Comments by "Ikenga Spirit" (@ikengaspirit3063) on "The Diary of an Italian Slave Trader | Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Slavery in the Americas" video.

Yeah, this is still early in the slave trade. Racism developed because of the trade not the other way around and was still developing in this time period.
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@Sam Wallace using racial terms =/= racism. And the Italian author referred to the Portuguese Women as "their own". So not only was he making a distinction between Portuguese and black Africans but also between Portuguese and Italians. So yes, at this point what was happening was more a distinction between nations than between races.
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Nothing personal
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@aztaline5593 fine, in some cases Muslims were more cruel to their slaves like with the castration example but in many cases Europeans were worse. Europeans kept their own children by slave women in slavery(all children of a free man become free in the Muslim world), there was no social mobility for slaves(which there was in the Muslim world) and people were worked to death in all the European slave plantation systems with the Southern USA actually being the significant exception.
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@shakiMiki while modern racism is a very white European originated concept, the Arab slave trade also produced its own anti-black Racism that still has ramifications to this day.
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@ashokafulcrum4795 Well, thanks for that. I would concede that using India as an example isn't best as the Muslims system of forced labour never completely replaced the Indian one but the argument that Blacks in Umayyad Spain and North Africa when slaves were disproportionately used as soldiers and Persian having better access to Turkish slaves it was more economical to use Turkish slaves so rarely ever had major black armies. I would still argue that in most cases Muslim slavery was better than what the Europeans did in the Americas but that's where I'll stop. If you're looking for an example in Africa of a history of Muslim Jihadis that they try to sugar coat, check out. Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria It shows how Jihadis and Brits worked had in hand to subjugate indigenous peoples in Nigeria.
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@LiterallyGod 😲
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@user-mb3dx5fl9f the trade of Slavs was more common among Umayyad Spain and Muslim Near east. Like okay, if the Byzantines had a big slave trade what were they used for? They had no plantation economy, their army was locals or mercenaries, their Empire became so poor their coinage turned into just a method for gathering taxes and nobility became so extinct we don't see family names reemerge until the short period during the Macedonian dynasty so it isn't the mobility owning slaves. The Byzantines had no major slave trade, the people that had it were Vikings trading slaves to the Muslim world, that is why we have our best pre-Kievan Rus account of the Rus from Muslims and the Muslim world having their own me for Slavs, Saqaliva (or something like that) unlike the rest of Europe that just used transliterations of what Slavs call themselves.
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ibang yermom Your lack of knowledge on the letters of the King of Kongo sending letters to the Portuguese King to stop the slave trade in his territories and lamenting that his Predecessors joined in the slave trade. And of the several African states that banned slavery to different extent shows itself. Next time don't touch a topic that you know nothing of.
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@ashokafulcrum4795 Well, yeah slaves that were taken into jobs with actual social mobility got to experience social mobility. Your average non-slave miner or farmer in the middle ages is going to live and die a farmer or miner, same applied to laves taken for those roles. Search up Malik Ambar, he and other African slaves in the Ahmadmahgar sultanate reached the highest military position and he eventually basically took it over. There are other examples that I can't remember now but yeah, Blacks can and were often used in the Army not as Plantation workers in the Islamic world because for most Islamic states, Plantation Farming was unfeasable or simply unused. Like the example you gace with the Zanj revolt, after the revolt the plantation system in Southern Iraq died off with it. So yes, while there was d distinctly anti-black racism in the Islamic world it didn't stop them from using black soliders in Egypt, Morocco, Spain and India being the ones I am sure of. The main distincter of what slaves were used for were still their past expertise not their race. As for the Zanj rebellion, a large part of why they were mostly black slaves there much like the trans-atlantic was for convenience reasons. The Northern trade route passed through difficult mountainous terrain and dangerous turkish tribes while for the experienced sailors that brought slaves from East Africa, the Ocean was a high way and they could immediately drop on the flat ground of Iran.
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@pixelsabre "There wasn't that much of a difference in economic power however" how wasn't there that much difference in Economic power? almost the entire of European Eastern Roman holding were ravaged by Avar, Slavic and Bulgarian attacks in quick succession, the yearly raids by the caliphate completely ruined Eastern Anatolia and Western Anatolia no longer had the same sort of economic importance that it once did. The Byzantines only controlled parts of Apullia and Cantabria and the manpower to keep those were a constant drain. Just between the end of the Heraclian dynasty and the high point of the Macedonian dynasty alone shows the Byzantine economic decline as most of the country side reverted to a bater economy and coinage became mostly just a way for to collect taxes vs the Caliphate so wealthy they could pay to restrike their entire coinage over technicalities of a peace treaty with the Byzantines. No, the Caliphate was far wealthier than the Eastern Romans by far who only recovered for a short time under the Macedonians. "No one before the 18th century had a slave-powered growth economy like the Sokoto Caliphate or the European Trans-Atlantic traders did" Mali and the Abbasids had it at least and if the Abbasids didn't basically collapse soon after the Zanj rebellion they might have continued it.
