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