Slavery: The Barbary Trade to Modern Day

Captain Croker horror stricken at Algiers, on witnessing the Miseries of the Christian Slaves chaind & in Irons driven home after labour by Infidels with large Whips." Additional information about the source: "The cruelties of the Algerine pirates, shewing the present dreadful state of the English slaves, and other Europeans, at Algiers and Tunis; with the horrid barbarities inflicted on christian mariners shipwrecked on the north western coast of africa and carried into perpetual slavery. authenticated by Mr. Jackson, of Morocco; Mr. MacGill, merchant and by Capt. Walter Croker, of His Majesty's Sloop Wizard. Who in last July (1815) saw some of the frightful horrors of Algerine Slavery; to rouse general attention to which, this Economical Publication is issued. With an engraving. London: printed for W. Hone, 55 Fleet-Street. 1816"

Two events occurred this week that prompted me to write this piece. The first was the United Nations vote to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity,” accompanied by a call for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.” The second was a video recording of the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he spoke about his 2005 biography of Thomas Jefferson. Hitchens devotes an entire chapter to the First Barbary War of 1801 to 1805, explaining that as President, Jefferson was determined to end the system of tribute payments that the United States had been making to the Barbary states—Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—to protect American ships from capture and their crews from enslavement. In Hitchens’s telling, this conflict represented the young nation’s first war against an Islamic power and the crucible in which the United States Navy was forged.

So, what was the Barbary slave trade, and how does slavery persist?

For over three centuries, a shadow of terror fell upon the shores of Europe. From the coast of Italy to the cliffs of Ireland, from the beaches of Spain to the fishing villages of Iceland, a threat emerged from the south that depopulated coastal regions, emptied villages, and enslaved an estimated one million Europeans. This was the Barbary slave trade: a systematic campaign of maritime piracy and coastal raiding operating from the ports of North Africa, and one of the largest forced migrations of Europeans in history.

The Barbary corsairs, as they were known, were pirates and privateers who operated from the semi-autonomous Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, as well as from ports in Morocco. They were not merely bands of opportunistic raiders. They were organised naval forces, operating from cities that had grown wealthy beyond measure through the capture and sale of European slaves. The term “Barbary” derives from the Berber peoples of North Africa, but the corsairs themselves were a diverse group. Some were native North Africans, others were Ottoman Turks. Remarkably, many were European renegades: men who had been captured, converted to Islam, and turned their skills against their former countrymen. These included Dutch, English, and French sailors who brought advanced shipbuilding techniques and sailing knowledge to the Barbary fleets, enabling them to extend their reach far beyond the Mediterranean.

The numbers involved in the Barbary slave trade are both staggering and disputed. Between 1530 and 1780, as many as 1.25 million Europeans may have been captured and sold into slavery in North Africa. At its peak in the early seventeenth century, an estimated 35,000 European slaves were held in Algiers alone. These figures, compiled by the American historian Robert C. Davis, have been debated. Other scholars caution that precise numbers are impossible to verify, as the Ottoman authorities kept no official records of the trade. But even conservative estimates acknowledge that the scale was immense and sufficient to depopulate large stretches of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese coasts.

The Barbary raids were swift, brutal, and devastating. Corsairs operated from fast galleys that could appear without warning, strike coastal villages, and vanish with their human cargo before any defence could be mounted. The range of their attacks was extraordinary. In 1544, the legendary corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, enslaving between 2,000 and 7,000 inhabitants of Lipari. In 1551, his successor Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, some 5,000 to 6,000 people, and transported them to Tripoli. Three years later, the same corsair sacked the Italian town of Vieste, beheading 5,000 inhabitants and abducting another 6,000. The Balearic Islands were invaded in 1558, with 4,000 taken into slavery. In 1618, Algerian pirates attacked the Canary Islands and carried off 1,000 captives. The Italian coastline was so thoroughly ravaged that between Venice and Málaga, coastal settlements were virtually abandoned.

The corsairs’ reach extended far beyond the Mediterranean. In 1627, a raid on Iceland by the Dutch renegade Jan Janszoon, operating under the name Murad Reis, resulted in the capture of nearly 400 Icelanders, who were sold in the slave markets of Algiers. England lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates between 1609 and 1616 alone. In 1631, the Irish village of Baltimore was attacked; almost its entire population was taken, with only two ever returning. Even the English coast was not safe, for in 1640 Algerian corsairs raided Penzance, enslaving sixty men, women, and children.

The fate of captives varied dramatically. The wealthy or well-connected might be ransomed, though the process could take years. The most famous European captive was Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote, who was held for five years after being captured in 1575. His experience in Algiers would colour his writing for the rest of his life. For the majority, however, the fate was harsher. Captives laboured as galley slaves, chained to oars for years, or worked in quarries and on construction projects. Women were forced into domestic servitude or concubinage. Those who converted to Islam could sometimes secure freedom, but they could never return to their homelands. Some, like the eleven-year-old Thomas Pellow captured from a ship in 1716, spent decades in slavery before escaping.

Families left behind faced desperate efforts to raise ransom. Churches collected money, and religious orders such as the Trinitarians were founded specifically to redeem captives. The Danish state established a “slave fund” in 1715, financed by compulsory insurance for seafarers, which ransomed 165 slaves between 1716 and 1736.