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@pixelsabre The Middle East was far, far safer than the Eastern Roman Empire during the 3 main caliphates. The Qaramatians, Berbers and Zanj(the later of which aren't even raiders) were only an issue at the END and collapse of one of those 3 main caliphates to be replaced by the next, if that was all the Romans had to deal with it would be like if the only raids Eastern Anatolia suffered were starting from 1204. The Romans on the other hand had to deal with yearly Arab attacks, often with armies larger than anything they could muster, this was so bad that an Arab writer that made their way into Eastern Anatolia said there were no cities only forts and bunker houses, this has literally no comparison in the 3 main caliphates. Nowhere in them was there a previously urbanized region so devastated as to lose all distinctive urbanism and we know Europe Eastern Rome was no better. It was only during the Islamic civil wars that Eastern Anatolia was safe from raids that given how far and few between that was those civil wars were far from "endless", just significant when they happened. By the rise of Italian merchant cities, the Caliphates were no longer a political power and thus out of the scope of my argument. Rich Estates to whom? Not to the majority of the workers on those estates that got on that estate in the first place because their constantly raided lands were too poor to produce anything and so basically sold themselves off to a land holder. This would be like calling the Late Roman Empire rich because large land holder when the only reason those land holder could be so large is because they were less affected by the economic ruin than small land holders that basically enserfed themselves to larger land holders. The breaking of the back of the established dukes and nobility was done by the constant loses to the Arabs not any special development on the part of the Eastern Roman Bureaucracy or Emperor. Evidence to that being the moment that Abbasids began to collapse with the anarchy at samara, those ducal families re-asserted themselves, ending with the failure at Manzikert. Also, the Byzantines never really lost their currency driven bureaucracy, the extent to which it was currency drive constantly reduced but that never reduced to zero. Palace employees were still paid in currency (and supplies) and taxes were still calculated in terms of currency, the share of supplies in the bureaucracy just increased constantly as the Eastern and Western extremedies of the Empire couldn't support monetary economies for a while. The Abbasid had such a huge slave economy in Iraq that the Zanj rebellion is the largest slave revolt ever. However, after that and the other rebellions of that time period they lost the ability to do that. So yeah, didn't reach the later Indian Ocean slave trade. There were several slave routes to the Abbasid Empire, with the East African Ocean one probably the most important one as the name of the "Zanj" rebellion suggests. There were the Trans-Saharan slave routes but also through the Nile, through the Volga and Ural rivers, through the horn of Africa to Arabia and through the East African coast to the Persian Gulf
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@user-mb3dx5fl9f the Byzantines commonly castrated themselves which is why they didn't see it as weird (although castrations were banned by the Orthodox church it was still avery common thing to happen to a 3rd or 4th son of a noble house) and didn't have a large slave economy so even when it happened to slaves it was still nothing compared to all of Southern Iran and much of the middle Niger being cultivated by slaves that were worked to death, so much so that the Zanj rebellion is the largest slave rebellion in history and it occured in Abbasid Iraq.
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@pixelsabre Difference being that the Byzantines didn't have nearly the same sort of economic power as the Arabs so much more of the Arabs had and used slaves. The Byzantines also didn't have slave armies, slave concubines or plantations, all of which the Arabs and other Muslim powers had. The Byzantines in the most basic sense just didn't have the economy or reach to have a slave system comparable in size to the Arab one.
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@404Dannyboy Oh, pls. The only people that argued against the Spanish enslaving natives were the Jesuits and Catholic Church you know the people who's entire life it was to understand the Bible, not people that don't even know that according to the Biblical narrative Noah's flood had wiped out Cain's descendants. The very fact that the only real institutional support for slavery comes from a pseudo polytheistic sect that is barely considered Christian further proves my point.
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But ur God, how couldn't you have know that?
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@aztaline5593 I think I'll try and find that video where a King of Kongo was wrote to the Portuguese King to ask him to help and stop the slave trade because he was hurting his country and people. Somewhere in the letter he lamented on how preceding Kings and his people had engaged in the slave trade so that by his era it was entrenched and he couldn't just ban it off by the flick of a finger. Also, some African states did ban it. Ashanti didn't sell slaves, Nri had a ban on slavery and the slave trade baked fully into its state ideology and religion and Benin banned slave trade for over a century (until it started declining needed to get guns by any way and started selling slaves again).
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@lusciouslucius honestly we don't know which was more volume of people whether the Islamic or Atlantic slave trade and estimates are a bit all over the place.
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@joyseyboy you don't really get out of Islamic slavery by converting to Islam, it was more something that existed in theory not in practice. Ethnic groups that converted relatively early to Islam were generally targeted less but still targeted and Muslims could remain as forced labour to other Muslims even if frowned upon.
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@LucasDimoveo they banned slaving of Christians and the Pope tried to ban the trans-atlantic slave trade at one time with the Sublimis Deus Bull but after some pressuring by the Iberians it was dropped.
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@404Dannyboy No the Bible is silent on slavery but Christianity has religious institutions had had long anti-slaver streaks whether it is early Christians freeing Christian slaves and buying slaves to free them or the Catholic Church trying basically eliminating slavery in Europe through the middle age and trying to ban the transatlantic slave trade with the Sublimus Deus Papal bull.
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@404Dannyboy No, read their actual texts. They defended Atlantic slavery using Aristotle. That's where the idea of races that live comfortably/better under slavery come from. Only thing Christianity had to do with it is that they also had to make Christian defense as that was their religion. In Southern USA just before the start of the USA civil war they were trying to reinvent serfdom.
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@lif3andthings763 that's what it became after it gathered some steam but it started out as the largest black slave revolt.
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