The Forgiveness of History
Brief thoughts on slavery and the prospects for human survival
Dublin was once a slave-trading port (also Bristol, York, and even London). This had nothing to do with the early modern Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas; the traders were Norse Vikings and the people boarding ships to nowhere were Celtic Irish, Welsh, Saxons, and Scots.1 We know this from the sagas and the Icelandic Book of Settlements.
“Erp's mother was Myrgiol, the daughter of Gliomal, king of the Irish. Earl Sigurd had taken them in the spoils of war, and made them slaves. Myrgiol was the bondwoman of the earl's wife, and served her faithfully. She knew many things. She preserved her mistress's unborn child while she was in the bath. After that Aud bought her for a high price, and promised her freedom if she served Thurid, the wife of Thorstein the Red, as she had served her mistress. Then Myrgiol and her son Erp sailed with Aud to Iceland.” 2
“Irish slaves taken to Iceland by Ketil Gufa, son of Orlyg, son of Bodvar, son of Vigsterk, from western piracy " late in the settling time " (870-900), rebelled and perished (Landnamabok, c. 97). Their names may be noted : " One was called Thormod, another Floki ; Kori, and Svart, and two Skorris."3
“Leif sailed upon a western expedition. He harried in Ireland, and found there a great house underground : he went in, and it was quite dark there till [he came to a place] where there was light from a weapon which a man was holding. Leif killed the man and took the sword, and much other treasure. Thereafter he was called Hior-leif. Hiorleif harried far in Ireland, and took much spoil there. He took there ten slaves, named Dubthach, and Geirrod, Skaldbiorn, Halldor, and Drafdrit ; more are not named.”4
I grew up thinking of the Vikings as seafaring berserkers who fearlessly raided up and down the coasts of Ireland, Great Britain, France, and the Low Countries, pillaging towns, villages, and wealthy monasteries, loading their sleek clinker-built dragon ships to the gunwales with loot. Now I know those ships were also stacked with human beings destined not just for the new colonies in Iceland but also for sale along a vast sea and river network stretching from Newfoundland to Baghdad and beyond.
Yes, one of the huts at the famous L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site in Newfoundland housed Leif Erikson’s slaves.
Studying graves on Iceland, archaeologists discovered that over half the women in the early Viking settlement were from the British Isles, that is, they were concubines and slaves torn from their homeland, never to return.
I think the fact that I didn’t know any of this had to do with the place (Canada) and the time (1950s and early 1960s). Slavery was a bad thing safely tucked away in the past and in the American South.
The Norse at home lived mostly on small farmsteads and had little use for slave labor, but owning a slave conferred social status and slave trading made them wealthy. I have seen estimates that slaves made up as much as 25% of the population of Sweden at the time I am talking about.
The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan is notorious for his (lurid) description of a high status Viking funeral somewhere along the Volga River in present day Russia (the original Rus were Vikings). The dead man’s slave women were polled to see who would volunteer to accompany him on his trip to the afterlife. The chosen woman was made drunk, sent from tent to tent having intercourse with the dead man’s friends, then helped aboard the funeral ship.
I saw that the girl did not know what she was doing. She wanted to enter the pavilion, but she put [her head] between it and the boat. Then the old woman seized her head, made her enter the pavilion and went in with her. The men began to bang on their shields with staves, to drown her cries, so that the other slave girls [would not be frightened] and try to avoid dying with their masters.
Then she was raped again inside a tent next to the corpse and strangled to death.
I tell you this not to shock you, but to try to nudge the contemporary Western mindset that focuses on the Atlantic slave trade and tends to diminish or even forget slavery in other forms and at other times. This focus is legitimate for the people involved and their descendants, but if you lift the horizon, other worlds of shame and horror emerge. The truth is that humans are inhuman and always have been, especially if there is money to be made. We should all be more depressed about this than we are.
Slavery goes back as far as records can reach. The Code of Hammurabi dealt with slaves, including a bit about how, if your slave developed epilepsy within a month of purchase, you could return him or her for a full refund (much like Amazon).
Long before the Portuguese invented sugar estates on the Canary Islands, there were slave-worked plantations in what is now Iraq, also in ancient Rome (they were called latifundia), and in Arabic North Africa. I don’t speak here of the Far East; my reading hasn’t gotten me there yet.
