It's honestly unnerving how much and how quickly can history be forgotten
.
Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe
"Little-known" doesn't come close to giving it justice. I've seen normies IRL be genuinely confused by the notion of white slaves, despite being from a country literally bordering the red area on this map, completely oblivious to the fact that their ancestors were one of the most often enslaved groups in Eurasia and there basically never having been black slaves here.
Equal to the West African slave trade in its demographic impact on the supplier region and greater than it up until the 18th century, yet it is the former that has basically redefined and put itself at the center of any kind of slavery studies, is talked about to this day and even continues to be an issue in world politics, both in terms of international politics between various countries and internal issues of various large countries, while the Black Sea slave trade is all but forgotten.
It never comes up in fiction and isn't in history books either (I found out about this particular slave trade on English-language Wikipedia ffs). Nobody except history professors and 4chan Chuds looking for anything they could use to undermine the mainstream undestanding of the world, history and politics even knows about this.
It's just interesting to think about it and what other historical events have been completely forgotten because there's no infrastructure to remember them. Or which are currently happening and won't be remembered.
Of course, I understand why that is so. First off, there is no surviving population in Turkey that traces its origins to those enslaved people, since the men were by and large prevented from reproducing as a large majority were castrated and mostly didn't have any chance to have sex with any woman even in the rare cases where they weren't castrated. Meanwhile, the women were used for reproduction by their owners, with all the random freak instances where an enslaved man would've impregnated his female owner or his male owner's wife being just dealt with by paternity fraud. Then, you have the fact that the countries which participated in the Transatlantic Slave Trade have much bigger populations and much more advanced historical research scene, so it is much more studied and written about, which in turn influences the historians in our EE countries, and they also start focusing on and reading publications about the more studied phenomenon.
That second point really can't be understated, I did a quick check on both Slovak and Czech websites which catalogue various student theses (bachelor's, master's, and so on), looking for ones with "slavery" among the studied terms, for the former there were only theses about modern slavery, Roman slavery, and the US slavery of course, with absolutely nothing about slavery in our own history, while for the latter, it was very much the same, though they had much more of them indexed, and after searching through like 150-200 of them I actually managed to find one, single thesis about slavery in their history during the Early Middle Ages, and that was it, the rest was American, Roman, and modern stuff. I wonder whether Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian brocels here would find anything different on their analogues of those sites, but I highly doubt it.
And lastly, since we live in a world where browns and blacks are well, well below whites in the power hierarchy and when it comes to development, it just comes naturally to people to think about whites being in power over others in the past, rather than think about Europeans being mass enslaved and brought to non-white lands by force and violence.
Crazy to think that if those factors were flipped, it is the same Transatlantic Slave Trade which we all know about that is almost a religion in some political and activist circles, that would be the irrelevant and forgotten niche historical footnote.
.Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe
"Little-known" doesn't come close to giving it justice. I've seen normies IRL be genuinely confused by the notion of white slaves, despite being from a country literally bordering the red area on this map, completely oblivious to the fact that their ancestors were one of the most often enslaved groups in Eurasia and there basically never having been black slaves here.
Equal to the West African slave trade in its demographic impact on the supplier region and greater than it up until the 18th century, yet it is the former that has basically redefined and put itself at the center of any kind of slavery studies, is talked about to this day and even continues to be an issue in world politics, both in terms of international politics between various countries and internal issues of various large countries, while the Black Sea slave trade is all but forgotten.
It never comes up in fiction and isn't in history books either (I found out about this particular slave trade on English-language Wikipedia ffs
). Nobody except history professors and 4chan Chuds looking for anything they could use to undermine the mainstream undestanding of the world, history and politics even knows about this.It's just interesting to think about it and what other historical events have been completely forgotten because there's no infrastructure to remember them. Or which are currently happening and won't be remembered
.Of course, I understand why that is so. First off, there is no surviving population in Turkey that traces its origins to those enslaved people, since the men were by and large prevented from reproducing as a large majority were castrated and mostly didn't have any chance to have sex with any woman even in the rare cases where they weren't castrated. Meanwhile, the women were used for reproduction by their owners, with all the random freak instances where an enslaved man would've impregnated his female owner or his male owner's wife being just dealt with by paternity fraud. Then, you have the fact that the countries which participated in the Transatlantic Slave Trade have much bigger populations and much more advanced historical research scene, so it is much more studied and written about, which in turn influences the historians in our EE countries, and they also start focusing on and reading publications about the more studied phenomenon.
That second point really can't be understated, I did a quick check on both Slovak and Czech websites which catalogue various student theses (bachelor's, master's, and so on), looking for ones with "slavery" among the studied terms, for the former there were only theses about modern slavery, Roman slavery, and the US slavery of course
, with absolutely nothing about slavery in our own history, while for the latter, it was very much the same, though they had much more of them indexed, and after searching through like 150-200 of them I actually managed to find one, single thesis about slavery in their history during the Early Middle Ages, and that was it, the rest was American, Roman, and modern stuff. I wonder whether Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian brocels here would find anything different on their analogues of those sites, but I highly doubt it.And lastly, since we live in a world where browns and blacks are well, well below whites in the power hierarchy and when it comes to development, it just comes naturally to people to think about whites being in power over others in the past, rather than think about Europeans being mass enslaved and brought to non-white lands by force and violence.
Crazy to think that if those factors were flipped, it is the same Transatlantic Slave Trade which we all know about that is almost a religion in some political and activist circles, that would be the irrelevant and forgotten niche historical footnote
.
