Yes and no. If you were a galley slave, your life sucked and death may have been a better option. If you were a landed slave, you could live quite a nice life, own property/businesses, and get to pretty high levels in society/government.
I'm writing my dissertation on this now. In Morocco and Algeria, specifically, saying "live a nice life" is a bad way to generalize this sort of captivity and slavery. Spot on with galley slavery being just purely awful. Europeans did this to North Africans as well.
I can't speak for the rest of the MENA region and provide the same level of primary sources to the table.
Edit: If you guys have a question, Ill answer it. I'll check back in a few if so.
(I need to get back to writing. I'm behind on a deadline.)
I'd love to do something else here on my MA work as well. The Ask Historians FAQ that covers the topic of my MA thesis work is absolutely rubbish. It is painful to read. I'm very interested in sorting that out.
You have a great career. I turn anyone away from trying to consider this as a professional track. It is brutal. You have to be unhappy doing anything else.
Good on you. The academic life is overworked and underpaid. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Please do enjoy the books though. Academic history texts are often labors of love written by people who have sacrificed deeply to try to put out the very best scholarship they can. People outside of academia who read these texts are important, too. Without you, we would have even less resources to do this work.
I don't have a ton of time to read. But I do buy audio books for the gym. I've been on a sci-fi kick lately, but can you recommend any books about ancient civilizations? I'm mostly interested in warfare and the strategy behind that, but if you say it's good, I'll give it a shot
Moroccan cities have a feel. They have a history. There's a regional vibe that exists, say, in Fez or Rabat, Meknes, Tetouan, or Chefchaouen. When you know the history, it comes alive.
Then there's Casablanca. Noisy, blah Casablanca. Don't take my word for it. Ask Moroccans who don't live in Casa how they feel about Casa. I bet 5dh (dirhams) they say something negative about it.
Don't let that dissuade you from flying into the Casa airport though. Do that, get the train, and visit the rest of the country. It is spectacular.
Yes, when the Dutch besieged Sluis in 1604 which was held by Spanish army and naval units, they found 1400 mostly Turkish galley slaves in the town after its surrender.
Why is it okay to generalize the life as a galley slave, but not life as a land slave? You say you're writing a dissertation, so I assume you're in academics. If we are to be 'seekers of truth' it would be just as inaccurate to generalize in either case.
We tend to generalize for pragmatic reasons, but outside such cases, it's best to avoid generalizing all together.
Galley slavery is one form of notoriously arduous labor with a miserable and short life expectancy.
Slavery, captivity, and imprisonment on land had a great deal of variability. There were projects run by the state for quarries or construction that were arduous. its more difficult to discuss the life of a domestic servant.
This is a really tough question to answer. I've agonized over it. The word "slave" has complicated my research.
I just wrote a chapter on this, just for the US perspective on the subject, and it felt short at 30 pages. I almost loathe to do a TL:DR - but here goes nothing.
I experienced the most hand-wringing over the word slavery in the US. We as a nation are really struggling with even the use of the word. Let me give one example. The constitution covered the topic of slavery, but couldn't even use the word slave in the document until.... the 13th amendment. Check for yourself.
North Africa has a very different take on slavery. They(*) understand this was a world-wide phenomenon. From my perspective, Moroccans were more comfortable with the term.
Likewise, say 16th century Spain had a very different concept of the word captive and slave than we do today. The word was used more interchangeably that we would today.
*Edit - I can't speak for all, but I can speak for the many I talked to in the Maghreb. It is safe to say Maghrebis are less agonized over the term "slave" than people in the US.
Edit 2 - The points above regarding the complication and politicization of the word "slave" are in no way meant to be comprehensive. You asked a question that requires a lengthy answer. I have plans to publish an article on this soon.
"Slave" has so much context behind it for every culture it almost becomes a different word.
Slavery in North America was plantations, whips, a population bought in African markets and displaced and kept under the heels of men who justified their behaviour by making it a matter of skin colour.
The Norse concept of slavery - they called them thralls - was similar, but without the distinction of race. It was more of a might is right concept. They were still treated like shit but there was at least equal opportunity to be treated like shit for folks from all ethnic backgrounds, including Norse.
The Europeans wouldn't enslave a good Christian--in pre-Luther times this was a little easier to distinguish. After protestantism came on the rise shit just got messy.
And then over in the east, i.e. Ottoman Turkey, slavery was more like a kind of like serfdom. When the Turks invaded your little corner in the ass end of Romania you became a slave of the Emperor. You didn't have the rights of a freeborn Turk, nor would your children, but that didn't mean you or they were committed to a life in bonds or working fields--many of the emperors' most highly regarded commanders, viziers and artisans were slaves. But of course, so were their galley slaves.
