As requested Guest Mohammed Smith:

Slavery in Arabia, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East

Main article: Arab slave trade
For Muslim views on slavery, see Religion and slavery.

The Arab world has traded in slaves like many other cultures of the region. It was one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. The Arab or Middle Eastern slave trade is thought to have originated with trans-Saharan slavery. The Moors, starting in the 8th century, raided coastal areas of the Mediterranean and Northern European (including British and even as far north as Scandinavian) coastal areas and would carry away sometimes whole villages to the Moorish slave markets on the Barbary Coast. Nautical traders from the United States became targets, and frequent victims, of the Barbary pirates, as soon as that nation began trading with Europe and refused to pay the required tribute to the North African states. The slave trade from East Africa to Arabia was dominated by Arab and African traders in the coastal cities of Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa.

Male slaves were employed as servants, soldiers, or laborers by their owners, while female slaves, mostly from Africa, were long traded to Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab, Indian, or Oriental traders, some as female servants, others as sexual slaves. Arab, Indian, and Oriental traders were involved in the capture and transport of slaves northward across the Sahara desert and the Indian Ocean region into Arabia and the Middle East, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent. As many African slaves may have crossed the Sahara Desert, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean as crossed the Atlantic, perhaps more. Some sources estimate that between 11 and 17 million slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 to 1900, compared to 11.6 million across the Atlantic from 1500 to the late 1860s. The Arab or Middle Eastern slave trade continued into the early 1900s.

Many Slavic males from the Balkans, and Turkic and Circassian males from the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern Black Sea regions were taken away from their homes and families and enlisted into special soldier classes of the army of the Ottoman Empire. These soldier classes were named Janissaries in the Balkans and Asia Minor, and Mamelukes in Egypt. The Janissaries eventually became a decisive factor in the intrigues of the Istanbul court of the Ottoman sultans, while the Mamelukes were mainly responsible for the expulsion of the Crusaders from Palestine and preventing the Mongols from entering Egypt.

The Arab trade in slaves continued into the 20th century. Written travelogues and other historical works are replete with references to slaves owned by wealthy traders, nobility and heads of state in the Arabian Peninsula well into the 1920s. T. E. Lawrence documented practices in which African Muslims performing the hajj would bring a son with them to Mecca and there sell him into slavery. Slave owning and slave-like working conditions have been documented up to and including the present, in countries of the Middle East. Though the subject is considered taboo in the affected regions, a leading Saudi government cleric and author of the country's religious curriculum has called for the outright re-legalization of slavery.

Ard,

Thanks very much for the correction you are right the Port "raided" was Baltimore, not Skibereen. Will get the other information as soon as I can get to the source reference.