Anita has asked several times whether there were connections of any
significance between Islam and Africans and the European enslavement of
Indians.
Though not always direct, the connections are there, embedded in the
processes of change that shifted the focus of Western European
enterprise and empire from the Old (especially Mediterranean) World to
the New (American) World between 1400 and 1700, or thereabouts. It was
the earlier expansion of Islam that brought sugar production from India
to the eastern Mediterranean, where it was discovered by crusading
Europeans, with momentous consequences for the next several centuries of
world history. Muslim merchants also helped construct a trans-Saharan
slave trade that helped the West shift from a "slaves are Slavs"
paradigm to a "slaves are Africans" mindset once the Turks took
Constantinople in 1453. Because of these and related developments,
Portuguese and Spanish colonizers, with the technical assistance (sugar
production, colonial administration, trade & finance, seafaring) of
Venetians and Genoans (remember Columbus?), were establishing sugar
plantations worked by black African slaves on Atlantic island colonies
(e.g., Madeira, Cape Verde, Sao Tome) before 1492. The Iberian
initiatives that sent ships further and further along the west and
central African coast and sponsored Columbus's voyages of the 1490s
depended in critical ways on the expertise of Jewish and Muslim
mapmakers and their scientific view of the world. Ironically, 1492 was
the not only the year in which Columbus made his epic voyage but also
the year in which resurgent Christian monarchs expelled Jews from Iberia
and "reconquered" that peninsula by defeating the remaining pockets of
Muslim power. Once in the New World, the Iberian conquistadors quickly
turned to mining gold and silver and growing sugar--all with forced
labor, first mainly Indian and then increasingly African (the latter
including, in many areas, significant numbers of Muslims).
This is a horrendously oversimplified account, but it at least hints at
some interesting connections between the rise of Islam and the expansion
of mostly Christian Europe in both the Old and New Worlds (see works by
Philip Curtin, Charles Verlinden, David Brion Davis, Robert Bartlett,
Patricia Seed, Felipe Fernandez Armesto and others for more details).
Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego
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