The Arab slave trade in North Africa across the Sahara and down the Nile River began in the eighth century (same as the Vikings) with the spread of Islam and lasted into the 20th century; in the war torn Sahel, it continues to this day in one form or another, e.g. the rape of women and the forced conscription of boy soldiers. In comparison, the Atlantic slave trade lasted only about 400 years. James Walvin, author of The Atlas of Slavery, gives estimates of between three and a half million and seven million people who made that sorrowful passage.
One of the ironies of history: the use of the word “assimilation” and the practice of slavery and slave trading by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Arabs, and the Turks (the list goes on) indicate that over time these events lose their capacity to trigger moral outrage. They become old stories. Yet they are dense with the half-life of ancient memories of murder, children and women ripped from their homes, transportation to foreign lands, rape, forced labor, never going home. All this safely subsumed and sanitized under the word “assimilation.”
Over time, the original British (who themselves weren’t the original population) retreated to Wales, Brittany, and Scotland, or were simply assimilated by the Saxons and Vikings. Then the Normans came and made everyone French. Slice it any way you want, there have been more than enough tears shed, languages lost, and families destroyed. At least history is consistent.
There is a line of thought that New World chattel slavery and the trade in African people were categorically different and worse than any previous form of slavery. This is an argument from sheer numbers, the efficiently business-like organization of the European slave trade (the new techniques of joint stock capitalization helped), and the racialization of slavery.
I find this argument Eurocentric, white people claiming pride of place once again. Not only are they the best, they are also the worst; always superlative, always the center of attention. The British are particularly good at spinning this argument and making themselves the hero because they stopped the Atlantic slave trade (1807-8) and freed their slaves (in agonizing stages, between 1834 and 1838). But of course they were also the most successful and business-like of the western slavers.
The Atlantic slave trade continued after the British stopped it (yes, you read that right), though in a diminished form. Brazil was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery (1888). But the slave trade to North Africa and the Middle East continued into the 20th century. There are slave markets today in war-torn Sudan, Darfur, and South Sudan, just as there are other forms of slavery elsewhere in the world. According to Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People, New Slavery in the Global Economy,5 it is cheaper to buy a human being today than at any time in world history.
As a social institution slavery is protean. Yet, though there are variant customs and practices, it seems invidious to argue one is worse (or better) than another. They all amount to someone being stolen or sold from home and forced to work (sex work included) for free. Can you really imagine a little girl kidnapped from her village in present day Nigeria taking stock and thinking, well, on the whole I am better off than if I had been put on a ship and sent to Virginia or Jamaica in 1802?
Here’s a description of how a slaving expedition would go in late 19th century Sudan from Samuel White Baker’s book In the Heart of Africa6 (the book was published in 1886 but describes events beginning in 1862). The expedition would be financed on spec in Khartoum and led by an Arab trader/investor. (I’m afraid I am using the term “Arab” too loosely; in these sub-Saharan territories, much trading was done by Arab businessmen but also by converted Africans; in West Africa, these were called “slatees,” according to Mungo Park.)7
…on arrival at the desired locality the party disembark and proceed into the interior, until they arrive at the village of some negro chief, with whom they establish an intimacy.
Charmed with his new friends, the power of whose weapons he acknowledges, the negro chief does not neglect the opportunity of seeking their alliance to attack a hostile neighbor. Marching throughout the night, guided by their negro hosts, they bivouac within an hour's march of the unsuspecting village doomed to an attack about half an hour before break of day. The time arrives, and, quietly surrounding the village while its occupants are still sleeping, they fire the grass huts in all directions and pour volleys of musketry through the flaming thatch. Panic-stricken, the unfortunate victims rush from their burning dwellings, and the men are shot down like pheasants in a battue, while the women and children, bewildered in the danger and confusion, are kidnapped and secured. The herds of cattle, still within their kraal or "zareeba," are easily disposed of, and are driven off with great rejoicing, as the prize of victory. The women and children are then fastened together, and the former secured in an instrument called a sheba, made of a forked pole, the neck of the prisoner fitting into the fork, and secured by a cross-piece lashed behind, while the wrists, brought together in advance of the body, are tied to the pole. The children are then fastened by their necks with a rope attached to the women, and thus form a living chain, in which order they are marched to the head-quarters in company with the captured herds.
