The massive slave trade of Eastern Slavs and Africans compared

Gural
Gural Members Posts: 96
edited February 2010 in R & R (Religion and Race)
It really seems that the African slave trade is the only phenomenon in the world history that can compete with the vastness of slave trade practiced on Eastern Slavs.

It's noteworthy that the most hectic phase of Slavic slave raiding began only after Russia's so-called "Mongol Yoke" had already ended - by the late 15th century, as Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks started their military alliance and business partnership.

Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 by Richard Hellie. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

pp. 21-23, 25
Early Modern Russia and the International Slave Trade

Between 1450 and 1725 the world witnessed many changes in slavery. The most notable were the abolition of slavery throughout most of Europe and the introduction of black slavery into the New World on a massive scale. To the east and south of early modern Russia, slavery in the Islamic world continued unabated, and the attempt to stop slave raiding by Turkic and Arab peoples which dispatched hundreds of thousands of Russians into the international slave trade, was a major cause of the Muscovite garrison state. Comparisons with Africa are fruitful, for Africa and Slavdom have been the two chief sources of slaves for a longer period of time than have any other areas. Philip Curtin has described the two areas as "population reservoirs." 29
...

East Slavs felt no compunction about dispatching each other into the international slave trade, but this practice was drastically curtailed with the consolidation of the Muscovite state at the end of the fifteenth century. 32 Around the mid-sixteenth century the Russians ceased providing other Slavs as slaves to the Tatars. 33 No such consolidation occurred in Africa where, down to the 1930s, the various tribes continued to raid one another to capture slaves both for domestic use and to sell to outsiders. Moreover, in spite of the picture presented in Alex Haley's Roots, white slave traders almost never entered the interior in pursuit of prey but rather purchased their cargo from Africans at the ocean front; coastal Africans would not allow Europeans either into or through their own countries. On the other hand, the Tatars who raided Muscovy always penetrated Rus' on their own initiative, not by invitation, and the Muscovite government made the greatest possible effort to prevent Tatar incursions. 34

The number of Africans sent into the international slave trade has been calculated at 10 million across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1870, 10 million across the Sahara between 850 and 1890, and 8 million from East Africa between 650 and 1905. 35 Alan Fisher has discussed the number of East Slavs captured by the Crimean Tatars and dispatched into the international slave trade for the years between 1468 and 1694, but arrived at no general totals. He also has some earlier figures, such as 2,000 slaves a year in the fourteenth century, with that figure rising in the fifteenth. Slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475, when the Ottomans took over Black Sea slave trade from the Genoese and the Crimeans began slave raiding as a major industry, especially between 1514 and 1654. In the 1570s close to 20,000 slaves a year were being sold in Kafa, ten times the number that had passed through there in the 1540s. 36 In 1589, taxes were collected on the sale of 4,000 imported slaves a year and that the Poles may have had losses at an even higher rate throughout the entire seventeenth century. Catherine the Great spoke of annual losses of 20,000. 38 No doubt she had in mind the number initially seized, not the much smaller number that ever made it to the sale block. Both African and Slavic losses can only be described as staggering.

While the impact of Muscovy's massive, involuntary involvement in the international slave trade on domestic political and social life is well known (the garrison state and a near-caste society were both second-order consequences of Muscovy's attempt to meet its defense against slave raiding), that participation seems to have had little impact on early modern Russian slavery itself. While there were Tatar slaves in Muscovy, the institution was shaped primarily by the fact that the vast majority of the human chattels in Muscovy were native Russians.
...

The consequences of the massive losses of population for Africa are not as clear as they are for Muscovy. Philip Curtin even has suggested that the sixteenth-century contact with the New World led to the introduction of two new crops, manioc and maize, which helped to increase fertility and sustain a rise in population greater than the losses from the export trade. 39. Muscovy got nothing comparable from the Tatars.

I cannot help noticing that the Russians, Polish, and Ukranians have done relatively little self-excusing moaning about their enslaved past, compared to Blacks! So to all you blacks who say that the white man is the devil, can we Slavs say that asians and blacks are the devil???

Comments

  • shadb33
    shadb33 Members Posts: 3,810 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2010
    According to "scholars" and their criteria there were only 5 true slave societies: Athens, Rome, the Caribbean, U.S. South, and Brazil. So Russia aint make the cut.
  • Gural
    Gural Members Posts: 96
    edited February 2010
    shadb33 wrote: »
    According to "scholars" and their criteria there were only 5 true slave societies: Athens, Rome, the Caribbean, U.S. South, and Brazil. So Russia aint make the cut.

