White slavery

On the European continent under feudalism, there were various forms of status applying to people (such as serf, bordar, villein, vagabond, and slave) who were indentured or forced to labour without pay.

[6] The term was also used by Clifford G. Roe from the beginning of the twentieth century to campaign against the forced prostitution and sexual slavery of girls who worked in Chicago brothels.

Most Slavic slaves were imported to the Muslim world through the border between Christian and Islamic kingdoms where castration centres were also located instead of the direct route.

[10] Due to the Byzantine Empire and Venice blocking Arab merchants from European ports, they later started importing in slaves from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea.

For a long time, until the early 18th century, the khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East.

Slave markets flourished on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, in what is modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya, between the 15th and middle of the 19th century.

"[21]Davis's numbers have been challenged by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that the true picture of European slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe and black people from west Africa.

[citation needed] Middle East expert John Wright cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation.

From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids along seaside towns of Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children.

[26][27] Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail Ben Sharif controlled a fleet of corsairs based at Salé-le-Vieux and Salé-le-Neuf (now Rabat), which supplied him with Christian slaves and weapons through their raids in the Mediterranean and all the way to the Black Sea.

Moulay Ismail was nicknamed the 'bloody king' by the Europeans due to his extreme cruelty and exaction of summary justice upon his Christian slaves.

In the eighth century, slavery lasted longer[clarification needed] due to "frequent cross-border skirmishes, interspersed between periods of major campaigns".

[34][35] In the Arauco War (1550–1662), a long-running conflict between Spanish and Mapuches in Chile, both sides engaged in slavery of the enemy population, among other atrocities.

[36] As late as in the 1850s alleged shipwreck survivor Elisa Bravo was said to be living as wife to a Mapuche cacique,[37] in what is described as the most brutal forced coexistence[38] resulting in children of "mixed blood".

[39] A report dating from 1863 said that her captors, fearing vengeance from Spaniards, sold her to the warlord Calfucurá in Puelmapu for a hundred mares, but that she had died after three years.

[citation needed] Slaves were drawn from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, including Gaul, Hispania, North Africa, Syria, Germania, Britannia, the Balkans, and Greece.

[citation needed] Damnati in metallum ("those condemned to the mine") were convicts who lost their freedom as citizens (libertas), forfeited their property (bona) to the state, and became servi poenae, slaves as a legal penalty.

This has been confirmed by biochemical analysis of 166 skeletons from three imperial-era cemeteries in the vicinity of Rome (where the bulk of the slaves lived), which shows that only one individual came from outside of Europe (North Africa), and another two possibly did, but results are inconclusive.

[45][46] The "pençik" or "penç-yek" tax, meaning "one fifth", was a taxation based on a verse of the Quran; whereby one fifth of the spoils of war belonged to God, to Muhammad and his family, to orphans, to those in need and to travelers.

[31] Christians and Jews, known as People of the Book in Islam, were considered dhimmis in territories under Muslim rule, a status of second-class citizens that were afforded limited freedoms, legal protections, personal safety, and were allowed to "practice their religion, subject to certain conditions, and to enjoy a measure of communal autonomy" in return for paying the jizya and kharaj taxes.

[55] Basilike Papoulia wrote that "the devsirme was the 'forcible removal', in the form of a tribute, of children of the Christian subjects from their ethnic, religious and cultural environment and their transportation into the Turkish-Islamic environment with the aim of employing them in the service of the Palace, the army, and the state, whereby they were on the one hand to serve the Sultan as slaves and freedmen and on the other to form the ruling class of the State.

"[56] When the Ottoman Empire allied with Muslim territories against Christian, slavery would be a major persistence in ensuring economic gain to both sides.

Sterling Professor of History at Yale University David Brion Davis wrote that:[58] From Barbados to Virginia, colonists long preferred English or Irish indentured servants as their main source of field labor; during most of the seventeenth century they showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from chattel slaves – a degradation that was being carried out in a more extreme and far more extensive way with respect to the peasantry in contemporary Russia.

Female inmates, some of whom were sick with venereal disease, were forced to attend confessions three times each day where they would be whipped if their demeanor and behaviors were not acceptably penitent.

[61] In addition to Salpêtrière, the French transported women from other almshouses and hospitals including Bicêtre, Hôpital général de Paris and Pitié.

It was particularly associated with accounts of women enslaved in Middle Eastern harems, such as the so-called Circassian beauties,[62] which was a slave trade that was still ongoing in the early 20th-century.

The slave trade in primarily white girls intended for the harems in the Ottoman Middle East attracted attention in the West.

However, in March 1858, the Ottoman Governor of Trapezunt informed the British Consul that the 1854 ban had been a temporary war time ban due to foreign pressure, and that he had been given orders to allow slave ships on the Black Sea passage on their way to Constantinople, and in December formal tax regulations were introduced, legitimizing the Circassian slave trade again.

[69] Moral panic over the "traffic in women" rose to a peak in England in the 1880s, after the exposure of the Eliza Armstrong case and the internationally infamous White slave trade affair in the 1880s.

Arthur Lee would state in the House of Commons: "the United Kingdom, and particularly England, is increasingly becoming a clearing-house and depot and dispatch centre of the white slave traffic, and the headquarters of the foreign agents engaged in the most expensive and lucrative phase of the business.