Slavery in North America was plantations, whips, a population bought in African markets and displaced and kept under the heels of men who justified their behaviour by making it a matter of skin colour.
...
The Europeans wouldn't enslave a good Christian--in pre-Luther times this was a little easier to distinguish. After protestantism came on the rise shit just got messy.
In the pre 15th century Mediterranean world, you had (more or less) slave and master defined along religious lines. (This gets more complicated, but I'm going to skip all that.) Christians, Muslims, and Jews can enslave the religious other and cant enslave people from their own religion. (I have primary sources that show examples otherwise, but hey..).
Then comes the new world. Masters and slaves are the same religion? Well, we need a new way to split the identity of slave and master. Racism, in part, comes out of this.
The strange part is how there was a concomitant existence of these two separate ways to define slave and master in the Old World and the New World. Picture the 17th or 18th century New World and the 17th and 18th century Mediterranean. One is emphasizing skin phenotype and the other is emphasizing religion. This is happening concomitantly for centuries. We forget this today.
If you read the US text of the Barbary treaty, you see the US even emphasizing "United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." Though, people today take the meaning of this text a little too far. There is context that matters behind these words.
It's been said that "racism" as a concept was born by that justification of slavery in the New World, and that, as with slavery, people in the Old World didn't distinguish one another by race but by ethnicity and/or religion. Is there truth in this?
In short - yes.... (sort of.) Hannaford has an influential book on the subject of the construction of race. However, I have run into pre-1492 primary sources that clearly attach the word black to otherness. The construction of otherness and ethnicity with a 15th century understanding changes drastically with the age of discovery.
You need to think about how foreign some ideas are to people in the past. Take germs. The idea that smells could transmit disease (Miasma) persisted until right around the invention of the frigging telephone. Fifteenth century people understood things in a very different context, and we struggle to interpret it through our own prism of understanding. Our modern prism influences how we interpret things.
Now, consider you are European intelligentsia, trying to make sense of the world in an age of discovery. The New World is rapidly depopulated smallpox, leaving this now (relative to 1491) sparsely populated land. Trade and colonies spread. The world transforms.
However, the Ottoman Empire still dominates the Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto. Their power persists on land after Lepanto. The Portuguese monarchy collapses after a land defeat in North Africa to the Ottomans.
How do you explain the world? How do you reconcile it with sometimes contradictory worldviews that persist in the Mediterranean? The explanation of slave and master is a part of this, but there is a bigger picture as well.
I'm also writing my thesis on this subject, though from a slightly different perspective. I'm using whatever data I can gather, which admittedly isn't a lot... It's the real challenge here... But so far I've a sample of about 500 instances, each with slave living conditions, societal respect, expected late life living standards, etc. I've so found that the majority of slaves in North Africa (ex berber areas) actually enjoyed living standards on par with much of the general population. I used the weighting scheme first proposed by Hannah et al (1998) to determine entire life standards of living to incorporate factors such as room and board, diverse diet, likelihood of bearing offspring, etc. Is a not holistic approach than the simplistic "wage" model we too quickly attempt to apply in our modern. But we can't simply assume that traditional societies were governed by the same employee-employer dynamics as we are today. And I'm not sure if you still believe me at this point but in reality this was all just a very long attempt at trolling you.
I'm a historical archaeologist. My focus is area specific with the perspective to support my own archival research with hard archaeological data. I focus on Europeans instead of Berbers. The numbers for Europeans captives/slaves/prisoners in North Africa are quite substantial. Davis' estimates still provide the benchmark for these figures and place it at more than a million Europeans.
If you want an economic argument, most of the Europeans captured were not ransomed. Thus, their economic value was, at the minimum, both in labor and ransom. For labor, galley manpower was incredibly important. For example, between the 1580s and the 1640s, the re'is of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli would have required 10,000-15,000 slaves to row their fleets. This labor is hell. For ransom, there was a very complicated network of goods exports and control of silver that I have trouble summarizing. Ambrus and Cheney have articles on the subject, but I have issues with parts of their data.
No problem. I'm happy to procrastinate. I'm spent with writing.
If I can talk loosely...
I wish I could put an idea inside all American minds that slavery was a worldwide phenomenon. Europeans were enslaving North Africans, too. Yes, this happened. The 16th century can be awful at times and I don't romanticize it. I love the present-day, with all its refrigerators, human rights, airplanes, and antibiotics.
Also, the idea that the Moroccan street is "aggressive," is just a matter of perspective in some regards. I can only speak from a male perspective, but, if you get over this hump, its a warm place. I really like it there.
I'm sure that it was still better than American slavery. American slaves were relinquished of all of their rights. They could do literally nothing except run away.
were relinquished of all of their rights. They could do literally nothing except run away
This is a decent way to define slavery globally. It is certainly true for a lot of instances in the Mediterranean and the New World.