    Well those "scholars" you're referring too are either poorly educated or a Khalid Muhammad type who just blindly hate whites. The word slave came from US SLAVIC PEOPLE when the Roman empire invaded our lands and took us as slaves because they saw us as inferior. ? 's hatred of Slavs also accounted for 50 million of us to be murdered and starved to death during world war 2. He saw us Slavs, Poles specifically, as sub-human parasite race mixers. You can live in denial all you want, but blacks weren't the only people to be subjected to slavery. Arabs are still enslaving blacks in Darfur, but the blame always comes back to whites.
  • Gural
    Gural Members Posts: 96
    edited February 2010
    More details on the 17th century Slavic slave trade. Just like the Barbary pirate kingdoms of North Africa were semi-independent vassals of the Ottoman Turks (and their suppliers of White slaves) in the West, the Crimean Tatars functioned in the same position in the East:


    Peter the Great; His Life and World by Robert E. Massie. London, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1981.
    pp. 85-6

    It was not the Turks whom Sophia and Golitsyn were asked to attack, but their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. Russian fear of these Moslem descendants of the Mongols was deep-rooted. Year after year, Tatar horsemen rode north out of their Crimean strongholds across the grazing lands of the Ukrainian steppe and, in small bands or large armies, swooped down on Cossack settlements or Russian towns to ravage and plunder. In 1662, Tatars captured the town of Putivl and carried off all the 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Russian slaves thronged Ottoman slave markets. Russian men were seen chained to the pars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean; young Russian boys made a welcome gift from the Crimean Khan to the Sultan. So numerous, in fact, were the Russian slaves in the East that it was asked mockingly whether any inhabitants still remained in Russia.

    There seemed no way to stop these devastating Tatar raids. The frontier was too broad, the Russian defenses too scanty; the Tatars' objectives could not be known in advance, and their mobility could not be equaled. The Tsar was reduced to paying an annual sum to the Khan, protection money which the Khan called a tribute and and the Russian preferred to describe as a gift. But this did not stop the raids.

    p. 87

    Sophia and Golitsyn would have been happy to end the war at once, had they been allowed to keep Kiev. What they could not face was the withdrawal of Russia's allies, leaving Muscovy alone to face the whole might of the Ottoman Empire. Reluctantly, therefore, they faced the necessity of organizing another expedition to the Crimea. In the spring of 1688, the Tatar Khan provided a further stimulus to action. Launching a campaign of his own, he ravaged the Ukraine, threatening the cities of Poltava and Kiev and advancing almost to the Carpathians. When he retired to the Crimea in the autumn, 60,000 prisoners stumbled behind his horsemen.

    p. 137

    Unquestionably, Peter's compulsion to reach the sea and his desire to test his army both played a part in the Azov decision. But there were other reasons, too. Russia was still at war with the Ottoman Empire, and every summer the horsemen of the Tatar Khan rode north to raid the Ukraine. In 1692, an army of 12,000 Tatar cavalry appeared before the town of Neimerov, burned it to the ground and carried away 2,000 prisoners to be sold in the Ottoman slave marts. A year later, the number of Russian prisoners mounted to 15,000.

    Since Sophia's fall, Moscow had done little to defend these southern border regions, despite the appeals to the capital. Indeed, the Tsar's indifference had led to a stinging jibe from Dositheus, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. "The Crimean Tatars are but a handful," he wrote to Peter, "and yet they boast that they receive a tribute from you. The Tatars are Turkish subjects, so it follows that you are Turkish subjects. Many times you have boasted that you will do such and such, but all finished with words only and nothing in fact is done."

    And here a great quote for everyone, made by Sahib Giray, leader of and army consisting of ARABS, BLACKS, AND TURKS:
    In 1541 the Crimea prepared a crucial attack. Sahib Giray himself set off on an expedition. In the letter to the juvenile Tsar Iwan IV he wrote: "Be acknowledged that we want to seize your lands, capture you, harness you to plough and tell you to plant ashes."
  • Hyde Parke
    Hyde Parke Members Posts: 2,573 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2010
    Gural wrote: »
    Well those "scholars" you're referring too are either poorly educated or a Khalid Muhammad type who just blindly hate whites. The word slave came from US SLAVIC PEOPLE when the Roman empire invaded our lands and took us as slaves because they saw us as inferior. ? 's hatred of Slavs also accounted for 50 million of us to be murdered and starved to death during world war 2. He saw us Slavs, Poles specifically, as sub-human parasite race mixers. You can live in denial all you want, but blacks weren't the only people to be subjected to slavery. Arabs are still enslaving blacks in Darfur, but the blame always comes back to whites.


