anasawad wrote:The Ottoman empire did trade with slaves for long periods of time.
And Arabs lords used to trade with slaves captured from Africa in those areas also for long periods of time. I believe only ending in the 1800s if i recall what i read currectly.
(...)
So history of slave trading in the Arab world is considerably recent and many of who they enslaved came from Ethipia and such areas. So they could have ended up in Europe and America.
Even in Turkey as some recent reports show that Africans in Turkey did come first as slaves.
By recent you apparently mean "only six or seven centuries old"?
Yet Muhammad did bother to rule slavery because it was already common place in the VIIth century in the ME, just like it was common in Ancient Egypt, in the old Roman Empire, in India, in China, etc. Muhammad's conquests turned many people into slaves and he personally owned some. According to Muhammad as long as one is not Muslim, it is right to make a slave of him. Racist asshole.
Sure, the Ottoman empire amplified slavery, practicing it at an industrial scale for centuries, with people from all continents (Christian children from occupied regions in Greece and Balkans, Christian Mediterranean villages attacked by Algerian pirates, Western African slaves, ...). To the point that some related Arab words entered our vocabulary (razzias, devchirmé).
But it was already an old tradition in the Arab world and the trade from West Africa to the Arab world is much older. At some points of history slaves were the most important exporting industry in West Africa (the slaves themselves usually came from farther).
Europe is actually the exception as the late Roman Empires first and Christianism later did a lot to extinguish slavery in our lands. When it resurfaced during the colonization of Americas, it only lasted two centuries. Only one in Spain as they quickly deemed it immoral. Although I will not deny that it was a very brutal form of slavery (slavery is always brutal but it was worse).
The Holocaust did drag larger attention than events in Africa. But people (whites) were stood against Leopard too, I think that Britain even sanctioned him?
I fail to see the point of putting slavery in comparison to the holocaust. Anyway westerners are perfectly aware that slavery was something brutally wrong and there are as much movies about it than there is about the Shoah. I still have to see a single Muslim movie about the wrongdoings of Muhammad and the slavery in the Islamic world.
That being said here are a few reasons why the Shoah holds a distinctive role in western consciousness:
* Its brutality: 6 millions of people were killed over four years, against ten millions deported over two centuries for slavery.
* It took the complicity or passivity of many people. The tale of the www2 is the tale of how ordinary people can be turned into mass killers, and how others can turn blind eyes.
* Its purpose was specifically to eradicate categories of people. Slavery's purpose was profit.
* It is recent and it happened right next to us, to people like us. All human beings are like that, not just westerners.
anasawad wrote:And Africa had some of the wealthiest nations in history only up until it was torn by wars in the late centuries.
No, this is not what happened. Africa was never such a big deal, although it hold a respectable rank until the first millennium. But this its demise is far older than European intrusions.
First of all you must distinguish western Africa (the half of the western bump under the Saharah) from the rest as they had very different fates. Western Africa is where most of empires happened and it was even relatively prosperous at some points. Aside of that, the rest was pretty much savage, with a few notable exceptions such as the African horn and the Eastern coast close to the ME.
Africa has a simple geographical problem:
* One third is a desert, another is arid and/or threatened by desertification, another is a jungle. Western Africa is relatively nice but it is still subtropical and the desert has kept progressing for the past 5K/3k years. Maybe it never had the capacity to consistently feed a feudal-level civilization.
* Destructive meteorological cycles, that yield famines and others. Some cycles last centuries and are big enough to destroy civilizations, some last decades and can kill half of children.
* Obstacles to trade and knowledge diffusion. The Saharah and other deserts are walls. The jungle is a wall. The Atlantic is risky to navigate. The southern half of the continent is a plateau that stands 1km above the coasts. Few rivers, some encumbered by the jungle. The two thirds of the continent are void of any significant river. The climate is too hot, which causes many deaths and makes labor very hard.
And I know the ME is not hospitable either. But the coasts are and they
consistently are. And more importantly the ME was the nexus between Asia and Europe, and it has great maritime opportunities.
They first need to organise and utilize lands and basic resources for basic life needs like growing food and building houses.
Then when everyone is good they can start building and improving schools and universities.
Hands do not make plants grow. But cash allows you to buy what you need to improve your land's productivity and import the food you lack.
The solutions to the African agricultural problems are still unknown. Traditional African agriculture does not work, not with so many mouths and such an infertile land. Modern western agriculture does not work either: fertilizers cannot make the land revive and our varieties are not fit for their soils and climates. Those interested in agriculture can find great challenges to solve in Africa. This takes biologists, chemists, and all of the talents that come with them.