The other slave trade Algeria never mentions

The other slave trade Algeria never mentions

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Barbary corsairs captured approximately **1.25 million Europeans** and sold them in the slave markets of North Africa. That figure, which appears in textbooks on modern history and has resurfaced these days amid the protests in France, is the uncomfortable counterpoint to a narrative that only looks in one direction: that of French colonial plunder. The debate does not deny colonization. It questions who holds the monopoly on grievance.

The trigger was a message recalling how France razed the **Palace of the Djenina** in Algiers in 1856, an Arab-Andalusian building more than three centuries old, or the Es-Sayida mosque. From there, the conversation turned to the other side of the Mediterranean: the raids that for centuries emptied coastal towns from Italy to Ireland, passing through Spain and Portugal, and reached as far north as Iceland.

What the Barbary slave trade was

The Barbary states of North Africa —formally under the Ottoman Empire, though in practice highly autonomous— sustained a capture economy throughout the Early Modern period. Corsairs attacked ships and coastal towns, and captives were sold in the markets of Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli. The phenomenon was not marginal: it shaped life across the entire Mediterranean coastline and left a mark still traceable today in place names and everyday speech.

One of the curiosities the conversation brings up appears here: the expression "**the coast is clear**" (originally "no Moors on the coast") is not an innocent metaphor. It was born from the raids that forced Spanish coastal towns to watch the horizon. And it explains something else: the density of fortifications that dot the Spanish coastline, built to repel attacks that were not sporadic but part of everyday life.

The Spanish bombardments of Algiers in 1783 and 1784

The military response was not an isolated episode either. In August 1783, the Spanish Navy bombarded Algiers eight times between the 1st and the 8th, under the command of Admiral **Antonio Barceló**. There were fires and material damage, but no capitulation. The trinc year, in July 1784, Barceló returned with an allied fleet —Naples, Portugal and the Order of Malta— and sustained a campaign of continuous bombardment between July 12 and 21.

The figure helps put the scale of the conflict into perspective: we are not talking about skirmishes, but about naval campaigns involving a full week of sustained fire against a capital city. The question hanging over it all is uncomfortable: if the right to respond to the capture of civilians is accepted, where does the line between reprisal and colonization lie?

Hypocrisy as an accusation pointing both ways

The core of the resentment is not so much the historical fact as its selective use. The argument is made that colonial memory is invoked only when convenient and silenced when the aggrieved party is the other side. Against it stands the classic counterargument: comparing an Early Modern captive trade with a 19th-century colonial conquest mixes eras and scales, and no past injustice legitimizes another.

Some take the discussion to even more uncomfortable ground: slavery was not an exclusively European phenomenon, nor an exclusively white one. It is pointed out that in the United States there were **free Black people who owned Black slaves**, a fact that dismantles the simplistic racial reading of the issue. History rarely fits into a good side and a bad side.

What remains of all this

The conversation heals no wounds, nor does it intend to. It does, however, leave one conclusion: for centuries the Mediterranean was a frontier of mutual capture, and each shore has its own inventory of grievances. The debate can be expected to flare up again whenever current events in France put colonization back on the table. With these materials, the basket will always be the same.