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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

1. This has nothing to do with the story.

2. The Kingdom of Dahomey is not modern-day Benin. In fact, Benin was deliberately renamed from Dahomey (the French had used that name for it as a colony).

3. It's probably not productive to single out any one African people in the slave trade. What seems to be the truth is that the slave trade was a vicious cycle driven by demand from outside the continent: great world powers would trade military technology for slaves, meaning that most tribe/states in Africa were essentially locked in an arms race to avoid themselves being enslaved. There was slavery in Africa (like basically everywhere else in the world at one point or another) before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but the Trans-Atlantic Trade was a sui generis world-historical event, at a whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human history) and it wasn't caused by Benin.

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1) The slave trade is extremely relevant to the article about the “amazons”. In the nation’s annual festival in those days, the Dahomey “amazons” would reenact capturing slaves. The Dahomey military (and the “amazons”) spent most of their fighting time attacking neighboring nations to get slaves to sell.

2) We agree. The place was called Dahomey. The place is now called Benin.

3) The kingdom of Dahomey was less than one third of one percent of the land area of Africa, and yet sold twenty percent of africa’s slaves that went to the new world. If ever there was a nation in Africa that could be discussed in the context of the slave trade, this is it.

Again, that is true of many African states. To get arms, you dealt with slave trading nations for them. To get the slaves to get the arms, you raided other nations. To defend themselves, those other nations needed arms. To get the arms, they dealt with slave trading nations for them. All you're point out is that eventually "winners" emerged. And?

Later

(The comment I replied to was drastically edited after I responded to it.)

Yes, for completeness I added responses to #2 and #3 from your first comment. Good luck - always fun either agreeing with you, or discussing our disagreements.

Some corrections: The place was wrongly called Dahomey, that's why it was changed to Benin. Also the actual place that performed the raids on their neighbors was less than 10% of modern-day Benin. Most of the area of the kingdom (some 1/4 of modern-day Benin), were vassals who would provide slaves as tribute.

Source: born there, lives there.

What was the actual place that performed the raids called?

Abomey

Well, then. This is where Hangbe ruled, where the Royal Palaces of Abomey are located, and where her descendents live. So the point about slavery stands, no?

I didn't discuss your point about slavery. I don't even want to think about agreeing or not since everyone will always have different opinions about it. That's why I started my first comment with "some corrections." Just wanted to correct a few things that were not.

Although I find it jaw-dropping that 20% of the slave trade came from such a tiny place! ;)

Well, I suppose that they were fierce warriors.

Why do you say it was wrongly called Dahomey? And maybe you can help me with a question I've wondered about: why was it changed to Benin? Benin was one of the great historical kingdoms of Africa, like Songhai or Ghana (also not in present day Ghana) or what have you, but as far as I know it's not related to the current country of Benin. It was located in present day Nigeria. I suppose maybe the people migrated, or was it more a case of wanting to get rid of the name Dahomey and choosing an inspiring name?

It's named for the Bight of Benin, and again, the name was changed to distance it from the French colony it once was under the name "Dahomey".

Ah, the bight. Of course! That makes sense, thanks.

> the Trans-Atlantic Trade was a sui generis world-historical event, at a whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human history)

Wrong. The Arab slave trade [1] exceeded the Western one both in scale [2] and in cruelty [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade [2] https://www.quora.com/Who-did-most-of-the-slave-trade-Europe... [3] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Arabic-slave-trade-more-humane...

So it seems. But the aggregate estimates are similar, about 10-20 million slaves. And the estimate for the Arab slave trade covers a much longer period, ~1300 years vs ~400 years for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So the mean rate for that was correspondingly greater.

The Arab slave trade unfortunately persists even today.

It is difficult to compare aggregates also because you should take into account population density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_populati.... trans-Atlantic slave trade was very huge (it had an impact on demography). Arab slave trade was already huge and has been lenghty. Both are terrible.

The Quora answers (your [2] and [3]) are biased and full of factual errors and misrepresentations, of course without references to sources. Stick with Wikipedia.

> The Quora answers (your [2] and [3]) are biased and full of factual errors and misrepresentations

Such as?

Unsourced Quora answers are not sources.

Quora is on the same level as reddit or even worse in my experience since most people seem to have an agenda.

Regarding 3, it seems that 70%+ of the African slave trade went to the Middle East, not across the Atlantic.

Also regarding 3, I wonder if, comparatively, the Soviet Union forcefully moved a lot more people (even percentage-wise) through its network of concentration camps. African slaves going over the Atlantic were what.. 2-3M deaths over 300 years, whereas the USSR easily disposed of 10-30M between 1917 and the 50s and later in its various GULAGs.

