While at dinner today, I started reading a book on the domestic slave trade of the United States, itself one of the more obscure aspects of the slave trade in antebellum America, and one of the introductory comments in the book irritated me, because it stated that reading this one book would help one to become an expert on the slave trade. There are at present, unfortunately, an awful lot of people who fancy themselves to be an expert on the slave trade because they have followed along the 1619 Project and think that they know all the secrets about slavery simply because they have focused on a tiny portion in space and time of the history of slavery within world history, starting in ancient history and extending to the present day. This simply has to stop, as there are people who think that white people are unique historical villains with regards to slavery, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Let us discuss how this is so by looking at what sort of knowledge would be necessary to be a genuine expert on the slave trade.

Even confining oneself to the Transatlantic slave trade, there are a lot of elements of the slave trade that simply go far beyond what acolytes of the 1619 program have to offer. The United States was a peripheral slave importer, importing roughly 450,000 of the 12.5 million slaves or so that were sent across the Atlantic, or around 3% or so of the total. Far more slaves were sent to South America and the Caribbean than went to the United States, and yet one would be hard pressed to find many writings about the slave trade in those areas. Few people know about the domestic slave trade within the United States, which is an important area, but one which demonstrates that conditions were far better for slaves in the United States than in other areas where slave populations continually needed to be bolstered by importation due to the severity of conditions, given that nowhere else in the Western world did slave populations increase naturally. This is not to say that the breeding and trading of slaves was pleasant business, far from it.

Even if we examine Africa’s role in slavery, the focus on America leaves out a lot of very important details to slavery in that continent. For one, it leaves out both the indigenous system of slavery–including its own logistics involved in the shipment and keeping of slaves in slave pens and slave forts–that Europeans and Americans tapped into, that Africans already had at the time the Transatlantic slave trade started. It neglects the slavery that went on in Africa for thousands of years before Europeans were involved in it, as well as the slavery that still goes on to this day in Saharan and Sahel regions of the continent where villages to this day in areas like Mali and Niger are labeled as slave villages. It neglects the Arab slave trade that went on across the Sahara and the East coast of Africa that also took some 12.5 million Africans into slavery but which has received far less press than the Transatlantic Slave trade, despite being horrors which survived late enough to be quashed in large part by the efforts of British and other imperial powers. Nor does this include the slavery of the Barbary coasts of North Africa, which often victimized Americans and Europeans, and was an aspect of slavery that deeply interested–for obvious reasons–the white population of the early 19th century. These are all aspects of slavery which deserve greater attention, and which place the horrors that Americans and Europeans are accused of in a fuller context.

Even if we limit our discussion of slavery to that which occurred in the Americas, the slavery of Africans is but one of the variety of unfree labor that has been exploited in American history. At least some books are interested in exploring sharecropping in the aftermath of the American Civil War as being a continuation of slavery by another name. Likewise, there are some writers who wish to write about peonage or the slavery of Native Americans, which often preceded the African slave trade and influenced its origins because the numbers of America’s indigenous peoples declined so precipitously in the aftermath of efforts of discovery and colonization by Europe’s Atlantic powers in the 15th century and beyond. There are few writers, though, who care to write about poor white sharecroppers, of whom I know some personally who grew up under such conditions, or who wish to talk about indentured servitude and its long history within the United States as a form of unfree labor mostly (but not entirely) involving the exploitation of whites. Nor does this include a discussion of the polemics of labor politics by which Southern elites compared their treatment of slaves favorably to Northern treatment of its unskilled immigrant laborers. All of this again places American slavery in a larger context as part of a family of unfree labor and labor exploitation that was one option among many that could be chosen by elites looking to increase their wealth.

Beyond this, though, it is clear that neither were Africans the only victims of slavery in human history nor were Europeans and their settler colonists uniquely evil historical figures who exploited the world. Indeed, for much of history, the chief victims of slavery within the Mediterranean and European world were other white people. Slaves are called slaves, after all, because of the massive amount of Slavs sold down the river to Constantinople and then on to other cities like Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad, which were medieval centers of the slave trade. Seeing some English slaves in Rome apparently helped prompt an early effort to convert Britain to Roman Catholicism. Slavery proliferated in the nations of the Islamic Middle East in the creation of janissary and Mamluk troops from foreign populations forcibly converted to Islam and then forced to serve as the shock troops of Islamic regimes in Turkish and Egyptian regimes. The importation of slave labor, at least from what I have been able to read, from Africa was also involved in the agriculture of such areas as the Persian Gulf and those parts of the Indian subcontinent near the Indus River delta. One would be hard-pressed to find these elements of slavery receive the attention that they deserve in providing an overall context of slavery and the slave trade.

Indeed, if one wishes to become an expert on the slave trade, it would be vital not only to know all that we have previously discussed in this essay, but also such matters as the role of slavery in the Bible and in the writings of Greek philosophers, Christian, Jewish and Muslim theologians, as well as the legal codes of such diverse regimes as the antebellum South and European nations, medieval Christianity, various schools of Islam, ancient Greece and Rome, and all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. One would need to know the economic basis that made slavery profitable as more than simply a rare phenomenon for elites, the logistics of purchasing, transporting, and providing for human chattel. One would need to understand the tension that existed between the exploitation of slaves in various ways and the interests of liberty at home for citizens, since slavery has always involved a high degree of coercion, not only in the United States but in ancient Greece and Rome as well. One can also examine the relationship between the slave trade and military history, given that conquest and raids were a major source of slaves, debt, which often led parents to sell their children, as well as crime and punishment given the slavery that resulted from conviction for crime and the need to give restitution to victims. Few people have any sort of expertise in most of this large body of material, but if you want to be a real expert in the slave trade, you have a lot of research ahead of you, it can easily be understood.