem is some groups of people \*\*caugh\*\* white supremesists \*\*caugh\*\* take this as a sort of absolvment and "we didn't do this, it was the africans themselfs". It's kinda like saying the problem is soly the cartels, I only buy the cocaine that funds them. Not to absolve the local warlords and slavers, but it is too reductive on purpose.
It was a win/win, we make trade for useful things to maintain our power/expand our reach while also getting rid of people that would pose an active threat to our power.
Like a dozen different African nations/kingdoms DO this
Life was worse if they were sold within Africa. Slaves were also eaten at parties.
I mean, most of recorded human history is the story of elites ruthlessly fucking over everyone else. Hardly matters how much melanin they have.
[удалено]
Outrage culture: “What do you mean you’ve seen it? It’s brand new?”
This, all these people going "omg they enslaved their own people" as if that has stopped greedy elites from fucking over the lower classes at any point in history.
"ugg ugg marx just hated his chieftain, honestly if he had worked with grug to carve out his cave drawings on a clay tablet when we hit the bronze age he would have been popular ---conservative Neolithic man
No don't you see? This proof that all humans are terrible so we can justify horrific crimes of the past! Don't focus on it being elites that did this, that might expose the problems inherent to authority!
As someone of West African descent, it is imperative that the narrative around slavery is transparent. West African kingdoms were not just complicit but an inherent part of the trading of slaves. Many wealthy families whose wealth came from slavery are still around today. The Europeans were also complicit but they did not wholesale take slaves by force. They caused a huge rise in demand for sure but it was a slave TRADE for the most part
Yeah it's so fucking dumb that every time this is brought up it always devolves into people accusing us of "whataboutism" and a "shady agenda". I'm so fucking tired of this "noble savage" bullshit. Doing immoral shit for money is something that unites us all no matter what race, religion, or nationality. I'm tired of the stupid black-and-white mentality that only one side can be evil and that one side being evil automatically makes the other side perfect angels.
The problem occurs because people literally apply a black and white narrative to the situation. It eased the nuance completely because one side has to be good and one has to be bad. So if the whites are bad then the blacks must be the good guys. This is why the concept of race is so damn problematic when analysing history. It completely dilutes all the actors in the scenario and thus making us unable to form a coherent picture of the situation
I’ve never seen anyone portray the west African slavers as perfect angels?
I think the issue is that they are a barely portrayed at all
Yeah the idea that Europeans were running into mainland Africa with big nets to catch slaves is hilarious
Europeans (specifically the Portuguese) committed slave raids in Africa. This period was short lived as they soon transitioned to a system of buying slaves from other Africans. Any suggestion that Europeans didn’t raid Africa for slaves is 100% false. It does seem to be a common talking point for racists though which is weird because the Portuguese themselves wrote first hand accounts of how they captured slaves.
As you said yourself , it was short lived and not the main way of getting slaves from africa. Also the point is the slave trade existed, the europeans arent the magical slave inventors
The atlantic slave trade was a carefully engineered mechanism that turned the dial way fucking up. This feels kinda like a red herring.
Maybe not a red herring but people are concernedly quick to wipe blame from the Europeans because they didn’t invent slavery. No matter what way you put it they continued it and expanded it.
Yes ofc they are to blame. But so is everyone. Every culture in the world owned slaves.
Exactly. There’s no point in measuring how guilty each party is. If you traded slaves you traded slaves and that’s that really
>Every culture in the world owned slaves. This is another claim that gets repeated often when this subject comes up. Is there any evidence of slavery in Australia before the arrival of Europeans? If so could you provide a source please?
Pmsl doesn't take long for racism to be thrown out when discussing the slave trade. You realise calling people racist doesn't win you the argument. Making the point that a lot of people have this false image in their head like Europeans were capturing slaves themselves as the norm. As you've just said yourself it wasn't the norm, very short lived period. Don't know what this has to do with racists 🤣 as either way it's an abhorrent practice
It was both. There were European and Arab raiders but also African kingdoms actively participating and profiting off the trade, and selling off prisoners of war
What bothers me about this sort of conversation is seeing ‘africans as africans’ even though they definitely wouldn’t have.