Much better organized, more ruthless, exterminating its own lawful citizens, thanks to the wonders of ideology. All for the greater good of society and the working class. No ethnic difference necessary to justify unprecedented genocide. Neighbors reporting neighbors to the authorities with almost total certainty of execution, for many decades.

> 2-3M deaths over 300 years

It's not just about the deaths, but also about the suffering and degradation spanning generations, for the sole purpose of making "superior people" more money.

I have no clue whatsoever about how much Africans suffered under slavery, but I would think that some would prefer death to watching their offspring born into slavery and ultimately die as slaves.

> It's not just about the deaths, but also about the suffering and degradation spanning generations, for the sole purpose of making "superior people" more money.

Absolutely, I don't see anybody making the claim that slavery is wonderful, and devoid of suffering and degradation for generations to come. Maybe the folks walking around with tiki torches, but, let's be real. You and I, and most of Hacker News interlocutors are not spending much time around that crowd day-in and day-out, so we can all safely assume nobody is advocating for that here.

The fact however is that slavery has been with us, as a species, for the entirety of our recorded history, and is still alive and well as of today, in one form or another. As horrible as the Atlantic slave trade has been for centuries, we can learn more history, transcend a US-centric, exceptionalist world view, and realize that what we're talking about was not an isolated, special and rare phenomenon, never seen before, or that never happened again since.

what we're talking about was not an isolated, special and rare phenomenon, never seen before, or that never happened again since.

We pretty much are. And a lot of this weird ahistorical 'contrarian' message board stuff about slavery might not seem like marching with torches but it tends to originate from the same places - as a way to rationalize and recruit for the ideology of the marchers. It's a sell job, not some clear-eyed, unflinching take on history as the people who tend to repeat this stuff often appear to think.

If it's ahistorical, you have the option to provide evidence to the contrary that disproves the facts stated above.

Instead what I'm seeing is ad-hominem bigoteering that attempts to ascribe bad faith, nefarious motives to someone even bringing up historical facts that can be looked up by anybody with access to the web or a library.

No, I'm not ascribing bad faith, I don't know if you're a racist-apologist, or (as I tend to assume) just message-board-fashionably ignorant or something else. And you are right, access to the web or a library will show you that no serious historians of the African slave trade sit around comparing it to the Soviet Gulags or claim it does not stand out as a phenomenon against the many other examples of slavery throughout history. Nobody does that because it's obviously silly, even in the most punctiliously charitable interpretation.

Thoroughly enjoying how this thread about female warriors in an ancient kingdom devolved into a historical revisionism thread about the european slave trade

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery :

The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. However the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves were vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places.

Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1860 BC), which refers to it as an established institution, and it was common among ancient people...

Although slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world (with the exception of penal labour), human trafficking remains an international problem and an estimated 25-40 million people are enslaved today, the majority in Asia.

Slavery is absolutely ubiquitous across both time and cultures.

And?

One interesting historical tidbit it that Caucasians were also enslaved in the Middle East.

Fishing towns along the south coast of England lived in fear of slavers raiding and the book Robinson Crusoe begins with the protagonist being enslaved.

I don't want to join in some pissing fight about who suffered most - all slavery is aborrent and causes generations of pain. But I think it an interesting and often overlooked dimension that the Europeans who started using slaves in the new world were from a society used to being preyed upon and enslaved by others.

You may be interested in looking up the etymology for "slave".

The Italian town of Genoa built most of its wealth in the 13th-14th centuries by buying Slavs captured by the Tartars on the north shores of the Black Sea and shipping them south to Pera (now part of modern Istanbul) where they would be re-sold with an added profit.

Ah, interesting. More here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe

Root of "slave" is "Slavonic" or captive.

On the other hand, root of Slavic or Slavonic people is captive.

Isn't it glory, e.g. Slava Ukraina?

I have some Russian. How is root of Slavic or Slavonic people is captive. ?

Doesn't look like the "slave" as etymology theory is confirmed:

>>>

Medieval Latin, from Late Latin Sclavus, from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), probably from the Greek verb σκυλάω (skuláō), a variant of σκυλεύω (skuleúō, “to get the spoils of war”).[1]

The origin of σκλάβος has been disputed historically. Modern etymologists accept that it refers to the spoils of war, as it makes sense morphologically, but there is an obsolete theory that the word comes from plural Σλαβῆνοι (Slabênoi), from Proto-Slavic slověne (plural; the singular form Proto-Slavic slověninъ is derived from it), although this theory requires unexplained and unattested phonetic irregularities. It is argued that that the originally the term referred to Slavs (Old Slavonic словѣнинъ, словѣне), who were often enslaved during the early Middle Ages, and that the originally ethnic term came to have a more general social meaning, possibly around the 9th or 10th century when it appeared in German texts - but nowadays it is commonly regarded that it was only old German propaganda pseudo-etymology.

Stephenson's Jack Shaftoe, for example.

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