Historical pain deserves evidence, not mythology.

Accordingly, when segments of the Black American discourse on slavery compress a complex, global system into a single racial culprit, analytical precision is often sacrificed for emotional catharsis. This is not a moral failure; it is an interpretive one. Slavery was real, brutal, and foundational to modern wealth formation—but it was neither invented nor sustained by one race alone.

The historical record, as established by mainstream scholarship, demonstrates unequivocally that slavery and mass coercion were global institutions practiced by multiple civilizations across centuries.

Imperial Japan’s conquest of East Asia, for example, relied extensively on forced labor, sexual slavery, and mass killing in Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. Similarly, the Mongol conquests depopulated vast regions through systematic slaughter and coerced subjugation on an unprecedented scale.

The Ottoman Empire institutionalized enslavement and child conscription, while European empires fused racial slavery with colonial extraction and plantation economies across the Atlantic world.

In parallel, Arab-Islamic empires sustained long-running slave trades spanning Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Long before the Atlantic slave trade reached industrial scale, African and Arab networks were already capturing, transporting, and selling enslaved........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)