Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "The Billion-Dollar Kidnapping Trade | The Business of Crime" video.

  1. In the Philippines, during the colonial era, the former Sultanate of Sulu and Maguindanao literally based their economy on kidnapping. This was after their traditional trade routes were disrupted by the arrival of European colonizers. They soon found out that kidnapping people and selling them to slavery was more profitable than trading spices for chinese porcelain. They raided the northern (Spanish-controlled) coasts of the Philippines, as well as other colonial possessions in Indonesia and Malaysia. They also raided ships. They then sold the captured people in slave markets in Batavia (modern day Jakarta), Singapore, the Sultanates of Gowa and Bone, to as far as the Sultanate of Zanzibar. They also ransomed captured Europeans or Chinese people. The scale of these kidnappings were so large that it left a permanent imprint in the Malay language, where the word for pirate - "lanun" - is derived from the exonym for the Iranun people, one of the ethnicities involved in these raids. It was a constant danger to shipping in Southeast Asia during certain months called the "Pirate Winds". More than half of the population of these sultanates were abducted slaves by the late 1800s. The Spanish even lodged a formal diplomatic complaint to the Dutch Empire (slavery of natives was forbidden in the laws of the Spanish Empire), asking them to ban the sale of Spanish subjects in Batavia. It was eventually suppressed when the Spanish (and later the Americans) conquered the region with the new steamships. It fostered ethnic tensions that continue to this day, more than 120 years later, where non-Muslim Filipinos still tell tales of the "M---o" (a derogatory word Muslim Filipinos),. who come and steal naughty children who stray from their parents in public places. Strangely enough, the colonial era pirate raids has been forgotten. Even though the practice has not. The region around the southern South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Celebes Sea, is still the epicenter of piracy and kidnapping in Southeast Asia. Though these days, instead of being just economic, it has acquired jihadist context, with the most notorious kidnapping group being the Al Qaeda and ISIS-aligned Abu Sayyaf group.
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