    wtf are you talkin about? Slavery existed way back in biblical days. the term may have derived from Slavic people, but slavery has been since the beginning of time. wtf is this thread supposed to be about anyway? Who was the bigger slave?
  • kingblaze84
    kingblaze84 Members Posts: 14,288 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited February 2010
    I never once have said whites are the devils of the Earth.....every race is capable of evil. Whites though, have the biggest capability for evil.....history proves this.
  • rusty shackleford
    rusty shackleford Members Posts: 1,736 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2010
    Gural wrote: »
    I cannot help noticing that the Russians, Polish, and Ukranians have done relatively little self-excusing moaning about their enslaved past, compared to Blacks! So to all you blacks who say that the white man is the devil, can we Slavs say that asians and blacks are the devil???
    if they did something to you directly, then yeah.. be bitter as you want.. otherwise, let it go. you weren't there... ummmkay?
  • shadb33
    shadb33 Members Posts: 3,810 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2010
    Gural wrote: »
    You can live in denial all you want, but blacks weren't the only people to be subjected to slavery.

    According to "scholars" and their criteria there were only 5 true slave societies: Athens, Rome....
  • BOSS KTULU
    BOSS KTULU Banned Users Posts: 978 ✭✭
    edited February 2010
    Slavs don't use slavery as an excuse because Slavs have lots of AK-47's.
  • HughEMC
    HughEMC Members Posts: 1
    I've written a blog about the history of racism. This is some enlightening info. I think many on this thread have jumped to the wrong conclusion about this post. It is knowledge & in many ways it helps form a solidarity between oppressed peoples http://hughcipher.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-brief-analysis-of-color-based-racisms.html?m=1
  • The Lonious Monk
    The Lonious Monk Members Posts: 26,258 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Gural wrote: »
    It really seems that the African slave trade is the only phenomenon in the world history that can compete with the vastness of slave trade practiced on Eastern Slavs.

    It's noteworthy that the most hectic phase of Slavic slave raiding began only after Russia's so-called "Mongol Yoke" had already ended - by the late 15th century, as Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks started their military alliance and business partnership.

    Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 by Richard Hellie. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

    pp. 21-23, 25
    Early Modern Russia and the International Slave Trade

    Between 1450 and 1725 the world witnessed many changes in slavery. The most notable were the abolition of slavery throughout most of Europe and the introduction of black slavery into the New World on a massive scale. To the east and south of early modern Russia, slavery in the Islamic world continued unabated, and the attempt to stop slave raiding by Turkic and Arab peoples which dispatched hundreds of thousands of Russians into the international slave trade, was a major cause of the Muscovite garrison state. Comparisons with Africa are fruitful, for Africa and Slavdom have been the two chief sources of slaves for a longer period of time than have any other areas. Philip Curtin has described the two areas as "population reservoirs." 29
    ...

    East Slavs felt no compunction about dispatching each other into the international slave trade, but this practice was drastically curtailed with the consolidation of the Muscovite state at the end of the fifteenth century. 32 Around the mid-sixteenth century the Russians ceased providing other Slavs as slaves to the Tatars. 33 No such consolidation occurred in Africa where, down to the 1930s, the various tribes continued to raid one another to capture slaves both for domestic use and to sell to outsiders. Moreover, in spite of the picture presented in Alex Haley's Roots, white slave traders almost never entered the interior in pursuit of prey but rather purchased their cargo from Africans at the ocean front; coastal Africans would not allow Europeans either into or through their own countries. On the other hand, the Tatars who raided Muscovy always penetrated Rus' on their own initiative, not by invitation, and the Muscovite government made the greatest possible effort to prevent Tatar incursions. 34

    The number of Africans sent into the international slave trade has been calculated at 10 million across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1870, 10 million across the Sahara between 850 and 1890, and 8 million from East Africa between 650 and 1905. 35 Alan Fisher has discussed the number of East Slavs captured by the Crimean Tatars and dispatched into the international slave trade for the years between 1468 and 1694, but arrived at no general totals. He also has some earlier figures, such as 2,000 slaves a year in the fourteenth century, with that figure rising in the fifteenth. Slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475, when the Ottomans took over Black Sea slave trade from the Genoese and the Crimeans began slave raiding as a major industry, especially between 1514 and 1654. In the 1570s close to 20,000 slaves a year were being sold in Kafa, ten times the number that had passed through there in the 1540s. 36 In 1589, taxes were collected on the sale of 4,000 imported slaves a year and that the Poles may have had losses at an even higher rate throughout the entire seventeenth century. Catherine the Great spoke of annual losses of 20,000. 38 No doubt she had in mind the number initially seized, not the much smaller number that ever made it to the sale block. Both African and Slavic losses can only be described as staggering.