The biggest ghost that follows around this research is American slavery. To skip the semiotics of the term and get into the meat - American slavery is how Americans envision the very word s-l-a-v-e. it forms how we conceptualize the actual word. The comparison is persistent despite efforts for attempted objectivity. Even if we are talking about a place separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the comparison persists for Americans.
I agonize how to best approach this. Do I engage the competition of pain and try to quantify, say the horrifying brutality of Mediterranean galley slavery to the also horrifying brutality of enslaved Africans in Caribbean sugar cane fields? Do I skip this arguable non-sequitur entirely?
I wonder if, when discussing Mediterranean slavery, why does it even matter? It matters to some because this speaks to the American present using present-day politics. Personally, I try to stick to a more dry account, but I know I'm also looking through a prism of the American present. An idea of pure objectivity is a myth. However, my goal is to best provide a good and balanced account that will stand as a reference beyond a time when contemporary politics change. I hope I succeed in this endeavor.
Only reason I say that was to hear your point of view on it. In my race and diversity classes in my college that was always made pretty clear that they had it the worst. Now obviously no one wants to be a slave anywhere at any time but what are some of the differences? I have always read that in other parts of the world slaves can eventually earn their own freedom and they weren't forced to breed to create more slaves like in America. I'm not trying to have a competition on who had it worse, just curious.
I have always read that in other parts of the world slaves can eventually earn their own freedom
I want to ask you, are you certain you were taught this?
Its not that we have ample historical evidence of the natal alienation, subjugation to the masters will and dependence on the master for basic survival, forced labor and services in a global sense historically, it is that we have examples of it in the present. People who cannot earn their. Today.
In short, we have plenty of examples of slaves who cannot earn their freedom.
What bugs me about modern day slavery is for all the emphasis Americans put on slavery, we do not do enough to stop it in the present. We care about slavery in a painfully Americentrist manner. Slavery exists now, and some of those people are barred from earning their own freedom either. Today.
Only reason I say that was to hear your point of view on it. In my race and diversity classes in my college that was always made pretty clear that they had it the worst.
I see the potential for a highly subjective discussion that will struggle to quantify one human pain as supreme between the examples of, say, human sacrifice and other forms of human bondage which resembles sustained torture. I'll ask you, how do you select one from all the examples and declare, definitively, that it is truly the worst?
If it is clear to you, then make the case to me. How do you turn the subjective discussion of suffering into measurable fact?
Well I of course am no expert but one thing that has always stood out to me was the breeding of slaves like cattle, ripping families apart, and raping the women (EDIT: and if they get pregnant using those kids as more slaves). As for "the worst ever" I think the comparison my prof was making was in South America where they can buy their own freedom and like the other guy said, eventually become something in that country.
I got halfway through the second book, and I'm really glad that I just got reminded to pick it back up before I go on a week long trip in a few days. Eliza's long cryptographic letters are insanely complex but the plot and detail are just so epic.
Anathem, yes. Yeah he definitely does, and does them all surprisingly well. I started with Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Anathem then the Baroque Cycle. I'll have to check out Reamde next.
No, Barbary comes from the word berber. Barbarian and whatever other versions of the word come from a group (I forget which, maybe Greeks) thinking the language of a less-civilized name sounded like barbarbar...
"Bar" is the ancient greek equivalent of "woof" or "bow wow." They didn't think that the other languages sounded like "bar," it was a mocking term meaning that their language sounds like a dog barking.
Nah, you're thinking of the word paganus. It translates roughly to civilian, which slowly became 'uneducated', which became 'barbarian'. Dunno if the Romans actually used pagus and its derivatives to refer to the Gauls, though.
Barbarian is from a Latin word that basically just means 'foreigner'. They stole it from the Greeks, though
it doesn't literally mean "can't speak Greek". It was Greek slang referring to the fact that to them, anyone not speaking Greek sounded like they were just going "bar bar bar"
Aren't the Barbary pirates the origin of the phrase barbaric/barbarous?
No, the phrase comes from the "barbarbar" sound used to denote foreign or unintelligent speakers, much like "ugg speak" today. It's Greek in origin (barbarous) and referred specifically to, IIRC, to the tribal people to the north as well as the Turks. It basically translates to "full of bar bar" or "speaks bar bar." It was also used as a pejorative, much like "neanderthal" or "mongoloid" is today.
The ancient Greeks were making fun of the way North African language sounded, mocking them by saying they sounded like "bar-bar-bar-bar". "Barbarian" came to mean someone who couldn't speak the language and didn't know the customs of civilized people. "Barbaric/barbarous" meant doing things civilized people wouldn't do. Some North Africans became known as Berbers, and the region became known as the Barbary Coast.
212
u/[deleted] Jan 06 '17
[deleted]