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As I said: > I have been able to find a few references to "black gold" meaning slaves I am not claiming that no one has ever used the term to mean slaves. Wh
by gjm11 13y ago
As I said:
> I have been able to find a few references to "black gold" meaning slaves
I am not claiming that no one has ever used the term to mean slaves.
What I am disputing is (1) your claim that in the 19th and 20th centuries the term was popular with this main meaning, and (2) your claim that it had anything to do with Islam.
On #1, I find that the term was extremely rare until it started being used to describe oil in the 20th century.
On #2, note that the slavers mentioned in your particular links were all Western European or American. Guess how many of them were Muslims? I'm thinking the answer is somewhere between "exactly zero" and "zero to within statistical sampling error".
- waps 13y agoBlack gold used to mean the slave trade towards America and within the British Empire and the Dutch. What does that have to do with Islam : simple. Who did they buy the slaves from ? The Ottoman empire. Most kidnapped slaves never did end up in the western slave trade by the way, but were instead kidnapped into north africa and the middle east (which was the effective center of the muslim empire, they even relocated mecca into africa). Almost none of them survived, and today with a few small exceptions no significant numbers of those slaves survive.
- gjm11 13y agoWhat is your source of information? I am not an expert on the slave trade, but my understanding is that most of the slaves in the western slave trade were bought in West Africa, which was never part of the Ottoman Empire. (I'm not saying that the Ottoman Empire was never involved in the slave trade. It was. So was the British Empire.) > they even relocated mecca into africa ????