When Englishman Thomas Pellow was 27, he led a slave-hunting expedition to the West African coast. His orders were to plunder the villages, kill the adults and capture the children.
But Pellow was not a mercenary employed in the transatlantic slave trade, which sent millions of its victims across the ocean. He was a slave himself – taken prisoner as a child by the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail. And 300 years ago, he was far from alone.
The sultan owned an estimated 25,000 European slaves, many seized in raiding expeditions on the south coast of England as well as countries as far afield as Iceland.
Though it is almost forgotten today – suppressed, perhaps, by some squeamish historians – the Muslim trade in both black African and white European slaves was deeply feared for three centuries.
Yet, at the time, dozens of memoirs, many of them bestsellers, were published by former slaves who had escaped from captivity, with horrendous stories of torture, rape and cold-blooded murder.
Now, a book by historian Justin Marozzi unflinchingly reveals the extent of slavery in Arab countries, which was conducted with unequalled brutality.
More shocking still, he shows that it continued in much of the Islamic world well into the 20th century – and, for hundreds of thousands of West Africans born into life as slaves, carries on to this day.
For Marozzi to investigate these stories, let alone publish, is courageous. His book invites an inevitable backlash from Left-wing academics and broadcasters who focus solely on the slave trade triangle between Europe, West Africa and the Americas that operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Hellbound and Down 