Barbary Slave Trade

The Barbary slave trade refers to the slave markets that flourished on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, which included the Ottoman provinces of Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania and the independent sultanate of Morocco, between the 16th and middle of the 18th century. The Ottoman provinces in North Africa were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, but in reality they were mostly autonomous. The North African slave markets were part of the Arab slave trade.

European slaves were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, and as far as Ireland and Iceland.

Barbary pirates also ranged across the Mediterranean waters, east of Tunis and south and east of the Scilian narrows escpecially the Aegean, raiding ships, coasts and islands, taking booty and slaves from the Aegean Islands.

Although the eastern Mediterranean is sometimes presented as being dominated by the Ottomans from the 16th century onwards, here too piracy and privateering remained intense. As late as the 18th century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean".

For centuries, large vessels on the Mediterranean relied on galley slaves supplied by North African and Ottoman slave traders.

The Ohio State University history Professor Robert Davis describes the White Slave Trade as minimized by most modern historians in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800. Davis estimates that 1 million to 1.25 million white Christian Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone (these numbers do not include the European people which were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast), and roughly 700 Americans were held captive in this region as slaves between 1785 and 1815.

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