    While the impact of Muscovy's massive, involuntary involvement in the international slave trade on domestic political and social life is well known (the garrison state and a near-caste society were both second-order consequences of Muscovy's attempt to meet its defense against slave raiding), that participation seems to have had little impact on early modern Russian slavery itself. While there were Tatar slaves in Muscovy, the institution was shaped primarily by the fact that the vast majority of the human chattels in Muscovy were native Russians.
    ...

    The consequences of the massive losses of population for Africa are not as clear as they are for Muscovy. Philip Curtin even has suggested that the sixteenth-century contact with the New World led to the introduction of two new crops, manioc and maize, which helped to increase fertility and sustain a rise in population greater than the losses from the export trade. 39. Muscovy got nothing comparable from the Tatars.

    I cannot help noticing that the Russians, Polish, and Ukranians have done relatively little self-excusing moaning about their enslaved past, compared to Blacks! So to all you blacks who say that the white man is the devil, can we Slavs say that asians and blacks are the devil???

    Well, one, I don't see how you would say blacks are the devil when even your own source says that Turks and Arabs were primarily responsible for enslaving Turks.

    And, two, Slavery was only half the problem with blacks. Last I checked, there was no system in place that was put there specifically to keep them down after they were freed. Blacks can't say the same.
  • Genya
    Genya Members Posts: 3
    shadb33 wrote: »
    According to "scholars" and their criteria there were only 5 true slave societies: Athens, Rome, the Caribbean, U.S. South, and Brazil. So Russia aint make the cut.

    That's exactly so - RUSSIA was NEVER a slave society, it was ENSLAVED society for the reason of them being slaves themselves - not keeping a system of captured slaves from abroad as did the US, Rome, and the rest.
  • Genya
    Genya Members Posts: 3
    Gural wrote: »
    It really seems that the African slave trade is the only phenomenon in the world history that can compete with the vastness of slave trade practiced on Eastern Slavs.

    It's noteworthy that the most hectic phase of Slavic slave raiding began only after Russia's so-called "Mongol Yoke" had already ended - by the late 15th century, as Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks started their military alliance and business partnership.

    Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 by Richard Hellie. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

    pp. 21-23, 25
    Early Modern Russia and the International Slave Trade

    Between 1450 and 1725 the world witnessed many changes in slavery. The most notable were the abolition of slavery throughout most of Europe and the introduction of black slavery into the New World on a massive scale. To the east and south of early modern Russia, slavery in the Islamic world continued unabated, and the attempt to stop slave raiding by Turkic and Arab peoples which dispatched hundreds of thousands of Russians into the international slave trade, was a major cause of the Muscovite garrison state. Comparisons with Africa are fruitful, for Africa and Slavdom have been the two chief sources of slaves for a longer period of time than have any other areas. Philip Curtin has described the two areas as "population reservoirs." 29
    ...

    East Slavs felt no compunction about dispatching each other into the international slave trade, but this practice was drastically curtailed with the consolidation of the Muscovite state at the end of the fifteenth century. 32 Around the mid-sixteenth century the Russians ceased providing other Slavs as slaves to the Tatars. 33 No such consolidation occurred in Africa where, down to the 1930s, the various tribes continued to raid one another to capture slaves both for domestic use and to sell to outsiders. Moreover, in spite of the picture presented in Alex Haley's Roots, white slave traders almost never entered the interior in pursuit of prey but rather purchased their cargo from Africans at the ocean front; coastal Africans would not allow Europeans either into or through their own countries. On the other hand, the Tatars who raided Muscovy always penetrated Rus' on their own initiative, not by invitation, and the Muscovite government made the greatest possible effort to prevent Tatar incursions. 34

    The number of Africans sent into the international slave trade has been calculated at 10 million across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1870, 10 million across the Sahara between 850 and 1890, and 8 million from East Africa between 650 and 1905. 35 Alan Fisher has discussed the number of East Slavs captured by the Crimean Tatars and dispatched into the international slave trade for the years between 1468 and 1694, but arrived at no general totals. He also has some earlier figures, such as 2,000 slaves a year in the fourteenth century, with that figure rising in the fifteenth. Slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475, when the Ottomans took over Black Sea slave trade from the Genoese and the Crimeans began slave raiding as a major industry, especially between 1514 and 1654. In the 1570s close to 20,000 slaves a year were being sold in Kafa, ten times the number that had passed through there in the 1540s. 36 In 1589, taxes were collected on the sale of 4,000 imported slaves a year and that the Poles may have had losses at an even higher rate throughout the entire seventeenth century. Catherine the Great spoke of annual losses of 20,000. 38 No doubt she had in mind the number initially seized, not the much smaller number that ever made it to the sale block. Both African and Slavic losses can only be described as staggering.

