This beautifully disturbing piece of art graces the cover of The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, republished by Suffolk and Watt in 2015.
Central is the slave girl, a dark-haired woman, likely of Southern European origin, naked at about 20 years, based on her hips.
What at first seems a garland is the cruel left hand of the sultan inspecting his purchase, tilting the head as the two long fingers of his right hand are inserted into her mouth to inspect her teeth. The figurehead of power is suitably veiled as an indication of the pervasive reach of his office.
Behind the girl stands the slaver in a Fez, like the Sheik a dark-skinned Caucasian, leaning on his slave goad and holding the white shift just taken from her to reveal her form.
Behind the Sultan stands the ubiquitous figure of the Barbary era, a white European—apparently of English or Dutch stock—converted to Islam and risen to the perilous position of advisor, for such tyrants employed outsiders or other taboo figures to enhance their tyranny over their own kind.
Most telling is the huddled trio of womanhood behind the slaver, a worn old black woman and two veiled white women, one with a toddler in her arms, who in her presence reveals the destiny of this poor taken creature, to be bred at the pleasure of the hawkish, robed tyrant, producing a slave soldier for his special army of outcasts.
I showed this picture to four men and two women and asked them, “How many weeks pay would you give up to purchase her from the slaver and would you free her or keep her if it were legal to do both?”
All four of the men declared that they would buy her and keep her for one week’s pay.
One of the women said she would buy and free her for a week’s pay.
The other woman said she would give a month’s pay to free her.
Keeping in mind that women did not draw pay in this era, and would not be in such positions to free their sisters and that none of them would want this girl living under their husband’s roof, the female question is a mute point.
As for the exchange rate, men of the working class kind that I interviewed make 20-times more, a adjusted for inflation, then common men did during the period of the painting, depicting life in the 1700s. For instance, working men of my grade in 1800 could only afford one change of clothes and one pair of shoes to the 20 and four typical of today’s man, and could never afford a horse, where most poor men today can get into a car. So, the instinctive feeling of the working man that he could, at best, afford to part with a week’s pay in order to acquire the companionship of a young beauty points to two facts of 18th century life:
1. Working men did not own slaves, could never begin to afford the price.
2. Working men typically paid the slave owners [pimps] of slave girls in order to have sex during this period.
It is therefore of great interest to this author, that today’s white guilt merchants, who depict all slaves as black and all masters white, continue to promote the idea that working white men are to blame for black chattel slavery of the past—even though they died in droves to end it—in an era when prostitution of slave girls [all white and most from Russia] in my home town, is targeted exclusively at an elite white clientele. I have firsthand knowledge of this, as I have been solicited by this trade when earning above the median.
This exact drama, played out in an all white setting, in Jamestown, in 1621, when the captain of the Marmaduke sold 12 English girls for various weights of tobacco to the fledgling dirt-lords of Virginia.
Lest I seem too sanctimonious, if it were legal to own her and keep her, I’d part with two weeks’ pay, because she’s got good hips. Even then the point is mute, because the big fiend with his fingers in her mouth would out-bid me.
This was a woman’s lot in life through most of civilized history. To pretend that such a plight only afflicted African girls over a two-hundred year span as a unique expression of European-American, masculine evil—race-based rather than class-based—is perhaps the biggest and most cankerous lie we’ve ever told ourselves.
America in Chains
I have a question. What happened to all the off spring of these slaves? You can look around and there's plenty of Backs so you know we kept them alive but there were millions and millions of Whites slaved in the Middle East. Where did they go? I have heard that all Males were gelded so that would explain half.
The slaves in the Middle east and North Africa had exceeding high mortality rates.
The blacks tended to last in crappy areas that were unhealthy and the whites interbred with the Berbers and Arabs, which were still Caucasians.
The estimates of white Europeans and American slaves in Islamic nations go as high as 2 million for this roughly 250-year-period.
The estimated numbers of black slaves taken to these regions begins in the tens of millions over a 1,200 year period. Recall that one Nigerian Sultan sold 14,000 girls in Cairo on one trip.
A higher percentage of blacks were gelded than whites, as they were more in demand as eunuchs. Some white men—I recall Venice selling 100 to the Turks for sex slaves—were gelded as eunuchs and also as pleasure slaves. However, it seems white men were primarily desirable for their industriousness and special skills.