The Barbary slave trade began to decline in the late seventeenth century as European naval power grew. The French bombarded Algiers in 1682 and 1683, forcing the Dey to release Christian slaves. The English and Dutch launched punitive expeditions, and by 1700, the worst of the raiding had diminished. However, the trade did not end until the nineteenth century. The newly independent United States, whose merchant ships had previously been protected by British treaties, found itself under attack. The Barbary threat directly led to the founding of the United States Navy in 1794. The First and Second Barbary Wars (1801–1805, 1815) saw American forces engage the corsairs and win concessions. The final blow came in 1816, when a combined British and Dutch fleet bombarded Algiers for nine hours, forcing the Dey to agree to end Christian slavery. The French conquest of Algeria, beginning in 1830, finally brought the Barbary states under European control and extinguished the last remnants of the slave trade.

For centuries, the Barbary slave trade was a defining terror of European life: a threat that shaped settlement patterns, naval policy, and popular culture. It left its mark in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the literature of Cervantes, and the collective memory of coastal communities from Cork to Crete. Yet today, it remains one of the least remembered chapters of European history, overshadowed by the Atlantic slave trade that carried millions of Africans to the Americas. The memory of those 1.25 million Europeans—fishermen and farmers, sailors and shopkeepers, women and children, deserves to be recovered. Their captivity was not a footnote, but a central fact of early modern life: a reminder that slavery was not a practice confined to one continent or one colour, but a universal human tragedy that touched every shore.

Sadly, slavery in a modern context exists in virtually every country in the world. The United Nations defines slavery in its broadest sense through the 1926 Slavery Convention as the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed in Article 4 that “no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” More recently, the UN has designated modern slavery as encompassing forced labour, human trafficking, debt bondage, forced marriage, and the worst forms of child labour. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, include Target 8.7, which calls on member states to take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour by 2025.

However, the UN has also acknowledged that progress towards this target has been insufficient, with the International Labour Organisation reporting in 2022 that the number of people in modern slavery had risen to 50 million, an increase of 10 million in just five years. The latest estimates suggest that 28 million are in forced labour and 22 million are in forced marriage. The country with the highest number of people in modern slavery is India, with an estimated 11 million victims, followed by China with 5.8 million, Russia with 1.9 million, Indonesia with 1.8 million, Turkey with 1.3 million, and the United States with 1.1 million. These six G20 nations together account for the largest absolute numbers of people trapped in forced labour or forced marriage. When measured by prevalence rather than raw numbers, the proportion of a country’s population affected is the highest in North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Modern slavery, as one rights advocate has observed, is woven through our clothes, lights up our electronics, and seasons our food. The G20 nations import an estimated £352.85 million worth of products annually that are considered at risk of being produced by forced labour, including electronics, garments, palm oil, solar panels, and textiles. Specific sectors with high documented risks include cocoa from West Africa, where child labour and forced labour are endemic; mica from India, used in cosmetics, where an estimated 20,000 children work in mines; gold mining, where close to one million children work globally; and palm oil from Indonesia and tea from Assam.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, armed groups are responsible for widespread sexual slavery. The United Nations documented 887 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025 alone, affecting 1,534 victims, the vast majority women and girls. Armed groups, including the March 23 Movement (M23), the Cooperative for Development of the Congo (CODECO), and various Mai-Mai militias—whose members, drawing their name from the Swahili word for water, traditionally sprinkle themselves with water in rituals believed to confer protection from bullets—were responsible for 75 per cent of documented cases. Libya has become an enormous transit hub for sub-Saharan Africans seeking to reach Europe since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. An estimated 400,000 to 700,000 migrants are trapped in Libya, where many suffer atrocities and have been sold into slavery in open markets. Survivors have reported being locked up, raped, beaten, and forced to pay ransoms to secure their freedom.

Even in countries with high levels of economic development, modern slavery persists. The United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States are noted for having relatively strong government responses, yet thousands of people continue to be forced to work or marry. UK government guidance identifies high-risk sectors including catering, care, agriculture, construction, the sex trade, nail bars, and car washes. Research from the University of Oxford is currently investigating labour exploitation in hospitality, warehousing, and social care sectors in the UK.

The indicators of modern slavery can be subtle but are often present in plain sight: controlling tactics such as withheld passports, restricted movement, debt-bondage, and threats of denunciation; living conditions characterised by overcrowded accommodation, few personal possessions, and workers living at their workplace; behavioural signs including fear of authority, avoiding eye contact, and letting others speak for them; and unusual working practices such as excessively long hours, inadequate safety equipment, and wages withheld or heavily reduced.

The significant increase in modern slavery in recent years reflects compounding crises: more complex armed conflicts, environmental degradation, assaults on democracy, a global rollback of women’s rights, and the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors have disrupted education and employment, increased extreme poverty, and led to forced and unsafe migration, all of which heighten the risk of exploitation.

Modern slavery is not a relic of the past. It is a present reality that permeates every aspect of our society. The profits from forced labour in the global private economy amount to an estimated £48.20 billion annually, with annual profits per victim reaching nearly £3,769 in the industry sector. Despite a United Nations goal adopted in 2015 to end modern slavery by 2030, the significant increase in the number of victims and stagnating government action mean that this target is even further from being achieved. As the Walk Free Foundation has stated, what is needed now is political will.