This is the commencement of business. Should there be ivory in any of the huts not destroyed by the fire, it is appropriated. A general plunder takes place. The trader's party dig up the floors of the huts to search for iron hoes, which are generally thus concealed, as the greatest treasure of the negroes; the granaries are overturned and wantonly destroyed, and the hands are cut off the bodies of the slain, the more easily to detach the copper or iron bracelets that are usually worn. With this booty the traders return to their negro ally. They have thrashed and discomfited his enemy, which delights him; they present him with thirty or forty head of cattle, which intoxicates him with joy, and a present of a pretty little captive girl of about fourteen completes his happiness.
An attack or razzia, such as described, generally leads to a quarrel with the negro ally, who in his turn is murdered and plundered by the trader—his women and children naturally becoming slaves.
A good season for a party of a hundred and fifty men should produce about two hundred cantars (20,000 lbs.) of ivory, valued at Khartoum at 4,000 pounds. The men being paid in slaves, the wages should be nil, and there should be a surplus of four or five hundred slaves for the trader's own profit—worth on an average five to six pounds each.
Lest you think this is an old story (see above), the video below gives details of contemporary slave raiding in South Sudan. I should warn you that the practice presented here of foreign aid groups buying slaves to free them has been criticized for ultimately encouraging the slavers. Nevertheless the video of actual slaves, actual slave traders, the horrific aftermath of a slave raid, and interviews with victims is stunning. As you watch, try to imagine these people 200 or 400 years ago on the Atlantic coast bound for the Americas, their horror and sadness. Please pause and attend to the faces of the women who have been raped, mutilated, seen their husbands murdered, and lost children.
Then, for the sake of argument, turn back to those Vikings. The slaves they purchased in Dublin were brought to the coast by inland chiefs, first obtained as a result of internal Irish wars, captured warriors, women, and children (an eerie parallel with the Atlantic slave trade which thrived on wars between African states in the interior of the continent).
What particularly caught my eye reading about the Viking slave trade were stories of a high value boys (especially boys kidnapped from monasteries, who could read and write) destined to be castrated and enslaved as eunuchs. There were two classes of eunuch, ones who had only their testicles removed and the so-called clean eunuchs who had their penises removed as well. Naturally, given the lack of antibiotics and anesthetics, very few boys survived this operation, which made them even more valuable. Most eunuchs were castrated as children.
Lest you think this dazzlingly brutal practice was rare, read this from Mary A. Valente’s essay “Castrating Monks: Vikings, Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs”:
The large number of eunuchs at the court of one Caliph, al-Muqtadir (AD 908–32), is recorded in a number of sources. The tenth/eleventh-century writer Hilal al-Sabi’ states that ‘It is generally believed that in the days of al-Muqtadir bi-allah [...] the residence contained 11,000 eunuchs: 7,000 blacks and 4,000 white Slavs; 4,000 free and slave girls and thousands of chamber servants’. Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir, a late thirteenth-century writer, claims that when Saladin conquered the Fatamids he found 12,000 people living there, but the only non-eunuchs were the Fatimid caliph himself and his immediate relatives.8
And just to be clear and not always beating up on Arabs — the Romans kept eunuchs, the eastern Roman empire of Byzantium kept eunuchs, the Greeks kept eunuchs, and afterwards, the Turkish empire employed huge numbers of eunuchs. In general, Islam is against castrating boys and men, especially if they are Muslims; they depended on foreign middlemen along the fringes of their zones of influence to provide boys and do the surgery (in practice, a competent operator could slice everything off with a single stroke of the blade). But, as Mary Valente observes,9 “only the Christian West was very much in the business of creating eunuchs on a large scale for export.”
As it happens, the Vikings were quick to adapt to this market. Adult male slaves, only good for labor, were less valuable than female slaves, and tended not to be traded on (traveling down the Dnieper River, it was easier to capture men along the way, the so-called Slavs). Young females of higher value were fed into the trading system that saw them trafficked through the Mediterranean or across the Baltic and thence along the Russian river systems to the Middle East. Boys, with the highest added value, were taken by either route, processing through the so-called castration houses — Venice was perhaps the most prominent, but there were other ports that provided such services.
