“Dude, if people used to be bought and sold like cars, what was the Mercedes, the Hum-Vee, the Toyota mini-van, the Smartcar? Really, who brought the highest prices, and for what?”
-Steevo
I shall answer this question according to the spirit in which it was given, limiting the field to Europe, the Middle-East and America, from 1500 to 1900, being roughly the period currently under study.
Sex Slaves
5. White men, of any kind, were prized by the sodomy-minded Turks.
4. English slave boys were sold as sex slaves to catholic priests from the 600s to the 1600s, including Bristol boys sold to Irish priests.
3. The olive-skinned women of the Canary Islands were prized sex slaves in the 1400s and 1500s.
2. Polynesian women were prized sex slaves throughout the 1700 and 1800s.
1. From 300 B.C. to 2016, blonde and red-headed women of Eastern Europe—from Thracian slave-girls in Alexandria, Egypt, to Russian babes being pimped out of hotels in Alexandria, Virginia—Slavic women, who the word slave was based upon, have held the top spot as the most desirable sex object on Earth.
War Slaves
5. Irish were good fighters, free, but very difficult to officer.
4. Scotts made good soldiers and would serve loyally as conscripts.
3. Tribal Africans were used as bodyguards and special troops throughout the Islamic world and served European officers well in Haiti and other theaters.
2. Christian boys from South Eastern Europe served the Ottoman Turks as Janissaries, the best infantry in the Islamic world.
1. Scottish, Irish and English slaves in America, when armed by their masters in the 1750s, kept their guns, moved west and conquered a continent, learning from the primitive warriors that had hunted them for a hundred years, becoming the American Rifleman, who is still one of the best war-fighters on the planet.
Domestic Slaves
5. Black women were regarded as ideal gardeners across the Islamic world.
4. Castrated black men were the standard domestic security servant across the Islamic world for a thousand years, the most prolific cock blockers in human history.
3. American Indian women were not sexually expressive, could be trusted not to have sex with the master, could haul more water than a white man, and were prized by the slave mistress as an ideal domestic servant.
2. Black wet nurses were so prized in the Americas that the American fixation on large breasts eventually led to wide spread plastic surgery long after chattel slavery ended in North America
1. Castrated white men were the most prized eunuchs in the Islamic world.
Cheap Slaves
5. The sons and daughters of American whites who did not own land could be kidnapped at will, if found without documentation confirming that they were not a runaway, and sold for a 100% profit. The only protection against legally sanctioned kidnapping in America was to be on land owned by your family, be known to be a man of the upper class, or to have freedom papers. So the children of poor, landless men without access to a notary were fair game for slavers up until the 1830s in the South, and 1923 in New York City, when forced child labor in factories was outlawed.
4. Indian children were free, provided you killed their parents, and were sold up until 1910 in the American Southwest.
3. English children could be had for the cost to feed them, could be harnessed to coal carts and worked to death on primitive factory machinery, so rarely consumed adult quantities of food due to the high child mortality rate among coalminers and factory workers and the unlikely event of reaching maturity.
2. English drunks were free and easy to ship, as port towns were dotted with pubs and taverns.
1. The cheapest slaves were Irish, as they had no government to protect them and were under foreign rule and English courts did not charge fees to authorize their shipment, such as in Scotland.
Where do the Barbary pirates fit into all this? My understanding is that their raids across the Mediterranean continued well into the 19th century.
Stephan Decauter was one of the men that kicked their swarthy asses when Jefferson sent our fledgling navy over to sort things out. Admiral Nelson was so impressed with the American Frigates [because we still had decent wood] that he thought they were downright unfair!
Most nations in Europe, at some point, fought the pirates over taking seafaring people captive. England seems to have been an exception for most of the era, letting Muslims in galleys—galleys!—scour the coasts of England for poor English fishermen long after Britannia owned the seas.
There is an excellent book on the Barbary War titled, To the Shores of Tripoli—you might recall hearing that line from a U.S. Marine, if you have gotten drunk with any of them.
When my siblings and cousins and I were children, my Italian grandmother would insist that everyone hold hands at all times in public, in case someone would try to "steal" us. Now I wonder if that wasn't some kind of cultural memory of these kidnapping slavers. I always thought she was paranoid.