    While the impact of Muscovy's massive, involuntary involvement in the international slave trade on domestic political and social life is well known (the garrison state and a near-caste society were both second-order consequences of Muscovy's attempt to meet its defense against slave raiding), that participation seems to have had little impact on early modern Russian slavery itself. While there were Tatar slaves in Muscovy, the institution was shaped primarily by the fact that the vast majority of the human chattels in Muscovy were native Russians.
    ...

    The consequences of the massive losses of population for Africa are not as clear as they are for Muscovy. Philip Curtin even has suggested that the sixteenth-century contact with the New World led to the introduction of two new crops, manioc and maize, which helped to increase fertility and sustain a rise in population greater than the losses from the export trade. 39. Muscovy got nothing comparable from the Tatars.

    I cannot help noticing that the Russians, Polish, and Ukranians have done relatively little self-excusing moaning about their enslaved past, compared to Blacks! So to all you blacks who say that the white man is the devil, can we Slavs say that asians and blacks are the devil???

    Well, one, I don't see how you would say blacks are the devil when even your own source says that Turks and Arabs were primarily responsible for enslaving Turks.

    And, two, Slavery was only half the problem with blacks. Last I checked, there was no system in place that was put there specifically to keep them down after they were freed. Blacks can't say the same.

    Answer:
    First, I am of Slavic descent, coming from Russia and familiar with the history. Our slave trade lasted longer than the whole history of the United States. The Slavic civilization and slavery existed for centuries before the US/the Americas had been discovered by the Europeans. The Eastern Slavs remained in slavery until 1861 - when it was abolished - just 2-3 years right before the US slavery was abolished. So, it was a much longer lasting torment of the past. But why would I think of blacks as devil? The blacks never enslaved us and had nothing to do at all with our history. Actually, they replaced us in Western and colonial Europe as they decided to switch from slav to ? ... We just remained in Eastern Europe tortured barbarically as were the black slaves in the Americas. I find nothing wrong with the blacks or anyone. I'm not complaining about my past history either - I have never seen my great-great-grand-parents any way...

    Second, just as slavery was only half the problem with blacks, it was also only half the problem with the Russian slaves too. After the blacks were freed, they still faced discrimination and racism for decades afterwards - that was , I presume, the other half of their problem.....But as for the Russians, when we got freed, we were faced with two wars, followed by almost a century of a ruthless and brutal totalitarian regime, similar to the North Korea today, in which millions have been tortured and starved in concentration camps - our own leader (actually non-white: he was ethnically a central Asian/Muslim origin, not an ethnic Slav) terrorized millions inside our own country - nobody could escape. And for suspicion of escape, people were persecuted or mysteriously killed. Stalin killed more people than the Natzi Germany and Communist China did combined. My own grandmother had to escape forced starvation by Stalin in Ukraine lands......while at the same time, around world war 2 - the same Slavs were hated and persecuted by Natzi Germany. Also, the Slaves were considered at one point in the US to be "non-white". And, when the harsh regime ended, the Russian society faced a colossal economic collapse, during which people went to work for 6-8 months a year without getting paid any money....working for free, only hoping to get paid ......people got hungry and corruption increased in the late 1990's, my family came to the US for better life
  • Genya
    Genya Members Posts: 3
    Genya..... I was saying that the situation in the 1990's was so bad, that my family had to just do whatever to escape poverty and we came to the US for a better life. Now, I live in the US, according to the US standard, I'm "poor" and qualify for food stamps - but this American poverty is so rich and luxurious in comparison to the Russian poverty. I met my African American friends here from a ghetto - the things they get - we could only dream of in Russia. The school busses, police officers at school, etc.....In our schools, if someone gets killed, it's just a bad news - nobody knows what and how and so it can happen again and again as there's no security protection at all and no cameras and no toilet paper in the bathroom, and sometimes, no bathroom at all. If we get the bathroom - it's all poopy -covered with ? - as we don't get maintenance workers everyday like in the US.....
    I wasn't trying to contradict any one's argument. I was just relating my relevant history as a person of Slavic origin and race.