Adam Smith and slavery

Adam Smith's lost legacy

Public comment in Britain and North America, aided by endless television repetitions that ‘slavery’ means the ‘slave trade’ from Africa to the USA, is almost completely blind to the fact that slavery from Africa to the Arab Middle East, classical Europe, and all countries to the East, persisted for thousands of years (note the number of African slaves in ancient Egypt) long before America was ‘discovered’.

The appalling practice of slavery was widespread in Eastern Europe and Russia at the time Smith was writing Wealth Of Nations, and Smith was pessimistic that it would ever be abolished.

The camel-led slave-trading 'trains' that left sub-tropical Africa to cross the Sahara, hardly penetrate public consciousness in the way that the African slave ships, made visual by film and television, which only show of the lesser, and shorter in calendar time (though no less evil), slave trade to America.

Not only were Arab traders active in the overland slave trade, they were often the local slave agents active in supplying slaves to slave trading ships from Europe for the American and Caribbean markets.

When the American market was closed eventually by the self-imposed political action of the governments of the USA, Britain, and other European countries, the Arab slave traders continued their despicable trade north across the Sahara, and by sea along the East African coast.