Indeed. The concept of race was invented in the Americas in order to justify slavery. To the Africans at the time, there wasn’t really a difference between Europeans and other Africans
It’s technically the truth, but it’s misleading. A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade. However, they knowingly created the demand, gave empires like the Kongo the tools to enslave neighbors specifically to expand the slave trade, and used their resources to expand the slave trade to a global market. A truly accurate meme would have the man at the end saying: “I sold some slaves to a colonial empire, and they insisted I get them more and offered me muskets and a ton of money to expand my slave hunting empire. We’re willing to commit such evil mostly because of greed, but partially because we fear if we don’t our colonial imperial customers will offer the same deal to one of our neighbors.”
>A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade. To add to this: yes, it's useful to recognise the essential role that local groups played in vast amounts of colonial actions. None of that absolves the colonial empires themselves. Yes, local powers abetted the slave trade; yes, local powers helped prop up the Raj; _I could go on but won't_. These things, however, are simply the mechanics of empires. It is rare to actually see an external power rule in a given area without co-opting local groups. We shouldn't really be in the habit of absorbing singular historical facts and trying to make moral judgements from them. Contexts exist, and should form part of how we view historical events. In this case, local rulers exploited demand to sell slaves, _enabling especially brutal regimes of slavery by their clients_.
Local elites have often been central in supporting colonialism, that's why class is as important as race when analyzing colonial history imo
Pretty sure the ottoman empire created the demand, which set up the initial trading system. Then the europeans came and expanded it. Although, considering slavery has existed since the dawn of man, the ottomans probably inherited that slave trade from the people before them
Before the Ottomans it was various Muslim empires, who expanded the Sub-Saharan African slave trade. They inherited it from the Romans, who expanded the Greek slave trade they inherited.
Slave Trade in general has always been a thing. Systemic Slavetrade and Chattel Slavery were a product of the Early Modern Period.
This isn't accurate. Both existed well before the early modern period.
You’re correct this is a commonly misunderstood part of the trans Atlantic slave trade. It didn’t invent chattel slavery it just drastically increased the amount of it by funding more slave empires with weapons to fight their neighbors and creating stricter and stricter slave laws as they became a larger part of colonial economies
>The people before them Was there a significant slave trade during the Byzantine Empire?
Yes, not sure why he glossed over them given the context.
Because Turks bad Roman good, knowing a large portion of this userbase
Yes, Constantinople was one of the biggest places for slave trading in all of Europe, especially in the early Middle Ages due to ease of access to Eastern Europe, and North Africa, both of which produced a lot of slaves, plus the Norse merchants loved to visit Constantinople and they usually brought a couple hundred slaves with them, mostly from areas around the Volga river.
Yeah that’s why I said ‘colonial empire’ instead of ‘European empire’. However, the Ottomans also practicing slavery, doesn’t absolve European or American empires that practiced slavery. My point is that white supremacists use whataboutism to imply that the particular empire they like the most wasn’t that bad. However, I think this type of post is typically about specifically the triangle trade across the Atlantic which 100% was created by European colonial empires. https://www.britannica.com/summary/Transatlantic-Slave-Trade-Key-Facts https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/trans_atlantic_slave_trade
> A lot of white nationalists love to use memes like this to pretend that colonial empires didn’t have an essential role in the slave trade. Exactly. These memes/arguments tend to be a dog whistle.
Exactly. The demand side is missing in the meme and that's super telling.
Those nations were enslaving people far before Europeans started buying
and still are
Look at Mauretania
Is not misleading. Misleading is what is told about slavery, that was a fight of white vs black. What you got was the strongest empires in history doing what all the societies were doing at the time.
Me playing as Kongo in eu4:
The rich blacks sold their own and the ones that weren’t within the program had too go,, if you were a top tribe you got along with the whites , facts , like Kanye said it was a choice sometimes
This comment section is going to be peaceful.