I grew up learning that the Vikings raided monasteries for their wealth (gold and silver religious objects, etc.), but my history books, as I have said, failed to mention slavery. Now a case can be made that the Norse raided monasteries to procure educated boys for the eunuch trade (as a general principle, as you research slavery, it always gets worse).
There were a lot of little boys in monasteries and churches. So-called child oblation, parents donating their sons and, yes, daughters to the church to be raised as monks and nuns, was a commonly accepted practice in the early Middle Ages. There was, of course (there always is) a Biblical precedent for this; see 1 Samuel, 24-28, where Hannah dedicates her son Samuel to God’s service.
24 And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the Lord in Shiloh: and the child was young.
25 And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.
26 And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the Lord.
27 For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him:
28 Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshipped the Lord there.
That line, “the child was young,” makes a person cringe.
It wasn’t until the late 11th century that opinion began to turn against the practice of child oblation based on irrevocability and non-consent.
In any case, now you get the picture: the Vikings raiding up and down the coasts of Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe or setting up slave trading ports, internal wars spinning off captives, monasteries dotting the coasts acting as collection points for high grade boy slaves, and an international network of trade routes leading to far-flung markets.
Again, Mary Valente:
Given the increasing demand for eunuchs, especially literate and educated eunuchs, in the Byzantine and especially Arab world from the ninth century onwards, Viking raids on western monasteries must be seen in a new light. Monasteries were indeed repositories of great treasure, and men and women could and were captured and sold to Iceland and Scandinavia. But the only way to explain the massive drive for captives is to understand the economics of the long-distance slave trade of the Viking Age. The added value of young, literate boys and teens and the fact that Venice castration houses needed a near endless supply of exactly such captives fill in another piece of the puzzle of the economics of the Northern Arc of the slave trade. As long as there was a demand for castrated young boys and teens, whether from Slavic or western European lands, whether pagan or Christian, there would be a supply.”10
I tell you this, yes, to shock you. Now I admit it. To remind you of things done but elided in the awful forgiveness of history.
Humans are flat-out amazing at inventing forms of cruelty. It is a consistent and defining trait.
According to University of Oxford archaeologist Marek Jankowiak, "It is now clear that we cannot fully understand the Vikings without taking into account slave hunting and slave trade. The 'business model' of the Baltic Vikings appears to have depended on it.”
Early sources of Scottish history, A.D. 500 to 1286, p. 384
Early sources of Scottish history, A.D. 500 to 1286, p. 345
Early sources of Scottish history, A.D. 500 to 1286, p. 335
If you can spare the time, here is a fascinating Kevin Bales lecture.
See my earlier substack on Baker and his wife. It’s worth mentioning that Baker’s wife was a white woman he discovered at a slave auction house in Turkish Hungary and managed to rescue from a life of concubinage or worse.
In East Africa, one of the most powerful Arab traders in the late 19th century was Tippu Tip who ruled a vast slave and ivory hunting ground around Lake Tanganyika. It was Tippu Tip who saved David Livingstone’s life when the missionary was destitute and starving (oh, the irony).
Around 1890, realizing that the Belgians coming up the Congo River from the west and the European missionaries and Germans penetrating the interior from the east were gaining the upper hand politically, he returned to Zanzibar and wrote his autobiography. He died in 1905, a vastly wealthy man, having accumulated seven huge clove plantations on Zanzibar and some 10,000 slaves to work them.
Mary A. Valente, “Castrating Monks: Vikings, Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs,” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, 2013.
Mary Valente, op. cit.
Mary Valente, op.cit.
I see that the conversation has gone beyond types of slavery as practiced in older civilizations. So I also think about a post_Civil War form of slavery: share cropping, in which the owner of the share cropped land took enough profits from the crops, so that the share cropper was left with just enough to subsist on, just as actual slaves were given just enough to subsist on by their masters.
And I'm also reminded of the Tennessee Ernie Ford song, "Sixteen Tons," in which coal miners were paid in company 'scrip' rather than in 'legal tender'. The scrip could only be used at a 'company store'. Hence the lyrics in the song:
"You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
Thinking about what seems to me to be the innate nature of humans to, at times, exploit other humans in various ways, I was thinking about the phrase 'wage slave'. Looking up the term online, I came across the Wikipedia entry for the term 'Wage slavery'. In the entry, there is a reference to ancient Rome:
"Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis.[11] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work[12][13] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism."