Francesca Tavares | The slave trades the UN forgot

The United Nations’ recent resolution designating the Transatlantic Slave Trade as the “greatest historical evil” is a troubling exercise in historiographical reductionism – one that prioritises contemporary political signaling over scholarly and historical integrity.

While the horrors of the Middle Passage constitute an indelible stain on the human record, canonising this particular trade as the singular benchmark of evil requires the systematic erasure of comparable, and in some cases more enduring, systems of bondage that flourished across every continent and civilisation.

Far from honoring the victims of slavery and exploitation, the resolution’s selective framing obscures the full moral reckoning that genuine historical accountability demands.

THE ARAB-ISLAMIC SLAVE TRADE

The most consequential omission is the Arab-Islamic slave trade. Predating the Atlantic trade by eight centuries and persisting in structural forms to the present day, this system has been extensively documented by historians Bernard Lewis (Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 1990) and Ronald Segal (Islam’s Black Slaves, 2001).

Unlike the Greco-Roman model of status-based servitude, the medieval Arab trade evolved into a racialised hierarchy – one in which medieval scholars such as Ibn Khaldun constructed taxonomies associating sub-Saharan Africans (the “Zanj”) with inherent servility. This architecture, some scholars argue, provided the very conceptual scaffolding later adopted by Western slavers.

The trade was further distinguished by the industrial-scale castration of male captives for use as eunuchs – a practice with an estimated mortality rate exceeding fifty per cent – and by the sexualised commodification of both African women and Slavic (“Saqaliba”) concubines. Its legacy persists today in the Kafala labor system and documented cases of chattel slavery in North Africa and the Gulf in the present.

THE RED SEA AND INDIAN OCEAN TRADE

The Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades represent a parallel lacuna. As documented by Richard Pankhurst and Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, a vast Arab-Indian commercial network displaced East African peoples into the service of Indian sultanates for centuries. The surviving Siddi (or Habshi) communities of South Asia – descendants of enslaved Africans – testify to the scale of this displacement, which rivals Atlantic figures yet remains absent from UN denunciations.

Meanwhile, the Barbary corsairs of North Africa enslaved over one million Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the notorious 1631 abduction of the entire village of Baltimore, Ireland (Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 2003).

The Ottoman devshirme, or “blood tax”, similarly subjected Christian boys from the Balkans to hereditary enslavement as Janissaries or palace administrators for centuries (Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 2005). These cases demonstrate unambiguously that neither the institution of slavery nor its racialised logic was an exclusively Western invention.

PRE-COLUMBUS AMERICAS

The pre-Columbian Americas further complicate the UN’s framework. The Aztec tlacotin (a formalised slave class) and the Incan mit’a – a mandatory labor draft under which entire populations were forcibly relocated (mitmaquna) to suppress rebellion and sustain empire (Michael Harner, 1977) – were systems of institutionalised subjugation that predate European contact entirely.

EAST ASIAN SLAVERY & IMPERIALISM

In East Asia, Japan’s imperial subjugation of the Ainu and its twentieth-century brutalisation of Korea and China (Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, 2000) and China’s ongoing Sinicisation of peripheral peoples – Tibetans, Uyghurs – represent an imperial impulse that, as Frank Dikötter has documented, is not a historical relic but a continuing mechanism of state power.

INTRA-AFRICAN AGENCY & COMPLICITY

Finally, a rigorous accounting cannot ignore intra-African agency. Sovereign polities – including the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Asante Empire, the Oyo Empire, and the Aro Confederacy – operated as active, profit-driven participants in the Transatlantic supply chain, capturing and selling members of rival communities (John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1998). To omit this history is not to honour enslaved Africans; it is to sanitise the very record the UN claims to memorialise.

It also raises a fundamental legal inconsistency the resolution does not address: if reparative liability is to follow ancestral profit, do the descendants of African, Arab, and Ottoman merchant classes who built generational wealth on the slave trade bear commensurate obligation?

Evil, history instructs us, has no exclusive color, ethnicity, or hemisphere. It is a recurring feature of human civilisation wherever power has been permitted to dehumanise the vulnerable.

A United Nations resolution that genuinely honors the victims of slavery – all of them – would acknowledge this universal architecture of oppression rather than deploying a single chapter of it as a permanent political instrument.

Selective memory is not moral clarity; it is a different kind of historical injustice.

- Francesca Tavares is an Attorney-at-Law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com