The Author Is Interested in Casting White Slavery in the Maghreb (the Arabic Name for Northwest Africa) in the Terms Developed to Cope with trans-Atlantic Slavery (the Bondage of Black Africans to Whites)

This book has come out of my desire to rethink the story of European enslavement in the early modern Mediterranean world - to place, as much as possible, this always rather neglected, even derided, form of slavery in the larger context of slave studies world-wide. I have been particularly interested in casting white slavery in the Maghreb in the terms that have been developed by historians and sociologists to cope with the much vaster and politically fraught topic of trans-Atlantic slavery - the bondage of black Africans to white Europeans or Americans that has become for many scholars the archetype and model of all slave studies. In part, I chose to do so because the topics and approaches that have grown up around American slavery provide such fertile conceptual ground fo r application to the Barbary Coast, where slavery is a hardly unknown, but still strangely neglected field in intellectual (as opposed to narrative) terms. In the course of my study of the so-called Barbary regencies and of the Italians who were caught up in the Islamic slavery practiced there, I was also increasingly impressed by other reasons that make these two arenas of bondage - black/ American and white/African - an especially appropriate intellectual and historical pairing.

--Robert C. Davis, introduction to Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xxiv.