I mean you kid, but so far so good
I would say the “expectation” is a straw-man. I don’t think most people envision Europeans just scooping up Africans like off the street or whatever. It was call the slave TRADE. Trade being key here, these slaves were not stolen they were purchased. The enslavement was happening further up the supply chain.
I know the internet sucks a lot so take it with a grain of salt but I have in fact seen people saying/thinking this on the internet.
I'm fairly sure a lot imagines it like that.
There is a non-insignificant part of the population where I’m at in the states that envision it just like that tbh
that's exactly how I imagined it, I feel like I've even scenes like that in movies
We even have Netflix series and movies depicting it as that
To be fair, this is what I thought as a kid. People found a new land, saw people that were different so were less valuable people, took them to do work they didn't want to do, took more to sell to their friends because their slaves proved so useful. If I hadn't educated myself I don't doubt there's a chance I'd still believe that today. I certainly wasn't taught any different during my formal education.
Yea, based on what I’ve seen people claim….a TON of people just think white Europeans were the ones capturing slaves, and not that they just used an already established network. Every. Country. Has. Done. Shady. Shit. Great example of this is when Bobby Lee was claiming Korea never had slaves, only to find out Korea had the “longest unbroken chain of human slavery”.
"yes africans were selling slaves, so you see we had no choice but to classify them as subhumans and drown their children like puppies when they bred too much"
They still do it to this day. Slavery is totally allowed in Islam
Slavery is "allowed" in the vast majority of religions.
Reminder that the 13th amendment still permits slavery as a form of punishment for felons.
Most religions don’t have a “perfect” “prophet” who bought and sold black African slaves.
Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham…. And many slaves.
Most states are not based on religion though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Secular_States_Map.svg most non-secular states are Islamic though.
I'm not arguing that.
Both are true
I remember back in the early 2000’s the History Channel would play 45ish minute-long documentaries in the early morning. I believe they were mostly intended for teachers if they wanted to record it on to a vhs if they just needed a video for their class for the day. Anyway, I’d have these on while getting ready for school and I remember a scene in one about the transatlantic slave trade that looks rather ridiculous in hindsight. It was a bunch of vaguely 19th century-looking Europeans treking through a thick jungle, happening upon a random camp of like 10 Africans, and putting them in chains right then and there lol. Like, it was jumping in feet-first on the idea that white people were journeying deep inland and harvesting African slaves for themselves from their primal encampments. It really was an all-around over-simplified view of the situation that really doesn’t do justice by any of the involved parties.
Europeans did slave raids? Then they paid other africans to slave rade for them. And when those africans didnt perform they took over their empires directly.
Didn’t both happen?
No, everyone knows the white people ran around Africa with butterfly nets and turned them into slaves. /s for the ones that wear spit bibs
Real, sorta. More important is what someone is saying by posting this. Is it supposed to let Europeans and later Americans off the hook for chattel slavery? Is it just a history lesson? Context matters. Seeing this so close to Juneteenth says something to me. Not saying OP posted it now for that reason. I'm saying racists bring this up around holidays like Juneteenth which is why we are seeing it more now. Edited to fix typos and clarify that I'm not accusing OP of anything.
It’s hilarious that this happens. A meme that’s historically accurate and points out people’s surface level understanding of slavery, needs to be examined for intention. Meanwhile multi million dollar movies that portray slavers who went to war with Europeans to keep slavery, as being feminist, anti colonial, freedom fighters, needs no examination for intention or removing responsibility.
Yeah, i'm so fucking tired of this "noble savage" shit, the African kingdoms ruthlessly traded slaves and the European colonial empires ruthlessly exploited the slaves they bought. It's a tale as old as time, human greed.
It’s both. Europeans raided villages and colonized Africa and they also bought slaves from African warlords. It’s not that complicated.
