Slavery - Is the West Really to Blame? #942533

⚠ EDITORIAL WARNING – CRITICAL INVESTIGATION
This book addresses historical facts, demographic figures, academic documentation, and testimony from historians in order to analyze the institution of slavery in a global context.
It does not seek to justify atrocities, minimize violence, or relativize suffering, but rather to examine the phenomenon in its entirety, broader than its politically hegemonic interpretation.
The objective is to widen perspectives, not to absolve those responsible.
Here, comparisons are made.
Here, questions are raised.
Here, the historical framework is expanded.

“More whites were taken to North Africa as slaves than blacks were taken as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies… White slaves were bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire decades after abolition in the United States.”
— Thomas Sowell
Slavery did not originate in Europe nor did it end in the United States. It spans millennia and entire civilizations: Africans enslaving Africans, Arabs trading captives across the Mediterranean, Asian empires capturing neighboring peoples, Mesoamerican kingdoms sacrificing prisoners as ceremonial property, and Western powers exploiting forced labor in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Universal history —viewed without ideological filters— reveals an uncomfortable truth: there is no innocent people.
Slavery was the norm, not the exception. Global, not regional. Pre-industrial, not modern.
However, in contemporary discourse the dominant narrative reduces the phenomenon to a simple moral equation:
West = perpetrator
Africa = passive victim
The historical record demonstrates something more complex: African slave networks supplying coastal ports, Arab emirates operating the largest slave market in the world for nearly a millennium, European states industrializing the trade, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim merchants participating in it in different periods, and millions of Caucasians sold in North Africa, Anatolia, and the Near East.
Not to exonerate anyone, but to restore the entirety of the picture.

? Central question of the book
If slavery was universal, why is historical blame assigned almost exclusively to the West?
Is this selective memory, moral pedagogy, or contemporary political construction?
This work examines:
✔ African-Arab slave routes prior to European contact
✔ the active role of African kingdoms in capture and trade
✔ rabbinical and historiographical documents on Jewish presence in the trade
✔ the Ottoman Empire and Mediterranean white slavery
✔ the European role in the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition
✔ how the modern idea of unilateral guilt emerged

This book does not defend conquerors or past villainies.
What it proposes is something more radical:
? to know the entire history.
? without selective amputations.
? without prefabricated moral narratives.
Because a people that does not know its complete reality —the good and the terrible— is condemned to obey whoever rewrites it.