When Europeans Were Slaves: Research Suggests White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Previously Believed.

(From AScribe)

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 - a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa's Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn't try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis's new estimates appear in the book "Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in …