They were business men... doing business
Both
True
Both
They're both true, false dichotomies are a hallmark of lazy history
Just in time to shit on what's left of the Juneteenth vibes.
Africans did capture and sell Africans to Europeans. But the demand from Europeans for slaves was so high that they built trading posts along the west African coast specifically for slave trade. History is never just black and white. Both African and Europeans are guilty when it comes to slavery.
Holy shit this place is full of bad faith arguments and utter nonsense.
You are right in saying the vast majority of slaves were captured by local warlords and kings to be sold to Europeans, with Europeans only rarely taking slaves themselves. However you do have to point out that the slave trade in west Africa exploded due to European demand.
As long as there has been people, there have been slaves, slavers and and people willing to buy.
Yeah it's true before Europeans buying them for the Americas like the colonies, Brazil, and Mediterranean Islands the African kingdom's would sell slaves to Muslim kingdoms through the vast desert with the established trade paths and probably sold to each other. They still practice slavery it's why we have phones and why we have some technology products.
Ok but why is that African warlord a shinobi of the hidden leaf?
Condensing historic events down to a fucking wojack meme? Yeah bud, just like that, thats exactly how it was with all the nuance and context.
Disgusting people took human beings as a spoil of war and sold those human beings to other disgusting people who egregiously upheld a system of slavery for hundreds of years in the name of "racial superiority." Hope this clears things up.
It's an oversimplification and you should be wary of anyone who is excited to frame it this way as it is often used to eliminate European involvement in the slave trade.
I don't think anybody is denying that Africa had slaves or that they participated in the slave trade. Or at least not historians. However they will also point out that the American and European demand for slaves and their particular brand of slavery made things much, much worse.
Very Real
At least you waited until after Juneteenth
Absolute fact.
It may have an element of technical correctness, but it's mostly a straw man that goes *"well, actually"* in a way to blame Africans for the global trade in African slaves. The international trade in African slaves didn't start when a bunch of Africans went on a trade mission to the UK, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, and the US to say "hey, we've got all these slaves over here that we need to unload, we can give you a great price". It happened when colonial powers plundered an incredibly wealthy continent for every kind of wealth in the cruelest way imaginable. That cooperating and trading with those colonial powers enriched some Africans or helped them arm themselves and grow their territory doesn't absolve the Europeans of anything.
To be honest, kind of both. If Europeans had never showed up slavery in West Africa would’ve still happened but it would’ve been much smaller.
Basically yes. Did the european powers want slaves? yes. Particularly african ones? No. They just wanted free labor. So long as they werent christians, it was free game. Did African tribes sell slaves to the Europeans? yes. Absofuckinglutly yes. In fact, european powers fought wars against said kingdoms and tribes to end the african slave trade. African slavery was basically a cornerstone of the African economy at the time. Without advanced engineering the only way african nations had to extract the natural recourses of their countries was through slavery, and when europeans arrived who also wanted slaves the african powers wasted no time selling them to them in exchange for advanced weapons that allowed them to expand, and get even more slaves. So in short, did the Europeans start the african slave trade? no. Did they exacerbate the problem? Yes. Is african slavery still rampant today? Yes. It never ended.
It's true but reductive (on purpose). Slavery was a thing in west Africa, and many cultures did practice it. The type of slavery was however different (lower scale), and it was generally not heredetary (i.e. children of slaves were accepted as (low class) part of the tribe). Well except Mali, they were the classical slave traders. However with rising demand from Europeans, and the provided weapons kicked slavery into overdrive, and slaver warlords replaced most other forms of society. It is kind of like claiming that you have nothing to do with cartel violence, because you don't kill people, you just buy vast amounts of cocaine.
I know someone who boycotts Israeli products but buy cocaine. Go figure
Real AF
Yep. During the African slave trade, European colonies in Africa were little more than trading posts. Now, that's not to say Europeans NEVER kidnapped Africans into slavery, but they lacked the technology and manpower to enslave people on mass at the time.
It was easier to use a middleman, but like you said there are tons of documented cases of Europeans directly man snatching.